Originally Posted by
Rhysati
I'm significantly further now than I was at the beginning of this thread so I'm going to add onto what I've said previously:
Having experienced the first two dungeons, the first trial, and STILL doing monotonous fetch quests and talking about mundane things with little relevance...I've moved from being disappointed to just flat out angry now. This whole thing is a literal waste of my time.
I've seen a number of people in the thread pointing at the graphics, the scenery, the music, the dungeons, etc as being good...and while I feel it's all serviceable/average....My annoyance is in the fact that in order to enjoy ANY of that, you MUST do this story. Now that's nothing new as content has always been locked behind the story. The problem is that when the story is this painfully dull and tedious, you cannot actually play the enjoyable parts until you've slogged through it all. This means that all those other things, whether lovely or not, are irrelevant to whether the expansion is good right now.
The story, falling flat on its face, is the most meaningful part of all of our adventures in the early days of the expansion. This is why this is one of the top threads on the forums, why a similar topic is at the top of r/MMORPG, and why the steam reviews are mixed. The problem isn't that the story is low stakes. It's that it is bad. The pacing is terrible. The content is dull and uninspired. If I asked ChatGPT to come up with some fantasy races and tell me what their cultures main focus is, I think it'd give me something with the depth this expansion has so far. It all feels so lazy.
Now, I'm hopeful that when I get 80% of the way through the story it'll finally pick up like some people have said, but this expansion actively makes me not want to recommend the game to my friends. This is the first time I've ever felt this way. I feel embarrassed to even talk about the game right now.