The amount of time I can devote to World of Warcraft, or really any game, isn’t necessarily less than it was a decade ago. But the amount of time I can devote to it in a single sitting is a lot less. The days when I was free to sit in a Sunken Temple group for six hours are well and truly behind me. Heck, even my D&D games tend to end after three hours nowadays. There’s just more stuff to do in my life, and I’m fairly certain I am far from the only person who has found their life more punctuated with tasks that need doing. As a result, games that I can come and go from in an hour or two have become very much my go-to over the past years.
I think the reason Diablo Immortal was something I enjoyed was how fast the dungeons were and how quickly I could get on, run some rifts and dungeons, and be satisfied with what I’d gotten done. I could play it for an hour and then go do one of the many, many things I have to do, as part of this cursed existence as a responsible adult that I am forced to engage in. It’s an endless cavalcade of venial horrors.
So that has me wondering what the life-to-game balance for Dragonflight is going to be like. Is this going to be the WoW expansion that respects my time? The one where I can play it in hour sized chunks? Where a raid maybe takes two hours, three at the outset? It’s not that I don’t fondly remember the days of staying up all night battering Nefarian down with sheer stubbornness, but I have stuff I gotta do in the morning now. Can’t do six hour stretches at a time, my bladder and my back will gang up on me.
What do you guys think? Is Dragonflight going to demand we spend marathon sessions to enjoy it?