Legion

There's a constantly shifting line in my head between games being something fun I engage in for stress relief or a dopamine hit and games being a checklist of tasks I have to complete.

World of Warcraft has been out since 2004.

Of all the artifact appearances we saw in Legion, the lengthy Balance of Power quest rewarded my favorite one.

I'll be up front -- I thought the Mission Table was the best innovation in Warlords of Draenor. Now, many years later, the news that it won't be in Dragonflight fills me with a kind of joy I wasn't aware I was capable of feeling -- a boisterous, almost terrifyingly primal exultation, like unto that you would expect to feel just before you started singing and a musical number just sort of happens.

The first Allied Races we got were unlockable by doing Legion content, and the others all required Battle for Azeroth unlocks, which means as of Dragonflight we're talking two or three expansions ago. World of Warcraft certainly seems to be trying to make leveling easier and more streamlined, but that also makes those older expansion unlocks for Allied Races more and more extraneous, in my opinion.

The idea of 'class fantasy' in World of Warcraft has been bandied about longer than the actual terminology for it, which gained prominence during Legion.

World of Warcraft has a sort of punctuated equilibrium when it comes to content releases -- sometimes more punctuated than equilibrium, if you ask me.

I'm generally pretty down for storylines in my games that swing the focus as wide and cinematic as it can get. Legion, for example, was a story I really enjoyed -- the invasion of Azeroth by a vast, world-spanning host of demons which led to a showdown on a planet seething with fel corruption between a Pantheon of beings on the scale of gods and their fallen former champion, who sought to potentially destroy our whole world.

Fiction has tropes, and a lot of games are an avenue of storytelling -- World of Warcraft has told a lot of stories over the years.

In recent interviews regarding the next expansion to World of Warcraft, Dragonflight, Ion Hazzikostas confirmed that there would be no new version of the Mission Table.