by Since Shadowlands, I’ve decided to stop getting so emotionally invested in the lore. It’s simply not worth being disappointed in a story and worrying about how the developers at Blizzard could have done better or what could have been illogical about the story’s progression.
So in Dragonflight I avoided evaluating the lore, cinematics, etc. However, there has always been something strange about Dragonflight’s videos. There was something wrong with the cinematics. Were the characters too cheesy? Are the conversations very superficial? Anyway, it was the way the characters spoke. But somehow I never found out what it was. Until recently, I was seeing more and more posts about how video cutscenes in Dragonflight played very slowly. And here, of course, the obligatory spoiler warning. It’s about 10.2 content.
Are Dragonflight videos downscaled to 0.75x speed?
First I saw the clip above. The excerpt from WoW streamer Asmongold is about the fact that the story’s pacing continued to slow down or become very smooth. According to the Redditor, characters speaking slowly are actually detrimental to the narrative.
The exaggerated clip, of course, was sped up or edited together in the back, so it looks like the WoW scenes used to be some kind of action movie. This led to the discussion that WoW needs more badasses and war again. But I don’t want to comment on that. The clip reminded me once again that Dragonflight characters like Alexstrasza, Kalecgos, Vyranoth and company speak strangely. Too slow in any way?
And then I saw the following post on the WoW Reddit forum.
“1.25x speed cinematics sound much better”. The post shows an in-game scene with Tyrande from patch 10.2. At normal speed, you hear the same slow flow of speech.
However, if you set YouTube to 1.25x speed (small gear in the bottom right corner), most of the dialogue will appear normal. So the kinematics previously worked at 0.75x speed?
And yes, saying things slower sometimes adds value.
Slower = more epic? Sometimes only
Major events in WoW history (buy now ) they are, of course, always in some way epic, sometimes played more slowly and somewhat drawn out to emphasize the theatricality. Something spoken slowly gives more meaning to the situation.
But that doesn’t really appear at the end of Dragonflight. As you can see from the memes in the community, the opposite is actually true. But I’ll leave that aside. Instead, I want to point out something else that shows that the playback speed of Dragonflight videos may have been intentionally slowed down.
Suddenly the animations look better too?!
The Dragonflight videos always seemed strange to me because the characters moved as if there were extra weights hanging from their extremities.
When Alexstrasza moved her arms, it looked like she was pushing water away from the pool. But at 1.25x speed, animations suddenly look much smoother. Would this mean that video sequences in WoW are intentionally playing slower than intended? There could be a logical explanation for this.
It may be easier to properly dub in different languages if scenes play more slowly. Of course, getting a character’s mouth to move to match what’s being said is always a challenge in WoW animations. How do you see this? Are the videos in WoW Dragonflight generally slower than in other expansions, or is it just me?
