Scott Johnson

Either way, it's extra money for them, for whoever, even if it was five people who did it. Right. It was extra money that they wouldn't have had otherwise. So, of course, from a business perspective, you do stuff like this. These kinds of things aren't crazy. And for me to sit here and complain about it and still pay up to that amount is a little jarring even in my own head.

Yeah. Come on, you guys. You didn't have to do it. You guys make a lot of money over there. Anyway, the the collector's edition looks nice to get some good stuff going on with that. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. They always do. But I don't think it comes with a copy of the game anymore. We're past that now. No more copies of games, no USB drive, no DD ROMs or none of that. We're done. It's all digital.

Get the code, go online, download it. It's the year 2024. Get used to it. Speaking of the launch, let's look at the dates real quick. Here's what we have to expect. For early access times in LA, 3 p.m. Pacific data. Data? Daylight. That's what I meant to say. There's no Pacific data. That will be, let's see, August 22nd, so tomorrow. New York, 6 p.m. Makes sense. Three hours later, right?

Or three hours difference. Right. Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1900. London, 2300 BST. Paris, zero CEST. What does that mean? Like midnight or whatever. The turning of the tide there. I don't know what that is. Taipei, 6 CST. I don't know what the CST stands for. These foreign regions, I'm not going to be able to give you much info on. Seoul gets it at 7. Is that AM or PM? I don't know.

It just says KEST, which I assume is Korean Standard Time. And then Sydney's getting it at 8 AM or PM. Again, they don't give the PMs or AM.

Yeah, I think you're probably right. If you are living in those places and you look there... you'll know. For global launch, that is all happening on the 26th and roughly the same exact timeframe for that day. So 22nd for early access, you will have access to the game until the 26th where you'll have it to yourself and you're a little exclusive club of people who bought Epic or higher.

And then on the 26th, everybody else jumps in the pool. And that'd be good for you because you're not even going to be you're going to be out in the middle of the Atlantic doing or Pacific doing stuff. Yeah. Or the Arctic, wherever the hell you go. How high up do you go? Are you in a different ocean by then?

But at some point, doesn't it change to something like you get high enough? It's like, you know, you know what I mean? Like at some point, it's the Northern Pacific maybe. Okay. All right. You're going to love that stuff. I'd love that. All those weird little village type places and strange fishing towns and stuff. Awesome.

Maybe I'll see some of those walrus people there. Yeah. It was all cool. But already in the game, we have the following. UI and quest changes. That's already in. All right. So that means all kinds of new icons on your map. Yeah. Some of it takes a little bit to get your head around, but for the most part, it's pretty straightforward.

The game is in the last couple of expansions have been very heavy on if it's the exclamation point with the shield, that's your main story campaign quest. And anytime you see those run those, because that's going to be your main story. Yeah. That's still true. However, It's not so easy now to just do those and do nothing but those. They want you to do more than that.

So just know that going in that some of these other regular exclamation points from the old days might be required. You're not going to over level like you did in the previous expansions. They haven't given us too many big details on that, but it sounds like it's just a broader distribution of XP.

I want to see all of it, so I'm fine with it too. That's my favorite part of open world questing. But also I hope it means improved side quests because they were so deprecated in the last couple of expansions, I don't think the side quests were awesome. They were okay. Sure. But they weren't like, whoa, I can't believe this side quest exists outside of the main story.

It's almost better than, you know, you hear that in games all the time, like The Witcher.

Yeah, I think people like a good MSQ, but I think that I think they may be maybe overcorrected a little bit. And this is a chance for them to pull it back some. So I'm actually looking forward to that. Also, Skyflight worldwide and is a toggleable thing. So even in the current content, if you're even still leveling in Dragonflight. You can turn your mounts.

What was called dragon writing is now just called sky flight. You can turn that off or on. And what that does is it turns your flying mounts into the old school sort of hover and move style that existed prior to this expansion. And between that and sky flight, which lets you do the full dragon writing kind of mechanics, uh, I love this, that they put this in.

But maybe some people always didn't like, you know, they just don't like change. So they'd never like dragon flight or dragon flying and they would rather just float and do their way. I think that's great because now they have their thing. Good job, guys. You got it. I think that those of us who've embraced the mechanics of dragon flight, it's so much freaking fun to get around.

Yeah, or click the other one is if you click on your collection, like the little horseshoe. And up top of the horseshoe, there's a little tiny dropdown up there of a few things like this, like random mount, something, something. And then the flight switching is also there. So they tried to put it in a couple of places to make it convenient.

But once you have that, just stick it on a bar somewhere, have it off to the side. And I find myself toggling all the time. It takes a little bit of time, like you cast a spell to do it.

Yeah, you have to be on the ground to do it. And when you do it, it immediately changes it as soon as the spell's over. And then you can mount up again and you're to the other way.

So where I find this most useful is world quests in particular, where it would be a lot easier for me to see things from a bird's eye view where I'm not soaring all the time, where I just need to kind of helicopter hover. And so I'll toggle it on for those kind of quests. And when I'm done, I toggle it back and then soar across the continent and do it somewhere else.