I’ve always wanted to love the setting of World of Warcraft—but its storytelling, gnarled up in confusing timelines, optional quests, raid cutscenes, and books,has always kept me at arm’s length. Despite that, I’ve always been rooting for it to get better. That’s mostly out of nostalgia, sure, but I also have a love for the mechanics of stories, and I like to cheer for an underdog.

Dragonflight, when I’ve dipped my toes in, hasn’t fired on all cylinders in the way I was quietly hoping, although it was definitely an improvement over what came before. But a sore spot remains: Because of how WoW is structured, almost every climactic moment in its story has had to exist in a goddamn raid.

Sure, there are questlines with their real-time cutscenes—but developers have l…