Battle for Azeroth Alpha/Beta General Discussion

[Ningjinq]

Still important to remember that, while it definitely looked promising imo for it not being too insanely far way, Antorus isn’t out yet and 7.3.5 is still coming. (Hopefully with open world content) Even a July release of BfA (which I think is within realm of possibility) would make Antorus the shortest final raid tier length of all time by a fair amount.

They like raid tiers lasting 6 months or so which makes the absolute earliest it likely would release be June.

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One thing WoD did do good on was cinematics. I believe they had a cinematic for every zone? Or did they not have one for Gorgrond and Spires?

Anyways, if we count cinematics off the top of my head, WoD had 4 leveling cinematics, 1 for Cho’gall darkening Highmaul, 1 for the mid way point of the legendary ring quest where Kilrogg drinks the blood and then the one for HFC. I think that’s it. No cinematic for BRF.

Legion had the Ysera cinematic, 2 seperate Broken Shore invasion cinematics for Horde and Alliance, the warping of Dalaran to the Broken Isles, 3 raid cinematics, Illidan destroying the wind chime. Was there one for entering the Broken Shore P2 in 7.2?

[madokbro]

Legion had Suramar and Stormheim cinematics as well. Also ToS and Argus cinematics.

[rda]

I’d say it’s very hard to tell when beta is going to start because the art looks mostly finished and 2 zones were playable so what’s their internal trigger exactly for what makes it to the point of it being released to the public? I certainly don’t know.

Normally you go beta when most of the things are in place and you have time to react to feedback (can spend most of your work hours doing that). Blizzard betas for WoW, however, over the years mutated into a PR message of "we are making good progress, don't worry and start preparing for when we release". They go beta way before they reach the stage where they have time to even assess feedback yet alone react to it. The devs have their hands completely full with things they know they have to finish or fix as it is. Bug reports from the beta testers don't help because there are too many holes and the devs already know that they are holes and have to be fixed. So, bug reports are largely ignored, the devs continue working as they would without the beta, just with more stress, and it all crawls to the release. If the devs are lucky, they manage to get to the stage where it would actually make sense to release the beta some months after they started it. But usually they seem to never get there because as soon as they start raising their heads they seem to immediately get some urgent rework coming their way. WoW betas are a mess.

I also don't know when they are going to go beta with BFA, right now certainly seems like way too early (what's there to test? several zones and several instances? but with the devs being obviously busy with the rest of the expansion - which looks like 80% of it - who's going to react to reports, what reaction can be reasonably expected apart from "thanks, we already know half of the things you reported and the rest needs discussion, we'll look at it later, because we are busy with things that don't need discussion"?) and it will continue to seem like way too early several months from here as well. But this never stopped them, so who knows when the beta will start, this can happen any time. It might make more sense to count back from what you think will be the release date. I think they are going to release Sep-Oct (no strong positions, it might be different), so perhaps the beta will start Feb-Mar.

[rcshaggy]

What can we expect from the Battlenet App with Battle for Azeroth and the Login Screen?

Here are some examples on what I mean;

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/N87kFX2nkLA/maxresdefault.jpg -Vanilla to WoD
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/aiRFbU3VoWc/maxresdefault.jpg -Legion Login Screen

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Legion had Suramar and Stormheim cinematics as well. Also ToS and Argus cinematics.

Was kinda annoyed by the lack of cinematics...
Even the expansion I hated "WoD" had pretty much every cinematic in there.

Hopefully Battle for Azeroth will have plenty too, with Zandalar and Kul Tiras...
Even the new raids...

[PepperjackJig]

I think a picture of whatever is on the box art. Probably a homage to Warcraft 2 Tides of Darkness. As for the login screen, At a loss there. I don't think showing a burning Teldrassil will be enough, but maybe a ruined UC.

[rcshaggy]

why have there been so many wow updates today? there's been like three or four, all around 30ish something MB.

makes me nervous.

I think Blizzard let their hozen on the servers and they crashed them...lol...

[Phunkle]

I am cautiously optimistic this means we will get many cinematics in BfA. Legion was somewhat lacking out of Val'sharah.

Aren't that two different teams, though? One that creates all the Blizzard CGIs and one specifically for WoW ingame cinematics?

[zlygork]

Aren't that two different teams, though? One that creates all the Blizzard CGIs and one specifically for WoW ingame cinematics?

CGI at the end of every zone and raid (Don't shoot me, I know how extremely unlikely this is)

[zlygork]

Yes, only Overwatch gets to have CGI every time they release a new hero, we at best get some improved in-game assets of Illidan fucking a chandelier.

Overwatch's animations seem as machinima as the in-game wow ones to me (with less technical limitations for obvious reasons) it's not like they get stuff on the expansion cinematic levels

[rda]

Several things from the front page that I haven't seen before:

The new AI for Islands/Warfronts behaves nothing like current WoW AI.
Island AI can even resurrect team members that you take down.

Right now this is probably just someone being overexcited because of the changes that he *hopes* will make a difference. They didn't show any of this new AI and their talks about it boiled down to "what if it did X? ah? could be interesting, right?", which suggests that they have either none or very little of it implemented.

But this does have potential. Blizzard at large aren't rookies when it comes to AI. Their AI in Starcraft is quite good, for example. Still, this looks like a very tough area to succeed in. For one thing, the AI in WoW will never outmatch a PVP player. The game has too many abilities / items for that, there are just too many tricks, and the AI will be susceptible to at least some of them. Several AIs will never outmatch several coordinated PVP players, this is even more difficult. But a slightly overpowered and slightly cheating AI could be good at providing the desired level of difficulty, and, what's more important, variety, for everyday PVE.

There is also an obvious continuation into doing instances and raids solo - if the AI is reasonably smart, go recruit some and do that mythic+2 instance or whatever level you can cope with solo for an achievement / reward. Or they could do some type of instances specific for solo with the AI helping - some new version of infinite dungeon or whatever.

Also:

The team ran old school Scholomance with the Nostalrius build.
...
Blizzard has maintained contact with Nostralius and ...

Naming the server Nostalrius was a mistake. Nobody can spell it, not even MMO-C.

[Cryptoriana]

What can we expect from the Battlenet App with Battle for Azeroth and the Login Screen?

Here are some examples on what I mean;

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/N87kFX2nkLA/maxresdefault.jpg -Vanilla to WoD
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/aiRFbU3VoWc/maxresdefault.jpg -Legion Login Screen

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Was kinda annoyed by the lack of cinematics...
Even the expansion I hated "WoD" had pretty much every cinematic in there.

Hopefully Battle for Azeroth will have plenty too, with Zandalar and Kul Tiras...
Even the new raids...

I personally think The box art and bnet wow pic will be a map of azeroth

EDIT: Your a good man, glad you got that shitty ow game at the bottom

[rcshaggy]

I personally think The box art and bnet wow pic will be a map of azeroth

EDIT: Your a good man, glad you got that shitty ow game at the bottom

Well actually my battlenet app is different...Just posting that for a example...Sorry...But I do like Overwatch.

[tristannarutofan]

Yes, only Overwatch gets to have CGI every time they release a new hero, we at best get some improved in-game assets of Illidan fucking a chandelier.

Yea but what about call of duty? U know if we are comparing games that have nothing to do with each other

[Cryptoriana]

Well actually my battlenet app is different...Just posting that for a example...Sorry...But I do like Overwatch.

May god have mercy on your soul haha

[Nyel]

Man, it's so strange to leave this thread in the evening and need to catch up only 3 or 4 pages instead of the 50 pages before Blizzcon. Very refreshing!

[Nathanyel]

EDIT: Your a good man, glad you got that shitty ow game at the bottom

I think the order in the screenshot is the default order, sorted by 'age' (not sure about D3 and SC2 though, although I think we got the BNet Client after both were released)

And yes, I like Overwatch, too, it's my second, after WoW :3

[rcshaggy]

So any difference between the male Zandalari with Battle for Azeroth to the male one in Mists of Pandaria?

[Lahis]

So any difference between the male Zandalari with Battle for Azeroth to the male one in Mists of Pandaria?

They are pretty similar, but the model has to be updated to support player gear.

[Wildmoon]

Oh my, on the front page right now:

This will trigger 4th spec crowd. lol

[Nyel]

Oh my, on the front page right now:

This could mean anything and nothing. Maybe it's just an item that lets all your spells heal for 100% of their damage while their damage is reduced by 50% or something like that.