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Starcraft 2 / Heroes Optimization & FPS Guide, Heroes Funny & WP Moments #69Legion - Dev Interviews
There are a few more interviews from the Legion Summit that we didn't get in our first pass.
- The team can't give us details on Thal'dranath (Millenium)
- Wrathion probably won't be appearing in Legion at release (Blizzplanet)
Kotaku
Kotaku had the chance to talk to Tom Chilton and Chris Robinson.
Development
- The lack of content in Warlords was in part due to the team thinking that Legion would be ready sooner.
- The development team has grown, but the larger team was able to produce more content rather than produce content faster.
- There are 235 people on the World of Warcraft development team now, including artists, designers, engineers, and producers.
- In Warlords development, the new character models were a significant pressure for the character art team.
- For Legion, the updated combat animations are a significant pressure for the animation team.
Ship Expansion
- The team has talked about doing a ship-oriented expansion internally several times.
- You could get a boat, upgrade it, sail around to places.
- There would be lots of tech and art challenges.
- Delivering an expansion like that while keeping the core gameplay is a significant challenge.
The Starting Zone
The Starting Zone had the opportunity to do a few different interviews.
Misc
- If you play for 1 - 2 hours you would get as much Artifact Power as you would from 10 - 12 hours of gameplay at a certain Artifact Knowledge level.
Pre-Expansion Patch and Release
- The pre-expansion patch has lots of new technology the team will be testing.
- The game will automatically create new instances in an intelligent way.
- If you are near your friends, both of you will be in the same instance and you won't be able to tell anything happened.
- There shouldn't be any stutter when this happens or queues to log in in and play.
- This process was more manual during the Warlords launch.
- The team has tried to identify every bottleneck people might come across when questing at launch so that there is no standing in line to finish a quest.
Scaling Leveling Zones
- The team will take a look at how the leveling zones scaling works out in Legion and see if it would work out well on older zones.
- Scaling might look like grouping the zones so that not every single zone scales for the full range of levels. There are many different ways it could be implemented with older content.
Story and Lore
- The Illidan story never felt wrapped up. The team felt that there was more story to tell and a greater destiny.
- The team often talked about what Illidan was doing at Black Temple and the motivations behind his actions.
- The Burning Legion story has to continually escalate and it has been a long time since they invaded Azeroth.
- The changes in the faction leader stories in Legion came from it being time for a change.
- Anduin is going to have one of the more compelling stories in World of Warcraft.
- The Legion is an enemy that can't be reasoned with. There is no common ground.
Legion Media
- There will be four free comics related to Legion, touching on different aspects of the expansion.
- One focuses on Anduin and dealing with learning the news about his father.
- Another comic focuses on a King Magni story.
- There will also be an audio drama released before Legion (hopefully) that focuses on the events leading up to the opening cinematic.
The Demons Arrive - Cinematic Cut
A short cut from the cinematic set to different music was released this week. It shows in the previews in select theaters.
Warcraft Movie Set Tours
Two videos that cover parts of the movie set were released.
Warcraft Movie - Box Office Update
The Warcraft Movie continues to do well internationally, with Deadline posting updated numbers:
- Warcraft estimates have been revised downwards to a $25.7M opening weekend.
- China is up to $145M so far, with the potential to hit $200M-$250M.
- Deadline claims the movie needs $500M globally to break even.
- It will probably be a few weeks until we know more if the director's cut will be a possibility.
Blue Tweets
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
Ghostcrawler Tweets
Ghostcrawler still occasionally talks about WoW. Remember that he no longer works for or speaks for Blizzard.
Originally Posted by MMO-Champion
Just curious, are the people on stage at Blizzcon for example actually programmers or just the idea guys?Very few studios employ someone just as an idea guy. Even designers have to do work at the keyboard. (OccupyGStreet)
I'd definitely like being an 'idea guy', what do you 'do at your keyboard', Greg?
Design docs, scripting, hooking up art, changing data tables. A lot of email of course. (OccupyGStreet)
I'd ask about those things in greater detail but that would be a bit much outside of DMs, etc. What sort of scripting?
A lot of mechanics design on WoW and LoL (and doubtless many games) are scripted. (OccupyGStreet)
If you want to boost damage or damage coefficients, you can do that in an editor. (OccupyGStreet)
If you want to special case anything (e.g. bonus damage, set bonuses, weird interactions) you script in a language like lua. (OccupyGStreet)
Design isn't telling engineers how things should be. (OccupyGStreet)
It is trying to get shit to work and then going to engineers for help when you can't make it work. (OccupyGStreet)
Final Boss - Discipline Priest Spec Preview
Final Boss is back with a second round of spec previews.
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