Legion Dev Interviews, Movie Update, The Demons Arrive, Tweets, Disc Priest Preview

Play Your Way Returns June 23 & Upcoming Firebird's Changes

The European Hearthstone Spring Championships 2016

Starcraft 2 / Heroes Optimization & FPS Guide, Heroes Funny & WP Moments #69

Legion - 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
Professions
I've been hearing that you need 300 profession skill to proc profession world quests, intended for release?
Yes, this is intended. Otherwise, it becomes too easy to switch professions daily to earn more world quest rewards. (WarcraftDevs)

Pets and Pet Battles
Are the battle pets obtained from the Order Halls intended to be non-tradable?
Yes, hardcore battle pet collectors will need to alt it up to complete their collections. (Muffinus)
Are you serious? Pls reconsider this. No other activity in this game isnt doable with 1 char
Fully completing many account-wide collections (transmog, achieves, mounts) require alts. (Muffinus)
but this require a lvl 98 alt for every class and the artifacts system isn't Alt friendly
Not every class has a pet associated, nor do they generally require full OH progression. (Muffinus)

Reputation / Questing
Suramar looks incredible. Having to farm mana to do quests.. not so much. Not looking forward to launch week/month with this.
We are still working on tuning incoming and costs related to Ancient Mana. Any pain points you've noticed so far? (WarcraftDevs)

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.

This article was originally published in forum thread: Legion - Dev Interviews, Movie Update, The Demons Arrive, Tweets, Disc Preist Preview started by chaud View original post
Published on 2016-06-12 01:43 AM
80 Comments
Comments 80 Comments
  1. un_known's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by TheWindWalker View Post
    Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
    Wrathion won't be appearing in Legion (Blizzplanet)
    Yeah... that's not true.
    Why are people taking the wratharion quote completely out of context?! You lot missed out "at release" so stop leading people on who TLDR
  1. Geodew's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by un_known View Post
    Why are people taking the wratharion quote completely out of context?! You lot missed out "at release" so stop leading people on who TLDR
    The OP was edited... :P
  1. Galathir's Avatar
    The changes in the faction leader stories in Legion came from it being time for a change.
    Because Vol'jin was Warchief for an entire expansion now and he did so much during his reign. It was clearly time to kill him off. /s
  1. kornek21's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by TheWindWalker View Post
    Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
    Wrathion won't be appearing in Legion (Blizzplanet)
    Yeah... that's not true.

    He wont at launch no...read abit better.
  1. 6ev4enko's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by i9erek View Post
    "Illidan story felt not wrapped up". What does this mean? They will kill him for good this time so it wraps up? Perhaps it should not be wrapped up.
    I guess you dont know what happens to him in the new novel they released about him? Quite some shit happens.
  1. Bohannon's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Galathir View Post
    Because Vol'jin was Warchief for an entire expansion now and he did so much during his reign. It was clearly time to kill him off. /s
    I don't actually blame them for killing Vol'jin. It obviously wasn't originally part of the plan, it was just gonna be Varian. But then they knee jerked this, because so many idiots have been crying about horde favoritism since Cata. So they just killed Vol'jin as well, so as not to have to hear about the stupid bullshit again. So when they say this, it's half true, and they just choose to not insult people like I am here so just include Vol'jin with the justifications as well.
  1. Aleksej89's Avatar
    Why are ghostcrawler messages from over a month ago (1st may) again reposted?
    Those were already written on mmo-c a month ago..
  1. deathslover's Avatar
    regarding the bit about no content patches in WoD : you werent the only one that was hoping legion was coming faster. half of your placer base was pissed cause things got stale and boring after a particular point of time. if you twats were putting out more content ppl wouldnt have been left feeling that way. its easy really unless your running out of ideas for stuff and/or bullshit going on behind the scenes was getting to much
  1. Ryxxi's Avatar
    Everything is hard to implement/change/do/work on/create for blizzard these days. They tech is just not there. We are living in 2000. Its so pathetic. I have seen smaller companies do better stuff.

    Company earns billions and changing animations for 200-500 spells in difficult over 4 years ? Such difficulty , Much struggle. Kappa.


    WoW prob doesn't even have 500 spells /abilities these days.

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by Guzzed View Post
    Wrathion not in Legion? Lol what a joke. Introduced a major character via MoP Legendary questline and he is barely seen.
    I know right, he is actually a cool character who helps us to prepare for legion invasion and now he it doesn't feel right for them..so they take him out.
  1. Poganin's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by tangers58 View Post
    "The development team has grown, but the larger team was able to produce more content rather than produce content faster."

    ... You see people at Blizz say crap like that, and you have to wonder just how out of touch they are with what actually is in their game. Where is this "more content" because I certainly haven't seen it. Expansions these days are less than half of what they were back in BC and wotlk. Anyone counting dungeons, raids, or patches could tell you that.
    The "more content" is obviously Hearthstone and Overwatch, and whatever else people at Blizzard are working on. I sincerely doubt all that rubbish about "our team is biggest ever right now" means the team working on WoW, because it sure as hell doesn't look that way.
  1. Ryxxi's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by styvan01 View Post
    Heck he's the reason why the Legion is at our doorstep. I mean if he didn't go to Alternate Draenor, Im sure they would not have come yet.
    Its was Garrosh not Wrath..know ur lore lol.
  1. Azrajin's Avatar
    Not sure whether to be entirely furious at a certain blacked out point there or to be upset. You give someone all that development have him say 2 lines of dialogue in an expansion then throw him out the window. Bad design choice, really bad design choice. I hope you realise that this isn't about favouritism, this is about doing what's natural story progression. In a way maybe it is but you can't take someone who is still nowhere near the end of development and toss him aside because it makes for 'good drama'.
  1. Engal's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by kornek21 View Post
    He wont at launch no...read abit better.

    the black dragon in highmountain says he gots " family matter to attend " at the end of the dungeon. We will see wrathion in legion.
  1. Kathranis's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by i9erek View Post
    "Illidan story felt not wrapped up". What does this mean? They will kill him for good this time so it wraps up? Perhaps it should not be wrapped up.
    I think they mean that when they used him as a boss in BC, he didn't have any development or any real motivation, wasn't really involved in the story. He was just a guy on the box that players killed in a patch. It was a complete waste of a character.

    And they had a solid out to revive him (demons don't die outside the Twisting Nether) so they did.
  1. Darkguyver2020's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Rekuja View Post
    "In Warlords development, the new character models were a significant pressure for the character art team."

    So they deserve a massive raise then? because WoD was a pile of garbage, and the only good thing about WoD was the character models and the art.
    The art team does deserve a raise, yes. Because they always do an A+ job when it comes to the aesthetics of the game.
    They were not responsible for the content of the expansion. The content designers should have their salary cut and given to the art team.

    Quote Originally Posted by tangers58 View Post
    "The development team has grown, but the larger team was able to produce more content rather than produce content faster."

    ... You see people at Blizz say crap like that, and you have to wonder just how out of touch they are with what actually is in their game. Where is this "more content" because I certainly haven't seen it. Expansions these days are less than half of what they were back in BC and wotlk. Anyone counting dungeons, raids, or patches could tell you that.
    They probably weren't present for WoD and have instead been working on Legion.
    From what I've been seeing on the Alpha/Beta. Legion will be packed with content.
  1. Aelric70's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by kot0005 View Post
    Everything is hard to implement/change/do/work on/create for blizzard these days. They tech is just not there. We are living in 2000. Its so pathetic. I have seen smaller companies do better stuff.

    Company earns billions and changing animations for 200-500 spells in difficult over 4 years ? Such difficulty , Much struggle. Kappa.


    WoW prob doesn't even have 500 spells /abilities these days.
    It didnt sound like spells were the source of the heavy workload. By combat animations, i believe they are referring to the movements player and perhaps some npcs make when fighting/shooting/casting. Thats 26 race/gender skeletons to animate in all of those activities. Each one probably has several different movements and making a skeleton move smoothly is more complex than spell animations. Be pissed about the timetable, but dont undersell the size of the task.
  1. mmoc4968a47eeb's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Shudder View Post
    International doesn't matter. New Alice movie made 10 million more and they called it a huge flop.
    International markets definitely does matter.
    Alice is a flop because it has only made $183 million WW so far, meaning that there's basically no chance it will make a profit.
  1. Darkguyver2020's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by kot0005 View Post
    Its was Garrosh not Wrath..know ur lore lol.
    And who, might I ask, was the one who freed Garrosh from prison in the first place? Wrathion.

    So you should know your lore and learn some grammar while you're at it.
  1. mmoc83257f2245's Avatar
    In Warlords development, the new character models were a significant pressure for the character art team.
    Always said WoD content suffered due to the amount of time it probably took to perfect the characters, and now ...

    For Legion, the updated combat animations are a significant pressure for the animation team.
    Concerns me there's a few months of content, then you get to hit the same things with your new fancy animations, for 14 months.

    Still, gotta remain positive eh?
  1. Jasper Kazai's Avatar
    Gotta love how in WoD, they made a big deal about saying "we want you to play alts because you like that class, not to serve your main" and now they're saying you need alts to collect all these battle pets. Those don't quite gel together. Which one is it?
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