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Rate the transmogrification set above you!
Dragonflight Season 4 Content Update Notes
The Lore and Secrets of the Shrouded Moors, New Diablo 3 Zone Coming in Patch 2.6
Top HearthPwn Standard and Wild Decks of the Week for July 2Fan Art - Naxxramas Trailer
Hurricane is back with another trailer, this time for Naxxramas.
Dev Interview
Jesse Cox and Crendor had the opportunity to talk to Ion Hazzikostas recently.
- There are no plans to increase the item level of items that drop from existing world bosses. World bosses are extensions of raid tiers.
- Dungeons are one of the big success stories of Legion. In older expansions, there was a huge spike in dungeon participation early in the expansion and then it rapidly dropped off. In Legion, through a mix of adding new dungeons, updating the difficulty baseline and rewards, as well as the Mythic Keystone system, we are seeing people to continue to dungeons as a parallel or complement to raiding.
- It seems very likely we will have more dragon story in the future. Certainly when you are Level 112, as you learn in the Chromie scenario, dragons are going to be very important.
- There are terrible void creatures out there and an unexplored set of worlds. That is something the team is looking forward to tapping into in the future.
- Argus would have made a monotonous setting for an expansion. It's an awesome place, but is a husk of a world that has been destroyed by the Legion. It isn't a place where we can have a bright and happy zone or civilizations that are flourishing and interesting to interact with.
- Draenor was a brutal and savage world, but had the Arroka and the rolling plains of Nagrand. Argus doesn't have that and wouldn't support that.
- Players often say they miss being a humble adventurer, rather than being a hero and champion. The story has advanced beyond that. When you are Level 90 or 100, you aren't just a faceless person anymore. You have defeated Onyxia, defeated the Lich King, defeated other great threats to the world, so you are becoming a peer to other heroes like Thrall, Jaina, and Varian. As we get stronger, the threats we face get stronger. At the same time, the team tries to keep in mind relative power scales. When we took on Deathwing, we had the assistance of the dragon aspects to make it a fair fight.
- On Argus, we find a Legion portal network that allows the Legion to assault other worlds. You go through these portals to Rift worlds using riftstones from Kil'jaeden's ship, allowing you to get a glimpse of all new planets around the cosmos. You clear out the Legion invasion force, fight a boss, do an event, and complete an objective there. This provides some variation to Argus and allows us to see some different settings.
- What's happening on Argus is the culmination of Azeroth's defense against the threat that the Legion poses. Could Argus be used for something else in the future? Who knows. It's an important location, the homeworld of the Draenei, a very important place, but the purpose it serves in the Legion story is defeating the Legion.
Darkmoon Faire - Blight Boar
The Darkmoon Faire is back in town with the addition of the Blight Boar band. Collect a toy, cage helmet, and guitar 2H mace from this event, as well as several achievements.
Tomb of Sargeras Progression
Several guilds are now at 7/9 in Mythic Tomb of Sargeras. Method is doing detailed coverage of the race!
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
On the matter of player experience: do you think that the average player wants a game design that is created in a manner that they immerse themselves in and don`t realize they`re dealing with gameplay mechanics, decisions and overall game design elements, or do you think that the average player prefers to face to-do mission lists, itemization tables, gameplay-oriented character decisions and interfaces that make the whole game experience feel and look like a mission control panel?This is a good question to talk about the difference between how players sometimes think about development, and how developers think about development… or at the very least, how I advocate that developers should be thinking about development.
I wouldn’t approach your question in terms of what the average player wants, but instead what kind of game you as a game developer want to make. You should have a vision for your game, and goals you are trying to meet, and an experience you want players to have.
The risk you run whenever you start worrying about what the average player would like (even if you are limiting that to the average player of your game) is that you can quickly to get to a least-common-denominator / designed-by-committee design. You can end up with a design that doesn’t offend anyone but doesn’t inspire anyone either. I love Dark Souls. I understand that it isn’t for everyone, and trying to make it more broadly appealing would probably greatly erode things that I love about the game (like the difficulty, hidden information, experimentation, and so on).
It’s a subtle distinction perhaps, but I think the development process should not be:
1) Ask players want they want
2) Build what they want.
Instead, it should be:
1) Come up with the kind of game you are trying to make
2) Ask players if your design is meeting this goal
3) Iterate until it does (or until you change your goal)
It’s kind of like the scientific method, where ideally you formulate a hypothesis first and then go get data.
So you may just be describing two different games in your original question. If I wanted a game that rewarded exploration and experimentation (something like Breath of the Wild), then I would go for the first one (the “immersive” one.). If I wanted a game where players were supposed to log in almost every day to check out what is going on, or maybe a really competitive game where comparing achievements and avoiding wasting time were both paramount, then I’d go for your second one (”mission control panel”). Those two games might have overlap in who enjoys them, but they might attract different “average players” as well. (Source)
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