Hot Buttered Popcorn Toy, Battle.Net Update, WoW Storytelling, DLC #643

[chaud]

The Boomsday Project Arena Meta Report - Meta and Tier Predictions

New Darkmoon Faire Toy - Hot Buttered Popcorn
The Darkmoon Faire is live for the week and with it comes a new toy, Hot Buttered Popcorn. This toy causes your character to pull out a box of fresh popcorn and eat it and has a 50 second cooldown. It also causes an emote in chat that says "(character name) munches on some popcorn." Pick it up from Stamp Thunderhorn for 50 Darkmoon Prize Tickets!

Battle.Net Beta Update
The Battle.Net Beta client has been updated to add:

• Notification Center - See all of your social notifications in one place.
• Giphy Support - Do a /giphy to embed a random giphy image for that term
• Link Previews - Get a preview of what awaits when you click that link!
• Mentions - Use @group member, mods, and leaders in Blizzard Groups.
• Improved Patching Order - Games will now patch in the order they were most recently played and with less Battle.Net App restarts required

The Evolution of World of Warcraft Storytelling
ScienceAlert has posted a three part interview with Alex Afrasiabi called "How Warcraft Builds Towards Stories Players Care About." We previously covered Part 1 here.

Part 2

• Before Mists of Pandaria, the team would only plan one expansion ahead of time for the story, but now they keep the previous and future expansions in mind when telling the story.
• There is some truth to forum posts that say "WoW's running out of bosses to kill. The Warcraft 3 well is nearly dry."
• It took a couple expansions to take Garrosh from a relatively unknown character to a boss.
• Saurfang was added just to be an NPC to turn in Onyxia's head to. Alex wrote his gossip text at three in the morning and it turned into who we know today.
• New expansions allows the team to create new heroes and new villains for us to face.
• The lore team helps to keep facts straight for storytelling.
• The Chronicles are historical, so they are helpful for fact checking WoW's history and providing inspiration for the story.
• Story is a motivational factor in the things that you do and your actions in the world. It gives them consequence, weight, and adds emotion.

Part 3

• At the start of an expansion, the team talks about what expansion is going to be about, the primary characters, the direction they're heading, and the tones and themes.
• From there, all of the books, novellas, comics, short stories, audio books, and all of that stuff originates from the game team.
• Alex tells the designers to not depend upon quest text to tell their story or the story of the world and the characters.
• The team should focus on when they have the player captive and able to listen, versus hit accept and move on and follow the quest map to check off the things on the list.
• The team wants to continue to try to and improve the ways in which they deliver the story so that you aren't bound by WoWpedia or the quest text.
• The goal is for players to feel something, so that may be anger, happiness, sadness, excitement, or other emotions.

Dark Legacy Comics #643
DLC #643 has been released!

[Grimalkin of Old]

The team should focus on when they have the player captive and able to listen, rather than relying on them not to just hit accept and move on.

Oh boy how far they are from such goal

[tbakke]

I can't be the only one seeing how they are trying to make WoW into Fortnite?

They are introducing lootboxes falling down from the sky.. and now the popcorn-emote.

[sociald1077]

I can't be the only one seeing how they are trying to make WoW into Fortnite?

They are introducing lootboxes falling down from the sky.. and now the popcorn-emote.

Depends on how many people have played Fortnite. I myself have not played it so its new to me.

[Nelaphim-EX]

They are hardly turning it 'into' Fortnite. But World of Warcraft has always taken popular elements of other games and introduced them when possible.

[Raldazzar]

Oh boy how far they are from such goal

speak for yourself, myself and my wife love the storyline at the moment. I've always been about the red vs blue. so this is fantastic.

[Venziir]

"New expansions allows the tea to create new heroes and new villains for us to face." Aha! But is it Darjeeling or Earl Grey?

[huldu]

That giphy stuff isn't working so I guess it isn't really live yet?

[TOM_RUS]

That giphy stuff isn't working so I guess it isn't really live yet?

It's only available in Beta version of Battle.net client. And that's clearly stated above.
You can switch to beta in BNA settings and try it.

[Corroc]

Oh boy how far they are from such goal

The full quote is actually

Focus on those moments where you have the player captive, where they're actually able to listen versus hit accept and move on and follow the quest map to check off the things on the list.

They are not saying that in every quest players should read in to the quest more than just bunch of objectives. What he is saying is that designers should focus telling story on quests where players actually want to see what the quest text says.

I have no idea why mmo champion still keeps trying to make simple sentence even more simple. Its actually pretty insulting to the source material. But I guess the guys who keep this site up dont care much about ethics.

[Appelgren]

I can't be the only one seeing how they are trying to make WoW into Fortnite?

They are introducing lootboxes falling down from the sky.. and now the popcorn-emote.

Yeah. Fortnite is the first game ever to have pop culture references like *grabs popcorn* introduced into it.

I bet they will steal things like dancing and finding loot out in the world too to make it even more fortnity!

Come on... did you really think that one through mate?

[Lord Pebbleton]

I'm still afraid of the next thing they will put up for 1000 Unfunny Island Tokens.

[Deleted]

"but now they keep the previous and future expansions in mind when telling the story."

Just wow...storytelling without remembering what`s happened in the previous parts? I`m speechless.....
And what simpletons...""I've always been about the red vs blue. so this is fantastic." Speechless again.....

[Tupolew519]

RIP Teldrassil

[Venziir]

"but now they keep the previous and future expansions in mind when telling the story."

Just wow...storytelling without remembering what`s happened in the previous parts? I`m speechless.....
And what simpletons...""I've always been about the red vs blue. so this is fantastic." Speechless again.....

The funny thing about that is, that it's not even right, I mean they've done it since Cataclysm, with both Garrosh and the Cataclysm itself that lead to MoP, which lead to WoD, which lead to Legion etc. It's true that there wasn't a real conenction between Vanilla-TBC-Wotlk, aside from Garrosh really, but aside from that? Nothing. So wierd that they can't see that themselves

[splatomat]

The full quote is actually

They are not saying that in every quest players should read in to the quest more than just bunch of objectives. What he is saying is that designers should focus telling story on quests where players actually want to see what the quest text says.

I have no idea why mmo champion still keeps trying to make simple sentence even more simple. Its actually pretty insulting to the source material. But I guess the guys who keep this site up dont care much about ethics.

I think there's a problem with the idea that there would ever be quests whose text is so irrelevant you just skip it. I mean, that's partly why players skip the text. How many different reasons can there be for 10 boar livers/broken scrap/poop/whatever until youre just like "ok whatever you need 10 poops, I don't even want to know why and I couldn't care less".

There's way too much "questing glut" in the game.

[Deleted]

Hmm all i see in the trade or general channels is "eating popcorn" spam now, yay

[Powerogue]

"The team should focus on when they have the player captive and able to listen, rather than relying on them not to just hit accept and move on."

That explains why they've gotten so good as of late of cramming very dense storytelling into cutscenes. Hell, the entire arc of Illidan and Velen's bromance was told in two cutscenes.

[Farfie0]

I was really hoping that the popcorn toy would just you be sitting there for at least 15 or 20 seconds, not just one munch... kinda disappointing. Even if they have to increase the cooldown, it just makes more sense. Who designed this thing?

[Mic_128]

I can't be the only one seeing how they are trying to make WoW into Fortnite?

They are introducing lootboxes falling down from the sky.. and now the popcorn-emote.

Please explain how fortnight invented popcorn emotes.