Was Karazhan supposed to be a vanilla raid?

[Krakan]

This all then makes me wonder, what did it look like during development during vanilla? What was their idea back then? Obviously they did some changes in TBC when they had some more experience with raid designing.

To my knowledge it still exists in game and was used for class weapon quests in legion.

It's pretty rough orginally the crypts were the raid not the tower.

[ClassicPeon]

Yes and as others said it was cut. Hellfire Peninsula was also supposed to be available in vanilla but was pushed back for TBC. Back then of course the devs were real bonafide devs that cared about games and not the marxist subversion they learnt in Americas education system, so they were amazing and did so much work in such a short amount of time. But Kara and HFP was just a bit too much lol... though same goes with other azeroth zones, classes fleshed out etc not everything was fully done in time.

"AWAAWRARARGHH. Back when i was kid developers where just better humans! They didnt care about money, hell half of them worked for oranges! Today you have all these minimum wage developers who clearly choose game developement because of the money!(One of the least paying programmer jobs you can get LOL).

Get real

[Kagthul]

To my knowledge it still exists in game and was used for class weapon quests in legion.

It's pretty rough orginally the crypts were the raid not the tower.

No, the crypts for the class quests were not laid out like the crypts from Vanilla. I clipped through and explored the place once, even recorded it...

But somewhere in various computer upgrades, that video got lost.

[Belloc]

Yes and as others said it was cut. Hellfire Peninsula was also supposed to be available in vanilla but was pushed back for TBC. Back then of course the devs were real bonafide devs that cared about games and not the marxist subversion they learnt in Americas education system, so they were amazing and did so much work in such a short amount of time. But Kara and HFP was just a bit too much lol... though same goes with other azeroth zones, classes fleshed out etc not everything was fully done in time.

You're comparing devs that were developing a game where most people's max resolution was 720p vs. devs developing a game where 1440p and 4k have become commonplace. The amount of work that goes into current content is more than twice (and probably much more than that) the amount that went into Vanilla and early expansion content. This isn't an issue of devs not caring about the game and saying so is really showing that you have no clue what you're talking about.

Also, you fail to consider exactly how much content currently goes into an expansion. Despite having the same amount of raid tiers, BFA has a huge amount of content when compared to TBC.

It's foolish to compare devs then to devs now, just as it's foolish to compare the game and its systems from then to now. "So much work in such a short amount of time"? You truly have no clue what you're talking about.

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"AWAAWRARARGHH. Back when i was kid developers where just better humans! They didnt care about money, hell half of them worked for oranges! Today you have all these minimum wage developers who clearly choose game developement because of the money!(One of the least paying programmer jobs you can get LOL).

Get real

No shit! It's just another typical "I hate the game that I'm addicted to" post. I'll never understand why people don't just quit if they don't like the game -- that's exactly what I did when I got burnt out... and, hey, I still love WoW even if I can't actively play it! There are plenty of other great games out there that they can play and actually enjoy. Though, to be frank, they'll just find other communities and bitch about those games, too, because these people define their personalities by their complaints.

[Krakan]

No, the crypts for the class quests were not laid out like the crypts from Vanilla. I clipped through and explored the place once, even recorded it...

But somewhere in various computer upgrades, that video got lost.

Ahh I know what you mean I was talking about the part you clip under not the one under the tower.

[Kagthul]

where 1440p and 4k have become commonplace.

Sub 10% of the market is not "commonplace".

Not commenting on your other arguments, but this is bunk of the highest order.

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Ahh I know what you mean I was talking about the part you clip under not the one under the tower.

It was huge and definitely extended into/under the tower. Some of the rooms/sub-zones even had their names that would flash up on the screen, including the water-filled Hell of Upside Down Sinners (a deliberate reference to Big Trouble in Little China) room.

It was quite cool.

Its unfortunate that it never got used for anything.

[AcidContainer]

"AWAAWRARARGHH. Back when i was kid developers where just better humans! They didnt care about money, hell half of them worked for oranges! Today you have all these minimum wage developers who clearly choose game developement because of the money!(One of the least paying programmer jobs you can get LOL).

Get real

lol sorry my good sirs, can't help that start speaking like that when I see the insanity happening in America and everywhere else. It just takes me back to Yuri Bezmenov every single time.

[Belloc]

Sub 10% of the market is not "commonplace".

It's common enough that the game is designed with those resolutions in mind. Higher resolutions = bigger dev teams.

[Kaleredar]

To my knowledge it still exists in game and was used for class weapon quests in legion.

It's pretty rough orginally the crypts were the raid not the tower.

Sub 10% of the market is not "commonplace".

Not commenting on your other arguments, but this is bunk of the highest order.

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It was huge and definitely extended into/under the tower. Some of the rooms/sub-zones even had their names that would flash up on the screen, including the water-filled Hell of Upside Down Sinners (a deliberate reference to Big Trouble in Little China) room.

It was quite cool.

Its unfortunate that it never got used for anything.

The crypts under karazhan are still there, almost completely unchanged from vanilla, save for them opening up the first little atrium area with the well that would drop into the pit of bones to normal movement and adding a large wall right at the beginning to the downward sloping path and sealing up the well to restrict players from going any further.

If you unlock the lucid nightmare mount, you unlock the ability to access the entirety of the karazhan crypts for that character.

The place with the legion artifacts is a completely separate area. The karazhan crypt is east of the tower and accessed through a mausoleum in the ground; the legion artifact area is north of the tower and is entered through a door in the side of a cliff.


I went in there numerous times before you were "supposed" to be able to get in there by various means (flying under the world, getting polymorphed through the gate, being mass-rezzed inside) and have access to it now by merit of getting the lucid nightmare mount, and lemme tell you... it's WAAAAY more interesting, and way more creepy, being an empty zone. It wouldn't be unsettling or unnerving or really all that mysterious at all if it just had your generic doofy ghouls and skelemen wandering around in it.

[Kagthul]

It's common enough that the game is designed with those resolutions in mind. Higher resolutions = bigger dev teams.

Umm... no.

Higher resolutions just means your texture artists do their work at a much higher resolution and then the lower resolution textures are just compressed.

Even back in Vanilla, they were working on textures well above 1080p at the time. They were compressed for use in the game. All digital art is that way.

Resolution has NOTHING to do with higher polygon counts, more complex geometry (actual circles, not squared off, etc), more complex vegetation models, etc.

Models are resolution independent.

Textures are not. But i assure you, the Dev team's original art (before it is compressed to be used in the game) is VERY high resolution, and always was. Otherwise it couldn't scale.

[HammerSickle]

It's worth noting that Atiesh's use effect teleported the user right outside the entrance to Karazhan, which would make more sense if the raid would be released in the original game in one of the patches after Naxxramas.

Jeff Kaplan showed original WOW Dungeon Plans and list from April 2003 and November 2004 on one of the Blizzcons so you can see what was changed in 18 months. Can't post a link, search for Blizzcon 2007 - Dungeons & Raids Panel 1/7 and watch from 5th minute onward.

Karazhan is listed there as level 65-70. He also tells that there's always more planned that they can actually build and implement, and they are always changing what goes out when and in what form, like the Scarlet Monastery that they decided to split in four parts.

Dungeons/Raids on April 2003 list were:

Deadmines
Shadowfang Keep
Wailing Caverns
Blackfathom [Deeps]
Monastery (probably the non-split version)
Gnomeregan
Dire Maul (ended up as patch content)
Uldaman
Razorfen Downs
Maraudon (ended up as patch content)
Caverns of Time (probably both Escape from Durnholde and Black Morass, since both are in the files)
Sunken Temple
Blackrock Spire
Stratholme
Karazhan
Ahn'Qiraj
Dragon Isles (he mentioned this place in documentary about WOW "Looking for Group")
Black Temple

The Black Temple mentioned here might not the Black Temple from TBC how it ended up to be. This one is probably the one from Warcraft III The Frozen Throne's one of the last missions of the Blood Elves campaign, I think it was called The Black Citadel and was located in Hellfire Peninsula, where you helped Illidan defeat Magtheridon and claim the throne and become "Lord of Outland". This place was renamed to Hellfire Citadel in TBC. This all makes sense, because like it was already was pointed out, Hellfire/Outland was supposed to come out in a patch for the 'vanilla' game, presumably after Naxxramas. All that is left of the original version are two zones that are similar in look to Blasted Lands. One of them actually resembles part of TBC Hellfire Peninsula.

[Drusin]

but they realised they had no chance making that in reasonable amount of time so rather than postponing game by years they scratched it

If vanilla came out today they'd just patch in Outlands ala Timeless Isle, Broken Shore, Mechagon, etc

[Kaleredar]

Umm... no.

Higher resolutions just means your texture artists do their work at a much higher resolution and then the lower resolution textures are just compressed.

Even back in Vanilla, they were working on textures well above 1080p at the time. They were compressed for use in the game. All digital art is that way.

While you're correct that art is made and then compressed down... textures aren't made or exported at "1080p" like it was some factor of screen resolution... all art is assembled on texture sheets that are powers of two; WoW's general go-to output resolution is 512x512 squares, and always has been. The "4k resolution" (4096x4096, or a texture 64 times larger than a 512 map) the guy you quoted mentioned is probably entirely unheard of in WoW, and might have been unheard of even from an authoring standpoint back in the day (I'm not particularly familiar with Photoshop's historic operating capacity.) The only, and I mean ONLY thing I could see being a 4096 texture in the entirety of WoW is maybe Gorshalach sticking out of Silithus, though I doubt that.

However, I would very much assert that much more work goes into WoW these days, art-wise, than did in the past, by merit of the tools available to use now.

Textures aren't a matter of opening up a photoshop file and laying something down anymore. Ground/wall/environment textures in WoW, for example, are sculpted in programs like Zbrush before being baked to a flat map with data extrapolated from the geometry and then being painted over in programs like 3D coat or photoshop. That adds an entire extra step where artists have to physically sculpt the models before even painting them, which is then an entire process unto itself. Those kinds of tools didn't exist until fairly recently.

[Lolites]

If vanilla came out today they'd just patch in Outlands ala Timeless Isle, Broken Shore, Mechagon, etc

thats possible, if they had other ideas for expansions, but if not they would go for more money so expansions

[Firefall]

While you're correct that art is made and then compressed down... textures aren't made or exported at "1080p" like it was some factor of screen resolution... all art is assembled on texture sheets that are powers of two; WoW's general go-to output resolution is 512x512 squares, and always has been. The "4k resolution" (4096x4096, or a texture 64 times larger than a 512 map) the guy you quoted mentioned is probably entirely unheard of in WoW, and might have been unheard of even from an authoring standpoint back in the day (I'm not particularly familiar with Photoshop's historic operating capacity.) The only, and I mean ONLY thing I could see being a 4096 texture in the entirety of WoW is maybe Gorshalach sticking out of Silithus, though I doubt that.

However, I would very much assert that much more work goes into WoW these days, art-wise, than did in the past, by merit of the tools available to use now.

Textures aren't a matter of opening up a photoshop file and laying something down anymore. Ground/wall/environment textures in WoW, for example, are sculpted in programs like Zbrush before being baked to a flat map with data extrapolated from the geometry and then being painted over in programs like 3D coat or photoshop. That adds an entire extra step where artists have to physically sculpt the models before even painting them, which is then an entire process unto itself. Those kinds of tools didn't exist until fairly recently.

4096 by 4096 is very small and I've been working with documents 20,000-30,000+ in photoshop for over a decade now and I'm sure WoW has too, thats what you need for marketing. Even a freaking flashplayer game company I worked with uses 20k as their default dimensions. You have no clue what you're talking about and shouldve left your reply to Kagthul as "you're correct."

[Kaleredar]

4096 by 4096 is very small and I've been working with documents 20,000-30,000+ in photoshop for over a decade now and I'm sure WoW has too, thats what you need for marketing. Even a freaking flashplayer game company I worked with uses 20k as their default dimensions. You have no clue what you're talking about and shouldve left your reply to Kagthul as "you're correct."

“Marketing?” Blizzard doesn’t (usually) show their UV-mapped texture sheets, let alone market with them. In fact, it you go find the blizzcon demo where they show off the new player skins, they show right on them that both the new AND old player skins are 512x512 maps in-game.

The big, beautiful HD paintings that get posted on the covers of the game boxes or into art books are not the same as the textures that get implemented into the actual game. Not even close.

Regardless of what you perceive a 4K image to be as it pertains to photoshop handling it, it is considered quite large for a video game engine to call up in a draw call and would be more than adequate to author in, especially if you know that the final texture is going to be 1/64th the size you’re actually painting. 8k textures (a “mere” 8192x8192) are few and far between. Programs like substance painter won’t even let you author in them (you can export procedurally uprezzed 8k maps that carry an “experimental” warning with them) and game engines like unreal engine require you to manually edit the program files to even allow 8k maps. They’re certainly unheard of in WoW.

[Shadowsgrace]

The shade of Aran has a voiceline mentioning the staff of medivh from naxx. Another is the raid portals in the karazhan building, both down and up, protected by portcuils. And then there's the staff of medivh havign a teleport there. The only thing that i can think of that sticks out of this theory is that there are ethereals there, but those could have been placed there later.

Basically Shareholders wanted more money, so instead of another Patch raid/content like everything else had been, they pushed it out as an "expansion". And to make people "buy the game again" raised the player level cap from 60 to 70, added flying etc... to justify not just releasing a patch.

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To my knowledge it still exists in game and was used for class weapon quests in legion.

It's pretty rough orginally the crypts were the raid not the tower.

The "Original Kara Crypts" were used in the acquisition of the Lucid Nightmare Mount, and was where the actual mount was located as the final part of the chain. The morbid creepiness of those crypts are probably the reason they were never used as an asset after TBC was decided. Also trying to appeal to a younger crowd of gamers, they may have felt it was too dark.

[Kaleredar]

The morbid creepiness of those crypts are probably the reason they were never used as an asset after TBC was decided. Also trying to appeal to a younger crowd of gamers, they may have felt it was too dark.

That was debunked by a WoW dev. They probably just never got around to using it for whatever they wanted to use it for.

Case in point, there are hanging bodies and skeletons and stuff all over WoW. No particular reason why the karazhan crypts would have been any different.

[Dhrizzle]

Basically Shareholders wanted more money, so instead of another Patch raid/content like everything else had been, they pushed it out as an "expansion". And to make people "buy the game again" raised the player level cap from 60 to 70, added flying etc... to justify not just releasing a patch.

That's pretty unlikely. At that time Blizzard was a small part of a small part of a huge mega-global conglomerate, the idea that shareholders in Vivendi would be coming up with specific game development ideas is far-fetched to say the least. Especially so when you realise that WoW had just blasted past all expectations and was pulling in 5-6 times the projected monthly revenue.

It seems more likely that WoW's runaway success opened up opportunities for the developers so small ideas that could have been patched in were opened up to be expansions, also allowing them to redesign classes to fit with the way the game developed over the course of Vanilla and introduce new features like flight.

The "Original Kara Crypts" were used in the acquisition of the Lucid Nightmare Mount, and was where the actual mount was located as the final part of the chain. The morbid creepiness of those crypts are probably the reason they were never used as an asset after TBC was decided. Also trying to appeal to a younger crowd of gamers, they may have felt it was too dark.

As TBC gave us "the path of glory" which was paved with the bones of genocide victims I don't think they were trying to tone down the creepiness.

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OT: There were quite a few bits in Vanilla that looked unfinished, presumably for later patches before they started on expansions. As well as the ones @Mikah listed on the previous page Azshara was unfinished and presumably was supposed to have something going on, Hyjal was a zone in development (complete with the skeletal remains of Archimonde,) Uldum looked like it was supposed to continue the Discs of Norgannon quests in a dungeon similar to Uldaman and of course there was the Missing Diplomat quest to find King Wrynn (who had a model on Alcaz island) which never concluded until they tied in the Warcraft comics at the end of TBC and decided to finish the chain with a quick "nevermind, we found him."

[epLe]

Originally WoW was never planned to have expansions, so Karazhan, Hyjal, Illidan's prison and a few more places was planned for Vanilla.

Then marketing found out a way to just make profits on larger patches, by calling them expansions. Subscription money was not enough.