Shadowlands Press Event - Developer Interviews and More

[chaud]

Shadowlands Press Event Recap
Blizzard recently held a Press Event for Shadowlands. We'll be updating the post below today with interview recaps, so keep checking back!


Shadowlands - Auto Battle Mission Table
Preach shared a video of the Auto Battle system we started to see data added for.

Shadowlands - Legendary Crafting UI
Towelliee shared a video of the legendary crafting UI.

Developer Interview - Ion Hazzikostas
Windowscentral shared a interview with Blizzard.

Character Customization

• There was a large engineering undertaking to rebuild how characters are put together under the hood, allowing for the new customization.
• More character customization will be added even after Shadowlands release.

Starting Experience and Leveling

• There is a lot the team would do differently with Island Expeditions. They took lessons from Islands and applied them to Torghast, which should feel more replayable.
• The team wanted to create a better starting experience, as the current game starts you with content that was made 10 years ago and doesn't reflect how the game is built today. That content wasn't created with a new player in mind in some cases.
• The new intro experience reflects the World of Warcraft as of 2020. There are treasures, other players around, optional rares, a mini-dungeon, and more.
• The more linear leveling experience in Shadowlands is an experiment. It's easier to tell a broader progressive narrative when you'll visit zones in a specific order.
• The sense of danger and struggle was lost when you could level through zones in any order, as a new zone didn't feel difficult due to the scaling.
• After you level your main character, then you can experience the zones in any order on alts.
• Keeping EU and US separate systems isn't great experience or design choice that the team would make. It would be great if one day people could play across both regions.

Legendary Items

• The ability to make multiple legendaries over the course of a raid tier with the limit of only one that you can equip at any given time, create interesting decisions, but players have control over these decisions.
• You'll probably acquire legendaries faster than you did in Legion, but the final rate hasn't been determined yet.

Covenants, Soulbinds, and Conduits

• The team wants players to be able to pick the Covenant that they think is cool and enjoy playing more rather than having to pick one for power reasons.
• Making Covenant swapping easy would be a last resort. Choices in an RPG are what define your character and let you carve out an identity that's different from every other player around you because they reflect your priorities.
• The goal is for all end-game systems to be accessible within your first week. It'll be paced a little bit so that you don't arrive at your Covenant and have a ton of systems unlocked.
• Soulbinds and Conduits are simple modifications that should be powerful that you customize your class and spec abilities for certain situations.
• Conduits are bonus items on top of the helm or the shoulders you might get from defeating a dungeon boss or a raid boss.
• Conduits are put into the Soulbind device in your Covenant sanctum and replacing it will destroy the existing one in that slot.
• You'll need to be in your Covenant Sanctum to change your Soulbind. Respeccing the Soulbind will be a minimal anima cost. You'll need to unlock the full tree over time, it's only fully unlocked in Alpha for testing.

Story

• The Horde is definitely in for a period of rebuilding.
• The Horde vs Alliance story isn't the main focus at the outset of Shadowlands, but there will be some story there.
• Having the final boss known at the start of the expansion makes telling the story easier, somewhat like Deathwing in Cataclysm.
• Recent expansions haven't revealed the end boss to preserve twists in the story. Sometimes the story needed to be told before the end boss made sense.
• One of the challenges in creating Shadowlands is introducing a villain and building up a villain for the very first time that we previously have known nothing about
• Villains need to be at least at Titan power level now to be a credible threat.

[Onikaroshi]

Not to sure about the mission tables, but they're mostly useless now anyway.

But damn, will be nice to be able to pick our secondaries on the legendaries.

[gblSweet]

Got a bad, bad feeling about conduits and dualspecs.

[mightykong]

Villains need to be at least at Titan power level now to be a credible threat.

Not true, this is standard hero trope that villains have to be more and more powerful because "we" are more powerful. Probably the most known example I could provide for this would be Baron Zemo in the Captain America: Civil War movie. He literally broke the Avengers and pretty much opened the door for Thanos with zero super powers. If you tell a decent enough story, you don't need a main villain to be the ultimate super power. You can have them manipulate others more powerful to enact their ends. You can't dip into that well every time, but WoW is ripe for that kind of story.

[Novaice]

Not to sure about the mission tables, but they're mostly useless now anyway.

But damn, will be nice to be able to pick our secondaries on the legendaries.

too bad it will be limited like in Legion.

[Jujudrood]

Not true, this is standard hero trope that villains have to be more and more powerful because "we" are more powerful. Probably the most known example I could provide for this would be Baron Zemo in the Captain America: Civil War movie. He literally broke the Avengers and pretty much opened the door for Thanos with zero super powers. If you tell a decent enough story, you don't need a main villain to be the ultimate super power. You can have them manipulate others more powerful to enact their ends. You can't dip into that well every time, but WoW is ripe for that kind of story.

To add to it, we are going into a previously unseen place, so the rules can be very different in terms of what "power" means.
As you said here, The Jailer doesn't have to be Thanos to the Avengers (our PCs).
If you are familiar with the comics, specifically Thanos Quest, he defeats two beings way more powerful than him by using cunning and guile.
The Champion specifically is tricked into destroying his planet in an attempt to "win", but ultimately ends up losing to his own ego.

I would love to see a WoW big bad who does the same, where in place of brute force, they are less powerful than our PCs but twist everything around you drive you to your knees.
It requires some pretty good story-telling to not come across as super cheesy, and I doubt that Blizz would be hiring the Russo bros anytime soon to write a story for them lol.

[Onikaroshi]

too bad it will be limited like in Legion.

If you're talking about slot, don't really find that to be a big deal honestly.

[Rune B]

Preach: "I don't like autobattles."
Also Preach literally a minute later: "Maybe you should make them mandatory so we have to play them."

Uh. No. See, that would be bad :-P It's more fun to have choice, and that it's largely optional content with some arbitrary rewards you don't really need.

[MakeMeLaugh]

The team wants players to be able to pick the Covenant that they think is cool and enjoy playing more rather than having to pick one for power reasons.

They say this, yet they put absurd powers to each covenant, and forget this is WoW with raiding/pvp/m+ LOL.

[apelsinjuice]

so conduits gets destroyed if you replace them, how will that work for dual spec classes, forced to make an alt just to play off spec?

[Unholyground]

Got a bad, bad feeling about conduits and dualspecs.

Only people who feel compelled to do everything all the time care, no one is going to truly care doing regular content what you have for anything.

- - - Updated - - -

so conduits gets destroyed if you replace them, how will that work for dual spec classes, forced to make an alt just to play off spec?

You will have 3 soulbinds, probably more as the expansion goes on so you can tailor them to your specs I assume.

[Lahkesis]

Heirlooms will no longer have experience bonuses. They are looking to replace it with something that is not a raw percentage increase.

It better be an amazing "replacement" because I would not have ever invested in the things without the XP bonus. And making us spend gold over and over again to keep them relevant? I suspect a significant outcry on this one.

[DemonHunter18]

Villains need to be at least at Titan power level now to be a credible threat. - Ion Hazzikostas 07.09.2020

.............................................ok

I want that drug he is consuming.

[Coconut]

There are a lot of positives here (Artifacts being transmoggable regardless of spec, gender swap in barber shop, etc.), so don't take this criticism as a general feeling towards interview, but I also have to say that "Villains need to be at least at Titan power level now to be a credible threat" is silly, especially considering the "borrowed powers" systems we've been using these last expansions. It can easily take us in a forced, over the top and ultimately boring direction. Fighting pirates, zombies, a horde of centaurs or a botani infestation can offer a diverse range of awesome and immersive feelings; fighting mountain-sized beings that threaten to end the world all the time is gonna get old really fast. Hell, this very expansion we went from subduing a titan soul and defeating the Legion to fighting people like Jaina and Rastakhan. Is Ion saying they were close titan-powerd as well?

[Nero Duskwind]

In Shadowlands, Legion artifact weapon transmog will not be limited to spec. If you have the look for the artifact weapon, you can transmog it in any spec!

Halle-fucking-lujah

Shadowlands - Change Gender in Barber Shop for Free
According to an article posted on Eurogamer, Blizzard will be dropping the store fee for changing your character's gender and adding the ability to do it for free at the Barbershop! The following is a quote from John Hight taken from the article:

*Insert "snip-snip-snip" jokes here*

[Darknessvamp]

Heirlooms will no longer have experience bonuses. They are looking to replace it with something that is not a raw percentage increase.

Refund my gold and time spent getting them then if you're planning to make them useless and functionally the same as any other piece of gear. That was the whole point of investing in them.

[Nero Duskwind]

Refund my gold and time spent getting them then if you're planning to make them useless and functionally the same as any other piece of gear. That was the whole point of investing in them.

You want a refund for the time invested into the Pathfinder achievements while you're at it?

[Darknessvamp]

You want a refund for the time invested into the Pathfinder achievements while you're at it?

Why would I? I did them when they were current content and I got the reward of flying and the mount associated with them, I earned what I worked towards and the removal of the restriction posed by pathfinder doesn't negatively affect me. I can still fly and keep my mount. Not to mention I was also not making a major gold or currency investment in completing them. Heirlooms gathering on the other hand stretches back expansions for me from farming Justice Points back in MoP along with guild leveling to garrison development in WoD for specific rings and trinkets to continuous gold investments for each new level cap increase all for the sake of having the experience bonus whilst leveling across multiple classes and up to level cap. If they're just straight up removing it, they're getting rid of the very thing I worked towards earning and the reason why I spent gold and time on them. Of course I'm going to want a refund if they're planning to take away stuff I worked for.

[Novaice]

If you're talking about slot, don't really find that to be a big deal honestly.

the amount.
Limit was 2 after research in Legion

[Drench]

Why would I? I did them when they were current content and I got the reward of flying and the mount associated with them, I earned what I worked towards and the removal of the restriction posed by pathfinder doesn't negatively affect me. I can still fly and keep my mount. Not to mention I was also not making a major gold or currency investment in completing them. Heirlooms gathering on the other hand stretches back expansions for me from farming Justice Points back in MoP along with guild leveling to garrison development in WoD for specific rings and trinkets to continuous gold investments for each new level cap increase all for the sake of having the experience bonus whilst leveling across multiple classes and up to level cap. If they're just straight up removing it, they're getting rid of the very thing I worked towards earning and the reason why I spent gold and time on them. Of course I'm going to want a refund if they're planning to take away stuff I worked for.

Use em now. I hope they give 0 reward back and just delete em. It took a day to nearly max them all and thats from a pvp perspective.

Casual people pay silver to have a npc fly them to one side of the map and act like they went on a daring month long adventure that required them to give up their wife and family to play that long.


If you can't make time then play a autobot phone game.