Dragonflight Alpha/Beta General Discussion

[Foreign Exchange Ztudent]

I honestly have a hard time believing they would announce the expansion a Month later for this expansion when the entire point of this expansion was to get us to this reset point for 10.0. But, at the same time I guess they could somehow reveal it without actually revealing how we got to this new Azeroth. But, who knows.

[Santandame]

The people in this thread discovered a new word recently and trying to get in their quota of using it as much as possible like a young child would usually do?

That word being ''copium''?

It's like when Reddit discovered that ''wholesome'' was a word.

[Fahrad Wagner]

Calls me having a serious mental disease and playing victim, stays here to shit on the game and people that like it, then says this:

Like, I get it, some people in this thread strongly dislike the current state of the game, and they have their own very valid reasons to do so. But they bring something to the table, they're critics, yes, but constructive ones.

And then we have those who just come to take a dump on anything the development team does, and lose a considerable amount of time and energy attempting to ruin it for others. It just sounds so lonely.

Anyway, I won't dwell any further on that, I'd much rather discuss the game that I enjoy playing than entertain our daily boogeyman.

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

The warfronts look good enough imo. Sure the mountains still look a little old, but new textures and models for everything would be good enough for me. I'm not expecting bfa or shadowlands level assets. MoP and WoD level stuff would be fine. Even uldum still looks great.

Flying around on the PTR taught me one thing in particular.

The biggest problem the Cata revamp had was its trees. They tried to be faithful to the originals and it resulted in them looking bad, especially from above.

That's why the New Cata zones still tend to hold up while the revamp has aged visually.

[Fahrad Wagner]

I honestly have a hard time believing they would announce the expansion a Month later for this expansion when the entire point of this expansion was to get us to this reset point for 10.0. But, at the same time I guess they could somehow reveal it withiout actually revealing how we got to this new Azeroth. But, who knows.

We will probably know more once we get access to the raid journal on the PTR! Whatever Zovaal is attempting to do, it will probably be linked to 10.0 and rule in or out a potential world revamp. I hope at least!

[Ersula]

So let me get this straight.
The theory is that they made cata, they public stated multiple times how it fucked them and they dont want do that again. Than, they didnt make 1 but 2 bad expansion because of what, a world revamp?

True, but if they learned that they shouldn't try to design new endgame zones AND revamp the existing world at the same time, it should be doable: An Azeroth Revamp will probably keep the existing Cata Version of these zones & the new version is just for endgame.

By BFA & Legion expectations, Kalimdor & the Eastern Kingdoms are pretty small.

[Chickat]

They. Don't. Plan. Short. Expansions.

Every expansion has a 22-25 month lifespan. If it's closer to 22 months that just means development went well & they can't plan for that.

I just said that they might have planned a 4th tier up until launch but scrapped it after that. They didn't get 9.1 out and scrap a whole patch that was half worked on. They probably scrapped it before launch when they realized that they were delayed so much.

[Fahrad Wagner]

The people in this thread discovered a new word recently and trying to get in their quota of using it as much as possible like a young child would usually do?

That word being ''copium''?

It's like when Reddit discovered that ''wholesome'' was a word.

It is exactly what it is, childish behaviour for lack of stronger arguments.
My little niece (who is three) has a new favourite word every 2/3 weeks that she keeps using in the most random sentences... maybe I should introduce her to "copium". But if I do so it will have to wait until next week, this week it's "petit phoque" (small seal) and it's too adorable to be skipped

[PopoJagaimo]

Sylvannas will probably die to help us win... we go back to Azeroth and it's taken over by the light and Turalyon's army.

[Nyel]

I honestly have a hard time believing they would announce the expansion a Month later for this expansion when the entire point of this expansion was to get us to this reset point for 10.0. But, at the same time I guess they could somehow reveal it without actually revealing how we got to this new Azeroth. But, who knows.

I honestly feel like everyone besides very few is just whelmed by this patch announcement. I haven’t followed the development of retail too much outside of mmoc, but the official forum, Reddit, YouTube - the reactions to the 9.2 announcement are very, very lukewarm.

So an expansion announcement next month sounds like the best they can do to keep players hooked.

[Chickat]

I think some people tend to forget Kul Tiras was quite snowy aswell. Imo the picture is from the glacier plains at Drustvar

Doesn't look like anything from bfa to me, but maybe I'm wrong.

[Hellspawn]

Sylvannas will probably die to help us win... we go back to Azeroth and it's taken over by the light and Turalyon's army.

Or she dies to safe Anduin.

[Nyel]

Or she dies to safe Anduin.

This sounds truly terrible.

[Kokolums]

Sylvannas will probably die to help us win... we go back to Azeroth and it's taken over by the light and Turalyon's army.

she just got here. shes been trapped in that crystal since warcraft 3 until zovaal shattered it and plunged her soul back into her body.

[Fahrad Wagner]

Or she dies to safe Anduin.

Oh God I hope not... the cheesiness of that...

[Chickat]

Flying around on the PTR taught me one thing in particular.

The biggest problem the Cata revamp had was its trees. They tried to be faithful to the originals and it resulted in them looking bad, especially from above.

That's why the New Cata zones still tend to hold up while the revamp has aged visually.

Yes and they didn't go far enough with hd textures and models. An arathi level revamp with new buildings, trees, vegetation, textures and doodads would be fine even if they kept the same mountains.

[Hellspawn]

This sounds truly terrible.

She powerslides into his sword (you know its like poetry... it rhymes) and breaks the spell that binds Anduin.

[Foreign Exchange Ztudent]

The whole sudden Dev being like "Oh Sylvanas and Tyrandes' story is important" leads me to believe that is how her fate ends. I genuinely rather want her to be the one to reset the Universe but I don't know. It seems my hopes for a Reset away from all the chaos of Current Universe Azeroth is moving away at rapid pace with the whole revelation that Tyrande is suddenly back in the picture for some odd reason.

[KainneAbsolute]

In the preview, they put a lot of emphasis on the water. Like it is unique and "it creates a threshold between Zereth Mortis and kind of a more primordial space below it."

Are we talking about a substance like the water of the Well of Eternity? Is the Well of Eternity and Azerite the same? In Zereth Mortis, we saw zones full of life and water and dry zones and without water...

[Jokubas]

The idea that all of this goes back to Warcraft III bothers me not just because it's an extremely bold thing to say, but because I think I know why they're saying it. This is a place I wish I made videos and was really good at articulating this sort of thing, because I'd really like to pick apart why it's garnering such a reaction.

Back in 2015 I had a list of things that made me think Sylvanas might headline the next expansion. It revolved around a lot of comments from interviews or CDev answers, like them saying that Sylvanas was following in the Lich King's steps years and years ago. In 2013 they said she was going to do something big and there would be a reckoning. By 2018 I was convinced she was working for a new death villain because of the Three Sisters comic and some of the vague N'Zoth riddles. That made me go back to some other CDev and other comments that I had kept track of. Not too long after Wrath of the Lich King they admitted that both Arthas and Ner'zhul were holding something back, something that never had an explanation until Shadowlands. There was also Castillian, a comic character who helped make the Wrathgate plague, who we were told we would hear from again in a CDev (we haven't, but the Wrathgate has been thematically relevant).

In other words, I totally believe them that Shadowlands is at least built on loose threads surrounding the Lich King and Sylvanas and the powers of death that have been around for a long time.

The problem is that it hasn't been leveraged at all. I was looking forward to this and I still kinda forget that the Jailer isn't just some standalone villain that sprang fully formed for this expansion. The story seems so obsessed with keeping things secret that not only do we barely know what the villains are trying to do moving forward, but even the "they were secretly planning this all along" element has been kept vague and mostly unused. Part of the reason you reveal someone has been meddling long before you thought they were is so you have an excuse to revisit those plots and show the previously unnoticed meddling, but even the pretty basic idea that the Jailer was the real power behind the Lich King is something that has only been vaguely referenced and still somewhat inconsistent on.

The story frustrates me a lot, but this might be the one that gets me the most as a missed opportunity, because I don't think it's just my speculation that is connecting these dots for once. I think they really did set up an amazing twist on an old plot, but then completely dropped the ball on anything that makes such a twist exciting. We should be seeing how this changes what we knew about Warcraft III and Wrath of the Lich King. We should be seeing how this influenced Sylvanas' decisions. We should have walked into a Shadowlands that had long since been dominated by a Jailer who had been carrying out his plan unimpeded by us for years before we showed up. Instead we show up at the exact spot in a villain's plan that we normally do: just in time for them to make their move, even though he's supposed to have been making moves for decades. The Jailer's machinations were finally made clear and disturbing when we learned that he broke the "engine of death", but even that ended up falling flat because it honestly hasn't mattered at all (the drought ended up being unrelated somehow) and we still don't even know what he actually did.

I blame a seeming inability for the team to ever commit to a final draft of a story. I won't blame anyone in particular as I don't know why it happens (it could be a result of some mandate coming from elsewhere), but it's consistently hampered the ability for any story in World of Warcraft to have proper setup and payoff. You can't tell a mystery story when the clues have changed by the time you get to the reveal.

You can see this all over the place in Shadowlands. Upon the initial announcement, there was a clear icy green color scheme to the Jailer and his powers. By the launch this is gone. It seemed to maybe be in favor of making him look more consistent with the Lich King (which should be a good thing given my theory), but it ended up providing no consistency between anything the Jailer was doing. Being unable commit to a color scheme might sound like a small thing, but it affected other things as well. Sylvanas' unusual power when she killed Saurfang and fought Bolvar were apparently obviously some new magic to everyone in-universe, but just looked like her normal magic to the audience, completely undermining the impact of those moments (and just made everyone think Bolvar was a pushover).

The Jailer's design itself keeps changing as well, and that certainly isn't helping. I don't even mean the concept art, but his silhouette from the announcement trailer to the actual game. There were design motifs on that Jailer which appear elsewhere in the expansion but no longer appear on the Jailer, destroying that visual consistency for no apparent reason. His most recent change was at least part of the story, but even then it feels weird. The implication is that this is what he would have looked like when he was the original Arbiter, but it seems a little hard to believe that the role originally screamed evil and no one saw his betrayal coming. I honestly believe the concept art was supposed to be his Arbiter look, but I suspect they may have again changed it to make his connection to the Lich King more obvious. Unfortunately, since the story has not earned the reveal that he was behind the Lich King all along, it just sort of makes him look like a cheap knock-off instead, like all of the Star Wars Expanded Universe Sith that seem to think you can make a villain as memorable as Darth Vader just by making them a cyborg with a mask.

The deeming of the Chronicle as no longer true but an in-universe unreliable narrator I think is the worst mistake they've made story-wise but also the best example of the constant redrafting. The Chronicle was an amazing piece of writing that managed to compromise decades of pointless retcons into a consistent narrative that managed to reconcile many different branches of the story without just throwing them out. Having that sort of solid foundation to build upon is exactly what the story has needed for a long time and still needs to this day. Contradicting it just proves the fatal flaw that the storytelling has.