Midnight 12.X Patches & World Soul Saga Speculation Thread

[Dragon ANX]

Hype Train derailed after the 4 images leak.

The HYPE is UNSTOPABLE

[Lady Atia]

Everything I've seen from the book has made it extremely baffling that they let it get pushed back a whole year. As you said, it's the same fundamental issue as the Sylvanas book: the primary hooks of their respective plots (why did Sylvanas join the Jailer, what are their plans? and the family drama between the Aspects and the Incarnates) are barely elaborated on in the game and left for books after the story is about over. They're straight up telling the plot out of order but still acting as if players have the same knowledge as them the whole way through?

I harp a lot on the story in here, but if we had even half of the book's development in-game, and it actually came out around the expansion's release, I think that DF's main plot would have felt considerably better.

Sylvanas had the "excuse" of a troubled expansion development, hell, go all the way back to Lord of the Clans which had to bridge the gap between WC2 and WC3 because a planned game got cancelled. I'm not seeing what the excuse for them doing it again with Scaleborn is unless they genuinely think this is sensible narrative design.

Yeah. Also the whole "Vyranoth must choose a side" plot is basically boring as hell now that we know she becomes the frost Incarnate first before switching back to our side.

And yeah, I'm all in for the game to also have the book's development - it needs to stand on it's own. But literally delaying the book, which is a far better medium to give us the basic story beats than the game ever will be, just to that people won't complain about "having to buy/read a book", even if it DOES make the expansion better, is just weird. Similiary, delaying it because the teases and eastereggs would tell us what may be coming next (Aberrus and the Eye of Ysera are both mentioned) is weird because the speculation that comes from that is far more interesting than going in fully blind and have some round-table video talk about Aberrus and Zaralek Cavern as if we could associate anything with it without any hints about them existing beforehand ...

So yeah, story should ALSO be told ingame, but for what it's worth, they should also have used the novel to properly hype up the expansion, it's villains and it's future content instead of "wanting to surprise us", only answering stuff after it no longer matters, or even worse, as with Raszhageth, give us a great enemy in the book, but alas, we already killed her 2 raids ago by the time we get an actual in-depth look at her.

[Echil46]

Beer and mining/archaeology I guess

You can't go and say "archeology" is their focus. Their drive can be their desire for past knowledge, tho.

But. Let's say suddenly, the Dwarves are starting to ramp up their archeology occupation, while keeping it close to the vest. You go and help them, and you learn the curse of flesh is becoming more active in the dwarf population. So they need to find a cure, and to do that they are looking into the history of the first living dwarves. Eventually, they get to create a cure, which forces them to either go back to being earthens or, since the curse is a gift from the old gods, become void-touched meaning they're more likely to fall into madness...

Start the story now, ties it with Algarian dwarves, give them the cure at the end of 11.2.9, and tie the whole void-touched with a 12.00 where the whisper they hear wakes us up from a slumber caused by Nzoth which influenced the whole planet.

[GhostFish]

The art in the background is the biggest giveaway that the whole thing is fake. Usually the focal point in an artwork is something interesting, but here it's just a gryphon flying next to a random black tower that looks incredibly bland.

Can't really tell what's hidden behind the prop pillar in the foreground though.

[allifeur]

Can someone explain me what makes people consider this one screenshot to be made by an AI?



While this architecture is quite weird, it looks like it has realistic proportions, with rock textures fitting the style of modern expansions, ingame water, and trees and biomes that fit the two zones from the four screenshot leak.

[Paula Deen]

Can we move on from the whole AI detector thing, it is clearly not useful in any manner.

Oh yeah? My AI detector says you are, like most birds, AI. Specifically a Regan era spy drone.

[milkmustache]

Can someone explain me what makes people consider this one screenshot to be made by an AI?

image snip

While this architecture is quite weird, it looks like it has realistic proportions, with rock textures fitting the style of modern expansions, ingame water, and trees and biomes that fit the two zones from the four screenshot leak.

Whoa where did this come from?

[Alanar]

Indeed the same pillar

Literally the time area.. idk why this needs to be overanalysed.

[Paula Deen]

Can someone explain me what makes people consider this one screenshot to be made by an AI?



While this architecture is quite weird, it looks like it has realistic proportions, with rock textures fitting the style of modern expansions, ingame water, and trees and biomes that fit the two zones from the four screenshot leak.

Zoom in. Specifically around the banding and the buildings to the right you can tell it started as painted art, probably ai made, then they added the artifcating to cover up the imperfections. Like it's clearly AI although it is a pretty good I'd like to know what they used to get it to stylize that close to Blizz Art.

[Teriz]

I hate dwarves being the focus. I lived fine without it for 20 years. If only we had memorable cool dwarf character in Suramar fashion, which isn like every other generic dwarf, but i believe it will be more like DF - generic and watered down.
can we get some leaks?
or at least Trading Post news?

I highly doubt Dwarves are a focus. There’s no reason to focus on Dwarves given the current story beats or likely direction of the story. Also it would alienate Horde players.

[vintage79]

Indeed the same pillar

there is more portals in this 'room'

maybe in the new (revamped) wow this will be a hub connecting all leveling zones? something like cavern of time / portal room in ESO? (to the old world)

[Sondrelk]

Can someone explain me what makes people consider this one screenshot to be made by an AI?



While this architecture is quite weird, it looks like it has realistic proportions, with rock textures fitting the style of modern expansions, ingame water, and trees and biomes that fit the two zones from the four screenshot leak.

The general consensus is that making a screenshot of a WoW zone is extremely difficult with AI gen, and that images like these are much more likely made with level editors, of which we have had good examples of for years.

Personally I find it hard to believe this image. Not because I couldn't see a zone with this colour palette, and architecture with this style. But because the zone doesn't seem like it would be intuitive to play in this form.
Even with dragonriding likely being carried forwards, there simply doesn't seem to be any roads to get to the places we see here, which suggests to me a lack of cohesive level design.

[Echil46]

Can someone explain me what makes people consider this one screenshot to be made by an AI?

While this architecture is quite weird, it looks like it has realistic proportions, with rock textures fitting the style of modern expansions, ingame water, and trees and biomes that fit the two zones from the four screenshot leak.

I'm not saying its fake, nor its real, but i'm dubious as the logic behind snapping a picture of a background that has ABSOLUTELY nothing special.
If you are exited about something to come, you pick something significant.
Either you worked on the game and you're like "A few more days 'til player see THAT MODEL i made". or "til player get to explore THAT ZONE i worked on".

Or you have intel on the game and you're excited to get into the game, and you use a more significant picture. Like, the capital upclose, or a major building.. or anything more significant.

Not saying its fake, but if its real, the author of that picture is absolutely not original ^^

[milkmustache]

Somebody posts an obviously fake AI image: the thread goes nuts for a week, analysing every little detail and bending itself backwards to make it fit.

Blizzard themselves uploads stuff that seems a little suspicious: the thread goes "naah, there's nothing to this and I don't understand why anybody would waste their time on this".

Yea it is a bit suspicious. 1 for 1, we're looking at an animated version of the Corridor of Time. It's probably just for Blizzcon inclusion fun, but who knows, a hint isn't a stretch! For the #TeamWorldRevamp cult, we can point out that the portal reveals Orgrimmar, which is amongst one of the larger clues about a world revamp via the Thunder Lizard Spirit's dialogue in the Orc Heritage quest.

[Nyel]

Blizzard themselves uploads stuff that seems a little suspicious: the thread goes "naah, there's nothing to this and I don't understand why anybody would waste their time on this".

Because there’s really nothing suspicious about it. There doesn’t need to be a philosophical debate of time future and time past regarding this picture.

[allifeur]

Whoa where did this come from?

From redditor u/spicy_sean_spicer, which seems to be someone's old account with notably bad taste and bad humour ; something I would expect from someone who doesn't care about leaking content early. NSFW content down there so be cautious.

Zoom in. Specifically around the banding and the buildings to the right you can tell it started as painted art, probably ai made, then they added the artifcating to cover up the imperfections. Like it's clearly AI although it is a pretty good I'd like to know what they used to get it to stylize that close to Blizz Art.

It does have this weird feeling where it looks like a minecraft map turned into WoW, but I'm failing to notice those visual artifacts you're refering to.

[Paula Deen]

there is more portals in this 'room'

maybe in the new (revamped) wow this will be a hub connecting all leveling zones? something like cavern of time / portal room in ESO? (to the old world)

We already have a working portal room that was JUST expanded in 10.2 to accommodate future releases.

[Nyel]

Personally I find it hard to believe this image. Not because I couldn't see a zone with this colour palette, and architecture with this style. But because the zone doesn't seem like it would be intuitive to play in this form.
Even with dragonriding likely being carried forwards, there simply doesn't seem to be any roads to get to the places we see here, which suggests to me a lack of cohesive level design.

That zone basically looks like Kul Tiras. There’s nothing special about it.

[Only one player]

Blizzard no longer registers names in countries, many things have already been leaked through documents like this, can anyone find anything? like registering the xpac name in some Asian country

[Baraden]

Used it on another one of the AI generated images from the same batch...



I don't think we should be relying on this site. I even included the Bing watermark in the bottom left corner and it still can't tell it's AI.

Yeah AI detectors are duds

My uni thought about using them for assignments but gave up when they noticed that even dissertations written by doctorate level lecturers would often get flagged as AI written at times