Midnight 12.X Patches & World Soul Saga Speculation Thread

[COBRAstriker]

Multiple devs have come out and said it was a dev driven effort and had nothing to do with CEOs.

And really the things changed were so minor and the fact they nothing else has gotten thr same treatment since means people still waffling on about it are making a mountain out of a mole hill.

I wouldn't call removing emotes or voice lines from players, minor. Especially after nelgecting the countless demands for more emotes to be added so players can have a better RP experience. At least they added /lean. But it's so lazily done that your character just snaps into it. I've said it before but it's high time Blizzard updates the player skeletons so they are able to do better animations. Maybe we can also move to more grounded animations and facial expressions instead of these overly exaggerated, Disney/Pixar ones we have now. And our ingame cinematics wouldn't look worse than cinematics from 20 years ago. But alas. That effort goes into Harranir and Niffen

[Nymrohd]

Why would the sepulcher be infinite? It's a confined testbed and machine to generate infinity, not infinity itself.

It creates infinities.

[Tourmaline]

That’s just the most recent dev mention, here are some from around the time.



https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comment...on_twitter_to/

From the second sentence in the press release (bolding is mine):
"These updates are a relatively small part of a comprehensive, company-wide effort to improve the WoW team and Blizzard as a whole, but they’re important to us as developers."

"comprehensive, company-wide effort" means that it was a corporate decision to make the sanitization pass. What to remove/change seems to be a combination of the dev team and player feedback which absolutely would have come down a thumbs up or thumbs down decision by managers (whether as high up as Ion as some have suggested, we have no idea).

[Lorgar Aurelian]

The creation story of Chronicle Vol. 1 didn't really close that specific door with the whole Light/Void explosion thing, because in a fantasy framework, you're still left with "who created the Light and Void," or "did those energies have sentience(s)?" It also only circumscribes the birth of the physical universe itself, which is only a part of Warcraft's observable metacosm - and doesn't address the origins of things such as the Emerald Dream, the Shadowlands, or the Twisting Nether. This makes it entirely possible for both creation stories to be simultaneously true.

Ya but that’s just the “if gods not real who made the Big Bang” argument.

There doesn’t always need to be a bigger fish fish, things work better when your hot just trying to blatantly trying to one up what came before including making similar architecture and creation facility’s.

[Hitei]

It creates infinities.

Right, but that is my point. It is a singular, finite structure that is able to infinitely generate realms. If you have a magic gun that shoots infinite bullets, that doesn't mean that the magazine should be infinitely long... that'd just be a regular gun that has an infinite magazine attached.

[Houle]

Still seems pretty arbitrary to me, to be honest. The Warhammer aspect of the earlier incarnation of Warcraft was never really a known quantity back in its day and was never truly part of the lore - it's something we learned later on as Warcraft grew in popularity. But WC1 and WC2 had pretty extensive backstories in their respective manuals, going into the story, background, and overarching lore of the game. Then WC3 launched and pretty much retconned the majority of the existing WC1/WC2 lore, but no one seemed to care or really bat an eye. You got a new pantheon of distant god-like figures, the demons became an extradimensional alien army, and also intimations that Azeroth was once occupied by protoplasmic deities of chaos and evil.

The Warhammer aspect has been part of the games identity since day 1. Its why Warcraft orcs look exactly like Warhammer orcs, or why certain races (see what would become the the BL for example) were called the same as in Warhammer until WC3 onwards. Sure, they changed stuff and tried writing around it when it became clear they wouldnt get the IP, but the game was very, very obviously made to be a Warhammer Fantasy PC game. From the artstyle, to the character designs, to the races names. Same story with Starcraft, which was made to be a Warhammer 40k PC game.

To me, this comes across as a strange appeal to tradition or an argument from age, where simply because a concept is old, it is accepted and expected without issues, whereas new information or creations have aspersions cast on them simply because of their newness.

No, it is simply pointing out that when a franchise is still new and in the process of finding its own direction and lore after being born from a different IP, people are generally more willing to forgive big fundamental changes than 20 years later, when the franchise already HAD found its direction and lore for those 20 years. Thats really all there is to it.

That kind of unfocused "they changed it, now it sucks" knee-jerk response to change in general. Stories have to move forward and have new things happen to continue, after all, and it would be weird and awkward to just close the book on an ongoing story and automatically dismiss new information or revelations out of some form of fear of change.

While continuing stories have to move forward for new things to happen, theres a considerable difference between creating new lore and fitting it besides already established things, and constantly changing fundamental parts of the established lore to replace it with new things.

One is good storytelling, the other is not. You can do the latter once or twice, when it becomes absolutely necessary, but when you do it as often as Blizz does, it starts becoming a symptom of laziness and/or indifference. Why bother attempting to weave new lore around and between the old one, when you can just replace the old one and call it a day.

The creation story of Chronicle Vol. 1 didn't really close that specific door with the whole Light/Void explosion thing, because in a fantasy framework, you're still left with "who created the Light and Void," or "did those energies have sentience(s)?" It also only circumscribes the birth of the physical universe itself, which is only a part of Warcraft's observable metacosm - and doesn't address the origins of things such as the Emerald Dream, the Shadowlands, or the Twisting Nether. This makes it entirely possible for both creation stories to be simultaneously true.

Its has been said in SL that each of the First Ones created/became one of the cosmic forces. That directly rules out the explanation in Chronicle for how the Light lead to the Void, and how both of them clashing led to the Nether/Disorder.

[Joshuaj]

Why would the sepulcher be infinite? It's a confined testbed and machine to generate infinity, not infinity itself.

Regardless of if it did or not, we know these things have a core. We've been to the Heart of Eternity. There is an origin point.

[Nymrohd]

Right, but that is my point. It is a singular, finite structure that is able to infinitely generate realms. If you have a magic gun that shoots infinite bullets, that doesn't mean that the magazine should be infinitely long... that'd just be a regular gun that has an infinite magazine attached.

I mean my point in that paragraph was about it being more impressive in scale but go off, be technically correct, get a pat in the back

[Hearthfinder]

Not sure you could really adequately render what the Shadowlands are actually like in the context of a video game - not without the application of some really powerful hallucinogens or awareness-spectrum alterations. It's more meant to convey that experience of being in the Shadowlands is trippy, like a dream or a powerful reverie - it lacks the same grounded nature of reality, and everything feels more relativistic and less fixed in time and space.

I suppose that's true.

[Aucald]

Ya but that’s just the “if gods not real who made the Big Bang” argument.

There doesn’t always need to be a bigger fish fish, things work better when your hot just trying to blatantly trying to one up what came before including making similar architecture and creation facility’s.

I didn't say it was necessary; I said that the space to be filled by a new mythology was already present.

[Nymrohd]

Its has been said in SL that each of the First Ones created/became one of the cosmic forces. That directly rules out the explanation in Chronicle for how the Light lead to the Void, and how both of them led to the Nether/Disorder.

Curious, where was any of this said?

[Vakir]

The 9.1.5 censorship patch has changed my view of Blizzard in a fundamental way that I don't think I will ever be able to move past,

It's a problem, but it's per usual fingering the wrong culprit.

Emphasis on fingering given what happened, haha, but really the enemy is corporatism. So much knee PR jerk reaction as a result of the crushing revelation of a bunch of sex pests and a breast milk thief during a period of unprecedented bad press along one of the worst major patches of all time in arguably the worst expansions.

They don't actually care about a lot of those changes. They didn't for long stretches of time with the same people around. And in this case, many of the changes they did care about were in fact from those "figureheads." Danuser confessed removing bitch was on him. Metzen confessed an interaction with his child informed certain character design changes. But I'm sure pressure still existed for some.

As far as censorship, it needs to be external to be that. Arguing for freedom of artistic expression also means arguing for an artist, or artists, to decide certain things they do not want to show or engage with. I'm a horror guy - I can't tell you how many intense scenes or ideas I wish remained in some projects, I am fascinated by the idea of the existence of a 3 hour Hereditary cut, but I also recognize that it's not my decision in terms of whether those things "belong" to me. WoW is developed by a bunch of people so it's a grey area.

But the real origin of all this stuff, good, bad, or neutral, starts in 2008 with Activision.

[Super Dickmann]

Circling back to what @Lorgar Aurelian pointed out earlier, the most damning indictment of Blizzard's character writing, despite it being on an uptick in TWW compared to the three before, is that obscure discussions about the minutiae of Shadowlands, even years later, are a distant second only to faction dynamics in being able to put some rigor mortis in the lore-interested's cadaverous veins.

This is partly survivorship bias, given how many stopped following entirely during that carfire, selecting only for those aware and inured to it, but the same was also the case in its heyday. Only Sylvanas and Tyrande threads towered ahead of discussions about the Bald Man, the worst main villain in the franchise, 's stacking of obtuse plot devices to achieve whatever the fuck he was trying to accomplish, with no character or plot beat, new or old, getting more than a glance in comparison.

[Hitei]

I mean my point in that paragraph was about it being more impressive in scale but go off, be technically correct, get a pat in the back

It's not about technicality. I just fundamentally disagree with your conclusion here.

It is a crucial part of the Sepulcher, and ZM in general, that they are FINITE. The Shadowlands are infinite because they can be created infinitely, Zereth Mortis is an installation. It is one specific mechanical facility, precision designed to create subrealms, not some weird ambiguous planar soup that the subrealms arise out of. Places like the four regular zones (i.e. Bastion, Maldraxxus, Ardenweald and Revendreth) should have been expanded to seem more infinite, with just endless landmasses floating off in the skybox fading beyond sight.

But the Sepulcher being a finite and delineated space entirely suited the nature of what it was.

[COBRAstriker]

From the second sentence in the press release (bolding is mine):
"These updates are a relatively small part of a comprehensive, company-wide effort to improve the WoW team and Blizzard as a whole, but they’re important to us as developers."

"comprehensive, company-wide effort" means that it was a corporate decision to make the sanitization pass. What to remove/change seems to be a combination of the dev team and player feedback which absolutely would have come down a thumbs up or thumbs down decision by managers (whether as high up as Ion as some have suggested, we have no idea).

You're conflating 2 different things. There were company wide changes with tangible results, such as making sure that such behavior is not repeated or tolerated anymore. And then there were game changes from devs themselves which have said multiple times that were led by devs. From the thread that was posted:

The way I see it is that "they" are two completely different groups of people. "They" in charge of company wide policy changes are not the "they" in charge of wow content changes. I agree there needs to be company changes, but that doesn't mean there can't be game changes. - @\kenandstuff

I can say with certainty that these changes did not come from requests from the c-suite, these changes came from demands from wow devs. - @\kenandstuff

[Nymrohd]

It's not about technicality. I just fundamentally disagree with your conclusion here.

It is a crucial part of the Sepulcher, and ZM in general, that they are FINITE. The Shadowlands are infinite because they can be created infinitely, Zereth Mortis is an installation. It is one specific mechanical facility, precision designed to create subrealms, not some weird ambiguous planar soup that the subrealms arise out of. Places like the four regular zones should have been expanded to seem more infinite, with just endless landmasses floating off in the skybox fading beyond sight.

But the Sepulcher being a finite and delineated space entirely suited the nature of what it was.

It lacks spectacle.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

From the second sentence in the press release (bolding is mine):
"These updates are a relatively small part of a comprehensive, company-wide effort to improve the WoW team and Blizzard as a whole, but they’re important to us as developers."

"comprehensive, company-wide effort" means that it was a corporate decision to make the sanitization pass. What to remove/change seems to be a combination of the dev team and player feedback which absolutely would have come down a thumbs up or thumbs down decision by managers (whether as high up as Ion as some have suggested, we have no idea).

We know what that effort was as the devs also talked about it, blizzard opened a slack line where devs could put up things they wanted changes to see if others agreed.

And as one dev pointed out prior to any official statement from blizzard, the way things went down wouldn’t even make sense as a cover up.

if it were intended as a smokescreen it would have been promoted. you only know this exists because someone went datamining. getting upset with team 2 because we have corporate overlords who won't listen to our v. reasonable collective demands is... a choice one could make, ok.

[Joshuaj]

Curious, where was any of this said?

I think he's a bit confused, cause at best, the six forces of Light, Shadow, Order, Disorder, Life, and Death are most likely the First Ones. The powers that represent those forces and govern their influences are the forces we're used to seeing, such as the Titans, the Void Lords, the Demons, etc.

- - - Updated - - -

The forces of Light and Shadow clashing and creating everything was kinda sorta retconned in SL, yeah. But it could also still remain somewhat true, if we're to assume Light and Shadow represent creation and destruction respectively.

[Aucald]

The Warhammer aspect has been part of the games identity since day 1. Its why Warcraft orcs look exactly like Warhammer orcs, or why certain races (see what would become the the BL for example) were called differently than they were called from WC3 onwards. Sure, they changed stuff and tried writing around it when it became clear they wouldnt get the IP, but the game was very, very obviously made to be a Warhammer Fantasy PC game. From the artstyle, to the character designs, to the races names. Same story with Starcraft, which was made to be a Warhammer 40k PC game.

No, I mean the idea that the game was based on the Warhammer IP wasn't common knowledge then, and it was never a functional part of the game's actual narrative as of release. That it was inspired by Warhammer is a known quantity, and has been for almost two decades now.

No, it is simply pointing out that when a franchise is still new and in the process of finding its own direction and lore after being born from a different IP, people are generally more willing to forgive big fundamental changes than 20 years later, when the franchise already HAD found its direction and lore for those 20 years. Thats really all there is to it.

Which again still reads as "they can only make changes when something is in its infancy, and after that, I can arbitrarily close the door on further changes."

While continuing stories have to move forward for new things to happen, theres a considerable difference between creating new lore and fitting it besides already established things, and constantly changing fundamental parts of the established lore to replace it with new things.

One is good storytelling, the other is not. You can do the latter once or twice, when it becomes absolutely necessary, but when you do it as often as Blizz does, it starts becoming a symptom of laziness and/or indifference. Why bother attempting to weave new lore around and between the old one, when you can just replace the old one and call it a day.

That would require the "new lore" to fundamentally replace or supersede the old lore, which I don't think is necessarily in play as often as people make the claim. The First Ones, for instance, neither replace nor supersede the Titans in any real sense - it's not a retcon, and everything the Titans are and did still happened in the narrative itself. The existence of a wider metacosm beyond the physical universe doesn't mean the physical universe is unimportant, or that events there no longer matter.

Its has been said in SL that each of the First Ones created/became one of the cosmic forces. That directly rules out the explanation in Chronicle for how the Light lead to the Void, and how both of them led to the Nether/Disorder.

The physical universe is not part of the six cosmic forces outlined in the First Ones mythos. So it's entirely possible that the First One of Light and the First One of Void, created or became their respective force and then came into conflict with one another, with said conflict creating the physical universe. The two sets of mythology are flexible enough to fit together without much coercion, really.

[Vakir]

I understand the motive, I see the bait, and I'm not biting. Good attempt though.

The paranoia is weird to me. This isn't a bully calling McFly a chicken, not engaging is just as bad, it's asking you to back up an opinion. If you're "backed into a corner" to be forced to say a preference, and you feel like that betrays something, it might be worth self-examination.

But you have no obligation to. And that's fine.

At the end of the day, if abilities and aesthetics make something work, it isn't the character, it's the encounter itself or the setting or the art style.

So it isn't Dimensius. It's just any spectacle. Any sufficiently talented art team can also make anything else with an equal or higher amount of scale, regardless of who or what it's connected to story wise.

That's all my point is.