Midnight 12.X Patches & World Soul Saga Speculation Thread

[Nymrohd]

Imo Class Halls should be part of leveling.

[Throren]

Because Isle of Dorn is so vast ^^

Isle of Dorn's playable area, not counting all the open water that make up the map around it, is double the size of Zul'Drak, even more so if you count the actual map size/water around the isle

Grizzly Hills + Howling Fjord + Zul'drak combined would be more in line with a modern expansion zone size

[Skildar]

Isle of Dorn is about 5,6k yds by 3,6k yds across. Zul'Drak is about 3,8k yds by 1,7k yds. So yeah, Isle of Dorn is about 3 TIMES the size of Zul'drak

Nice, I didn't know we could get these geographic info. I should get back to Zul'drak to get the proper feeling because when I'm dashing through Isle of Dorn it already feels like the zone is very tiny and unfortunately barren.

[Nymrohd]

Nice, I didn't know we could get these geographic info. I should get back to Zul'drak to get the proper feeling because when I'm dashing through Isle of Dorn it already feels like the zone is very tiny and unfortunately barren.

Just mark an area with the in game marker and you can see the distance from it. Skyriding makes everything feel smaller.

For instance, Azure Span is roughly rectangular and I think the largest zone in the game. From Vakhtros Summit where the World Boss spawn to the edge of Brackenhide Hollow is 8k yds. From the entrance of the Azure Vault to Forkriver Crossing it is 3,3k yds. This makes it four times as large as Zul'Drak and +30% larger than the Isle of Dorn.

And I am bored so why not. Taking it as average width for the three zones combined, from Venture Bay to Bloodmoon Isle is 4,4k yds. Then roughly perpendicular to that, from Baelgun's Excavation site to the Altar of Serratus is only 7k yds. So combined all three zones combined are just +15% larger than the Azure Span

[Skildar]

Just mark an area with the in game marker and you can see the distance from it. Skyriding makes everything feel smaller.

Smart :thumbsup:
I'm not sure I would mind a nerf to skyriding max speed but again with all the teleport spells and portals they've added to the game, why bother. I wouldn't be surprised if at some point they decide to add a spell to teleport to any flymaster.

[Limayria]

Imo Class Halls should be part of leveling.

And ever green, revamped so that players are not the leaders of them so we can get class representation in plot lines with the order hall leaders as player stand ins so we can at least kinda get a "champion of azeroth" character

Because we will never be able to have characterzation for our individual pcs, there's too many possibilities of things you did or did not do unlike something like ff14 where you have to do all the MSQ from every expansion so there's lots of moments of characterization they can give you

[Jastall]

Yeah, you can probably fit all of Northrend in three modern zones, plus Azjol-Nerub which seems a given to me now that Blizzard has the tech. Maybe reserve a section for a X.1 of some description.

[Daniri]

We can't even get the small Horde and Alliance questlines we used to have, and you guys are out here thinking they'll evergreen 13+ separate campaigns?

[huth]

We can't even get the small Horde and Alliance questlines we used to have, and you guys are out here thinking they'll evergreen 13+ separate campaigns?

They couldn't even manage a single expansion of that, and that was with abandoning the previous one.

[Nymrohd]

They couldn't even manage a single expansion of that, and that was with abandoning the previous one.

Here is the thing. Yes we say they abandoned WoD to make Legion beefy. What did they abandon to make BfA nearly as beefy? Cause BfA launched with a crazy amount of content as well.

[Skildar]

Here is the thing. Yes we say they abandoned WoD to make Legion beefy. What did they abandon to make BfA nearly as beefy? Cause BfA launched with a crazy amount of content as well.

I would say thta considering the amount of cinematics and content patches. Many other IP development were stopped or put on hiatus to invest heavily on WoW. For instance we know Diablo had a lot of project started during that time but none saw the light of day (game, netflix series).

[Magistrate]

Here is the thing. Yes we say they abandoned WoD to make Legion beefy. What did they abandon to make BfA nearly as beefy? Cause BfA launched with a crazy amount of content as well.

There would need to be clear evidence that anyone pulled from any non-WoW project was pulled specifically into WoW. Also take into consideration iirc Blizzard peeps have said in the past WoW's proprietary engine, etc., take like a year or something for people who have not used it to become self sufficient enough to take over projects.

There's more people working on WoW than any point in the game's history save maybe launch...not sure, usually MMOs have a huge staff for the base model of the game and slim down for expansions.

[Count Zero]

While I think TLT is likely to have Order Halls, I think it would be smarter to introduce Order Halls at the beginning of a saga (14.0) and have them carry on the entire Saga. Order Halls (and covenants) felt weird to only be relevant for one expansion. Maybe we could have the best of both worlds & have Order Halls last from 13.0 to 17.0

Imo Class Halls should be part of leveling.

I wish more stuff would be evergreen between expansions, where it makes sense, like how housing will be integrated. Order Halls being a game-long experience is another one that would work.

[Kiivar86]

They'd need to do some big work on class halls if they have any hope for them to be evergreen. Some really just sucked.

(And I've said it before but there's also the issue of two classes having their halls completely destroyed of course)

[Thomir]

I'm getting Danuser-pilled thinking about how much of a cleaner expansion TWW could've been if they followed his script. Beledar as a Naaru crystal and the Emperor's vision of a falling star, Old God blood plot thread (that fucking mural?), Rootlands. TWW in early development sounded like it was shaping up to have a much cleaner story than ... "calcified Worldsoul essence" and K'aresh out of nowhere.

[Nymrohd]

I'm getting Danuser-pilled thinking about how much of a cleaner expansion TWW could've been if they followed his script. Beledar as a Naaru crystal and the Emperor's vision of a falling star, Old God blood plot thread (that fucking mural?), Rootlands. TWW in early development sounded like it was shaping up to have a much cleaner story than ... "calcified Worldsoul essence" and K'aresh out of nowhere.

And then we'd be going to Avaloren or something like that instead of Quel'thalas. Or just Zereth Lumen.

[Super Dickmann]

...There's whole other cans of worms being opened with this decision, like how having every Alliance/Horde head of state as the player's best friends makes it drastically more difficult to tell convincing smaller scale stories or anything with an ounce of nuance because we can't have these characters expressing wrongthink opinions or incorrect beliefs that might cause them to disagree with one another (remember kids, conflict or tension always leads to BfA and BfA Bad). Or that the Alleria/Xal'atath dynamic is a black hole that sucks in everything it touches and wonders how it can be made to be about Alleria.

Really, you could slap together a Powerpoint with some marketing-friendly buzzwords and something like "the story no longer centers the player's journey" and it'd probably get through to the sorts that can't parse feedback well.

Your posts re: this topic way earlier in the thread were also very good and borrowed power is a good way to put it, with all the same problems. In respect to the perspective issue, I wrote on this here, linked to avoid repeating myself. One aspect I don't think matters all that much is the passivity of the PC. The PC is a meatsuit and camera and has been for most of his time. It's a conceit to the genre, unless it's ditched entirely and the main plot is basically a single player game with a mostly set protagonist, see Final Fantasy for example, that you basically have to close your eyes and not think too much about why the main cast need you to do most of the violence for them. The reason you can't do an FF-style story though is that unlike FF, where you're directionally the same dude/tte going through the same story with the same themes, the factional, racial and class difference in descending order of importance have historically affected what part you want to most engage with and thus your character's presumed qualities that make a quest work or not.

Taking the Alleria example, the scene, much like the scene where you have dinner with Anduin and Faerin or when you follow Moira along for Fearbreaker work on the assumption that your character is a long-time Alliance PC, specifically either a human paladin for most of it or also possibly a dwarf in the latter bit. Your character might not have any lines or identity, but the general implied traits of what you rolled correspond to the behaviour in that quest. This works less when you're say, a zombie being told about how horrible it is to profane the dead in Hallowfall or a warlock being told about the cruelty of biological warfare as you pull out someone's eternal soul out their urethra and sacrifice it to summon demons from hell as part of your basic rotation. It's in this respect that the switch from doing factional stories to doing one overarching story has made it worse, because in the faction split story, the same basic content can via a change in a word document somewhere be made to fit two very different vibes.

You attack the same places on both Alliance and Horde-side in say, Dragonblight, but the description and vibe are totally different. The more narrow the story, the more out of place the more people are. Thus, since the 'main' plot is about following in this case Alleria about, anyone that has no motive to engage with her mental drama or say, was her enemy in the past (orcs, differently colored elves) etc. is out of place, Anduin even more so, and in turn, since the actual bulk of the game, i.e the quests where we support local factions largely only indirectly engage with your character as well, some nice flavor dialogue aside, both end up not servicing the theme of the only real decision you can make, which is the selection of faction, race and class.

Trying to fix this by way of making everyone we follow as value-free as possible by having them hold only the most basic and inoffensive beliefs makes this worse rather than better. This is because a) it makes them boring and thus hard to engage with even if you do care since nobody in this game about violence believes in anything enough to actually act upon it violently and b) making Danath Trollbane declare the only bane he has for trolls is his grief for their experiences with intolerance and persecution doesn't actually make you care about questing with him as a troll in side quests that feature killing trolls, so if you don't care, you now still don't care and are annoyed.

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I'm getting Danuser-pilled thinking about how much of a cleaner expansion TWW could've been if they followed his script. Beledar as a Naaru crystal and the Emperor's vision of a falling star, Old God blood plot thread (that fucking mural?), Rootlands. TWW in early development sounded like it was shaping up to have a much cleaner story than ... "calcified Worldsoul essence" and K'aresh out of nowhere.

Soon all will come around to my dialectic. In general, splitting the story to allow follow-ups to old zones and to tell stories gradually was the right call but that does nothing for TWW as a story if viewed as anything except from the narrow standpoint of Alleria's arc and setting up Midnight (and even then the base game fucks the first part up but nevermind).

Notwithstanding the elephant in the room that is forgetting and failing to resolve the entire premise of the expansion, the original TWW throughline is a hell of a lot more coherent and the calcificied world soul that works nothing like azerite or any of the wells have done before but coincidentally looks, acts and behaves exactly like a naaru ship is the most glaring example. As is that the original press release had the Arathi stuck there for two centuries which would itself solve endless plot issues ranging from how they built this massive space so quickly and developed ways of life specific to it, to not having living characters who are perfectly well aware of what the Arathi Empire, its Emperor, goals, strength etc. are but don't discuss it as the writers haven't thought of it yet. Further, them being willing to work with you would also fold better as you'd have essentially a new generation and a cultural drift going on.

As an additional note, while we can't know for sure how much of TWW was already in the tank, DF, which we know was wholly Danuser-helmed handled the presentation of the Titans much better, with watchers and their works being mostly positive and their controlling actions making some fucking sense. Compare the magic bathwater to guide evolution and install limits on behaviour in DF to the cartoonish nonsense of creating a skyscraper-sized killdroid next to the main way to the world's core. Not to defend that core, mind, it's perfectly passive while it's being destroyed by what are spawn of the old gods, but so that if your caretaker robots decide to break free it'd rise and blast them for their hubris.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Just to have some other stuff to discuss. What would people really want for Housing that would elevate it.
For me, the music box from the Garrisons, and more music discs. Housing will probably be great, but the background music is one of those things you notice immediately, and if it's always the same thing, then it will get stale fast.

I'd like to be able to program the decorations to do stuff like move or move conditionally, like being able to program the blocks you place in Lego Universe. You could create elevators that moved up and down (either on a timer or via proximity or pulling a lever) or minigames.

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To Warcraft players, not the wider public. Most non WoW players genuinely have no idea who Arthas or the Lich King is. A lot of WoW players won’t either. I think you are vastly overestimating how popular the story of this game actually is. Most players don’t even pay attention to the story.

Arthas most certainly does not transcend the Warcraft franchise as you’re suggesting.

He is but it's a two generational difference. Zoomers and gen alphas didn't grow up with Warcraft. Same deal with cinema. James Stewart and John Wayne were amongst the biggest movie stars ever from the golden age of Hollywood, but today only boomers know about them. Zoomers don't know who the beatles are. Entire classrooms where the teacher asks who has watched Star Wars and no one raises their hand.

[Rathwell]

I'm getting Danuser-pilled thinking about how much of a cleaner expansion TWW could've been if they followed his script. Beledar as a Naaru crystal and the Emperor's vision of a falling star, Old God blood plot thread (that fucking mural?), Rootlands. TWW in early development sounded like it was shaping up to have a much cleaner story than ... "calcified Worldsoul essence" and K'aresh out of nowhere.

Where can one read Danuser's script?

[Val the Moofia Boss]

And ever green, revamped so that players are not the leaders of them so we can get class representation in plot lines with the order hall leaders as player stand ins so we can at least kinda get a "champion of azeroth" character

Because we will never be able to have characterzation for our individual pcs, there's too many possibilities of things you did or did not do unlike something like ff14 where you have to do all the MSQ from every expansion so there's lots of moments of characterization they can give you

My issue with class order halls is that they are not a substitute for factions. There was a post about this earlier, but what set WoW apart and made it feel distinctive was that you were not playing a generic do gooder universal hero. You were playing as a soldier in one of two opposing factions with their own histories and identities and self interests that were exclusive. Factions is what this franchise is built on, not necesssrily Horde vs Alliance as WC3 introduced three more and TFT was about those three. Shadowlands didn't have Hord enad Alliance but introduced four new factions to join, though sadly they were weakly developed, did not fight each other, and were abandoned after one expac.

A chief problem with Legion, DF, snd TWW is the lack of a strong faction presence. You become a generic universal do gooder. The Legion class order hall content is also grossly oerrated and I am not sure why they keep getting brought up. The storylines were 2 hours max and none of them were good. The DK was horrendous. The class order halls were otherwise absent from the expansion, unlike going through esrlier WoW expacs where you are constantly viewing it through the lens of Horde/Alliance with your outposts and forces and questgivers everywhere. The order halls otherwise offered nothing else. They were just a place to check in at ocassionally to do the facebook mission table or convert currencies, or as an alternative AFK spot in between RBG queues only a portal away from the current city of Dalaran. If they want to bring back the order halls, it would either have to be in addition to a renewed faction focus or there would have to be major restructuring but I doubt Blizzard's seriousness to commit to something lile that.