Midnight 12.X Patches & World Soul Saga Speculation Thread

[huth]

well, i'm sure they're getting great data about housing with how bad the server lag and d/c are! The only data they will get is that they need better servers or more capacity!

Or what parts need to be optimised. Which is actually useful.

[Joshuaj]

Negative, just woke up after a long night of work and still have some stuff to do, but hopefully when servers calm down you'll get some footage from the PTR provided that the external stuff is there too.

Some folks are saying housing sizes are in, others are saying it ain't. But ik the base styles and whatnot are in.

[Hearthfinder]

That Shadowlands cutscene triggers my PTSD.

[Valysar]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IR0avXKTjg&t=300s
Sylvanas has no plans to return to Azeroth... for now.

Sylvanas's voice sounds like it was done by AI... weird

[Foreign Exchange Ztudent]

Honestly, more tasteful than usual even if I kind of had a laugh about the "ORDER BTW" quip. Albeit, it satisfies my headcanons and the belief that there was a pre-ordered Shadowlands that could maybe have a illustration later down the line.

Neat, it is surprising to me how they can write pretty well when they want to and yet the A Plot seems silo'd off into just being where any form of engagement of the story dies.

[justwatching]

idk if we'll get more than renown five but the current limit seems to be

25 rooms, 850 interior budget and 200 exterior budget

Rooms and Interior increases but no idea about exterior. 200 does feel low on Alpha right now.

Some folks are saying housing sizes are in, others are saying it ain't. But ik the base styles and whatnot are in.

House sizes arent even in on Alpha so I doubt they are in this.

[Reive]

Rooms and Interior increases but no idea about exterior. 200 does feel low on Alpha right now

the numbers i posted are what you get at renown 5 which is the highest you can get on alpha

[Joshuaj]

Rooms and Interior increases but no idea about exterior. 200 does feel low on Alpha right now.




House sizes arent even in on Alpha so I doubt they are in this.

That's kinda why I want confirmation on the matter

- - - Updated - - -

Honestly, more tasteful than usual even if I kind of had a laugh about the "ORDER BTW" quip. Albeit, it satisfies my headcanons and the belief that there was a pre-ordered Shadowlands that could maybe have a illustration later down the line.

Neat, it is surprising to me how they can write pretty well when they want to and yet the A Plot seems silo'd off into just being where any form of engagement of the story dies.

Uuuggghhhh...

I'll just keep on waiting for further clarification ig

[MyWholeLifeIsThunder]

You can't fix a trash fire like that. Danuser was dealt an unwinnable hand. He wasnt ever going to be allowed to kill Sylvanas. That wasnt going to happen. So what did we reasonably expect?

That's why I say they should have said it was a Doombot lmao. There are character assassinations that are so egregious you kinda have to invalidate them somehow. You can't write your way out of a greasefire.

"It was a dreadlord all along" would have been to obvious, but I keep saying that they could have implemented the Soul Fragment differently: Have that part of Sylvanas fully drinking the Jailer's cool aid since her death, and swap it with "main" Sylvanas during her sojourn to Helheim. So since mid Legion it was not actually *our* Sylvanas, but a version of her that has spent all of her undeath in the Maw.

Yes, I know, it's pretty much the "It was the Phoenix Force and the Real Jean Grey was in Jamaica Bay all along" switcharoo, but it would have been better than we got.

[justwatching]

the numbers i posted are what you get at renown 5 which is the highest you can get on alpha

Yeah and its been datamined up to 20. It goes up to like 29 Rooms or something crazy.

[Sondrelk]

That's why I say they should have said it was a Doombot lmao. There are character assassinations that are so egregious you kinda have to invalidate them somehow. You can't write your way out of a greasefire.

"It was a dreadlord all along" would have been to obvious, but I keep saying that they could have implemented the Soul Fragment differently: Have that part of Sylvanas fully drinking the Jailer's cool aid since her death, and swap it with "main" Sylvanas during her sojourn to Helheim. So since mid Legion it was not actually *our* Sylvanas, but a version of her that has spent all of her undeath in the Maw.

Yes, I know, it's pretty much the "It was the Phoenix Force and the Real Jean Grey was in Jamaica Bay all along" switcharoo, but it would have been better than we got.

You would still have the stink of her actions tainting the entire Horde during BfA. But you could at least pretend like the conflict wasnt so horribly black and white.

Though of course, that would still leave you with Sylvanas the extremely questionable character who very likely orchestrated the entire Wrathgate incident after decades of torturing innocent humans and forsaken to make the plague.
Realistically you would still need Sylvanas to leave the story to avoid uncomfortable implications.

[Monkal]

You guys think it's worth signing up to the PTR just for the House testing?

[Lorgar Aurelian]

Absolutely not. The WoW development pipeline is way longer than you seem to believe.

we can just look at any beta or even some ptr testing's to see this isn't true and they are fully capable of changing quest, dialog, and even novels which is obvious with the syvlanas one.

even with being locked into using the shadowlands as all the assets would have already been made the story and dialog is more flexible so either they choose not to change it which I don't think any one believes, or there changes just suck which is the obvious real answer.

[Limayria]

Sylvanas's voice sounds like it was done by AI... weird

I was thinking the same thing, maybe not AI but it sounds off somehow

[SilverLion]

That's why I say they should have said it was a Doombot lmao. There are character assassinations that are so egregious you kinda have to invalidate them somehow. You can't write your way out of a greasefire.

"It was a dreadlord all along" would have been to obvious, but I keep saying that they could have implemented the Soul Fragment differently: Have that part of Sylvanas fully drinking the Jailer's cool aid since her death, and swap it with "main" Sylvanas during her sojourn to Helheim. So since mid Legion it was not actually *our* Sylvanas, but a version of her that has spent all of her undeath in the Maw.

Yes, I know, it's pretty much the "It was the Phoenix Force and the Real Jean Grey was in Jamaica Bay all along" switcharoo, but it would have been better than we got.

So there's layers to this. If this were purely a comic, I'd be like fuck it, retcon it. Who cares. Comics don't matter, etc. But unfortunately, while WoWs narrative isnt much better than a comic, there is a Pandora's box that we'd be opening. Every time a character went in a direction people didn't like, there would be the demand for the nuclear option. I'm not going to argue Sylvanas is well written, but I am going to posit that the difference between WC3 Thrall, WoW Thrall and Cata Thrall are basically 3 different personalities and characters. Should current or Cata Thrall be retconned? Because Cata Thrall was an unmitigated disaster that didn't get fixed for almost a decade. We'd be in this cycle of basically nuking entire plot points whenever a new narrative lead took over.

The truth is, and I think especially this forum is unwilling to admit this, is that Afriasiabi derailed so much of the WoW story. We didn't care at the time because he was hitting tropes that a vocal minority really jerk themselves off to, but the dude was literally just writing random bullshit in on a whim, depending on his personal whims. We take the Garrosh thing in Stonetalon as a joke, but it really was indicative of his mindset. Nothing Danuser could do would solve this.

As an aside. Nathanos is no worse a self insert than Thrall and Aggra. Just saying.

[Vexilius]

in Alpha the waves are very small and generally only from lists you'd actively have to pursue being on. Random invites likely won't happen until Beta in a few weeks.

ah so waves dont start til beta got ya

[Eurhetemec]

Absolutely not. The WoW development pipeline is way longer than you seem to believe. Metzen announced his leadership of the Warcraft Brand in September 2022, and it was reported he was back working at blizzard 10 months before that. That means Metzen had about twice as much leeway, at least a year longer on TWW's development than Danuser had on Shadowlands.

Yup. People can totally ignore reality and say "But they could alter dialogue!!!" and stuff as much as they like, but it's never as simple as that when we're talking about a huge character arc which involves a ton of quests and content and cutscenes and so on. This isn't the same as editing a few non-voice-acted lines in a quest or two, it would be a much more major undertaking.

As for Metzen, some people just want to have it both ways so they can keep believing what they already believed - i.e. Danuser had plenty of time to change things with SL, but Metzen didn't have enough time to change things with TWW, even though Metzen had way more time. Honestly I don't think Danuser is a good writer, and in interviews he comes across as rather gauche but I think it's very clear that creep Afrasiabi ruined SL like he ruined so much he touched.

As an aside. Nathanos is no worse a self insert than Thrall and Aggra. Just saying.

In terms of pure back-patting self-insert character-ness, yeah, he's not worse, hell he's arguably a little better because he's a bad guy at least, whereas Metzen had Metz... er Thrall as perfect and unable to do any wrong that wasn't ultimately forced upon him. But the issue I think is that Nathanos became annoying as hell, and not in a good "love to hate" way, but a boring "Ugh not this guy again!" way.

[Marlamin]

ah so waves dont start til beta got ya

Public opt-in waves are Beta-only usually, correct.

[MyWholeLifeIsThunder]

You would still have the stink of her actions tainting the entire Horde during BfA. But you could at least pretend like the conflict wasnt so horribly black and white.

Though of course, that would still leave you with Sylvanas the extremely questionable character who very likely orchestrated the entire Wrathgate incident after decades of torturing innocent humans and forsaken to make the plague.
Realistically you would still need Sylvanas to leave the story to avoid uncomfortable implications.

What's funny is that they pretty much said that Sylvanas was not behind the Wrathgate in Chronicles so they already retconed her responsibility on that.

But the problem was never that Sylvanas did morally apprehensive stuff here and there, the problem is that negated any plausible deniability, which is what made her character interesting on the first place.

So there's layers to this. If this were purely a comic, I'd be like fuck it, retcon it. Who cares. Comics don't matter, etc. But unfortunately, while WoWs narrative isnt much better than a comic, there is a Pandora's box that we'd be opening. Every time a character went in a direction people didn't like, there would be the demand for the nuclear option. I'm not going to argue Sylvanas is well written, but I am going to posit that the difference between WC3 Thrall, WoW Thrall and Cata Thrall are basically 3 different personalities and characters. Should current or Cata Thrall be retconned? Because Cata Thrall was an unmitigated disaster that didn't get fixed for almost a decade. We'd be in this cycle of basically nuking entire plot points whenever a new narrative lead took over.

The truth is, and I think especially this forum is unwilling to admit this, is that Afriasiabi derailed so much of the WoW story. We didn't care at the time because he was hitting tropes that a vocal minority really jerk themselves off to, but the dude was literally just writing random bullshit in on a whim, depending on his personal whims. We take the Garrosh thing in Stonetalon as a joke, but it really was indicative of his mindset. Nothing Danuser could do would solve this.

As an aside. Nathanos is no worse a self insert than Thrall and Aggra. Just saying.

Pretty much. I do think that what was done with Sylvanas deserved the nuclear option. Like this was the situation where you have to say "Fuck It" and walk it back as much as you can.

BfA's progression demanded her to be Killed, but it would have been just idiotic to kill yet another Horde leader in succession. They had to turn back the character somehow, but I think they should have gone harder with it.

I don't have any issues with Nathanos as a self insert if I'm going to be honest. He still makes for a compelling supporting character in her narrative when you're completely unaware of Danuser's writing.

[Garrac]

Trying to find all the vendorss. Seems like theres one that sells the BfA goodies called T'Lama, but I can't find her neither on Zandalar, nor on the main housing hub. This place needs guards telling you where each vendor is...