Midnight 12.X Patches & World Soul Saga Speculation Thread

[Foreign Exchange Ztudent]

And just like that, they raised it to 250 without a patch in just a hotfix. Expecting even higher amounts as they can start actually patching performance issues.

Honestly, I'm just in awe of everything and its just really cool to see such a perfect foundation for a system that can now be squeezed for all its' juices for what will probably be a really fun problem solving environment for many years to come.

[Joshuaj]

Well...unsure if I can make a full fence at 250, but I can at least start it.

[Sondrelk]

Well...unsure if I can make a full fence at 250, but I can at least start it.

Regardless of whether 50 is a big amount or not, it is still a 25% increase in budget.

It's probably not going to change much for those that want a massively detailed floating city, or those like me that wanted a cave. But it is nice to see a decent increase after just one week.

Not going to be surprised if they keep increasing the budget intermittently until we reach the "final" budget close to the pre-patch.

[LarryWithTheWeatherReport]

Gameplay is the main reason to play WoW. It is fluid and more often than not feels good. That is why most people play wow the story is only background noise. If someone is playing WoW mainly for the story then that is sad. There are way better stories out there.

I wouldn't say gameplay is the main reason, it's the setting of Warcraft that gets people to stay which would involve lore as one of the reasons from it. A game can have the best and most advance gameplay but without a good setting with interesting characters, style, theme etc than people will still get bored of it. Most of the folks on wow are either OGs from WC3 or people that tried the game in the past and felt in love with the setting, the interesting art style, character design, faction design, lore, world etc.

The other big MMORPGs couldn't suck in as much people nor get them to stay and be too interested in it for long because they are either too souless (Black Desert Online), too weeb (FFXIV), or not enough budget (Elder Scrolls Online). Each one of them lack something WoW has and that is why WoW was always the biggest and best cause even at it's worse, it's still better than any other MMORPGs at it's best.

[Joshuaj]

Regardless of whether 50 is a big amount or not, it is still a 25% increase in budget.

It's probably not going to change much for those that want a massively detailed floating city, or those like me that wanted a cave. But it is nice to see a decent increase after just one week.

Not going to be surprised if they keep increasing the budget intermittently until we reach the "final" budget close to the pre-patch.

I think a good max would be 400 or 500 (though 500 might be too much?), but an occasional 25% increase every week or 2 would be nice for sure.

[Dracullus]

Saying "...But the gameplay is good" for an RPG is like saying "Yeah, the writing of this movie sucks, but I watch it for the special effects". Story, worldbuilding and vibe matters.

"Gameplay" for game is same as "writing" for movie, core of whole damn thing. So it's more like "special effects of this movie sucks, but I watch it for story".

WoW, beside gameplay is carried by quality & quantity of content, art and music (which are also huge part of "worldbuilding and vibes"). Story of WoW is more meh than actively disrupting gaming experience, it's just Dragon Ball of western fantasy, simply going on too long to make any sense.

Well...unsure if I can make a full fence at 250, but I can at least start it.

I managed even at 200, scaled it to 150% though.

[Sondrelk]

The writing in WoW is never going to be stellar as a whole. Mostly, I imagine, from an MMO being the absolute worst format to tell a story through.
You have the story itself being told in about 6-10 chunks across roughly 2 years. And each one needs to be short and concise, because the players are allergic to anything resembling a time gated story, even more so if such a story should coincide with gameplay updates.

The best piece of non timegated storytelling in recent WoW is either one-off questlines like the Man'arai Draenei, or Heritage armour questlines. If you want the actual good stuff in WoW, then you need to look at least back to the SL Covenant questlines, which could have a world slowly evolve. Or better still, the Insurrection storyline in Legion, which is when the writers could really let the story breathe, knowing that it was all going to smoothly lead into the raid across 8 full weeks.

The stoyr in WoW is never going to reach beyond "occasionally pretty decent" as long as it needs to continue being an MMO. And especially not when the demands of gameplay interferes with the story.

[Joshuaj]

The Arathi don't really convince me as paragons of cosmic research. They couldn't even get some form of teleport beacon with them so their casters back home could contact them if things went south. Historically there have been many "authorities" supported by a religious state who only ever used pseudoscience

In other words, I think this is trash world building by spreadsheet with someone really excited to use combinatorics that I hope may well have been discarded by now as a concept. If you try to force power combinations you will only end up with completely artificial concepts that just won't feel right to anyone except our usual apophenic posters.

Always presumed every cosmic perspective was correct in some way. Like they're all pieces of a bigger puzzle.

[Reive]

metzen used the word "democratic" to describe the writing team. imo that sums up the biggest issue the writing in wow: the lack of a strong vision. too many people (both devs and players) have decisional power over how the story should or should not be. the result is a bland (at the best) and often inchoherent writing.

also, there seem to be a clash between the ideas of the og devs and the current ones. it feels like the current writers loathe what wow used to be and are actively trying to "erase" that past. retail wow has completely lost the vibe and tone it once had

[COBRAstriker]

MMORPG players. It's basically a staple of the genre because Ultima Online did it first.

Housing has never been one of my priorities but a huge chunk of the people I've played with have been asking for it. And that includes some sweaty players.

I'm obviously not referring to housing, which I will admit, as jaded as I am because of the current shitty creative direction, and this is only from what I've seen so far, but the builds that people are able to make and the amount of creative freedom players have is nothing short of impressive. I genuinely believe that housing is probably one of the most polished and intricate systems Blizzard has released in many years now. The fact that it also dropped without breaking the game in half, minus some bugs or missing QoLs here and there, is also commendable, especially when you consider that many patches as of late like Nightfall released completely broken. On the gameplay side, things are going great. That has never been my issue and I have always praised many of their decisions there, and yes, I am also staunchly anti combat addons like WA or DBM, or convoluted class mechanics and encounters

The issue is in the poor writing, shitty stories and cinematics and just in generel the creative direction which take away a lot from the good work coming from the gameplay team which I think is a massive issue

[LarryWithTheWeatherReport]

it feels like the current writers loathe what wow used to be and are actively trying to "erase" that past. retail wow has completely lost the vibe and tone it once had in the past

That sounds like some conspiracy shit, I don't think writers coming into the franchise now would be crazy and evil enough to hate on the past aka what started Warcraft.

[COBRAstriker]

snip

You seem too hung up on budgets and patch cycles. That's not the issue, as Super Dickmann also said. It's never been that. WoW has now more voiced dialogue and cutscenes than ever before. Those don't come cheap, either in time or money, especially VAs. The problem is that the direction is off. It's not Warcraft. It's a shitty soap opera with the Windrunners at the center of it and every orbiter around that acts and thinks like a modern day liberal college student

Ultimately it doesn't matter how hard you row, if your boat is going in the wrong direction. And that'a what's happening with WoW. I have no doubt that a lot of time and effort went into Dracthyr or Harranir. But it's not Warcraft. The entire creative division on WoW would be better suited for something like Fortnite, which funnily enough, is where Danuser is now, or a preteen kids show that always ends with a moral lesson

[Foreign Exchange Ztudent]

We don't have the framework regardless, its a gameplay focused framework and not a story focused one and again if they wanted to be story focused the amount of spend, resources and effort would make it a severe loss leader.

In many ways, my only issue with the current status quo is that they presented this as if it was something that it is not. Its' a gameplay focused model with a very large emphasis on Cozycore and attachment to the video game through being a part of the video games' universe. So obviously even if we argue that more has been invested it just isn't enough, regardless.

I will however say that there is some disconnect here because the audience they cater do indeed seem like the type that also would want the story to at least feel engaging on a surface level but what do I know.

Structuring the expansion around a deliberate loop of Announcement CGI Cinematic, Prologue, Animated Shorts, Launch CGI Cinematic, Base Expansion Story that leaves intrigue of whats' next rather than a complete Stop, into a relevant A Plot Patch and then all minor patches have small or medium sized connection to the A Plot to make the experience more wholistic and then into a Final Patch that leads to a epilogue that then leads to a prologue.

But again, I'm not certain that any communication channel is even open at this point between what they're doing and any other element.

You took their marketing too much at face value, which is dangerous in general, but especially when it comes to Blizzard who hadn't put out a story with more than mild acclaim since 2015 and with good acclaim in 20 years. Their claim, in practice, is that the story content they would produce would be less shit. DF is extremely boring and TWW is completely disjointed, but the former is basically harmless save in the respects it is the most like SL/BFA (Gilneas) and the latter is the same (lol Arathi) but couples it with having fairly decent (by Blizzard standards) moment to moment writing and worldbuilding. In this low aim, they succeeded.

Now, does that make the saga more than a marketing stunt? Actually, yes, though it's hard to tell if it's in a good way now that we've seen a part of it. I'll say this about Steve Danuser, the man had probably the worst moment to moment dialogue writing of all time under his oversight, but his plots were fairly coherent on their own terms and managed to begin and end solving most of the central topics. They didn't gyrate wildly from topic to topic and when an element was introduced it generally came back. The skeleton of the story that was plain in TWW - Nerubians leading to Undermine leading to Not!Harandar, through the throughlines of the na'vi and the Black Blood, with the tease for future stories being the Arathi and the Beledar as a naaru ship makes considerably more sense than what we actually got.

Honestly, I did feel skeptical about Metzens spiel immediately. But I did enjoy it for what it was even if it was wholly unrealistic and idealistic view of what would inevitably transpire in which its' more in the form of stickmen drawings than whatever epic context it was meant to evoke.

Of course, once I saw the interview rounds and they confirmed that we only had 2 Major Patches to play with storywise and the fact that our first major patch in Dragonflight was a extremely chaotic pivot patch I recognized we probably just had a very Gameplay centric model rather than anything focused on Storytelling.

Anyways, I think if nothing else what Steve was really god at was intrigue and asking interesting questions and keeping lore theorists fed even if it sometimes went to the most absurd points. Problem Steve had is that he never truly was the master of the Franchise and so when push came to shove that it was time to show some cool epic sequences with BFA and Shadowlands it just never manifested itself because of potentially a myriad of reasons that we can speculate til hell freezes over.

Obviously, the lack of "cool epic sequences" continues and in many ways we're still a 3 minute cinematic, animated short away to make a return to the quote unquote "good times". Its' just that will it happen or will the myriad of potential sequences in TLT also be devalued into nothing.

[COBRAstriker]

That sounds like some conspiracy shit, I don't think writers coming into the franchise now would be crazy and evil enough to hate on the past aka what started Warcraft.

It's hard not to see it that way considering what they did from BfA to now. The sanitization of the setting. The removal of anything that makes these races unique or stand out. SL is still the worst offender where they teased Arthas in the Bastion Afterlives trailer which in hindsight was nothing more than a cheap cash grab by nostalgiabaiting and the fact that he's an iconic character only to shit on him at the end of the expansion using nobody else but of course a Windrunner. Helm of Domination turned into the Burger King crown. And the list goes on. It's hard not to see these things as an active effort by the new guard to shit on the old guard's work, considering that most of them are not there anymore either. The way a lot of older, established characters continuously get mischaracterized also tells me that they think that the way in which old characters were portrayed is 'wrong' or 'problematic', and they must 'fix' it. It's a genuine effort on their side to make WoW conform to their real world ideals, that much is clear

[Reive]

That sounds like some conspiracy shit, I don't think writers coming into the franchise now would be crazy and evil enough to hate on the past aka what started Warcraft.

maybe they don't hate it, but they definitely have no respect for it. a lot of the current writing feels like an attempt at erasing certain parts of the original lore in order to recplace them with newer concepts

[Super Dickmann]

But again, I'm not certain that any communication channel is even open at this point between what they're doing and any other element.

There's enough of a communication channel that the entire post-SL gameplay paradigm exists because of how much borrowed power and endless grinds pissed people off and right now questlines are rewritten on the go from complaints (the Garrosh questline). The nu-Amani exist entirely because of racial whining on Twitter. The problem (as with most things) is not the method, methods are just a tool, good or bad purely by whether they work, it's who does it and what it results in.

[Joshuaj]

Yeah, as I thought, I MIGHT need another 25% increase in order to complete my fence. 226/250 atm, and I think I might reach the limit before I can complete it. It's a good start though!

[Foreign Exchange Ztudent]

There's enough of a communication channel that the entire post-SL gameplay paradigm exists because of how much borrowed power and endless grinds pissed people off and right now questlines are rewritten on the go from complaints (the Garrosh questline). The nu-Amani exist entirely because of racial whining on Twitter. The problem (as with most things) is not the method, methods are just a tool, good or bad purely by whether they work, it's who does it and what it results in.

I mean, its a lot easier to get people to screech when the gameplay design is inherently anti motivational psychology something we know a video game is not supposed to do and is instead supposed to use motivational psychology to keep you addicted and consuming. To be fair, there were so many myriad of reasons that Shadowlands collapsed not withstanding the negative sentiment that permeated everywhere on top of the fact Gameplay focus issues mean that the moment you login you face them and its a lot easier to ignore all of these direction, story and writing concerns because again you don't need to face them if you don't want to nor ever showcase an iota of interest in it.

I just do not really see even if every scene in The Last Titan is just in-game scenes akin to Tirions' death that people will be that angry in many ways I would personally just find that very funny and honestly I'm personally just trying to find the humor in all of this at this point cause it is at that point for me and the game is good so why not think of this in a different lense.

Yeah, as I thought, I MIGHT need another 25% increase in order to complete my fence. 226/250 atm, and I think I might reach the limit before I can complete it. It's a good start though!

They're going to get that rookie number up, it is going to be fascinating to keep an eye on! I'm honestly kind of geeked out with how fun it will be considering the foundation of this Housing System and to then see where we end up with pushing everything to the limit and also in regards to optimization wise.

[GeometryWizard]

Everything makes more sense if you consider that the writers both have almost total freedom to do whatever they want including whether they heed social media complaints or not, and that they hold a resentment for the foundations of Warcraft lore likely because they associate it with Afrasiabi and want to spite him as much as possible. It's how you get the current tone where everything is generally trying to be very kiddish and cozycore but some questlines wildly differ in tone because of zero communication between devs like how Midnight has one questline all but saying fel magic is totally illegal kill on sight in Silvermoon and another outright saying it's not illegal

The gameplay changes to make everything cross-faction also enable both of these patterns further because it's obvious the current writers don't care about the Horde at all and likely even associate it with Afrasiabi. Now they don't have to worry about being forced to write about the Horde or anything too Warcrafty (remember Afrasiabi is the boogeyman) and can just go all in on elf soap opera writing and making the big patch timegated storyline to be about petting bees for 3 hours. For further proof it's a direction issue or lack of it really you can look at the new quests they wrote for SoD and most of them actually feel like something you'd see in vanilla. That's because the classic team knows they'd get roasted even harder for making retail-feeling quests and so they committed to making something authentic vs retail where the writers only heed a few social media posters who either praise everything they write or exclusively look at things from a racial lens

The gameplay designers have had to carry the weight of messing up in SL so hard for years and were forced to change how they designed the game while the writers successfully deflected all blame onto them and have established their own fiefdom within Blizzard now where feedback is shredded before it even arrives and most of what they do is just lashing out at the concepts of Warcraft most of the playerbase grew up loving while creating nothing interesting themselves. Gameplay devs have to accommodate what millions of players want because the money tells them to while the writers are just doing self-insert fanfiction aimed solely at themselves

[Xilurm]

I mean, the original quotes are a bit too close to right wing speech, so it's kinda weird it took them so long to add something to tune them down.

I feel really bad for you if you react like this to fictional storytelling. Do you only enjoy stories that have sunday morning cartoon villains?