The War Within 11.X Patches & World Soul Saga Speculation Thread

[Ferlion]

The fourth picture makes me think Troll. The bridge and gold on the Titan robits.

[matijwow]

The fourth picture makes me think Troll. The bridge and gold on the Titan robits.

It looks a lot like Zuldazar.

[Izalla]

Same, they just keep finding ways to use assets in multiple ways to lower how hard the revamp is going to hit them eventually and I think it's a really smart way to do it.

Why else would they add quilboar to Kul Tiras when they are a Kalimdor mob that doesn't exist in Eastern Kingdoms, or retcon a bunch of centaur lore so they could add them to the Dragon Isles? Neither mob really belonged in such a place, but hey, those were some of the last models that hadn't been updated yet. Even gnolls, also in desperate need of a model update, happened to appear in the Dragon Isles. Did Blizz really just want to reuse gnolls, or did they really want an excuse to update the gnoll models? And hey look! Now they have gnolls, quilboars, centaurs, and kobolds (from Legion) to replace the old vanilla models with! That was sure convenient.

[Chickat]

@22mage22

What do you have to say about this?

[Izalla]

It looks a lot like Zuldazar.

Especially with the dinosaurs. I want that dinosaur mount! As soon as I saw the pet in game I fell in love.

[D4NNYB0Y]

@22mage22

What do you have to say about this?

And @Scaleface

[Izalla]

And @Scaleface

Scaleface already let us know he has no info this time around. Gonna be interesting to watch the "leakers" who said anything other than Avaloren fight with those pictures though hahah.

[Ferlion]

Honestly, I almost dismissed the Harpy out of hand. She looks like she's got a lightning shield animation on, just slightly newer.

[Syphin33]

It's because it was probably AI generated and then they threw random models on top and added shadows manually. So the models are slightly off in perspective and lighting and the shadows don't look like the match. Gives a similar impression to the character creation screen (those are also flat with 3D models on top).

You're gonna be so wrong... this just smells of the "blue eye bolvar and the drac'thyr" debunking all over again. There were SO MANY post like yours just bending your brain and picking apart every little pixel explaining why it was a fake.

[arrantprac]

The image is an order of magnitude above any fake leak we've seen before. When have we ever seen a faked image that *actually* looks like an in-game screenshot?
It's 100% real.

[Hitei]

The image is an order of magnitude above any fake leak we've seen before. When have we ever seen a faked image that *actually* looks like an in-game screenshot?

Every time someone has tried to pass off private server shit as a leak, or any of the other composite fakes like the Shadowlands stormwind harbor leak, or the Awakening dungeon page/inn leak.

[Vakir]

Or its real and uninspired because they are also revamping Azeroth at the same time.

I mean, that's the only thing that would bring me back, but it feels like a distant dream.

Verbatim last announcement, they looked at Dragonflight's zone amount as "expected for a WoW expansion." The "1-2 sizzle features and 4 zones" feels like the standard expectation now that this has become an increasingly corporate boxed product. It's been a frog in the heating up pot thing for a while now in terms of how gradually the scaling back became.

I really wanna be wrong.

[Izalla]

I'm coming down on the side of "these are probably fake" but not for any particular thing wrong with them. I won't be shocked at all if they do turn out to be real though. It's way past bedtime for me now though so I must tear myself away from this thread and get a few hours of sleep... Hopefully you guys don't add 20+ more pages before I wake up.

[Hitei]

I mean, that's the only thing that would bring me back, but it feels like a distant dream.

Verbatim last announcement, they looked at Dragonflight's zone amount as "expected for a WoW expansion." The "1-2 sizzle features and 4 zones" feels like the standard expectation now that this has become an increasingly corporate boxed product. It's been a frog in the heating up pot thing for a while now in terms of how gradually the scaling back became.

I really wanna be wrong.

Do people really care about the number of zone divisons?

[MyWholeLifeIsThunder]

You're gonna be so wrong... this just smells of the "blue eye bolvar and the drac'thyr" debunking all over again. There were SO MANY post like yours just bending your brain and picking apart every little pixel explaining why it was a fake.

I'm leaning on fake because the screenshots are playing it very safe. They look *very* good, just like WoW's style, but all of the assets look like something that exists, and the environments ressemble places that we've already seen.

The Dracthyr leak was something completely new that people even said it didn't look like WoW. Everything in this leak looks like something that already exists in the game, just reconfigured.

[Woggmer]

Speaking of the Wildhammer and the skies, why the hell did they live in a place like Grim Batol? Never made sense to me.

So, basically... before the clans split apart into the 3 we know (Bronzebeards, Wildhammers, and Dark Irons) they were all living together until the High King Modimus Anvilmar dies, resulting in a civil war conflict between the 3 Dwarf Clans over who gets ownership of Ironforge.

The Bronzebeards won, with the Wildhammers deciding to establish their own city in another tall mountain, Grim Batol and create a fortress that could rival Ironforge.

It didn't used to be a miserable place like how we found it in Cata... a lot of that is due to Modgud using Xal'atath to turn the shadows against the Dwarves, turning some of them into the skardyn.. resulting in Grim Batol becoming a cursed place of evil thanks to Modgud's curse. Forcing the Wildhammers to retreat again with half of the moving north to create Aeries Peak while the other half stayed in the area known as Northeron in the Twilight Highlands.

Source.

[Izalla]

So, basically... before the clans split apart into the 3 we know (Bronzebeards, Wildhammers, and Dark Irons) they were all living together until the High King Modimus Anvilmar dies, resulting in a civil war conflict between the 3 Dwarf Clans over who gets ownership of Ironforge.

The Bronzebeards won, with the Wildhammers deciding to establish their own city in another tall mountain, Grim Batol and create a fortress that could rival Ironforge.

It didn't used to be a miserable place like how we found it in Cata... a lot of that is due to Modgud using Xal'atath to turn the shadows against the Dwarves, turning some of them into the skardyn.. resulting in Grim Batol becoming a cursed place of evil thanks to Modgud's curse. Forcing the Wildhammers to retreat again with half of the moving north to create Aeries Peak while the other half stayed in the area known as Northeron in the Twilight Highlands.

Yeah I know all that stuff, I just mean, why would they make their home in a box underground when they are a sky people? Did the only really become sky people after they had to leave Grim Batol?

Okay for reals now I'm going to sleep I swear.

[Worldshaper]

Exactly. If you're gonna leak stills from a new trailer, why would you pick the most generic looking areas of each zone? There's like nothing going on in these images.

No unique, new landmarks.

No new creature models.

Nothing about the textures or effects that feels new.

The world design is just a hodgepodge mess of muted colours. Nothing about this sells the expansion.

[Vakir]

Do people really care about the number of zone divisons?

Eh, it's true that can be arbitrary, but it's more about whether those divisions inform biome diversity or story division.

The actual point though was in reference to a world revamp (which would benefit from the inverse, as was discussed pages back, with mega-zones) as compared to the gradual shrinking of zone numbers, while overall landmass has varied. That's something on a scale I just really doubt happening. I don't get a lot of ambition vibes from how they look at the game now and how heavily everything is managed and corporatized, somewhat understandably when we look back on what we learned about the older Blizzard.

Again, I would love to be wrong. I've just been hearing it as the anticipated focus for about 3 expansions of hype now. Everyone was certain that Zandalar/Kul Tiras achievement removal and datamined armor was a "red herring" because they didn't want to see it, everyone was certain about blue-eyed Bolvar/denying the general inevitability of the Shadowlands, and so many were certain that Dragon Isles had to accompany a revamp.

[Woggmer]

Yeah I know all that stuff, I just mean, why would they make their home in a box underground when they are a sky people? Did the only really become sky people after they had to leave Grim Batol?

Okay for reals now I'm going to sleep I swear.

I'd say that seems more accurate, they were probably just like the Bronzebeards until they were forced out and decided to live in Aeries Peak and the Twilight Highlands.