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

[Pheraz]

Imo they should stop to bore us with this come and travel with me to know more about how I feel stories. That doesn't fit to WOW
Either quests should be fun/easy story or epic.
I already have my doubts with what I've read about arathor. Sounds a lot like the super softie blue dragon aspect

[micwini]

Maybe old BE NPCs said stuff that made sense during TBC but not anymore.

No they don't and most new lines have the same kind of text. Some are even the same but just rerecorded for no reason.

[GeometryWizard]

What confuses me is that more important characters like Astalor Bloodsworn sound exactly like you think a blood elf should and then the NPCs sound like vulpera and tauren. It's even worse how the trolls sound like plucky upstart teenagers trying to do a troll impression they're too whimsical and friendly for what's supposed to be a group with a longstanding grudge against us. It's like they're trying to cast male and female actors that roughly sound the same which I guess makes sense for the earthen but isn't realistic at all so we keep getting nasally super innocent and soft sounding men and women lowering their voice as much as they can that sounds cartoonish coming from a pretty elf

Not only are the actors terrible miscast but ones like the Teen Titans actor are good voice actors so the problem is with how they're being directed to sound like they're meant to be overly friendly to not scare kids like a Spyro the Dragon game or something. And even if that was the case they just sound flat and terrible, the people comparing them to sounding like fan machinima actors are right

It's just part of the super weird vibes of Midnight where it feels like there's no consistent direction anywhere and that started with how AI generated and confusing the Gamescom reveal felt. It's like there's no one vision in any department so here for instance it feels like the voice actors aren't even being given the same instructions on direction and tone. Some of them sound like they are voicing for World of Warcraft and others sound like they are voicing for a Nick Jr. show and it's all the same race in the same city

[allegrian]

Imo they should stop to bore us with this come and travel with me to know more about how I feel stories. That doesn't fit to WOW
Either quests should be fun/easy story or epic.
I already have my doubts with what I've read about arathor. Sounds a lot like the super softie blue dragon aspect

This started in DF mostly. In BFA you had worldbuilding mixed with the main zone story to move the plot instead of moving just the feelings from NPC.

I think the writing and questing team is so spread, that they just focus on what they have more freedom (world building) and the main story, which is locked in by cinematics and voice acting, feels a bit unrelated.

Then you play Mop and Legion remix where basically all the zone quests follow their theme perfectly and dont' feel disconnected at all, and they are all mostly awesome.

I imagine that if they created highmountain today, we'd have dozens more lines of dialogue from Maila about her feelings, or many quests about how good and diverse the Dorgbar culture is.

[micwini]

I don't think it is the actors, as much as it is the direction. I'm pretty sure Brann is still the same actor, but compare it to his WotLK/cata lines. Wildly different. Correct me if im wrong on this.

Voice "acting" these days feels more like stageplay/musical acting than real acting.
It feels overly performative, mimicking old medieval stageplays in which they exaggerate their voices. Compare this to older voicelines, where it felt like people were talking in a more serious matter. No matter the emotion (anger/pride/calm/sad) it felt more sincere.

Not sure how to describe it well, but this is the best I can do.

[allegrian]

What confuses me is that more important characters like Astalor Bloodsworn sound exactly like you think a blood elf should and then the NPCs sound like vulpera and tauren. It's even worse how the trolls sound like plucky upstart teenagers trying to do a troll impression they're too whimsical and friendly for what's supposed to be a group with a longstanding grudge against us. It's like they're trying to cast male and female actors that roughly sound the same which I guess makes sense for the earthen but isn't realistic at all so we keep getting nasally super innocent and soft sounding men and women lowering their voice as much as they can that sounds cartoonish coming from a pretty elf

Not only are the actors terrible miscast but ones like the Teen Titans actor are good voice actors so the problem is with how they're being directed to sound like they're meant to be overly friendly to not scare kids like a Spyro the Dragon game or something. And even if that was the case they just sound flat and terrible, the people comparing them to sounding like fan machinima actors are right

It's just part of the super weird vibes of Midnight where it feels like there's no consistent direction anywhere and that started with how AI generated and confusing the Gamescom reveal felt. It's like there's no one vision in any department so here for instance it feels like the voice actors aren't even being given the same instructions on direction and tone. Some of them sound like they are voicing for World of Warcraft and others sound like they are voicing for a Nick Jr. show and it's all the same race in the same city

We can see there's abosutely no direction at all since DF, where they change where the story is going from patch to patch. This is even happening in this world soul saga, were they're suposed to commit to a planned trilogy story. Clearly cutting everything to do with the base TWW zones, moving harandar/rootlands to midnight while changing its relevance completely, changing Xalatath's nature and motives every other patch...

After The first entry of the trilogy and reading spoilers of the base patch for midnight, I don't even know what's the point of this trilogy at all. I guess whatever TLT ends up being, will be what they planned for the whole TWW to be.

[micwini]

This started in DF mostly. In BFA you had worldbuilding mixed with the main zone story to move the plot instead of moving just the feelings from NPC.

I think the writing and questing team is so spread, that they just focus on what they have more freedom (world building) and the main story, which is locked in by cinematics and voice acting, feels a bit unrelated.

Then you play Mop and Legion remix where basically all the zone quests follow their theme perfectly and dont' feel disconnected at all, and they are all mostly awesome.

I imagine that if they created highmountain today, we'd have dozens more lines of dialogue from Maila about her feelings, or many quests about how good and diverse the Dorgbar culture is.

This and Suramar would be a heavily politicized reference to 2020 white house occupation instead of the French revolution but with elves and demons that we luckily got in our timeline.

[allegrian]

I don't think it is the actors, as much as it is the direction. I'm pretty sure Brann is still the same actor, but compare it to his WotLK/cata lines. Wildly different. Correct me if im wrong on this.

Voice "acting" these days feels more like stageplay/musical acting than real acting.
It feels overly performative, mimicking old medieval stageplays in which they exaggerate their voices. Compare this to older voicelines, where it felt like people were talking in a more serious matter. No matter the emotion (anger/pride/calm/sad) it felt more sincere.

Not sure how to describe it well, but this is the best I can do.

I'm not sure if you're talking about wow's voice acting or about voice acting in general. I think that wow has become more disney/pixar/cartoony sice Mop. Of course you can notice that in the MoP cinematic and pandaren, and then in Wod's race revamp, where many races became more cartoony. Warcraft always had cartoony elements (like peons) but it wasn't the overall vibe of the franchise. A good example would be to compare Vanilla gnolls vs DF gnolls.

So the same happenned with voice acting: it became less serious/metal/epic and more like the voice acting you'd find in a disney/pixar movie.

[Darkarath]

https://x.com/Portergauge/status/1986603950645387418

The troll ones ain't any better tbh.

Midly better but terrible for Amani Trolls.

They should despise us.

They sound too friendly and too little Amani.

[Khaza-R]

I think its definitely a directional thing and a product of them trying to lean out of hard stereotypes. TBC BEs were supposed to be haughty and arrogant. It came across very clear through the old dialogue and VAing.

This is the same exact issue with all the councils. They don't want to pick a strong direction for most races. It doesn't make them more nuanced and interesting. It just leaves them feeling more like bland grey mush.

[Zardas]

This and Suramar would be a heavily politicized reference to 2020 white house occupation instead of the French revolution but with elves and demons that we luckily got in our timeline.

Isn't Suramar supposed to be referencing france under german occupation in ww2 instead of the revolution of 1789 ? That's what I also thought with the underground resistance movement and all that.

[allegrian]

I think its definitely a directional thing and a product of them trying to lean out of hard stereotypes. TBC BEs were supposed to be haughty and arrogant. It came across very clear through the old dialogue and VAing.

This is the same exact issue with all the councils. They don't want to pick a strong direction for most races. It doesn't make them more nuanced and interesting. It just leaves them feeling more like bland grey mush.

It also came across clear with both male and female BE idle animations, which look out of place with the current vibes.

The problem with councils and races is trying to make everything politically correct for the current real world, and compare any monster race to real world human ethnicities. So there can be no evil, savage or cannivalistic mosnter races in wow anymore as long as they're non-verbal.

And of course you can only have pure cartoonishly evil factions now as enemies.

[Enrif]

A snap-dragon loa is exceptionally curious because by all current lore, snap dragons were created at the behest of Azshara pre-Naga and then following the sundering they were domesticated by the Naga. So I'm curious if this just a loa as term for "really powerful thing trolls worship" or are we meeting a snapdragon Wild God. If we're meeting a snapdragon wild god, it's fair to assume the Naga won't be far behind... amidst all the plethora of deep sea loas that are being seeded; is our Ula'tek patch about the Naga trying to co-opt the Isle of Fangs to go dominate a venomous Loa and awaken an old god minion in one fell swoop?

yeah, it is interesting to see that many maritime loa, while Zandalar only had 1. And the Snapdragon is the most strange one, as you mentioned. Perhaps a snapdragon wildgod emerged after their creation? Or they retcon the creation of the snapdragons.

But isle of fangs, serpent loa, a lot of other water loa, and then lets remember that the dungeon entrance was also underwater for the isle of fangs, right? Then of course the obvious points about Nage=Elves and this is supposedly the elf expansion, and the Naga were the closest to the void before the creation of the void elves. And we have at least 1 naga outpost on the coast of quel'thalas.

There is a lot that could point towards Naga as part of the isle of fangs patch. But i don't think we have any direct naga related stuff outside of that outpost and now the snapdragon.

[Count Zero]

I think the EU has successfully litigated against microtransactions using the exact argument of bundles mismatching cost. If they do try this, they will get sued for it. That said, it absolutely is better to avoid having dozens of smaller transactions that require a payment provider. Those transactions have a cost (and that will be taken into account in pricing) and also exposes you to any issues with said payment provider (outages or other failure of service, slow service which will be problematic etc.)
Ideally, you should be able to make a test build of your house with Hearthsteel items, save that bundle of items, get a cost quote and then buy the exact amount of Hearthsteel. Ideally.

Multiple transactions, sure. But even in your ideal scenario, that's one transaction for those multiple items - so it would be the same with virtual currency or cash. But also it sort of assumes you only ever make one big hearthsteel purchase for your home ever. They won't have the entire inventory they will ever have all available from the start. Most people will periodically make purchases.

For what it's worth, they've already acknowledged this specifically:



People can insist that they're lying, but no one can say it hasn't been addressed already.

"Minimize leftovers." With cash there would be no leftovers.

[allegrian]

Everything is a Loa now, the ancients from the sundering have been ignored and forgotten.

Trolls are the new elves.

[Nymrohd]

Everything is a Loa now, the ancients from the sundering have been ignored and forgotten.

Trolls are the new elves.

They never truly invested in the Night Elves' relation with the Ancients anyway. They were a druid first thing and since they couldn't let druids stay exclusive to Night Elves even in vanilla . . . Heck by the time the Ancients were important in a quest we even had troll and worgen druids.

[Enrif]

Everything is a Loa now, the ancients from the sundering have been ignored and forgotten.

Trolls are the new elves.

All ancients are loa, not all loa are ancients.

[Scyth]

The Amani voices aren't bad imo but some of those Belf ones are just terrible. Doesn't fit the race at all.

Very unlikely it will get changed though, not that easy to change voice lines.

[Sondrelk]

All ancients are loa, not all loa are ancients.

And to think that before BfA this would have been an insane take. And then suddenly Zandalar seemed to establish that the Mount Hyjal ancients were just a tiny group compared to the seemingly vastly more numerous Troll Loa.

[JDBlou]

yeah, it is interesting to see that many maritime loa, while Zandalar only had 1. And the Snapdragon is the most strange one, as you mentioned. Perhaps a snapdragon wildgod emerged after their creation? Or they retcon the creation of the snapdragons.

But isle of fangs, serpent loa, a lot of other water loa, and then lets remember that the dungeon entrance was also underwater for the isle of fangs, right? Then of course the obvious points about Nage=Elves and this is supposedly the elf expansion, and the Naga were the closest to the void before the creation of the void elves. And we have at least 1 naga outpost on the coast of quel'thalas.

There is a lot that could point towards Naga as part of the isle of fangs patch. But i don't think we have any direct naga related stuff outside of that outpost and now the snapdragon.

I 100% think it's completely wild guessing but there's definitely some hints towards Naga featuring in Midnight in some capacity, we could see Naga even if we don't see Azshara herself. A random outpost in QT which is itself signficantly out of place it is, perhaps it is as just a mental reminder that the naga are out there and related to elves or it's a Chekhovism at work.

I'm just hedging a bet on some gut instinct/intuition.