Now that the dust has settled,

[Calfredd]

What are you even talking about. Metzen jumping up and down like Steve Balmer at BlizzCons and shouting "we develop those things for 100 years" could never get him fired, because he has an excuse that gullible customers will easily consume; he tells them "well at least SOME of the ideas were developed for years"; yeah but I don't care about that if at least 95% of your development time is forced upon you by circumstances to be done on the next expansion and the expansion just released.

You basically misunderstand basic logic here and you demand the authority fallacy is enough to deny that. No company is heavily developing a third game when both the current game is just being released and they have a second game to develop after that on top.

Yelling "Fallacy! Fallacy!" at the top of your lungs doesn't mean a fallacy is taking place. What evidence do you, an uneducated (in game design) nobody have to show Blizzard is lying about their development process? Remember, you basically saying "because I said so" or "it's common knowledge" like you have been doing for all of your threads is not evidence and people can give you the proverbial 'shut up' should you keep pushing as you have been.

[Bozzoltank]

Late addition to the original question, but I feel like it would've killed me if they hadn't announced anything about Midnight until Gamescom, and they just randomly drop a Quel'Thalas + Zul'Aman combo alongside housing.

The actual announcement, while cool, simply confirmed. Nothing that was shown in the Features trailer except for Harandar was a surprise to me (and Prey, but who really cares?).

[epigramx]

two expansion teams, a live team, and the housing team. They are always well ahead of what is publicly available to players, for example we know for a fact that they were already building out the zones for Midnight in November 2023.

There are people that oversee the whole product, and there is certainly some level of overlap and also probably some people who get shifted around between teams to maintain some level of continuity.

The expansion team that did The War Within (11.0.0 ~ 11.0.2) will have already been actively working on The Last Titan since around October 2024.

The expansion team doing Midnight (12.0.0 ~ 12.0.1) would have been actively working on it since around January 2023, will keep working until it launches, and will probably continue working on the final version patches (the 12.0.1.xxxx patches) that will be pushed live over the following month or two, before moving on to whatever 13.0 is.

The live team should actively be working on both the Midnight pre-patch world event (12.0.0) and the next minor and major content patches (12.0.x and 12.1.0).

The labels you put on those teams are dumbed down versions of the reality for uneducated in programming gamers. When they tell you a "live team" the mean all their lead programmers are on top of the current code because it's critical to get a new expansion and new code ready; mappers can work much more long term and if their mapping work is extremely specialized then they waste resources not working even for 3 expansions in the future; basically some of their professionals would be twiddling their thumbs no matter what if they didn't put them to work on something else.

And we didn't even take into account the marketing bs; of course they'll say they have gigantic teams working for you 24/7 for 10 expansions in the future; the reality is the critical work that must be done now has the majority of the work hours and the artists who are hitting a certain bottleneck because of other developers not being done yet they are put into other projects even if they are maps of expansions from 2029.

[Kathranis]

all their lead programmers are on top of the current code because it's critical to get a new expansion and new code ready

There's this thing called VCS, you know. They have sophisticated tools that allow them to manage, merge, and revert different branches of the codebase, database, assets, etc. Version control is even built into the client side for WoW which is how you can have like seven different versions of the game all running off the same launcher with shared assets.

There are many, many different vectors of engineering, programming, and game design that are all happening simultaneously on a game like WoW. The engineers aren't the same ones designing the classes or doing level design or writing quests.

[Zodiark]

There is still mystery in the WSS expansions. All we really got after TWW was the titles and a very broad outline of the direction the story was going. Nothing about new races, classes, zones, etc. until the reveal of each individual expansion. Allwe really know about The Last Titan is that part or all of it will be set in a revamped Northrend.

Ok tinfoil hat time. But... now that you mention it, with the reveal of going back to Northrend either in part or whole as you say, could that signify a return of Bolvar, and/or the Lich king? I mean IF they have been retconning SL lore, wouldn't it also be feasible that the stories of major NPC's associated with it had retconned stories too?

[Joshuaj]

Ok tinfoil hat time. But... now that you mention it, with the reveal of going back to Northrend either in part or whole as you say, could that signify a return of Bolvar, and/or the Lich king? I mean IF they have been retconning SL lore, wouldn't it also be feasible that the stories of major NPC's associated with it had retconned stories too?

Can I be honest? I'm half convinced they're not actually going to retcon anything major with the Shadowlands lore.

The Etheral and Broker "retcon" only worked cause there was nothing really definitive about the Brokers origins in the actual game itself, I don't think.

And the whole "familiarity" ordeal between Azeroth, the Shadowlands, and the other cosmic realms has already been established in the Shadowlands expac itself. The question remains though, why is there such a familiarity between it all? And why is Azeroth's power capable of activating Progenitor waystones or Progenitor machinery? Cause that implies she and the Progenitors are linked in some way.

As for the Titans mission, the Order links, and whatnot? Simple. I think Order conceived of the Pattern and used the Manifold plot and Cosmology entire as a means to "hold" Azeroth + the Worldsouls.

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Cause assuming Chronicle 4 is correct, the Progenitors are named Light, Shadow, Order, Disorder, Life, and Death, and we know the pattern and cosmos entire has a unique, inherent structure and separation of powers system to it.

[Ielenia]

They can say they have unicorns too.

You really have no idea what you're talking about here, are you? You're calling Blizzard a liar because what they say about how they work goes against your very tiny understanding of how game development (and software in general) actually entails.

You're just spinning your wheels, fast and loud, yet you're not going anywhere.

They have to heavily develop the imminent to be released expansion and they have to stay for at least one or two months on top of it after a new release to fix bugs on new code hence they have to start heavily developing an expansion a bit after the major release of the previous one.

After a point is about understanding that human resources are finite and even if you wanted to split them in 50% current and 50% future then it would be a bad business model that they would never follow.[/QUOTE]
Yeah. That's why they have more than one team working on expansions, genius. While one team is working on the expansion that has been released, the other team works on the next expansion.

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The labels you put on those teams are dumbed down versions of the reality for uneducated in programming gamers.

Precisely. Dumbed down for you.

[Joshuaj]

They can say they have unicorns too. They have to heavily develop the imminent to be released expansion and they have to stay for at least one or two months on top of it after a new release to fix bugs on new code hence they have to start heavily developing an expansion a bit after the major release of the previous one.

After a point is about understanding that human resources are finite and even if you wanted to split them in 50% current and 50% future then it would be a bad business model that they would never follow.

Funny you mention Unicorns, cause Midnight Quel'thalas actually has them LMAO

[epigramx]

VCS, you know. They have sophisticated tools

Irrelevant; you expose you're not very familiar with that business by just mentioning that; anyone can use git or other even in 1 man projects.

The point is some parts of their release cycle are critical and they're not going to risk their lead programmers working "for 2028".

Obviously if some artists like mappers are done with their work they can work for 2032.

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they have more than one team

Read above (after "The point"). Merry Christmas.

[Lolites]

You basically misunderstand basic logic here and you demand the authority fallacy is enough to deny that.

do you understand how ironic this is coming from YOU after you basicaly said "what devs say is lie, MY OPINION is truth"?

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Dumbed down for you.

and clearly still not enough

[Ielenia]

you expose you're not very familiar with that business by just mentioning that;

Holy shit, movie theaters WISHED they have this level of projection. God damn.

Read above (after "The point"). Merry Christmas.

Your "the point" is bullshit, because it is an argument borne out of ignorance of the subject matter and refusal to actually understand how Blizzard works.

You keep accusing everyone who disagrees with you by explaining how things really work and how Blizzard has said they do. Everyone is telling you the exact same thing, yet you sit at your computer and claim that everyone is wrong and that you're the only enlightened one, who knows how things at Blizzard work better than Blizzard themselves.

Seriously, you're literally the embodiment of the Skinner meme.

[epigramx]

projection

I'm a professional programmer. You have 24,000 posts in a gaming forum. I'm sure you know more about the programming of gaming.

[blaatschaap]

The Etheral and Broker "retcon" only worked cause there was nothing really definitive about the Brokers origins in the actual game itself, I don't think.

The retcon only "worked" because people at large don't really know about shadowlands lore. It was in fact explicitly stated, in game and even in print books (Grimoire of the Shadowlands and Beyond) that the Brokers were native to the shadowlands. The whole thing was made up to bridge TWW to Midnight with minimal dev time in light of the postponed Haranir content that was supposed to be in TWW. They repurposed SL content and borrowed from future Voidstorm content to rapidly create the K'aresh patch zone.

[Joshuaj]

The retcon only "worked" because people at large don't really know about shadowlands lore. It was in fact explicitly stated, in game and even in print books (Grimoire of the Shadowlands and Beyond) that the Brokers were native to the shadowlands. The whole thing was made up to bridge TWW to Midnight with minimal dev time in light of the postponed Haranir content that was supposed to be in TWW. They repurposed SL content and borrowed from future Voidstorm content to rapidly create the K'aresh patch zone.

Could just make it to where any and all documents were altered to make it look like the Brokers were native to the Shadowlands. After the shit with Dimensius, I wouldn't want to associate myself with K'aresh either. Saves my ass the trouble of a potential future Void assault on Tazavesh.

[Ielenia]

I'm a professional programmer.

Sure you are. And I'm the president-king of the planet Earth.

You have 24,000 posts in a gaming forum.

Oh look, red herrings abound. My posting frequency has literally zero bearing on my professional skills.

I'm sure you know more about the programming of gaming.

I'm sure you'd love if that was actually true.

I'll repeat again: everything you do in these forums go against all your claims. You've shown to have next to zero actual knowledge about the game you claimed not only played, but participated in a cutting-edge guild in the past. Even now, your claims about being a "professional programmer" are debunked by the inanity of your posts about anything regarding technical programming and implementation.

So forgive me if I believe your claims about being "a professional programmer" as much as I believe the claim the planet Earth is made of cheese and the moon is actually god's tongue.