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Warcraft Movie Stills, Illidan Novel Cover Art, Blue Posts, Tweets, This Month in WoW

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Blizzcon Charity Auction, Solo Farming vs Public Groups

Deck Spotlight: TwoBiers' Dreadscale Hunter, The Angry Chicken #115, Hearthstone World Championships - Day 3

Heroes PTR Offline, Artanis' Changes, Matchmaker Issues, Into The Nexus #74

New Hero D.Va - A Starcraft II Player, Beta Patch Notes - October 30th

Warcraft Movie Stills
Empire Magazine had an article about the Warcraft movie in the latest issue, along with three images from the movie.







Illidan Novel Cover Art Sneak Peek & BlizzCon Signing
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
As previously announced, Blizzard Entertainment and Random House LLC are partnering to bring you some great new novels, including World of Warcraft: Illidan written by William King (coming in March 2016).

Today, we’re pleased to share with you a first look at the cover art.


If you’re heading to BlizzCon, William King will be signing cover art posters at the following times and locations. Please make sure to stop by, say hello, and welcome him to the Blizzard family!

Random House Booth

Friday, November 6
  • 12:00-1:00PM
  • 3:30-4:30PM

Saturday, November 7
  • 10:00-11:00AM
  • 5:00-6:00PM

Blizzard Signing Area

Friday, November 6
  • 5:00-6:00PM

Saturday, November 7
  • 2:00- 3:00 PM

To preorder your copy of Illidan, head over to http://www.randomhousebooks.com/books/535580/

Blue Posts
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
CM Communication
It's more that a lot of the well thought out stuff aren't quick and easy posts to make in response to, and they may not be allowed to even say anything.

If somebody makes a post about concerns for the future of PvP in Legion for example, somebody like Neth is almost assuredly under a NDA and can't actually say anything without approval from somebody else at Blizzard.

As to other things, a lot of the times comments would boil down to "Yeah I read it, and told the developers about it" to which people would probably still be upset that they didn't go more into it. Keep in mind Neth is a CM and can only really pass information onto the dev team, which I imagine she already is just without telling us about it. Blizzard has never really been in the habit of making posts just to indicate that they read a thread.

As for the comment in the OP, notice how no real information has been given about the game itself. It was a pretty "safe" comment to make, relatively speaking.

We've actually said things like this many times before.

We often leave the "well thought out" posts alone not because we aren't aware of them but they often end up in our internal reports and we don't want the thread to get derailed just because one of us shows up.

Posting or not posting isn't a hard science. We have to make calls on things all of the time. The larger 'well thought out' posts aren't going to get short quick answers either. We could do that but then we get "you don't understand" or people assume our involvement means we either agree or are going to make something happen "soon" based on their post. Design is both a fast and slow process. We do what we can to keep on top of the thoughts and ideas of the community and our development teams do too. They read and are aware of far more than you realize. But again, sometimes people take our responding to something as a promise to take action based on what they said. We'd rather wait to respond when there is a response worth sharing.

Again, it's not a cut and dry thing as much as people think it is. People are complex. They want different things. They interpret words and tone in text differently based on their personal state of mind, wants or desires.

I think many times people just want to feel acknowledged, especially when they put a lot of thought into something many stand behind. But it's a big community and I'm sure challenging, to say the least.

Some people are OK with just having their thoughts acknowledged. Others aren't unless the "I read this" is followed up by "and we did/are doing something". Some people would rather us say nothing than post as I am now unless there is a hard answer to something. Others like just knowing we're here.

I would much rather be visible (when I can be) in little ways than be invisible for long streaks of time– though I often need to be since my job is much larger than posting here. I do miss getting to speak with you all more often, but I'm doing a lot of behind the scenes work that (hopefully) results in you getting information too as well as relaying information to the developers. There's a lot of planning, excel sheets, project tracking, meetings, writing, etc. that happens on a daily basis.

You know what might go a long way to ease the tensions and nerves of the posters with good threads (or any threads, really)? A check box on the Blue Poster's version of the forum where they can indicate the thread was read by them without typing out a reply. Anybody who jumps onto the thread would see the flag at the top of the original post (Oh, a blue saw this!) and know that they weren't ignored or forgotten. You could even set it to auto-populate the flag when you click the link if you were so inclined.

Granted, I'm sure you read most, if not all posts over time, but this would be attract a more psychological response from others rather than them being left to assume and/or think the worst.

The only problem with the "this has been read by a blue" flags would be that people would say, "This was read by a blue but they didn't say anything! No response! When do we get a response?" etc.

Sometimes we "blue" things by responding so people know we were there, but again, that has it's own issues. There's no "perfect" system, but we will keep doing what we can. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Blue Tweets
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
? about 6.2.3. Baleful: created between 655 - 695, increments of 5. No more upgrade token, or what will it do?
It will work the same way it does currently, and set the item's level to 695. (WarcraftDevs)

The Wrath Timewalking Plate Item Gauntlets of the Kraken is suppose to have 286 Stam,it says 274 Stam for level 100 ilvl 675 stat budget. Please check into this to verify this is indeed a number error. #TY
This will be fixed in 6.2.3, thanks for the bug report! (WarcraftDevs)

This Month in WoW - November 2015
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
It’s a big month! A little gathering called BlizzCon will pack November to the brim with World of Warcraft revelations, announcements, videos to watch, new goodies to acquire, and the pinnacle of WoW esports. You’re not going to want to miss November!

In-Game Events

Day of the Dead [November 1-3]
Can you feel it? The spirit world draws close during the Day of the Dead. This is why we decorate the graves of our dearly departed with flowers and candles and offerings: to welcome them back, even if only for a time.

Purchase some Orange Marigolds from Chapman and use them to see the otherwise invisible spirits waiting in graveyards. Bake (or buy) some Bread of the Dead and give it to a Cheerful Spirit to kick off the Grateful Dead quest and unlock a new pet, the Macabre Marrionette – which you can only get during this event.

Darkmoon Faire Returns [November 1-7]
The wondrous and mystical Darkmoon Faire returns to Azeroth on November 1, and if you haven’t completed all of Silas Darkmoon’s new Darkmoon Races, now’s the time! Test your speed and agility on a variety of racing mounts as you dodge electrifying obstacles and zip all over Darkmoon Island for rewards and achievements. You may also want to take a few moments to be a kid again by going for a ride on the new Darkmoon Seesaw.

The faire continues to be one of the best ways to acquire heirloom gear, and don’t forget all of the toys, mounts, and pets that can only be gotten here. Get in that cannon!

WoW’s 11th Anniversary [November 23]
The World of Warcraft Anniversary celebrates Azeroth's heroes dedication to protecting and preserving their world. Whether you are an honorable Tauren, a brawny Orc, a crafty Gnome, or a resourceful Human, we appreciate your continued support! We hope to see you around for many years to come!

Pilgrim’s Bounty [November 23-30]
Even during hard times, the Pilgrim’s Bounty celebration emerges across the lands of Azeroth, bringing with it the opportunity to reflect and give thanks for the nourishment the land has provided. This season is the perfect occasion to brush up on your cooking skills while sharing in a veritable cornucopia of delicious offerings found on the communal dining tables located outside capital cities. There’s also no better time to go on a wild turkey hunt, or, should wild turkeys prove too elusive, transform friend and foe into tasty turkey targets.

It's a time for reflecting on your journeys and good fortune and sharing plentiful food and stories with friends. You can partake in wonderful Pilgrim's Bounty feasts near major towns by sitting at a Bountiful Table and enjoying the food!

World of Warcraft Esports

Road to BlizzCon: WoW Arena World Championship
The time has come. This is it. BlizzCon is where you’ll get to watch the Global Finals of the World of Warcraft 3v3 Arena World Championship. One team will stand victorious and take home the lion’s share of a $250,000 prize pool and the title of BlizzCon 2015 Arena champions.

The Opening Week action begins at 1:30 p.m. PDT on Friday, October 30, and continues at that same time on Saturday, October 31. The final rounds at BlizzCon get underway as Noon PST on Friday, November 6, and continue at 3:00 p.m. PST on Saturday, November 7. Be sure to tune in to our free live stream on the official BlizzCon website.

Bonus Events
  • November 4-9: Draenor Dungeon Bonus Event
  • November 11-16: Pet Battle Bonus Event
  • November 18-23: Burning Crusade Bonus Event
  • November 25-30: Apexis Bonus Event

Last Month In WoW
Among the many interesting happenings in October, we couldn’t help but take special notice of the annual Running of the Gnomes. Event organizer Dravvie tells us that over 2400 people gathered on the Scarlet Crusade (NA) realm, created new Gnome characters, and then ran from Gnomeregan to Booty Bay. From there, they all went on to Orgrimmar. Check out these pictures of the event:



Along the way, over $3,400 was raised for the Cleveland Clinic’s Cancer Program. That’s impressive! Our thanks go out to everyone who sent in a heads up about it.

What’s happening in November that you’d like us to highlight? Let us know in the comments below.

Questions for the Devs, Warcraft Movie, Day of the Dead, Tweets, Pumpkin Contest

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Pumpkin Carving Contest Winners, Rank #1 HC 4-Man vs GR 81

November Ranked Card Back, BlizzCon Dev Interview Questions, Hearthstone World Championships - Day 4

Pumpkin Carving Contest Winners, WTF Moments #22, Top 5 Fails #23

Submit Questions for the Developers
We have our first interview in a long time coming up at Blizzcon and as always, we want to let the community ask questions! This time our interview will be covering the design of Legion.

If you have any questions you think we should ask, be sure to add them to the comments of the linked post for consideration. We will pick the best questions and add them to our list!

  • Don't post any questions in the comments of this news post. Use the linked topic instead.
  • These should be questions about Legion, not Warlords of Draenor.
  • No class specific questions please. This includes things like balance between the different healing/tank/DPS classes and specs.
  • Keep questions reasonably short.




Warcraft Trailer Screenshots
Some screenshots from the Warcraft trailer were posted on Reddit this weekend. Obviously this was not intended for release and may not represent the final movie.



Day of the Dead
Day of the Dead was updated last year. There are several wrestling inspired costumes you can purchase for 100 from Chapman. Once in the costume, you can do battle with other costumed players. You can use the costumes even after the holiday is over!

There seems to be a bug with the achievements this year, as you can't kill other players with the costume on, only bring them to 1 health. You need to be dueling for them to die.


If you haven't already done the other part of the holiday, be sure to check out the guide on Icy Veins.

LevelTypeSlotName
1Holiday"Blooming Rose" Contender's Costume
1Holiday"Night Demon" Contender's Costume
1Holiday"Purple Phantom" Contender's Costume
1Holiday"Santo's Sun" Contender's Costume
1Holiday"Snowy Owl" Contender's Costume

NamePoints
To The AfterlifeDefeat a contender while wearing a contender's outfit purchased during Day of the Dead.
5
Vientos!Defeat 20 contenders while wearing a contender's outfit purchased during Day of the Dead.
5
CalaveraDefeat 50 contenders while wearing a contender's outfit purchased during Day of the Dead.
10


Blue Tweets
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
How do you feel about Wildstar's area-effect visuals and would you change them? (Muffinus)
I think Wildstar really made that their thing, so it works for them. I was worried we were going to overdo it for WoW.
I agree with this statement. (Muffinus)

Why is "gamey" considered a bad thing? — Games need rules, but when the rules intrude too much it can be disruptive… https://t.co/IRrx2YUwhh
Real answer: because immersion is often at odds with clarity. Sometimes, there is a more immersive way to get that gameplay. (Muffinus)

Commercial gyms are like Casual guilds, with casual members. Minimum effort yet members want maximum attention / perks.
Gyms want to be a product that everyone buys but very few people use: https://t.co/AYIC1JlY2I (holinka)
ultimately you should be happy about those casuals. They keep prices down. (holinka)
over the members who pour their sweat and hard work day in day out at the gym?
make a gym like that! Maybe you can change the world! (This is all addressed in the linked podcast btw) (holinka)
also it is probably not $10-20 more a month. More like "double or triple what I pay now." (holinka)
I'm also not saying it's a good thing. Just the way gyms are structured now. Definitely room for high price hardcore gyms. (holinka)
why should that even be a means to an end though. I'm not even thinking about a REALLY hardcore gym. Just some place that has high
I guess the bottom line is most gyms are setup to sell memberships not to have people work out in them. Seems backwards right? (holinka)
Just describing why not defending it. But that person who gets on the elliptical for 10 then leaves is more cost effective. (holinka)
pays as much as you but is only there for 10 minutes. Most cost effective person? The one that never shows up at all. Free money (holinka)
real life is very sad (holinka)

Ghostcrawler Tweets
Ghostcrawler still occasionally talks about WoW. Remember that he no longer works for or speaks for Blizzard.
Originally Posted by MMO-Champion
what's your take on the popularity of classic WoW servers? Is it time?
I've never played on one. I understand the appeal but not sure if it's a satisfying meal or just a light snack. (OccupyGStreet)



2015 Pumpkin Contest Winners
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
The winners of this year's pumpkin-carving contest have been chosen -- and they're monstrously spectacular. We'd like to thank everyone who participated this year, and we can't wait to see your mad scientist skills in action again next time around.


Check out all of the creepy, incredible, and creative winning pumpkins here.

WoW Down to 5.5 Million Subscribers, Warcraft Movie Trailer at Blizzcon

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WoW Down to 5.5 Million Subscribers
Blizzard has their Q3 2015 earnings call tomorrow, announcing that WoW is down to 5.5 million subscribers at the end of Q3 2015. This is down 100k from the Q2 2015 call that listed WoW at 5.6 million subscribers.

  • Activision Blizzard agreed to buy King Digital Entertainment for $5.9 billion. They are best known for Candy Crush Saga.
  • Hearthstone key engagement metrics grew 77% year-over-year and set a new quarterly revenue record for the franchise.
  • Diablo III continued to bring in new players in Q3, and in China, the game passed the 2-million-unit milestone.
  • Overwatch beta has over 7 million players signed-up to participate, not including China.

Don't see a chart? Enable javascript!


Warcraft Movie Trailer to Premiere at Blizzcon
Everyone will be able to see the Warcraft Movie Trailer on Friday, as it will be part of the Opening Ceremony, which is streamed for free!



Overwatch Sprays
Overpwn has posted the hero sprays which may be part of the unlocks system.

Warcraft Movie Trailer Teaser

Warlords Season 2 Ending Soon, Patch 6.2.3 PTR - Build 20691

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Warlords Season 2 Ending Soon
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
After an in intense season of conflict in Arenas and Battlegrounds, the time is coming soon to see who has climbed to the top of the PvP ranks. Prepare to fight your last battles of this season, and remember—there is no substitute for victory!

Warlords Season 2 will be ending as soon as a few weeks from now. Once the season ends, we'll begin a roughly two-week process to determine end-of-season reward eligibility.

All players who believe that they may have qualified for Warlords Season 2 awards should note the following:

  • In order to ensure you receive your award(s), please refrain from transferring your character(s) to another realm or faction until after Warlords Season 3 has begun.
  • Warlords Season 2 titles and mounts will be awarded a couple of weeks after Season 3 begins.

Conquest Points will be converted to Honor Points at the end of the season, and any Honor above 4,000 will be converted to in-game currency at a rate of 35 silver per point. A few other things to keep in mind once the season has ended:

  • The Honor cap will remain at 4,000.
  • Warlords Season 2 items with rating requirements will no longer be available for purchase.
  • The Season 2 vendors will move over from where they are now and convert to selling last season’s gear for honor. The Season 3 vendors will appear in the newly vacated vendor location.
  • Rated Battleground and Arena matches will not be available during the break between seasons.
  • We will confirm the start date of the forthcoming Warlords Season 3 in a post here in the weeks to come.

In war, you win or lose, live or die—and the difference is but an eyelash. To the battlefield!

Patch 6.2.3 PTR Notes - November 3
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Item Upgrades and Valor are back!
  • Item upgrades are back! Players will be able to earn and spend Valor to upgrade items from Hellfire Citadel, crafted profession items, items created from Baleful tokens in Tanaan Jungle, and all Draenor dungeon drops. All the items you’ve already earned are eligible for upgrades retroactively.
  • To upgrade, visit your friendly neighborhood ethereal in Orgrimmar and Stormwind, or Stormshield and Warspear to upgrade your gear by 5 item levels at a time for 250 Valor, up to twice per item, for a total potential boost of 10 item levels.

Class Tuning Changes
Death Knight (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)

Druid (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)

Paladin (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)

Shaman (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)

Warrior (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
  • General
    • Enrage now increases all damage dealt by 15% (up from 10%).
  • Arms

Raids and Dungeons
Timewalking
  • Pepe should now remain with players that enter into a Timewalking dungeon.

Patch 6.2.3 PTR - Build 20691
Build 20691 will be deployed to the PTR realms soon.

Spell Changes
Originally Posted by MMO-Champion
Death Knight (Forums, Talent Calculator)

Talents

Blood

Frost

Unholy

Major Glyphs

Druid (Forums, Talent Calculator)
  • Moonfire damage has been increased by 6%.
  • Moonfire damage has been increased by 6%.
  • Starfall damage has been increased by 6%.
  • Sunfall damage has been increased by 6%.
  • Sunfire damage has been increased by 6%.
  • Wrath damage has been increased by 6%.

Balance

Paladin (Forums, Talent Calculator)

Retribution

Shaman (Forums, Talent Calculator)

Elemental

Elemental & Restoration

Enhancement

Warrior (Forums, Talent Calculator)
Arms

Fury & Protection
  • Enrage now increases all damage dealt by 15% (up from 10%).

Blizzard Classic Games, Interview, Community Amphitheater, Tweets, Blizzcon Parties

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BlizzCon In-Game Goodies Showcased, Proc Support Wizard

Welcome to Our Inn

Promote Fix, New Season Roll and Artanis, Hottest Plays #53, TeamLiquid Line-Up Changes

Datamined Character Avatars, Introducing Overwatch Guides - Heroes, Maps, and Tips!

Warcraft Movie Interview
Entertainment Weekly and Collider both had interviews about the Warcraft movie recently.

Collider
  • The original script just told the story from the Alliance point of view. Duncan Jones came on and wrote the script to include both the Alliance and Horde points of view.
  • The latest screenings of the movie have been extremely well received.
  • The team is very satisfied with most of the movie, but they are still tinkering with it and going through the final process.

Entertainment Weekly
  • Fans will get a unique enjoyment from the movies, as they will be able to identify the Easter eggs.
  • The movie needed to be something you could watch even if you don't know anything about Warcraft while still making the players feel like it was their world. This is part of why the movie took so long.
  • The BlizzCon crowd is the hardcore crowd, as they know the stories and world and are looking for a reflection of things they;ve experienced being in that world themselves.
  • Comic book movies used to have a stigma associated with them too, but eventually filmmakers made movies that you actually cared about and felt something for. The same thing is going on with videogame movies now.
  • The first trailer has to do a lot introducing, as the movie shows a new world and characters that people aren't familiar with yet.


Blizzard Hiring for Classic Games
Blizzard posted a new position recently, hiring software engineers to fix up older games. This is likely related to the side project mentioned at Blizzcon 2013 that was updating older games to run on current versions of Windows.
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker)
Compelling stories. Intense multiplayer. Endless replayability. Qualities that made StarCraft, Warcraft III, and Diablo II the titans of their day. Evolving operating systems, hardware, and online services have made them more difficult to be experienced by their loyal followers or reaching a new generation.

We’re restoring them to glory, and we need your engineering talents, your passion, and your ability to get tough jobs done.

So if you like wearing many hats, know small teams are the most effective, and look forward to challenges that will create millions of new adventures for our players: we would love to hear from you.

  • Make gameplay first again on modern operating systems.
  • Create conditions for experiences that look as good as they play.
  • Own implementation and curation of features new and old.
  • Combat hacking to improve multiplayer.
  • Diagnose and fix all the things: crashes, deadlocks, overflows, heap corruptions, etc.

Blizzcon - Community Amphitheater
There are several discussions going on at the Community Amphitheater at Blizzcon that won't be on the Virtual Ticket. We hope to be able to provide coverage of them, but it may not be live.
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
Saturday, November 7, 12:15 p.m.
Quick updates on Engineering discussion. First, it's a Q&A discussion in the Darkmoon Faire area, not a panel on one of the panel stages. Second, it's gonna be at 12:15 on Saturday, and last for an hour. We'll be doing some of the questions we got from Twitter, and polling the audience. The engineers involved are myself, @ben_deane from http://Battle.Net , Timothy Ford from Overwatch, and Grant Mark from SC2/HOTS. We're super excited to do this, and we have a lot of good questions you've submitted. Thanks for your involvement. (kurtismcc)

Friday, November 6, 2:45 p.m.
Scott Johnson, host of The Instance Podcast, will be kicking off casual conversation with lead narrative designer Dave Kosak and lead quest designer Craig Amai about how the rich fantasy of the Warcraft universe informs their design approach to Legion, from quest flow to artifact weapons and beyond. Additional WoW designers will be on-hand and anxious to join the discussion!

  • Featured Guests: Lead Narrative Designer Dave Kosak & Lead Quest Designer Craig Amai
  • Moderator: Scott Johnson, The Instance Podcast Host
  • Special Guests: Designers Helen Cheng, Steve Danuser, Paul Kubit, Steve Burke, Jeremy Feasel, Juan Custer, Chadd Nervig, & more

Saturday, November 7, 2:30 p.m.
Following up on the Legion game systems panel Saturday afternoon, lead class designer Kris Zierhut and his fellow members of the class/systems teams will be in the area to talk further with you about their presentation. If you plan on attending the main stage Q&A panel at this time, we still recommend you come by afterward equipped with your questions for the developers!

  • Featured Guest: Lead Class Designer Kris Zierhut
  • Special Guests: Designers Chadd Nervig, Jonathan LeCraft, Russell Petersen, Jay Gill, Zachariah Owens, & more

If you’re not able to make these times, don’t worry! WoW developers will be hanging around the Darkmoon Faire throughout the weekend. Check with us at the Community Amphitheater anytime during BlizzCon for information on scheduled guest appearances.

Blue Tweets
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
PvP
Do you think after Legion the WOW PVP Scene will be a major contender in the eSports Arena?
No idea. Primarily focused on making it fun to play. (holinka)

Lore
From what I got from you, demons are soulless right? How would they be animate then=[This is kinda confusing.
That I have no idea about, some like Xavius had their souls torn apart by Sargeras right? But does every demonic being have one? (Muffinus)
Well, according to some sources fel consumes souls. Then we have sources stating fel energy also burns life.
Seems to be both, right? Some things consume soul shards, others use life to create mana, others use mana to kill life. (Muffinus)

And if IIRC, the Nether is the realm of the dead?
No idea, man. What is the Light? Where did that one dude in Icecrown go when he ascended? Do the Naaru live there? Deep stuff. (Muffinus)
I have no idea lol =] Maybe there's two realm of the dead. Heaven and Hell-opps
That's kind of the fun of Warcraft mysteries... (Muffinus)
I love mysteries=]I can't help but think that the Observers are related to Old Gods tho. Dem tentacles
Old Gods are still super mysterious to me, I love their mythos and the creepy stained glass vibe. (Muffinus)

Hey Dave, could we ever see a return of the Aspects?
The dragonflights will continue to have a big influence on Azeroth! (DaveKosak)

Ghostcrawler Tweets
Ghostcrawler still occasionally talks about WoW. Remember that he no longer works for or speaks for Blizzard.
Originally Posted by MMO-Champion
was there ever discussion during your tenure to add housing to WoW?
Concern was always that players stay in their houses and don't see other players. (OccupyGStreet)

One thing that I always wanted to ask I would really like an answer to: why do blizz nerfs always with the hammer? no scappel
It can also be demoralizing to have a scalpel cut patch after patch after patch. (OccupyGStreet)

why do you think Blizzard abandoned their core Vanilla/BC/SC1/D1 and D2 player base in favour of 'accessibility'?
I think "abandoned" is a very strong word. Blizzard has always strived for accessibility. (OccupyGStreet)



Blizzard - Japanese Game Localizations
Blizzard updated the WoW, Diablo III, Overwatch, and Hearthstone websites to have a link to a Japanese version of the website. Obviously only Hearthstone has been released in Japanese so far, so it is the only one that works. Blizzard has also been hiring for Japanese localization this year, along with two newer postings for a Project Manager and Senior Marketing Manager. Keep in mind that none of this means that any other games are getting Japanese localizations.



Blizzcon - Con Before the Storm Party
If you are looking for something to do before the Curse Party on Friday, be sure to check out the Con Before the Storm party on Thursday! There will be fan art, a photo booth, games, panels, meet and greets, and more!



Blizzcon - Curse Party at the Hilton Anaheim
Come join Curse for an awesome party at Blizzcon 2015 on Friday, November 6, 2015 at 8:00 PM! We can't wait to celebrate another amazing year of Blizzard games with other fans and users. There will be awesome music, loads of free drinks, swag bags for you to take home, and more!

The pre-reserved spots are all gone, but there will be a general entry line outside the ballroom, so get there early and be ready to party!

Legion Releasing by September 2016, Level 100 Boost, Early Demon Hunter Access

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Update (9:30 PM EST):Overwatch Origins will come with a Baby Winston Pet

Legion Releasing by September 2016
Legion website updates are happening!

  • The regular version costs $50
  • The Digital Deluxe edition costs $70.
  • Pre-purchasing gives you a Level 100 Boost.
  • Pre-purchasing gives you at least one week early access to the Demon Hunter class.
  • You will need a level 70 character to create a Demon Hunter and you can only have one Demon Hunter per realm.
  • Legion is expected to release on or before 09/21/2016. This is not a release date.

Activision Blizzard Studios to Create Original Film and TV Content

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Activision Blizzard Studios to Create Original Film and TV Content
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
Activision Blizzard (Nasdaq: ATVI) today announced the launch of Activision Blizzard Studios, a new film and television studio devoted to creating original content based on the company's extensive library of iconic and globally-recognized intellectual properties. Activision Blizzard's owned content includes some of the most popular entertainment franchises in the world, including Call of Duty®, Skylanders®, Diablo®, Hearthstone® and StarCraft®. Former Disney executive Nick van Dyk has been tapped to co-head the division, along with a senior creative executive who will be announced soon.


Activision Blizzard Studios' first production will be "Skylanders™ Academy," an animated TV series based on the award-winning Skylanders® game. Currently in production under the supervision of showrunner Eric Rogers ("Futurama"), "Skylanders™ Academy" will feature the voices of Justin Long ("Alvin and the Chipmunks,""Ask Me Anything") as Spyro, Ashley Tisdale ("Phineas and Ferb,""High School Musical") as Stealth Elf, Jonathan Banks ("Breaking Bad,""Better Call Saul") as Eruptor and Norm Macdonald ("Saturday Night Live") as Glumshanks. Additional voice talent includes Harland Williams and Richard Horvitz. The award-winning, $3 billion Skylanders® franchise has sold through more than 250 million toys since pioneering the toys-to-life category in 2011i.

Another near-term initiative for Activision Blizzard Studios will be the development of a robust cinematic universe based on the Call of Duty franchise. Call of Duty®: Advanced Warfare remains the number one-selling title on next-generation consolesii and today marks the launch of the highly-anticipated new Call of Duty®: Black Ops III. Activision Blizzard Studios envisions a series of Call of Duty feature films as well as the possibility of television adaptations.

"Activision Blizzard is home to some of the most successful entertainment franchises in history, across any medium. With the launch of Activision Blizzard Studios, our engaged fans can now watch the games they love come to life across film and television," said Bobby Kotick, Chief Executive Officer of Activision Blizzard. "Activision Blizzard Studios is yet another way we're celebrating our players and fans, and we expect that our film and television productions will entertain and delight whole new audiences, as well. I'm excited that Nick and his team will be leading this important new growth opportunity for Activision Blizzard."

Kotick added, "We intend to approach film and television development with the same unwavering commitment to excellence we are known for in game development."

Nick van Dyk, formerly a long-time Walt Disney Company senior executive, will serve as Activision Blizzard Studios' Co-President, alongside a top creative executive who will be announced soon. Van Dyk will have responsibility for distribution, physical production, strategy, finance and operations and will co-manage all aspects of the studio. Before joining Activision Blizzard last year, van Dyk spent nine years at Disney where, as Senior Vice President of Corporate Strategy, he helped drive Disney's focus on franchise intellectual property and played a significant role in the acquisitions of Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm. Prior to that, van Dyk was part of Artisan Entertainment's senior management team.

"Activision Blizzard Studios has the unique advantage of starting with a library of world-class intellectual property that includes some of the largest franchises which have not yet been developed in film and television," said van Dyk. "Our library spans more than 30 years of global entertainment culture and, in the last 12 months alone, fans of Activision Blizzard properties have played and watched our games online for more than 13 billion hours. This gives us a huge, passionate and deeply-engaged audience that is hungry for more great content built from the universes they already know and love—and which are extremely broad in their appeal."

Van Dyk added, "Activision Blizzard Studios is not just an exciting new business for our company, it is a synergistic complement to our core business. Our movies and shows will benefit from the remarkable IP created in our games and will further increase the awareness of, engagement with and passion for our franchises."

Activision Blizzard Studios is another important step in the company's strategy of expanding the platforms through which it offers its compelling intellectual property to existing fans and new audiences around the world.

The founding of Activision Blizzard Studios follows the company's announcement on Oct. 22 of a new esports division headed by former ESPN CEO Steve Bornstein and Major League Gaming co-founder and president Mike Sepso. The esports division will build on the company's competitive gaming leadership by creating all-new ways to deliver the best-in-class fan experience across games, platforms and geographies, furthering the development of its world-leading esports ecosystem. Activision Blizzard's other divisions are Activision Publishing and Blizzard Entertainment. On Nov. 2, the company announced its plans to acquire King Digital Entertainment, the creators of the Candy Crush®, Farm Heroes®, Pet Rescue® and Bubble Witch® franchises, which will make it a new global leader in mobile gaming.

Blizzcon Opening Ceremony in 1 Hour, Day 1 Schedule

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Update (1:45 PM EST): The BuyOverwatch site is live, but 404ing.

Blizzcon Opening Ceremony in 1 Hour
Hold on to your hats and join us in the chat for the biggest Blizzcon viewing party! Keep checking back to explore the new content as we update live during the panels!





Blizzcon 2015 Schedule
Note: all times are converted to the timezone your computer is currently in.

The Opening Ceremony has Started!

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The Opening Ceremony has Started!
Stay tuned for updates as they happen.

Update 3:05 PM EST: Players who pre-purchase World of Warcraft: Legion digitally can immediately boost one character of their choosing to level 100
Update 3:02 PM EST: World of Warcraft: Legion will launch in summer 2016 (winter 2016 in regions in southern hemisphere; on or before September 21, 2016)
Update 3:02 PM EST: Artifact weapon previews are up!
Update 3:02 PM EST: Overwatch launches Spring 2016.
Update 3:01 PM EST: Pre-purchasing gives a Widowmaker skin.
Update 3:00 PM EST: The collector's edition comes with the soundtrack, art book, and Solider 76 statue.
Update 2:59 PM EST: Overwatch is coming to console and PC at the same time.
Update 2:55 PM EST: Overwatch will include all 21 heroes, maps, content, and features when you buy it. The Origins version will include 5 skins, along with some content for other Blizzard games.
Update 2:53 PM EST: Mei is a new hero with an ice weapon. Genji is Hanzo's brother.
Update 2:51 PM EST: D.va is a new hero with a mechanical suit that can be used or she can get out of it to fight.
Update 2:50 PM EST: Overwatch is getting three new heroes, along with a new map.
Update 2:45 PM EST: The League of Explorers launches this Thursday!
Update 2:43 PM EST: The Golden Monkey replaces your hand and deck with legendary minions
Update 2:42 PM EST: New mechanic: Discover - Pick one of three random cards
Update 2:40 PM EST: Hearthstone is getting a new adventure, The League of Explorers.
Update 2:37 PM EST: Legion, Overwatch, and Overwatch Origins preorders are live.
Update 2:36 PM EST: Everyone else will have party with someone who has Cho'gall and play 2 games to get him. If you play 4 partied games with people that don't have him, you get some gold.
Update 2:35 PM EST: Cho'gall is free to Blizzcon and Virtual Ticket attendees, as well as a few other random players.
Update 2:31 PM EST: New hereos: Lunara, Greymane, Cho'gall (one hero, two players). New map, can't attack the core directly.
Update 2:28 PM EST: Heroes is getting a new game mode: The Arena. Less rules, multiple of the same hero, small single objective battleground.
Update 2:24 PM EST: Warcraft trailer is playing
Update 2:23 PM EST: Duncan Jones and some of the Warcraft movie cast are on stage
Update 2:15 PM EST: Starcraft 2 mission packs are coming in Spring 2016 with the rest by December 2016.
Update 2:10 PM EST: Starcraft cinematics are playing
Update 2:09 PM EST: Brightpaw the Mana Kitty is this year's charity pet!
Update 2:05 PM EST: Mike Morhaime is on the stage
Update 2:04 PM EST: Polygon spoiled the Star Nova Covert Ops DLC announcement.
Update 2:00 PM EST: Starcraft recap video playing









World of Warcraft: Legion - World and Content Overview

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World of Warcraft: Legion - World and Content Overview
Legion beta is coming in the weeks after Blizzcon! Blizzard posted a short recap of the panel.
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
The Broken Shore
  • The cinematic ties directly in to the main story of Legion, a first for the cinematics.
  • Legion is an opportunity to take storytelling to a new level.
  • Broken Shore will have a 40 person scenario for the Horde and Alliance, kicking off the expansion and changing the world. It starts right after the cinematic.
  • The level 100 boost is it's own separate adventure, so Broken Shore tuning will be more challenging and fun.
  • The Broken Shore scenario is 20 Alliance and 20 Horde fighting towards the Tomb of Sargeras.

Demon Hunter
  • The Demon Hunter intro is the story bridge from Burning Crusade to Legion, answering what Illidan was doing in the Black Temple.
  • There will be a cinematic at the start of the Demon Hunter intro.
  • Illidan was not prepared!
  • Mardum was a prison world for demons a long time ago, but it was shattered by Sargeras. You are there to get the Keystone that held the demons in for a long time.
  • The Burning Legion has more powerful versions of older demons, along with new more terrifying demons.
  • The Legion has giant Constructs as well.
  • You will turn the Legion's devices against them, bringing in your own army, listening in on their communication, and stealing power from their crystals, reducing some of your cooldowns to 0 for a short time.
  • You will gain your abilities by taking them from the powerful demons that you slay during the intro.
  • Illidan creates a Felsaber epic mount for you.
  • Maiev Shadowsong takes you prisoner at the end of the intro, putting you in the Vault of the Wardens for a long time.
  • The second half takes place in Vault of the Wardens, coming in Beta.
  • After the intro you join the Horde / Alliance who need your help to take the fight to the Burning Legion.
  • You then return to Mardum to establish your class Order hall.
  • Finally, you quest for your own artifact warglaives.

The Broken Isles
  • We are looking for the Titan relics, The Pillars of Creation.
  • The Broken Isles were a tiny part of a vast region of Azeroth known as Suramar.
  • Suramar was devastated in the Shattering, leaving only The Broken Isles.

Val'sharah
  • Val'sharah is being consumed by the Emerald Nightmare.
  • Malfurion was trained as a druid here.
  • Shaladrassil was a gateway to the Emerald Dream, but it has been twisted and tainted.
  • You are going to meet three of the key archdruids in Val'sharah.
  • There are new satyrs in the zone.
  • Lots of new models for druid related NPCs, including new Moonkin and Sea Lion models!
  • Many of the structures are inspired by trees

Stormheim
  • After the intro, you go to Stormheim and meet the Vrykul, competing against the God King.
  • We will learn more about the Kvaldir and Valkyr.
  • Mystic Vrykul are religious zealtots
  • There are Ascendant Valkyr in the Halls of Valor
  • New Dragonflight - The Storm Dragons. Found in Stormheim and Suramar

Azuna
  • Azshara's Vengeance devastated this zone before the Sundering. Mystery of why she killed and cursed thousands of her own people.
  • The max view distance in Legion is increased 3x
  • We meet the remnants of the Blue Dragonflight
  • Warden's Isle is an island in the zone, home to the Vault of the Wardens
  • The specter is the male counterpart to the banshee
  • There is a new huge type of Naga.
  • Naga have new high res models, armor, and weapons.
  • There is a local sea giant kingdom that Azshara has allied with.
  • The Wrath of Azshara is a creature that is huge.
  • Wardens have Owl companions.
  • Greek island concept art for this zone
  • Lots of new columns and domes for the Night Elf architecture in the zone.
  • 80+ artists and 60+ designers on the team.

Highmountain
  • One of the largest mountains in Azeroth.
  • There are three ancient Tauren clans who have lived in peace for generations.
  • The Drogbar stole an artifact, fracturing the Tauren clans.
  • The Drogbar are a shamanistic race, cave dwelling, were enslaved for some time.
  • Drogbar chieftain is in Neltharion's lair.
  • There are new creatures like Alpine harpies and new moose models!
  • Tauren decorate their horns to show clan and rank.
  • Swiss alps and Yosemite are inspirations for this zone.

Suramar
  • Suramar City is still intact thanks to a defensive spell from the city's mages. They harnessed the power of the Nightwell, keeping it up for 10,000 years.
  • The elves became dependent on the energies of the well, relying on it for living energy.
  • The elves in the city are a new type, The Nightborne.
  • The gates of the city were opened to the Legion. The city is kept in darkness.
  • Crimes are punished by exile of the city. Physical withdrawal makes them into The Nightfallen.
  • If a Nightfallen can't get arcane sustenance, they become permanently Withered.
  • Ancient Night Elves are arcane based, not nature based.
  • Suramar City is one of the most ambitious projects the team has ever done. A giant playable Night Elf metropolis.

Gameplay and Systems
  • Originally the plan was to work your way through the Broken Isles zones in a clockwise manner.
  • The team learned from flex and scaling in Warlords.
  • The Broken Isles will let you do the four leveling zones in any order you want, as all of the zones scale.
  • All roads lead to Suramar, which is a max level zone.
  • You can play with your friends, as the zones scale. Level 105 and 102 players can go to a zone and quest together.
  • Players aren't being scaled, the world is.
  • If it takes 12 seconds to kill a boar at level 102, it will take 12 seconds when at level 106.
  • Ideally players won't even notice the scaling.
  • There will still be enemies that won't scale for you to come back and tackle at max level.
  • In the past you would go to a zone, do some daily quests for some reason and then never go back.
  • In Legion, the goal is to have the best of Warlords and Mists of Pandaria. The freedom to choose which quest you want on a given day, but there is still a purpose and story.
  • There will be some structure to the endgame quests, but it should feel less like required content.
  • The endgame content can make use of all of the Broken Isles thanks to the scaling.
  • Legion will have ongoing world quests that are constantly changing. Varied reasons, gameplay, and rewards.
  • Objectives will last from hours to an entire week depending on how important it is.
  • The team wants to overwhelm you with variety and choices.
  • Rather than choosing what missions to send followers on, you can go on your own missions!
  • Some of the objectives are reputation specific.
  • Some of the objectives are PvP related, such as assaulting an Alliance tower as Horde.
  • World Bosses can be an objective that cycles through.
  • Gatherers will have special objectives for them only.
  • This can bring back some minigame gameplay, such as the rolling on the wall quest in Vale.
  • All of the region will have the same objectives at the same time so that you can play with friends on other servers.
  • Emissaries will send you on a quest to do some objectives for their faction. You can pick from the available ones. These aren't daily quests, they will hang around for a couple days.
  • If you don't log in for a while, there may be more emissaries waiting for you, similar to Hearthstone.

Raids
  • Legion will have two raids initially.
  • The Emerald Nightmare is a 7 boss raid in Val'sharah, essentially the Emerald Dream.
  • You get there by climbing the World Tree, crossing over from our reality to the Dream.
  • The first raid boss is a dragon! Pestilence Worm was a green dragon, now is withered away.
  • Cenarius is the next boss, corrupted by the Nightmare. He may or may not die, but is a boss.
  • Xavius is the third boss.
  • Suramar Palace is a 10 boss raid that is Gul'dan's base of operations. It is the center of the Nightborne and home to the Eye of Aman'thul.
  • Suramar Palace isn't a dark zone, it is a light city.
  • There will be a Dreadlord ambassador that you fight.
  • Grand Magistrix of the Nightborn.
  • Gul'dan final boss.

Dungeons
  • There are 10 dungeons in Legion.
  • Level up dungeons - Eye of Azshara, Neltharion's Lair, Halls of Valor, Darkheart Thicket, Violet Hold
  • The dungeons will be integrated into the story of the zones more than they have been previously.
  • The dungeons can also be done in any order, as they scale with your level.
  • At max level, there are five more dungeons - Vault of the Wardens, Black Rook Hold, Helheim, Suramar Noble District, Suramar Catacombs.
  • Suramar Noble District has some new gameplay that is different than any gameplay they have done before.
  • Darkheart Thicket - Level up dungeon in Val'sharah in the heart of the forest's corruption, part of the story of the zone to rescue an ally trapped there.
  • Halls of Valor - Level up dungeon in Stormheim that is inspired by Valhalla. You will prove your worth to Odyn. You are racing the God King to claim the Aegis of Aggramar. One of the best looking dungeons the art team has ever made.
  • Helheim - The counterpart of the Halls of Valor. This is a max level dungeon where you start on the dock to board the cursed ship of the damned. Much of the dungeon takes place on a ship.
  • Black Rook Hold - Max level dungeon. Ancient elven stronhold against the Legion, militaristic elves. Lord Ravencrest.
  • The goal for Legion is to keep dungeons relevant for the entire expansion, both in terms of rewards and difficulty.
  • Dungeons also need some variation to avoid the "Mechanar problem", picking the most efficient, even if it isn't your favorite.
  • Legion Challenge Mode will keep dungeons relevant.
  • Challenger's Keystone is used to start the Challenge Mode dungeon. It may come from world objectives. The keystone has a power level that determines the difficulty and reward. Higher levels of it will have some additional modifiers. There is now a single timer, roughly around where Silver is now. If you beat the timer, you upgrade your stone and can take on more challenging. If you fail, you lose the stone but still get loot.
  • You get a jackpot at the end of the week based on your best run.
  • There will be new modifiers to master each week to keep things fresh.
  • As good as you are, there will always be more of a challenge for you in dungeons.
  • You will have to focus on the combat experience, not just time.
  • Higher level keystones give more health and damage to enemies, but also can give them things like Enrage.
  • Extra enemies, corpses explode and leave fire behind, constant DoT for the entire dungeon.
  • The system will start slightly above Heroic Dungeon difficulty.
  • This system will complement raiding or even replace it for you entirely depending on what you choose.



Artifact Weapons



Press Kit Images

World of Warcraft Cinematics - The Road to Legion

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Submit Questions for the Developers
We have our first interview in a long time coming up at Blizzcon and as always, we want to let the community ask questions! This time our interview will be covering the design of Legion.

If you have any questions you think we should ask, be sure to add them to the comments of the linked post for consideration. We will pick the best questions and add them to our list!

  • Don't post any questions in the comments of this news post. Use the linked topic instead.
  • These should be questions about Legion, not Warlords of Draenor.
  • No class specific questions please. This includes things like balance between the different healing/tank/DPS classes and specs.
  • Keep questions reasonably short.

Only submit questions that are about today's Blizzcon content!



World of Warcraft Cinematics - The Road to Legion
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
  • The cinematic needed an emotional hook, so the team looked at war movies.
  • They considered starting with an Alliance footman writing letters to his family, then Orc grunt who was writing letters to her family, finishing with Varian writing to Anduin.
  • Every shot brings the ship from the cinematic closer to the Broken Isles. It was very technically challenging!
  • There were thick clouds and they wanted to use sunlight beams to light the characters.
  • The ship wasn't going to be featured in the game, so they cinematics team was able to customize it as they wished. They elongated the ship and widened the bow to make it more front heavy.
  • The gunship model was very detailed. 7 million faces, 3000 of the 4000x4000 texture maps, raytracing. It takes 4-6 hours to render each frame.
  • There were 18th century ships they used as inspiration.
  • They also looked at older planes with sheets of metal and rivets.
  • The original cabin was going to be much larger, but it felt better smaller, allowing it to just be a backdrop for the character.
  • Some of the items on the desk are reused from previous cinematics.
  • The compass is passed down from Llane Wrynn.
  • The team drew inspiration from all of the different versions of Varian art that already existed.
  • Translating the character proportions from art to the 3D model was challenging.
  • Varian texture maps were based on real people. Pictures of 40 year old white males that worked in the office were used for reference. These detailed shots are used to make Varian's skin look real.
  • Much of the variation in his skin is from the reference photos, not painted.
  • There are as many texture maps on Varian as there are on the entire gunship.
  • Varian has lots of hair!
  • Varian takes 4-6 hours per frame and 20-30 GB of memory to render.
  • The lens makes a difference to how Varian's facial features appear.
  • Later on in the process the team picks the f-stop / focal length, trying to keep the result look realistic.
  • Lens distortion and chromatic aberration help to make it look like a real lens was used. Making 3D look realistic involves adding artifacts back in to the video.
  • Lots of reference video was used to give Varian realistic facial movements. No motion capture was used!
  • There were 50+ assets on the deck in the first big shot of the deck, helping to make it look filled out and realistic.
  • The team can use a motion capture camera to walk around the 3D deck to capture the camera movement, adding the smaller shakes and sways that come with using a real camera.
  • Motion capture was used to animate some of the other characters in cinematic, such as the soldiers on the deck.
  • The effects team made some really great water by using reference footage of someone in a pool.
  • There is a small goblin tugboat in one of the shots.
  • Some of the ships were recycled from other cinematics, such as the ship being destroyed in Booty Bay or the ships in the Mists of Pandaria cinematic. More detail had to be added to the ships.
  • The reference for the Horde ship coming through the clouds was older Viking ships. It was less detailed than the Alliance ship, with most of it near Sylvanas for her closer shots.
  • Sylvanas being an Undead High Elf was something the team wanted to be reflected properly in the cinematic.
  • Sylvanas had some more armor added to her midriff.
  • It is hard to get the subtle facial detail for younger women right. The team had some photo references of women's faces, projected it on the model, and cleaned it up from there. The pore detail is from real people.
  • The team added the illusion of red bloodflow in her ears with the lighting.
  • The team worked with Anna Maltese to capture reference footage to make sure Sylvanas moved realistically.
  • The fel energy was used as a team color, appearing on all of the enemies.
  • The final fighting shot used hundreds of reference footage shots to make it great.
  • Lots of effort put in to the lighting and composition to make it amazing!

Q&A
  • The Illidan model from Burning Crusade was updated for Legion.
  • If the team does reuse assets, they usually have to update them to add more detail.
  • Orc skulls are reused in several cinematics.
  • Around 50% of environment assets are reused from previous work.
  • Cataclysm zeppelins are also in the background of the Legion cinematic.

Warcraft Movie Recap

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Warcraft Movie Recap
We finally got to see the trailer at Blizzcon this year! The movie comes out June 10, 2016.



Press Event
There was a press event for the movie that featured Duncan Jones, Chris Metzen, and some of the movie cast.


  • The initial version of the movie felt a little bit like "Humans are good, everything else is bad". Duncan Jones came in and pitched a film that told the story of both sides with the same empathy, care, and time.
  • Blizzard wanted to share the Warcraft story with people around the world, especially the vast part of the world population that doesn't play games.
  • Blizzard and Legendary shared a lot of the same values, so it was a great match.
  • Duncan laid out his vision for the film and it felt like he was pulling the thoughts right out of their heads. He gets the details right and appreciates the nuances.
  • The movie is a chance to show people who we love what it is that has gripped us so strongly for such a long period of time.
  • If you don't play Warcraft, you can still appreciate the movie as a fantastical story of right and wrong, as well as choosing the right thing to do.
  • If they do play Warcraft, there are so many great Easter eggs hidden in the movie for you to find.
  • This movie really feels like it is for everybody.
  • Durotan was all motion capture, so it took a strong director to make it work. You really have to become the character and get every detail right, as motion capture will capture every detail.
  • There was an orc cam to help actors get used to motion capture and create a movement vocabulary for Orcs.
  • Paula Patton plays Garona. She got the script and loved it because it read like a novel, with great background and history for every character.
  • Patton was also fascinated by the fact that her character was half human and half Orc, living a life of pain and struggle as a slave to Gul'dan. She had to fight to gain respect in the Orc culture and now feels like a fish out of water in the human world.
  • Patton found the role challenging and initially scary, but she eventually learned to ride a horse and wield a sword.
  • Garona is the bridge between two cultures that have never met and are now meeting for the first time.

Q&A
  • The actors got some idea of what things would look like during motion capture but they didn't see a completed and finished Orc until after they had been shooting for several weeks. Seeing how great the Orcs would look was a relief to all of them.
  • Technology has significantly advanced since Avatar, so the motion capture used in Warcraft was even nicer than Avatar.
  • Gul'dan has an unusual posture, so the actor had to squat and stay hunched over during filming.
  • The movie is a retelling of Warcraft 1, which was turned into a novel called The Last Guardian. The novel allowed them to build out the characters and story more, but storytelling of games was still crude in 1994. The mythology grew a little more with the movie, along with some tactical calls to simplify themes and ideas. The movie is the ultimate version of Warcraft 1, streamlining all of the best parts into something better.
  • The team made some weird decisions with the lore over time, some things Metzen wishes he could take back. Retelling the story was a chance for redemption, making the Warcraft 1 that everyone remembers, but better.
  • The "For the Horde", "For the Alliance", and "For Azeroth" roars from Blizzcon 2014 did get used!


Trailer Screenshots



Press Kit Images



Movie Posters

Legion Armor Sets, Transmog System, Community Amphitheater Discussion

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Legion - Armor Sets
In all of the excitment today, you may have missed the first preview of Legion armor sets. The Rogue and Warlock Mythic and PvP gear sets are shown below!



Legion - Transmog System
GamesBeat had a short interview with J. Allen Brack that covered the new Transmog system.

  • The new Diablo 3 inspired system will include tabards.
  • The designer that worked on the Diablo 3 system is working on the WoW system now.
  • In Diablo 3, once you obtain an item, you have unlocked the appearance and don't need to keep the item anymore.
  • The system will make transmog more of an item collection system and help to clean out your bags and bank.
  • The team knows that the limited backpack size isn't ideal, but they have to find everwhere in the code that assumes it is a fixed size. They tried increasing the number of slots but items would disappear into the void and be mailed back to you.


Legion Community Amphitheater Discussion
The Instance hosted a discussion at the Community Amphitheater with several of the developers. This did not appear on the Virtual Ticket.


Story, Lore, and Questing
  • Wowpedia is a great resource for the team to see what they have done with characters in the past.
  • Sometimes if there is something very cool they will contradict the lore a little bit to do it.
  • It is very important to the team that every single designer gets to contribute to the story.
  • Most of the priests you would recognize are Alliance, so some new Horde priests are going to be added.
  • Alleria is tied to the Marksman artifact weapon, so you will see a little bit about where she has been through that experience.
  • In Draenor several characters promised to help fight the Burning Legion or visit Azeroth. The team wanted to limit how much of Draenor leaked out, as it was an alternative timeline, but they may appear in the future at some point.
  • Jaina will play a role in Legion, maybe not a huge role.
  • The events at the Broken Shore are devastating and are really going to shake things up. The Alliance and Horde will be reeling from that throughout the entire expansion.
  • Many of the major characters use multiple specs, so Thrall may be Elemental and Enhancement.

Questing
  • Individual quest designers tend to put up their own ideas when it comes to specific content and parts of a zone. They are really excited about working with previous characters, working with the creative development team to fact check the lore and make sure it is consistent.
  • Individual quest designers usually have favorite characters that they enjoy working with.
  • Lorewalker Cho shows you his ancestors for one quest and all of the models used are rejected Lorewalker Cho models from earlier in development. One of them is wearing a Timewalker tabard.
  • The Artifact and outdoor world quest lines use the NPC models and voice acting to enhance the quest experience more than ever before.
  • When you hit max level, the team doesn't want you to feel like the questing experience is over if that is content that you enjoy. The team has been working on the max level questing experience, taking the lessons of Pandaria, Timeless Isle, and Tanaan Jungle to create an experience that allows you to log in and have things all over the world that you can go and take part in.
  • Legion tries to enable more types of gameplay at max level. If you enjoy questing, there will be a nice questing experience. If you enjoy dungeons, the new scaling will keep them relevant for you throughout the entire expansion. Raiding is still there and fantastic.
  • One of the quest designers switched to working on professions for Legion, bringing his experience from quest design to create profession related content that will last for quite a while during the expansion.

Class Halls
  • Rogues can sneak around their hall and pickpocket each other!
  • Garrisons were really fun for the first couple of months, but not so much after that. The team is aware of this and careful about not bringing the bad parts of garrisons forward with Class Halls.
  • Velen plays a role in the Priest hall.
  • All of the Class Hall locations are finalized. One will be previewed during the panel on Saturday. Others may be shown before beta, but there are no solid plans yet.
  • The team wants to strike a balance between players spending time in the Class Halls and the major cities. You will be going to the Class Halls multiple times per day and there are some special features you may want to hang out for.
  • The Warrior Class Hall has an arena thing that you can participate in. Every Class Hall may not have something special like that, as it reduces the variation.
  • Warlocks overstep at the start of the expansion when the Order Hall is introduced, getting greedy and think they have more power over the Legion than they really do.

Artifact Weapons
  • Some of the Artifacts will have a history that is well known to players, but there weren't 36 of them to use. The team had to make very compelling story lines at the start of the expansion to make players feel like their weapon is important and has a history.
  • There will be multiple people carrying the same artifact weapons, but this was already the case with weapons from current raids. There is actually more variety because each of the 36 weapons have different models and colors for each individual weapon.
  • Artifacts are trying to create an interesting long term progression system that gives you something to do even after you hit max level.
  • Artifacts will take some effort for other specs, but you should be able to switch specs. The further behind you are, the faster it goes. Keeping two Artifacts completely maxed out may take some more effort, but switching and catching up or keeping one Artifact a little bit behind shouldn't be too bad.

Classes
  • Class specific blogs with lots of details are coming starting on Sunday!
  • The class team makes changes for mechanical reasons fairly often, but Legion is giving the team a chance to focus on the class fantasy as much as they do for quests and the general story.
  • There will be a lot of class mechanic and aesthetic changes in Legion to try and bring classes back to their roots, as well as making the different specs more distinct.
  • The team is trying to develop different ways to handle class balance and tuning without harming the fantasy and fun of the classes and specs. The new PvP leveling system is one example, allowing them to tune classes specifically for PvP.
  • The team is really focusing on class fantasy in Legion. What do the different classes do when they are hanging out in their Class Hall?
  • The team plans out the major story lines very early in the process and build the progression of the zones along with them. Those stories have been becoming more important and numerous in each expansion.
  • Stagger is not going away.
  • Brewmaster gameplay does not deliver on the fantasy very well right now, as the biggest thing that matters to them is Guard. You generally think of a Brewmaster dancing around and avoiding things and when you do hit them, they don't seem to take a lot of damage.
  • The team tries to avoid drastic class changes in smaller patches, but with major patches and especially new expansions they can make larger changes.
  • Set bonuses got really strong in Warlords, providing some variation to gameplay, but there will be other systems that fill this role in Legion, especially the Artifacts. They will be fun and exciting, but maybe not quite as strong.
  • Talents are one of the best ways to distinguish the different classes and specs. Legion will have a lot more spec specific talents, adding variety to the different specs.
  • The team is adding some loose themes to talents. For example, all of the left column talents may have something to do with rage, all of the far right ones are a weapon enhancement, and all of the middle talents are something else.
  • The team isn't trying to use Artifacts or Class Halls to fix classes or change how classes work, but instead build upon what the class already is.

Sound
  • When the team was working on Pandaria, they wrote a song for Lorewalker Cho to sing. The voice actor was given a tune and gibberish song and it came out great.
  • In Starcraft, the sound team was doing an operatic passage that used Latin and French. The lyrics were mostly meaningful, but part of it was the team's names and other bizarre things.

Blizzcon Day 1 Recap, Day 2 Schedule

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Blizzcon 2015 - Day 2 Schedule
Join us in the chat for the biggest Blizzcon viewing party! Keep checking back to explore the new content as we update live during the panels!



Blizzcon 2015 Schedule
Note: all times are converted to the timezone your computer is currently in.


Blizzcon 2015 - Day 1 Recap
Saturday starts off with the Legion Game Systems panel at 1 PM PST / 4 PM EST, followed by Q&A and an In-Game Cinematics panel at the same time. Linkin Park will close out the show!

We will be going back and covering the Cinematics panel after the Q&A is wrapped up, along with the Engineering discussion and Community Game Systems discussion later in the day.

Opening Ceremony

World of Warcraft
  • Legion beta begins in the weeks following Blizzcon
  • Legion Cinematic was released
  • Warcraft Movie
    • The movie trailer was shown during the Opening Ceremony.
    • There was a press event with Duncan Jones, Chris Metzen, and some of the movie cast
  • Legion Releasing by September 2016
    • The regular version costs $50 and Digital Deluxe costs $70.
    • Pre-purchasing gives you a Level 100 Boost and at least one week early access to the Demon Hunter class.
    • You will need a level 70 character to create a Demon Hunter and you can only have one Demon Hunter per realm.
  • Artifact Weapons - Blog posts for all of the Artifact Weapons include models and a little bit of story.
  • World of Warcraft: Legion - World and Content Overview (Official Recap)
    • The Broken Shore has a 20 Alliance and 20 Horde (40 Player) scenario that begins right after the cinematic.
    • Demon Hunters have a unique starting experience involving Illidan, who creates a Felsaber epic mount for you.
    • There are four leveling zones that can be done in any order, as they scale.
    • There will be endgame world questing content that aren't strictly daily quests.
    • Legion will have two raids, one with 7 bosses (Emerald Nightmare) and one with 10 (Suramar Palace) with Gul'dan as the final boss.
    • Legion Challenge Mode dungeons keep becoming harder as you defeat them and the rewards keep getting better. Complements or replaces raiding.
  • World of Warcraft Cinematics - The Road to Legion
  • Misc

Overwatch
  • Overwatch Pricing
    • Overwatch - $40, PC only, includes all of the heroes. Widowmaker skin bonus for pre-orders.
    • Overwatch Origins Edition - $60, PC, Xbox One, and PS4. All of the heroes, bonus skins, rewards for other Blizzard games. Baby Wintson Pet for WoW.
    • Overwatch Collector's Edition - $130 PC Xbox One, PS4. All of the Origins Edition content plus the soundtrack, an art book, and Soldier: 76 statue.
  • New Map and Trailer
    • Hollywood is the new Overwatch map, set in a fictional version of Hollywood.
    • A new gameplay trailer was released.
  • New Heroes
    • D.Va - Former pro-gamer turned mech pilot.
    • Mei - Former Climatologist. Uses lower damage frost based attacks, has an ice block like ability, ice wall, blizzard.
    • Genji - Hanzo's brother. Throws Shuriken, deflects attacks, charges forward, and uses a katana.
  • Whats New in Overwatch
    • There will be no support for Macs
    • Release will only have 21 heroes, no announcement on additional heroes or pricing for anything after that.
    • New heroes are coming to beta next week.

Hearthstone

Heroes of the Storm
  • Announcement Trailer
  • Hero Deep Dive
    • There are more than 200 characters on the list of potential heroes.
    • Lunara, King Genn Greymane, and Cho'Gall are the three new heroes.
    • Cho'gall is one hero controlled by two players.
    • Cho'Gall will be given to everyone that bought a Blizzcon (or Virtual) ticket.
    • If you party up and play 2 games with someone who does not have Cho'gall, they will unlock the hero for free as well.
    • If you play 4 games as Cho'gall with someone else, you will get bonus gold!
    • The Arena is a new mode will let you pick from 3 random heroes, then play on a new small single objective map. The game is shorter and has less restrictions than normal games now.
    • Towers of Doom is the new map, allowing you to destroy enemy towns to take them over and damage the core.
  • New Hero Skills and Talents

Diablo III
  • Blood and Treasure - New Content and Features for Reaper of Souls
    • New zone - Greyhollow Island, Adventure Mode only.
    • The Eternal Woods and Royal Quarters were expanded for Adventure Mode.
    • Patch 2.4.0 is going to revamp, revisit, or revise nearly every one of the 24 class sets in the game.
    • Set Dungeons - Once you complete and don the full six pieces of any given class set, you'll receive a clue to track down an ancient dungeon designed just for you and your set.
    • Empowered Rifts, New Legendaries, More Stash Space, Season Journey Revisions, and more!

World of Warcraft: Legion - Game Systems

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World of Warcraft: Legion - Game Systems
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
Artifacts
  • The Deadwind Harvester - Purged the life from Deadwind Pass, for Affliction Warlocks. Get together with Council of Black Harvest, steal some information about artifacts from the Legion. Go to Deadwind Pass, under Karazhan! Every time you kill something, you get a damage boost for a short time. Souls try to escape and you can reap the damage boost effect.
  • Artifact power comes from quest bosses, rare spawns, rare drops, dungeons, raids, battlegrounds, arenas.
  • Artifact traits are unlocked by artifact power. You start with some traits unlocked. You first unlock active traits that you put on your bar.
  • After the active trait there are more choices, some of them passive. Minor traits have multiple ranks, you have to unlock them all to progress into the tree.
  • Eventually you can unlock every trait in the tree, but it will takes months into the expansion. You can keep getting smaller power increases after that, so weapon will get more powerful throughout the expansion.
  • Relics can be socketed into the artifact to increase power. Increases item level and gives bonus ranks to some traits. Go from 3 to 4 or 5 ranks in a trait, giving you some customization.
  • Two types of relics for each weapon.
  • You can eventually upgrade your artifact. Dungeon and world content lead up to a big upgrade moment. Upgrade will unlock a new model.
  • You can also get other models from different types of gameplay, as well as different colors.
  • Finish questing zones or do something that is significant to your weapon.

Class Halls
  • Class halls needed to be in a location that strongly represents the class. You should feel like your class when you are in that space.
  • Some Warriors see themselves are a barbarian or berserker, some as a knight fighting for what is right, some as a grizzled veteran. All of them should feel at home in that space.
  • Class Orders are stepping up to fight the Legion.
  • Druids almost had a class hall already with Moonglade. It gets pretty close to meeting the criteria, welcoming a variety of druids, but it could do a better job of immersing them in nature, welcoming feral and guardian druids more.
  • Druids are getting the Dreamgrove, you can feel the influence of the Dream around you. No other classes are allowed in. It fits better than Moonglade.
  • You will find a shrine in your class hall to unlock traits and work with your Artifact.
  • Class champions are also found in your class hall. Some of them are leaders of their own factions. You will unfold their backstory over time and see them in the world.
  • You will interact with your Scouting Map in your class hall. It lets you select your starting leveling zone and you come back to it for new content later on.
  • There is class specific content in the halls, such as demon hunting quests or pickpocketing quests.
  • There are lots of features and bonuses in the halls. Some are shared among many classes, such as armor stands to show off tier sets you have earned from previous content.
  • Hunters have a lodge in Highmountain, getting access to special flight path network no one else has.
  • Druids can reach many other natural places in the world very quickly.
  • Warriors can spar in an arena for bragging rights.
  • Every class will have their own variation of Death Gate to quickly go to their class hall and back. Giant eagle that takes you for hunters.

Demon Hunter
  • Demon Hunters are a dark hero, giving up their soul to fight a threat that most people don't even know exists.
  • Use weapons of the enemy against them, warglavies, fel magic, sculpted biceps.
  • You can select your horns, blindfold, tattoos, custom skin textures, plus normal customization options.
  • New VO for Demon Hunters, things like /train, /flirt, /silly.
  • Havoc is the melee spec with emphasis on mobility. Fight fire with more fire!
  • They use fury, generated by abilities, somewhat like rage.
  • Demon's Bite - Generates random amount of fury.
  • Chaos Strike - Does not consume fury, but requires you to have some.
  • Throw Glaive - No fury cost, short cooldown, no minimum range, hit multiple targets.
  • Blade Dance - Talent that might become a skill.
  • Double Jump adds mobility.
  • Glide is like your own goblin glider, with demon wings! Activated by jump key, no other keybind.
  • Other damaging abilities may not require a target and can be done in the air. Can use them to move outside of combat.
  • Consume Magic - Interrupt someone and gain a full bar of fury.
  • Metamorphosis - Leap in the air, transform, slam into ground, stun everyone, get more damage, more fury, 100% life leech. Gain defense through offense.
  • Spectral Sight - 10 sec cooldown, see through invisibility, stealth, walls.
  • Vengeance - Demon inquisitor. Extracting information from the enemy by using fire and inflicting pain. Also have picked up some protective spells. Maybe glaives and parry.
  • Strong defensive cooldown Metamorphosis. Lots of modifications through talents and Artifacts.

Classes
  • Immersive - You should feel like everything you do is involved with class. Abilities, names, animations.
  • Distinct - Every class and spec should have something unique.
  • Empowering - Your character is powerful, total control over what you are doing, use abilities the way you want to use them.
  • Death Knight runes restricted gameplay, so there are now 6 runes, one type, don't worry about what types are off cooldown anymore.
  • Fury Warrior is controlled by how many charges you have of different things. Use Enraging Blow as much as you want. Use Whirlwind, don't worry about Meat Cleaver.
  • Arcane Charges are a resource in addition to mana rather than a buff to monitor.
  • Arcane has a strong fantasy that you really didn't feel while playing. The mana management could ruin things. New mastery - Savant, increases the amount of mana you have. Mana level doesn't matter anymore. Also increases charges damage.
  • Survival Hunter - Melee spec with pet side by side, all of the old abilities are back and awesome.
  • Disc Priest - were a different flavor of Holy, but not good enough. Atonement is now core healing mechanic, now heal by dealing damage to enemies.
  • Subtlety Rogue - Had a really cool ninja fantasy. Shadow Dance was pretty cool, but it is now a passive. 20% chance to re enter stealth that doesn't break from taking damage. Can figure out what you want to do, new opener, combos, finisher, repeat.
  • Shadow Strike - Teleport to target, do Ambush level damage opener.
  • Honor Among Thieves gone
  • Demonology should be about summoning demons, not becoming one. More new minions, buff them and send them out to attack. Metamorphosis is for Demon Hunters.
  • Guardian Druid should be a giant bear, not dodging. Now about increased health, armor, survivability.
  • Shadow Priest - was poor cousin of Affliction warlock. Tapping into the void. Insanity - No more mana or Shadow Orbs, going more insane. Grow tentacles, transform into Void Form. Makes you more and more powerful the longer you stay there. Can only stay there for so long, Insanity drains away, keep generating as much as you can.
  • Talents will have less theme rows, more meaningful choices, more spec specific talents, hundreds of new talents!

Professions
  • More stuff to do!
  • Recipes all coming from the trainer is gone. You should get out into the world and carve your own path, go on adventures.
  • Tailoring sends you to Dalaran, wants to know what cloth is like in Broken Isles. You go get some cloth, sew with her, make a robe, cloth is falling apart and not working. Go out into the world, meet a Nightfallen who helps you with sewing problem, teaches you more patterns, find out why he was exiled, why he is so good at tailoring.
  • Miners learn from a dead Tauren. More efficiently mining new materials like Leistone, new Ore.
  • Mining and Herb nodes will be shared. Everyone can gather from a node, no more stealing nodes.
  • Recipes have ranks, 1-3 star recipes. Rare, make you more efficient at crafting things. Less materials, shorter cooldown.
  • Profession UI getting an update, bigger window, list on the left, details on the right, favorites at the top.
  • Learned and Unlearned tab, so you can see what you don't know and where to find them.
  • Obliterum. Build a big forge in the middle of Dalaran, convert crafted items you don't need anymore into Obliterum. Create ring, it has the wrong stats, destroy it and make Obliterum, use it to increase power of the ring you are wearing.
  • Lots of things to do with professions, shouldn't be running out of content.
  • Crafted gear should be special, helms are made out of gun parts. Shoot bullets at enemies with your head. Necks from JCs have guaranteed gem slot. Class specific buffs, 15% move speed for Warrior when enraged.
  • Inscription - Major glyphs are gone! Still have Minor Glyphs and Darkmoon Trinkets. Glyphs are a consumable, applied directly to the spell. One glyph per spell, but no limit on total glyphs! Vantus Rune - Week long buff that targets a specific boss. 10% bonus damage on Xavius.
  • Archaeology - Expansion length campagin over several months, lots of cool things to display, wear, equip, pets.
  • Cooking - Nomi comes from Pandaria, more recipes, can make bacon
  • Fishing - More like an adventure, less what are you watching on your other monitor.

Items
  • Used to have rare world drops, they are back.
  • Rare drops, from anywhere in the world.
  • Power should be relevant throughout the entire expansion.
  • Unique effects - Role, Class, Spec based effects. Movement speed increase based on haste, extra rage from blocked attacks, etc.
  • World drops are legendary! - DoT has a chance to trigger full remaining effect each time they tick.
  • Lots of world drop variety.
  • Drops aren't fully random, will have ways for you to target them.
  • All of the Legion items can scale, could be the best item in the game (super rare).
  • Duplicate personal loot can now be traded. If you have an item that is equal to or less than power level of what you have, can trade it to anyone else who was eligible for loot.
  • Transmog - Clean up bank and inventory some more. More customization. A collection system.
  • Wardrobe - As soon as item is bound to you, appearance is unlocked. Once it is unlocked, you can get rid of it. Account wide! Have to be able to equip item to unlock it.
  • New transmog UI - Left side is the same as the old one, right side is visual gallery of models. Top has a bar that shows you how many appearances you have unlocked.
  • Outfits - Make item sets, store what you look like now, link outfits to other people even if everything isn't unlocked.
  • When you log in to Legion, all of the items you have are unlocked, as well as items from every quest you have ever completed, including items you didn't even pick.
  • Save different outfits per spec. Switch set when you switch specs.
  • You can hide slots (cloak / helm / shoulders) per outfit.
  • Hiding shoulders allowed!
  • Weapon enchants, shirts, and tabards for transmog!

World of Warcraft Q&A

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World of Warcraft Q&A
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
  • When we discover Alleria and Turalyon in Legion, the way you view WoW will change. Amazing things in store.
  • It is important to sell the fantasy behind races and classes in the game. Then they will support and customize races. They want to do sub-races, just not sure how to do it right yet. Going to continue to work on it.
  • There are more and more groups that are cross servers, so the current guild structure doesn't meet their needs. A solution won't make it for launch, but some way to communicate with a cross-server group is something they are working on.
  • The flying achievement will exist at launch, but you won't be able to complete it at launch. You can start progressing on it though.
  • In Legion, there will be a short appearance by Bolvar Fordragon, likely at the Frozen Throne.
  • The team has a wide array of class quests with the Artifacts, one for every spec. The team is focusing on class content in this expansion, but it will likely be artifact related rather than green fire quest.
  • The team is looking at how tapping works in the outdoor world. Rather than one person hitting a mob and getting it, it would be nice if several people could tap it to get credit for quests and loot. No need to group with people you come across when questing. Open tapping will remain for larger NPCs like quest and world bosses.
  • Launching expansions more quickly is still a goal. Not sure when they would get to one per year. Quality is more important than release dates.
  • Tomb of Sargeras is just a monument.
  • Guilds are very important to the social structure of the game. It would be ideal if you could be in multiple guilds at some point, one for PvP, one for Raids. Maybe a secondary guild system? Still in progress.
  • No new battleground, focus is on the new PvP progression system.
  • No plans to update old starting zones for Legion. There will be Legion invasions in the world, maybe one will take place there. Legion wants to invade Azeroth, aren't going to start with the Exodar.
  • The Broken Isles version of Dalaran is upgraded, you will find out the secrets that are protecting it, they are big.
  • The team wants to get around to resolving old stories from Cataclysm at some point.
  • Keystone affixes are standardized globally for the week, so no need to try and find someone with one that is slightly easier.
  • The new transmog system should help with the inventory space problem.
  • Titan's Grip for Fury warriors is not dead. Artifact is too small, will be sized up. Holding 2 x 2H is a cool distinctive thing.
  • Legion will get into the details of multi Legion vs singular Legion.
  • One more character slot is coming in Legion.
  • No new scenarios in Legion that you queue for, but lessons learned from MoP scenarios used to create scenarios that are part of the leveling and questing experience.
  • You can pre-order, buy the collector's edition, and contact customer service to get the difference.
  • The team doesn't want the Artifact to be a blocker for playing multiple specs. There are lots of catch-up mechanisms in place to help you bring 2nd or 3rd weapons up to speed with your main one, as well as people who took a break from the game. You will have to decide what weapon you will use your Relics on though.
  • Legion will allow you to use all the specs, no longer limited to dual spec, each spec remembers your action bars and such. No such thing as no spec anymore, there is a default spec.
  • Multistrike is just another form of crit, doesn't appear in many of the class fantasies.
  • Versatility has a defensive component, useful for PvP, tanks, not a fantasy problem. Each stat should have a special identity and purpose. Do people hate Versatility because it is not strong enough or because of how it works?
  • The team doesn't like account wide things, because the point of having an alt is playing the alt, but things should be a bit faster the second or third time you do it. More and more people want to play and maintain alts, so the team is aware of the need to make things faster when you play it again.
  • Nothing like the AQ gate opening is coming. There will be the invasions around the world, taking server level participation. A large event would be nice, but it needs to be the right time and place.
  • Karazhan will be relevant in Legion. The secrets we need to beat the Burning Legion are in Karazhan. Karazhan could be a 5 player dungeon in Patch 7.1.
  • One of the Artifact quests will shed some light on what is going on in Tirisfal Glades.
  • Wrathion may have some interest in Highmountain and Neltharion's lair. Don't expect him to look the way he did before.
  • The team could make old world materials relevant again, but Legion is going to focus on new materials. Not sure you would enjoy old materials being relevant again.
  • New lore is coming for Tauren, Forsaken, Worgen, maybe even something for Gnomes.
  • Old Gods will play a role in Legion.
  • Some of the huge raids the team made in the past were awesome, but they might be better if they were broken up. More smaller raids, different environments, part of the same tier.
  • The team has tried to use non-linear layouts to make things faster for guilds that only raid a couple of nights a week that still want to progress.
  • Reforging isn't coming back. It isn't needed anymore.
  • You won't be using Artifacts forever, maybe display them on your mantle in a future expansion.
  • Part of the coolness of older rewards is how rare and cool they are. If you were guaranteed to get something it wouldn't be as cool. There is a difference between mounts / pets and power items.
  • Dance Studio - Still don't have the animation time for it.
  • No plans for Vanilla realms. Lots of emotional desire for it, but when other MMOs tried it, it didn't work out. Lots of complexity, old code, old hardware, old data, old bugs. Players would expect things to be fixed.
  • You can't transmog other things to look like Artifacts, but you can transmog Artifacts to look like other things if you really don't like it.
  • Alliance and Horde are coming together in your Class Hall to confront a common enemy.
  • You will still have the language barrier in the Class Hall. You can see the other faction, but doesn't mean you can speak their language.
  • Demon Hunters of either faction can speak Demonic to each other!
  • OpenRaid is a great site, group finder has worked out well so far, team wants to continue to expand on it and social tools.
  • No AU heroes at the start, after that TBD.
  • Genn Greymane and some Gilneans will appear.
  • Gear from strongboxes will be similar to gear you get out in the world, what you get based on ratings.
  • We will see Gul'dan before the boss encounter, it is a big part of the storytelling.
  • Mythic flex would be too hard to balance. It is challenging in lower difficulties now, would be much harder with Mythic and people trying to optimize group sizes.
  • Mythic being 20 players is the right number, especially with another class on the way. It allows for certain designs that require a decent number of players. Maintaining a guild roster is a struggle no matter what the raid size is. Ideally they will make it easier to find players and for players to find guilds, rather than changing the raid size again.
  • No new roles (tanking Warlock) for existing classes are planned in Legion. Legion is about enhancing the fantasy of the existing classes and roles.
  • Legion Challenge Dungeons won't be part of the random matchmaking system. One person is putting their Keystone at risk. Guilds, social circles, and group finder will be where you find players. Having an unused keystone is a desired commodity. People will be lining up to use your Keystone on a Sunday, shouldn't be hard to find people.
  • The team hates split raiding, high end guilds hate split raiding, but there isn't a good way to solve it yet. Forcing personal loot would solve it, but that isn't something that some players would enjoy. Open to suggestions.
  • Nefarian will get an update for a Demon Hunter class call, maybe using double jumps.
  • Melee got some new effects and animations in Legion, hopefully people will enjoy them.
  • The team built some of the class accessory models, but now there are Artifact weapons. There was a lot of overlap between the systems. Class accessories are still on the list, what is left beyond Artifacts to add to class fantasy.
  • The Talking Heads that appear during questing are cool. Legion has the most VO of all of the expansions. Every world group has different lines, so you will hear a lot more VO when out in the world.
  • Jaina is not a Dreadlord.

The Cutscene - Behind Blizzard's In-Game Cinematics

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The Cutscene - Behind Blizzard's In-Game Cinematics
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
  • The machinima team started doing trailers back as early as Burning Crusade. They quickly realized they could do more than just trailers and took on the Wrathgate cinematic next.
  • In 2010, the machinima department was part of the in-game cinematics department, which made all of the content for the Starcraft 2 story mode.
  • After Wings of Liberty, the team had made upgrades to their tools in preparation for Heart of the Swarm. The Diablo team wanted an announcement trailer for the Demon Hunter, so it was assigned to the machinima department.
  • A Cinematic Director works with the game team and creatives to get together and come up with the story that is going to take place in the gameplay experience or online. The story is then brought to artists, working with storyboard artists to block out the scene, layout artists to get the characters in their poses in the environment, as well as animators, lighters, compositors, and effect artists.
  • The director has to ensure that the truth, spirit, and flow of film are maintained during each step of the process.
  • The team has grown from 2 to more than 20 people.
  • Machinima artists work with the technology that makes everything work, as well as the creative side that makes everything look awesome.
  • Once the team has an idea of what assets they want to use, they have to find them. The team can use the regular game development tools, as well as a tool that allows them to browse the existing models. Once they have selected a model, they can change the textures if needed.
  • Once assets are pulled together, the other artists work on improving them so that they fit the cinematic and are high quality.
  • Game characters are the base for the characters in the cinematics, but in game they are optimized for situations where there are lots of characters on screen.
  • The team takes the game character and rounds out the edges and makes them higher quality so they still look good when viewed close up in the cinematic. This is done to all of the character, but especially the hands and faces. The topology of the face is important, as the characters need to be able to act when the animators work with them.
  • The lead animator brings characters to life though movements and performances.
  • Skin weighing plus additional bones meant that the Pandaren were able to emote much more than the older character models.
  • The team was about to work on the cinematic with Garrosh, so they decided to improve him without breaking the look of the game. They took the older model and made a new face rig, giving us Garrosh 1.5, which hasn't been seen before the panel. The game team happened to be making the new character models at the same time, starting with the Orc. The team took the new Garrosh and used the new face rig, creating the Garrosh we saw in Siege of Orgrimmar cinematics. This was the start of more expressive animation for in-game cinematics.
  • Compositing may be working with hundreds of layers at once on hundreds of shots, so it gets complicated really fast.
  • The team starts by looking for a visual style that complements the story. They then work with the in game shots, adding layers like atmosphere, fog, effects, colors, and fire. Warlords added per pixel lighting which was helpful for Gul'dan's cup.
  • WoW doesn't use a lot of lighting in the shots, but Heroes of the Storm does.
  • Heroes of the Storm trailers are 99% straight from the game, including the effects, background, and character models.
  • Heroes of the Storm was getting ready for closed beta and wanted a trailer for each hero. One new artist was tasked with creating all of the trailers. The too he used was a modified version of the Starcraft 2 editor, made especially for Heroes of the Storm.
  • The tool allowed for sculpting of the ground, painting textures, placing trees and objects, and summoning NPCs. This allowed him to cut from Camera 1, to Camera 2, to pan across to another hero, and fade out.
  • There are now 4 artists working on Heroes of the Storm machinima, allowing for lighting and compositing, custom models, and animations. This was first done for the Eternal Conflict trailer, as well as more recently in The Arena trailer.
  • In January 2014, the team was also working on Warlords of Draenor. Their plan was to make as many cinematics at launch as all of the other expansions combined. Alliance and Horde specific cinematics had worked well before, so they did it again with the first zone finale cinematics. Both are identical in the general concept, but the details are different and fit each faction well.
  • The Garrosh vs Thrall cinematic was the most challenging cinematic that Terran Gregory had ever worked on. There was a very complex and emotionally rich backstory between Thrall and Garrosh. Writer's block isn't always not knowing what to say, in this case it was having so many options and being paralyzed with choice. He knew it was going to be a battle to the death, so they started with the fight sequence. There used to be observers on the sidelines, almost as if they were in an arena. The observers were removed, giving the scene a different vibe. One on one is different than when you are around strangers. If this was the first time Garrosh was able to talk to Thrall without having to maintain any mask, what would really come out of his heart. They realized it was about abandonment, his father, Thrall leaving him to be Warchief. The final voice over came out amazing. While we could never forgive Garrosh for the things he had done, he was not a character that was beyond sympathy. It was a satisfying death for one of Warcraft's greatest villains.
  • Yrel's horns and hair were a unique identifier, as well as a customized gear progression to show her journey. Her gear became nicer over time, starting out with a simple modified Aldor set from Burning Crusade. She went to a Paladin set for Talador.
  • Garrisons needed a reward when they leveled up. Something flashy but not too long, giving you a little ego boost. The team worked with assets from the game while it was being developed, as well as their custom camera system to get smooth curves. The same methods were used for the Shipyard.
  • The team started with Yrel's game model, making the horns exactly like the concept, but they didn't look great when she wasn't looking straight ahead. They were then adjusted to work well with other camera angles. Her armor was then uprezzed and 3D armor was added to give her an actual breastplate rather than painted texture.
  • Yrel had to give a very emotional performance while not saying many lines, so expressiveness was important. Her game model was turned into a movie star!
  • Yrel's cinematic was quiet and subtle rather than the usual overly epic cinematic. It had to be compelling with very little dialogue in under 2 minutes. The team started by showing her looking to Velen for answers, but she doesn't realize the answers are within her. The final shot shows her hope and determination, which you see later in the Battle of Shattrath.
  • Garrosh vs Thrall is the more standard epic cinematic, but it is also a very intimate moment.
  • Warlords was a ton of work for the team, 6 sequences, 274 shots, all due in 6 months. The team developed a comp template that allowed artists to sit down and hammer out some stuff really quickly, making them functional really fast, increasing throughput.
  • Lords of War required a real 3D package for the first time. Real lights, real shadows, and they created dark and brooding sessions.
  • The team showed a small Legion in-game cinematic storyboard teaser at the end!

Engineering Community Amphitheater Discussion

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Engineering Community Amphitheater Discussion
WoW, Heroes, Battle.Net, and Overwatch engineers talked and answered questions. This was not included on the Virtual Ticket. If you enjoyed it, let Blizzard know!


Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
  • The Overwatch team was putting together a demo of Overwatch in China, but they had forgotten they couldn't show anything with blood. The game had to be patched over weak wifi in China to get rid of the blood. The team realized that there was one point in the code where the client determines if you shot another unit or the environment, a simple if statement. They realized they could change one byte of the executable to get rid of the blood. They wrote an executable to load the game client, find the byte, flip it, and save the modified client. It worked and Chinajoy got their Overwatch demo.
  • At Warlords launch, things were a little rocky. The team had all of the hardware they needed, but because WoW is an older game, each blade had to be dedicated to certain parts of the game. The team set up the blade configuration to what they thought would work well, but they weren't very particular about what kinds of blades were in each pool. They didn't have enough of the high memory blades allocated to instances, so they were running out of memory. Running in your garrison would spin up a new instance, resulting in hundreds of thousands of instances. It took the team around 8 hours to go into the datacenters and pull blades, add memory, and move blades between clusters. This result in some downtime, but when everything came back up it was much more stable. After that there were just software issues.
  • The Heroes of the Storm engine is the Starcraft engine, so when the team wants to make changes they have to consider all of the user created mods that may be using the functionality. They can't change things that would harm user mods in the Arcade. The team built lots of chains and shackles but everyone is okay with it. Thankfully no one leaves Team 1, so all of the people working on it are familiar with things.
  • The original WoW developers decided that there would be an array to hold your inventory. The first several entries are things that end up on the paper doll, your head and leg slots and such. After that comes your inventory. At some point they wanted to add a bank to the game, so they added that to the end of the array. Players shouldn't be able to access their bank anywhere in the world, as it would break the code. This was handled by adding lots of statements in different places in the code, defining what the array position was where the inventory ended and where the bank begins. This value was hardcoded all over the place, but it isn't just a simple search to find them all. Some math logic may rely on it being constant. If you want to add slots to the backpack, who knows what you are going to break? It becomes very buggy and error prone, and likely that you are going to make a mistake. This mistake would break the game in a way you don't like. As a result, they would have to put amazing engineers that could be working on new features on a task to look through thousands of lines of code to find all of those cases, as well as the QA department testing every edge case in the world to ensure the change doesn't break anything. This is how we ended up with a fixed size backpack.
  • The team would rather fix things when they come back to work on related new features. When they worked on cross-realm zones, they rethought how they handed off players between realms. They ripped out lots of the old code and redid it, resulting in being able to add features in the future without having to worry about 16 slot backpack style bugs. This allowed for seamless instancing for garrisons, along with some new things in Legion that have yet to be revealed.
  • All of the games are like legacy code that the Battle.Net team has to support. When the team wanted to increase the number of friends you could have on Battle.Net, they had to go and find all of the places where there was a constraint in the games. The UI in all of the games may have constraints on how many friends you can have and see. All of the games have to be patched to support any new features or changes. The team can never do anything that would require all of the games to patch simultaneously, so changes have to be backwards compatible to some effect.
  • It's reasonable to assume the WoW team is looking at new technologies, including DirectX 12. No timeline or announcements yet though.
  • Heroes of the Storm is a very data driven game. The design team comes to the systems team and wants to do something fun like a hero that is controlled by two different players (and show it off at Blizzcon). The team panics a little bit, thinks about it, and then gets it done.
  • Engineers don't ever want to tell design no. Designers are amazing at what they do and have great creative ideas, so no one wants to tell them no. Especially when the designer will find their own way to do it. There is a picture that gets passed around of a trash can with a iron sitting on top of it. The iron is turned on and there is a coffee pot on top of it, with spaghetti in the coffee pot. Problem solved, they can make spaghetti.
  • It is really important to figure out where the designers feel pressure when designing the game and try to make that pressure go away. As soon as you have a designer looking at a dialogue box with 128 checkboxes, they are no longer thinking about the awesome experience they want to deliver, they are thinking about what the difference between LEAVE_WORLD_CANCELS and ENTER_WORLD_CANCELS. (Where is the player when they are not in the world?!)
  • Overwatch has strike teams, where lots of people from different disciplines come together to work to get a feature done. With Overwatch, that is usually a hero. They get a gameplay engineer, engine programmer, designer, animator, and effects artist to make Hanzo. They have to bring in the Sound team which is always stressed. Everyone works together to perfect the gameplay, get feedback from each other, feedback from the entire team, and finally feedback from the rest of Blizzard and beta players. A lot of this interaction comes from sitting down and playing through what you are working on together.
  • There are two types of heroes in Overwatch: D.Va and not D.Va. They only started working on her a few months ago, not realizing it would take all of those months to get her done.
  • The team decided that the designers would eventually ask for something like a rocket that you fire and then control, so they got ahead of it and wrote some code to do that kind of gameplay. Junkrat came along and they thought they had it covered and everything was great. It turns out that all of that had to be redone for D.Va. Bugs came up like jumping out of the mech, but it is still behind capturing the payload, moving along. Another bug resulted in the camera going to 0,0,0 when you jumped out of the mech, leaving you with controlling nothing.
  • Engineers and designers have complementary goals. The designer's goal is to ensure that the highest number of players get the best experience. The engineer's goal is to ensure that no one has a bad experience. Think about all of the edge cases and make sure your code can cover them.
  • Appear Offline not being ready comes down to some legacy code. It is hard to design it in a way that remains consistent throughout the games. It isn't really hard technically to do. What do you do when your friend is appearing offline but they are in front of you in the game world? Appear Offline really means "I want to hide from my friends so I can play D3 rather than go and raid", but when you are both standing in front of the auctioneer...
  • The team uses lots of standard industry tools like VTune, as well as internally developed profilers. There is lots of automation to test things, like putting 10 heroes in a one lane map and having them fight each other to compare performance over each build. Heroes get changed from build to build, but it gives you a general performance trend and catching catastrophic mistakes.
  • Overwatch uses similar profiling tools.
  • Any time you are optimizing code there are trade-offs. Your knowledge about optimizations, the time it takes to write optimizations, how maintainable your code is going to be, and what constraints you are going to put on the engineers and content team to solve problems.
  • The team has had to make tons of optimizations that took the form of talking to artists to simplify collision geometry. There is no flat surface in a body, so optimizations are needed for performance.
  • When the team is trying to solve a design problem, they consider the fantasy they are trying to create, not what is the solution they are trying to write. They want to consider the player experience they are trying to craft.
  • At one point in his previous life as a HFT engineer, @kurtismcc saved 120ns on a hash function and people were thrilled. It was a big win.
  • The WoW team spends a lot of time looking at if it is faster to read static data out of a table to speed things up by 4-5x, then pat themselves on the back. Then they will do something like launch Warlords, spin up hundreds of thousands of instances, and find out that when you want to shut an instance down you have to crawl over a linked list to find the one you want to shut down. Someone decided hash tables would take too long so they put it in a linked list.
  • The teams have likely written five our six profilers to meet the needs of each team.
  • Blizzard has identified that they really want to make games stay online longer. They want to think less about engineering like something they throw over the wall and more along the lines of achieving three nines. They have been trying to achieve this internally, especially with WoW, but they are dealing with an older live infrastructure. Battle.Net also has a lot of older infrastructure. The team recently tried to get to a one hour patch cycle and they got down to 1h 45min in NA and 53 minutes in EU. They are getting faster and it would be nice if they could live patch WoW without maintenance one day.
  • There is a lot of static data that drives the game, so patch days require copying a lot of that data in very inefficient ways to a lot of places. They are working on improving that process. A lot of maintenance is inefficiently pushing updated code, binaries, and data to remote data centers. After that they need to do live testing, as until recently testing environments haven't been as great as they should be. They also have to take down and bring back servers in a specific order. The team has development environments where they test everything, but that all has to be replicated in the live environment and hope testing accounted for everything.
  • There are lots of people that enjoy VR at Blizzard, but they work on amazing game ideas, not adding amazing tech without a good idea. When and if they come up with a good application for VR, they will explore it. If VR will help player immersion it would be cool.
  • The team uses Perforce on the Overwatch team, as well as proprietary source control software they wrong for art assets.
  • Battle.Net uses Git for all of their code and Jenkins.
  • The WoW server team uses Subversion still, but there is talk of moving to Git where there is lots of shared code.
  • Team 1 uses Git, Perforce, Jenkins. (Not Leeroy)
  • The WoW UI team looks at the source code to figure out what functions do and occasionally use WoWPedia. There is some documentation for server side Lua, but client side not so much.
  • The Lua engine that runs on the server side is worse than not having documentation, as it actively scrapes the code looking for new functions to add so that designers have more flexibility. This means you end up with 17 functions named teleport and having no idea which one is the right one. If it is bad for addon developers, it is much worse internally.
  • WoW doesn't use a ton of agile development. A few of the teams are moving to scrum like things. Blizzard doesn't have a lot of consistency between teams internally.
  • The Overwatch team was worried about datamining. We found the Progression system 2.0 and even though you can still see it in the Blizzcon demo, it was something they killed 2 days before beta. They realized they didn't like it at all. They did it on such short notice that they left behind some remnants.
  • The WoW team knows that as soon as they put data on the CDN we will pull it and go over it with a fine tooth comb. When they were talking about changing over the system to the new content delivery system, they talked about encrypting every single thing to keep anticipation as high as possible. Encrypting everything would mean that they can't patch them, so you would have to completely redownload that content, so the team decided not to encrypt everything.
  • It is challenging to create a locked down and secure environment that allows for rapid iteration. Iteration is very important in both engineering and game design, so it is sometimes given priority over locking things down.
  • Blizzard games operate at a scale where an innocuous decision will come back to bite you really hard. You want to let players do the /who query in WoW to see who was online, but players were hitting the server really hard. Servers were spending 85% of their time answering the queries because there were so many players online. A good example of the n squared problem. The team has to be sensitive to things like this, as there aren't population bounds like the other games have.
  • Legion is rewriting a lot of code so that you subscribe to changes and get them pushed to you, resulting in more responsive servers. During Brewfest, the ram racing quest wasn't very fun, because you could never see the buckets. The server would only update your area of interest every 5-6 seconds, so you would arrive to the bucket's location before it updated and loaded the bucket. The team is trying really hard to improve that in Legion, but it is a lot of work.
  • Team 1 - SC2 and Heroes, Team 2 - WoW, Team 3 - Diablo, Team 4 - Overwatch, Team 5 - Hearthstone.
  • The teams all want to be on mobile more. Hearthstone has shown that Blizzard can do mobile well. Lots of people wanted to do Garrision missions on mobile devices and the team is aware and wanted that too.
  • Blizzard does code reviews across most of the teams and is taking advantage of modern C++ features to make code more readable. Readability and maintainability is an important value for them. Products have to live for a really long time, which is why it is important.
  • There is a cheap solution and a right solution and the team supposed to do the right thing, even if it takes longer. You don't want to have to come back and fix things that were done poorly.
  • There is a tension between wanting to understand code vs rewriting code that might look messy. If there is code with clearly defined ways to extend it, that is code that is great, even if it is legacy code.
  • Overwatch had a lot of people signing up for a constrained beta test. One of the things they want to see is how the code works in different network environment. One person at Blizzcon was playing from Chile and he let them know that it was playing great. The team has even trying playing over a tethered phone and it worked well.
  • Open beta weekends are good for crashing servers and exposing bugs. The D3 beta weekend exposed a bug that sent lots of games to a D3 server after it came back from a crash because it appeared to have no load.
  • Technology choices that you can get off of the shelf are generic and don't always solve the problems Blizzard encounters when developing games. The team would rather work with constraints they have built themselves rather than constraints someone else built into a tool.
  • If there was open source code to solve a problem on the WoW server team, they would use it. If you look at the legal descriptions in the client you can see a lot of the open source licenses from libraries that they use. They try to not reinvent the wheel.
  • Having a completed game is a valuable experience if you are looking for things to put on your resume. Passion for learning and variety in what you have done is also good.

Legion Class and Systems Community Amphitheater Discussion

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Legion Class and Systems Community Amphitheater Discussion
Several of the developers came to chat after the Game Systems panel today. This did not appear on the Virtual Ticket.


Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
Artifacts
  • All of the caster Artifact weapons that look they are 1H do have off-hands.
  • The further you are behind on the Artifact as you go through the expansion, the easier it is to place new traits into your Artifact. It is pretty quick to get mostly caught up when switching specs. If you are trying to maintain off-specs you can do that to a certain degree. It only becomes a burden if you are trying to keep many specs all topped off at once.
  • Alts will also have catch up mechanism for Artifacts.

Raiding
  • It used to be a bigger problem to have a melee heavy raid in the past. The problem isn't solved right now, but it is better than it used to be. Having lots of melee does make it a little harder to learn a new boss. The data shows that people switch specs more from melee to ranged than ranged to melee because of that perception. Melee does need to do more damage than ranged on Patchwerk style fights to deal with the problem.
  • Timewalker raids are cool idea, but their time has not yet come. Maybe in the future. The team is talking about revisiting some of the old raids in a new way.
  • The team is fixing the boss movement issues in Patch 6.2.3. Thank the engineers!

Healing
  • Healers should always have something to do. In Legion when you are doing group PvE content you will notice that you can do a lot more damage than you could before when you choose to spend globals and resources on it. When you are overgearing the content, the damage you do in your spare time will go from close to meaningless (now) to being a useful contribution to the raid (in Legion).
  • You should be able to level as a healer, so when you are playing solo you should be able to do substantial damage. Druids having Thorns again will help, things attacking you will take substantial damage.
  • Absorbs are a little bit less powerful, have longer cooldowns, and there are less of them in Legion. Paladins won't be causing absorb shields anymore, as their mastery has changed. Discipline mastery has also changed.

Tanking
  • Active mitigation is still a big part of what you do, but it went in too strong. If you messed up the active mitigation you died, so it mattered too much.
  • Active mitigation should be designed to where the expert player can get more out of it but the newer player isn't awful. It is less about managing your resources and more about using the right button at the right time and the magnitude of the effects are going down a little bit. It is still a very large part of what tanks do.
  • All of your long cooldowns like Shield Wall will count as if active mitigation is running while they are running.
  • Tanks have buttons that give tank or offense functionality, but the team is tried to do more things that have both. If you are trying to DPS really hard as a tank, that should translate to being a good tank at the same time.
  • Resolve is gone. The abilities that relied on it have been redesigned to not rely on it anymore. For Brewmaster, the active mitigation buttons either give you a gigantic Stagger buff or cleanse your Stagger. You want to use them in tandem.

Misc
  • People say that there is nothing to do in Warlords, but that isn't really true. There is nothing to do that gives a rewards that you care about. In Legion, the goal is to make the outdoor world, quests, dungeons, and raids all have things that you care about so that there are reasons to do them at max level.
  • The transmog system will include old quests that have been removed. There is a chance a few quests were modified that shouldn't have been, but they will handle those on a per quest basis.

Classes and Fantasy
  • The team is putting a lot of focus into improving the fantasy of each class, so you really feel different, unique, and caught up in your class's fantasy.
  • Visuals, animations, and sounds for many classes have also been improved.
  • Survival, Shadow, Demonology, Subtlety, Combat, Discipline are all getting big changes.
  • The team originally was going to keep the changes under control, but this ended up being one of the expansions with the most changes to classes after development got going.
  • When we see the beta, players shouldn't look at balance yet. There hasn't been numbers tuning. Give feedback on the play style and fantasy instead.
  • If a few classes are too strong, the team doesn't want to buff everyone else to that level because all of the encounters would have to be adjusted. Over the years they have tended to do this anyway, which makes older content easier and easier. The power inflation isn't great.
  • Nerfs get a lot of attention and the buffs (which there are more of) don't get nearly as much attention.
  • When every spec has something unique, distinct, and different that only they can do, it accentuates the idea that you are special to the world.
  • There are enough numbers being rolled in combat that any RNG evens out, it is more about there being a little bit of unpredictability to respond to in combat.
  • Lots of the major glyphs that are being removed are being added in to the core ability.

Talents
  • Currently there are a lot of rows that offer you three similar options to choose from, making it feel like it doesn't matter what you pick. This is going away by moving them into different rows, so you could take multiple mobility talents or multiple AoE healing talents. Really hardcore players may change their talents from encounter to encounter to get different capabilities.
  • There will be more impactful talents. Rogues have five rows with straight throughput improvements. Every spec has four or five rows of straight throughput improvements.
  • The additional spec specific talents help class fantasy and help to make them feel more impactful. In Legion around 2/3rd of the talents are spec specific.
  • Some talent rows now have multiple types of talents rather than all of them being the same. For example, a row could have a new ability, proc, or passive rather than three new abilities. This lets you control how complex or simple your gameplay is. Fury is a good example, as the core rotation with no talents is very simple, but there are a ton of options for added engagement through talents. You can take five additional active abilities you would use in your rotation (not long cooldowns).
  • The team will try to address the need to switch specs per encounter with talent choices.

Death Knight (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
  • Death Knights had a lot of balance changes over time. They had unique mechanics, like DoT snapshotting with Unholy. Those things have gone away now, so part of what made Unholy special is gone.
  • Something they are trying now is Festering Wounds. When the Death Knight hits a target, they will apply debuff and when they use a different ability that wound will pop. You might hit them and apply three or five, or pop three of them all at once.
  • The fantasy of a Death Knight pulling corpses from the ground to do their bidding is great, but in the game it doesn't feel like that when you are playing, so the team wanted to give them a unique mechanic.
  • Talents may give them multiple pets, different pets, stronger pets.
  • Frost is still very similar to live and Blood is somewhere in the middle.
  • Blood Death Knights having the different rune types is part of what made it easy to play. You would just push whatever buttons were lit up, as the runes controlled what you could use. Now you will have more options and control over how to use your runes.

Druid (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
  • Resto and Feral druids got minor changes.
  • Moonkin is inspired by the current state of the spec, but is now a brand new spec.
  • The current spec is based on a cycle of moving a bar back and forth on your UI. You are spending your time playing with the UI rather than the game.
  • The moving back and forth on the bar is going away, replaced with abilities that build and spend a resource with different strengths and weaknesses.
  • It should still hit the main Moonkin fantasy, as it is still heavy on DoTs, still has Moonfire, Sunfire, Starfall, and all of the unique Moonkin things.
  • Innervate is returning, but not to Resto Druids. If they had it, they would want to use it on themselves, which isn't very interesting.
  • Innervate is coming back to Balance Druids as their specific utility, so they won't have Stampeding Roar anymore.
  • tampeding Roar will be for Feral and Guardian only.
  • A powerful single target version of Mark of the Wild is coming back for the Resto Druid cooldown.
  • Rejuvenation in Cat Form is going away.
  • Predatory Swiftness is staying.
  • Feral isn't seeing a ton of changes, but they are getting lots of new talents.
  • The base Druid has less skills from the other three roles, but there is a new talent row that allows you to pick Balance, Feral, Guardian, or Restoration, and get a whole suite of abilities for that role and it makes you actually good at it. You get much more than the watered down version you had before and you get to pick which one you are good at instead of okay at all of them.
  • You could be a Guardian druid that switches to Cat form to do more damage when you aren't the active tank. You can also be a Moonkin, as if you take the Balance Affinity talent as Guardian, you get Moonkin form.

Hunter (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
  • Most Marksmanship hunters are taking the Lone Wolf talent on live, so the team decided to go ahead and remove the pet in Legion. You can still be ranged with a pet as Beast Mastery.
  • Survival Hunters have lots of cool mechanics right now and many of them have become Marksmanship talents in Legion.

Mage (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
  • Frost and Arcane mages got minor changes.
  • There is a Mage group that is very critical to influencing the course of Azeorth and directly fighting the Legion that is being reformed. They are getting a secret sanctum in Dalaran.

Monk (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
  • Storm, Earth, and Fire is supposed to make Windwalkers really good at three target damage, even when the targets aren't grouped up.
  • Windwalker single target damage was a little bit too low for a while during Warlords, they brought it up some, but it is still not one of the best performers.
  • The new Storm, Earth, and Fire is something they are doing to solve how hard it is to use the current version.
  • Someone looks at the skill and doesn't understand how it works and decides they will figure it out later. This is bad because it is important to doing good damage as a Windwalker.
  • The new Storm, Earth, and Fire is being simplified and made more intuitive. It will be a simple toggle, somewhat similar to Blade Flurry.
  • You turn it on and split into three, turn it off and you recombine into one. They won't attack the same target as you, but they will find something nearby to attack. You do lose the customizability of assigning targets, but it will do something useful at all times.

Priest (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
  • The new Atonement mechanic is very different than the older ones. It is a mix of using damage and healing abilities to mark allies with a buff as you heal them and then heal those people as you damage enemies with Atonement spells, so you have to weave both together at all times.
  • Discipline may be one of the more complex healers.
  • Disc priest's endless PW:S spam had to go! It was bad for them and bad for everyone.
  • Shadow Priests don't have Flash Heal or Heal anymore, but they do have Shadowmend, which is a new spell that is twice as good as Flash Heal in terms of how much it heals for, but over the next 10 seconds half of that heal fades away. If the target takes damage it comes off of the Shadowmend damage first, so if the target is constantly taking damage it is a really strong heal.
  • Both Shadow and Discipline will have Shadowmend.
  • Shadow will also keep PW:S.
  • Holy priests used to have the biggest single heal in the game and the team wanted to move them back in that direction.
  • Chakra is gone
  • They redesigned the way the Holy Word: Serenity system works.
  • Holy Word: Serenity is now the biggest single target heal in the game, it has a substantial cooldown but will heal roughly half of the health bar of the target. A crit would be a full heal.
  • Holy also will have Prayer of Healing and Discipline will not.

Rogue (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
  • Combat rogues felt very generic, so the name of the spec is changed to Outlaw.
  • This gives a new direction for the class fantasy, drawing inspiration from movies with different types of outlaws.
  • There is a column of pirate themed talents, such as cannonball barrages and grappling hooks.
  • The team considered getting rid of Killing Spree, but sometimes rough edges are cool. It is now a talent, so you can take it or other AoE talents. It always ports you back to where you started now.

Shaman (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
  • Shamans have mana, but it doesn't do anything for them. Mana is gone unless you are a Restoration Shaman! It has been replaced with a new resource called Maelstrom. It is built up through using abilities and then used on certain abilities. It is somewhat similar to the Demon Hunter resource but themed for Shamans and what they do.

Warlock (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
  • Demonology has gone really far off track from where the core fantasy is.
  • The team looked at Demonology and took some inspiration from what exists today, but mostly started from scratch.
  • Demonology is going to be completely different, which is going to require a lot of iteration and feedback from players.
  • There is no way to enslave dreadlords permanently, but they have talked about a talent that lets your enslaved demon last longer or making it permanent, but there are significant balance concerns.
  • It is much more focused on summoning demons and empowering them.
  • You still use Shadow Bolt as a generator.
  • Hand of Gul'dan is a spender which drops the meteor, but also summons one imp for every Soul Shard you spend on it, up to five.
  • There is a rotational ability that summons a pair of new demons, Dreadstalkers.
  • There is a new rotational Demonic Empowerment, that will buff the demons you have out, giving them a Bloodlust like buff.
  • Lots of talents that summon demons as well, one makes Curse of Doom summon an imp when it pops.
  • Another talent makes the Dreadstalkers you summon come with imps riding on them.
  • No female Felguard in this expansion. Creating and animating new models is very expensive.
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