"Subsequent Expansion" is the term I'm going to use for whatever expansion brings us 7.0. Because Warlords is still a little less than three months away, it's still the "next expansion."
As some recent interviews have suggested, Blizzard wants to try to get expansions out faster, to the extent that we might actually be looking at an expansion with only two raid tiers. Personally, I'm not all that crazy about the idea (I'd rather have something like Wrath, with four raid tiers over two years, though stretching out the middle ones so we aren't stuck on the last one for so long,) but on the other hand, it increases the opportunities for all the things you wanted to hear at the latest expansion reveal, but didn't.
WoW expansions have, I believe, always been announced at Blizzcon. Indeed, it's been somewhat like clockwork (except that Blizzcon doesn't always come at the same time every year.) So here's why this could have strange consequences:
Blizzcon this year is happening, I think, in early November, or possibly late October (I don't have the date in front of me, so I could be a little off.) If they truly wish to release another WoW expansion a year after Warlords, then one would expect them to announce it at Blizzcon - right before the release of Warlords.
This seems unlikely for a number of reasons - the chief one being that in the run-up to the new expansion, they wouldn't want to distract you by saying "well, you're about to finally check out the crazy stuff we announced last year, but before you do, here's what you'll be waiting a year for while you're working on that!" It seems far more likely that at this year's Blizzcon, the WoW discussions will focus more on laying out the patch schedule and showing off new features that will make their way into the game (like Timewalker Dungeons, for example.)
But of course there is no law that says that Blizzard must only announce their new expansions at Blizzcon. Reaper of Souls, for instance, was announced elsewhere. WoW has been Blizzard's tentpole for ten years now, (though I would guess Starcraft is their most popular game,) so I would think that they would generally prefer to make the big announcements at their own convention. But just logistically, time wise, announcing a new expansion at Blizzcon wouldn't really work - if they can actually manage to speed up the process.
If they announce it this year, they steal Warlords' thunder. If they announce it next year, it means that either they're going from announcement to live in a very short span of time or they've failed at the expansion-a-year goal. Even if it's more like a year and a half of Warlords, it really means they'd have to go into Beta very soon after its announcement.
See, here's what worries me about Warlords: Two raid tiers in a single-year expansion could work (though the main pitfall I think you'd experience is that Warlords as a whole would be kind of forgettable. "Oh yeah," we'd think. "We were level 100 for a short bit in that alternate universe expansion. Weird.") But Blizzard has never been able to accelerate the expansion process. I know they claim the new people added are now "up to speed," but there's always room for new excuses that might be perfectly legitimate. If Blizzard proceeds with the assumption that Warlords is going to be shorter than previous expansions, but then it isn't, then it'll be seriously content-starved.
And just as an aside, why can't we get an expansion with more than nine dungeons at launch anymore? Counting revamps, we've had 9, 9, and now 8 with Warlords. BC had 15 and Wrath had 11. That means BC launched with nearly twice as many dungeons as Warlords has.
I'm very eager to see what Blizzard has to present at this year's Blizzcon, because while I'm seriously doubtful that they would announce a full-on WoW 7.0 expansion, I think it will be a good opportunity to gauge just where WoW is going in the next couple years.
Wednesday, August 20, 2014
Sunday, August 17, 2014
Less Obvious Expansion Ideas
WoW's first couple expansions were somewhat obvious choices. Not in a bad way, mind you, but it was pretty clear in vanilla that we'd have to go to Outland and we'd have to go to Northrend at some point. Illidan, Arthas, and Deathwing were all big figures who had been conspicuously absent in Vanilla. Outland (then called the Outlands) had been explored as early as Warcraft II's Beyond the Dark Portal expansion, and Northrend was introduced in the same game that we learned about Kalimdor.
The first few expansions burned through some big characters, though, and Blizzard has, wisely, I think, tried to start building up new lore (all lore is new at some point, of course) for the new expansions. At least one Pandaren had been established before WoW, and actually, even such organizations as the Shado-Pan were already on the books before Mists of Pandaria came out, but nearly everything in Pandaria was built from the ground up.
Garrosh Hellscream has, of course, been a pivotal figure in the Warcraft universe, but has only existed since the Burning Crusade expansion. (Of course, at this point "only" seems a little silly when referring to an expansion that came out eight years ago. Ugh, I just made myself feel old.)
It seems that there's a canon of obvious future expansions that always get talked about when we're due a new announcement. A South Seas/Azshara expansion (a lot of people thought that the Dark Below would be that, though it turned out to be an expansion for Destiny, and not WoW,) an Old God expansion, maybe an Infinite Dragonflight expansion (fingers crossed!) and of course, if they wanted to pull that trigger, an ultimate Burning Legion expansion that has us finally confront Sargeras (possibly set on Argus.) And of course, despite Blizzard basically ruling it out as anything more than a raid instance, the Emerald Dream, which people have been expecting as the next expansion since before Burning Crusade.
But Mists and Warlords were both somewhat surprising. When I first heard about the trademark for Mists of Pandaria, I actually was very skeptical that the Pandaren would even play all that big a role. I figured it would be in the South Seas, on an archipelago, and that the "Mists" referred to the Kvaldir, who might be warring against the Naga. My speculation on the name "Warlords of Draenor" is on this blog, so you can see for yourself, but I remember imagining that it could be another part of Draenor we would discover, floating in the Twisting Nether, and that perhaps we'd have all new societies, including perhaps a group of brutal Draenei, becoming somewhat more Orc-like after being cut off from Velen.
The obvious expansions are fine, but they're finite, and some of them Blizzard is probably going to want to sit on. There are some early quotes from Vanilla where some developer said that the Lich King would take eighty level 100 players to take down when asked what his power level was. Obviously, at this point level and in-lore power level are somewhat divorced concepts. There's no way that Garrosh, even covered with Y'shaarj's blood, was anywhere near as powerful as the Lich King or Deathwing. And neither of those guys (ok, maybe the Lich King) were as powerful as the Old Gods, one of whom we fought at level 60. I absolutely loved Wrath of the Lich King, even if I do remember things that rose-tinted glasses would usually filter out, but Blizzard is in the position now where they don't get to have Arthas around anymore, which is a little frustrating.
There's a reason Batman doesn't kill the Joker, and instead opts to send him to Arkham Asylum. It's because damn, DC doesn't want to be in a position where they can't use the Joker anymore.
But I think it's also good to try something new and shake things up. Frankly, for all the complaints about "whimsical Pandas," I thought the story of Mists of Pandaria was top notch - the only flaw being that Horde players had to make a sudden shift between standing behind Hellscream and fighting against him (though the Dagger in the Dark scenario was a pretty decent attempt at justifying that.) Personally, I wasn't that crazy about the aesthetics of a lot of the Pandaria zones, but it was a matter of personal taste, and not a judgment of quality (though I think there's nothing in WoW that's anything like Valley of the Four Winds - a zone where you can actually imagine people really living and not starving to death!) But regardless of aesthetics, the character of Pandaria was wonderfully rich and the story of the expansion felt fuller than any that had come before, even my beloved Wrath.
Warlords of Draenor cheats a little bit in its originality, but it's something I'm willing to let slide given that it's kind of a 20th anniversary celebration of Warcraft. My only real issue with that is that if Blizzard insists Warcraft's all about Orcs and Humans, when do we get to hear about the humans? Warcraft's the only fantasy universe where the "boring race they spend too much focus on" isn't humans. But still, it's cool to see Draenor as it was pre-Outland, and I'm overjoyed to have an opportunity for the Draenei to actually do something (mumbles something about the fact that only one of the major Draenei characters in the expansion is actually from our universe.)
But post-Warlords, what comes next? What are the less obvious expansion ideas? Of course, as the "less obvious ones," these are all kind of inherently less likely, and are kind of stuff I'm pulling out of thin air.
Further Exploration of Draenor B:
In an interview, Tom Chilton said that he'd love to explore more of Draenor, but right now it looks like at most we're going to be getting all the Outland zones to fill out the map of Draenor (except Zangarmarsh, but it's ok, because Blade's Edge Mountains and Terrokar Forest are each represented by two zones in Draenor.) Given that Draenor as we know it is really just one continent on a potentially larger planet, you could imagine all kinds of crazy parts elsewhere.
A Trip to Eastern Kingdoms Past:
Just like the previous example, I wouldn't recommend this as the immediate follow-up to Warlords, but given hat we're seeing what the various Orc Clans were like in the early days of the Horde (albeit different thanks to Garrosh's imported Goblin technology and foreknowledge) I would love to see the Eastern Kingdoms before the First War. We've never seen Alterac before it was a ruin, and we've never seen (in WoW) an unplagued Lordaeron (except in the Culling of Stratholme dungeon.) Stormwind probably looked totally different before the First War, and hell, Stromgarde used to actually be an important capital. And that's not to mention the various Dwarves, High Elves, or Trolls that populated the place. If we went back a few centuries earlier, you could even see the War of the Three Hammers, and see what Blackrock Mountain was like before it went volcanic. I know that Cataclysm already gave us a new version of the Eastern Kingdoms, but one wonders what it would be like if it were to be rebuilt from scratch the way they're doing in Warlords.
The Freaking Moon:
Elune has to exist in more than just a metaphorical way, because we've met her son, Cenarius. Azeroth has two moons (actually, so does Draenor... weird.) Is Elune up there on the moon? Is she somehow a spirit that resides within the moon? What is the other moon's deal? We seem pretty happy and have the magical/technological capability to go to Outland, which was a planet presumably thousands of light-years away, then became trapped in another dimension. And now we're not just doing that, but going to a version of Draenor in an alternate universe. Don't you think that at this point, the Alliance and Horde might get to the moon? And how much do you want to bet that the smaller, blue moon, is actually a massive orbiting Titan facility?
Wrath 2: The Rescourgening:
There's only one reason that "there must always be a Lich King." It's because Blizzard knows that the Scourge is the best group of villains they've ever come up with and they want to keep them around. But other than a Cataclysm-style or Warlords-style revamp/remake of Northrend, how the hell would you do another Scourge expansion? Well, Azjol-Nerub was a tiny dungeon, and far from the massive zone that we were all hoping it would be (and then of course, in the following expansion we got our massive underground cavern zone in Deepholm.) It does seem like there could be more nooks and crannies to explore in Northrend. Speaking of...
What I thought the Dark Below was going to be:
For some reason, the "Dark Below" to me did not immediately make me think of the Naga, as for some reason it made me think more about being underground than underwater. It strikes me that we could, at some point, have a massive Old Gods-themed expansion. Cataclysm was kind of that, but it was sort of diluted with all the Elementals and the Black/Twilight Dragonflight (actually, if you ask me we could have focused a bit more on the Black Dragons in Cataclysm.) But given that Azeroth is a quasi-artificial planet, one wonders if the whole planet has mechanisms like the ones you find under Storm Peaks, and if we could explore them.
While I'm happy to go to Draenor (go Yrel!) I'm also intrigued and perhaps naively getting my hopes up that we'll get another expansion announcement at Blizzcon this year (for the record, it's super unlikely, and the big reveal will probably be Legacy of the Void and maybe a new Diablo III expansion, as well as some news about the patches that will be coming with Warlords.) I'm sure there are plenty of ideas floating out there that would also make for great expansion ideas, but for a while now, we've been in a kind of "anyone's guess" state of the game. So for curiosity if nothing else, I'm excited to see where the game goes.
The first few expansions burned through some big characters, though, and Blizzard has, wisely, I think, tried to start building up new lore (all lore is new at some point, of course) for the new expansions. At least one Pandaren had been established before WoW, and actually, even such organizations as the Shado-Pan were already on the books before Mists of Pandaria came out, but nearly everything in Pandaria was built from the ground up.
Garrosh Hellscream has, of course, been a pivotal figure in the Warcraft universe, but has only existed since the Burning Crusade expansion. (Of course, at this point "only" seems a little silly when referring to an expansion that came out eight years ago. Ugh, I just made myself feel old.)
It seems that there's a canon of obvious future expansions that always get talked about when we're due a new announcement. A South Seas/Azshara expansion (a lot of people thought that the Dark Below would be that, though it turned out to be an expansion for Destiny, and not WoW,) an Old God expansion, maybe an Infinite Dragonflight expansion (fingers crossed!) and of course, if they wanted to pull that trigger, an ultimate Burning Legion expansion that has us finally confront Sargeras (possibly set on Argus.) And of course, despite Blizzard basically ruling it out as anything more than a raid instance, the Emerald Dream, which people have been expecting as the next expansion since before Burning Crusade.
But Mists and Warlords were both somewhat surprising. When I first heard about the trademark for Mists of Pandaria, I actually was very skeptical that the Pandaren would even play all that big a role. I figured it would be in the South Seas, on an archipelago, and that the "Mists" referred to the Kvaldir, who might be warring against the Naga. My speculation on the name "Warlords of Draenor" is on this blog, so you can see for yourself, but I remember imagining that it could be another part of Draenor we would discover, floating in the Twisting Nether, and that perhaps we'd have all new societies, including perhaps a group of brutal Draenei, becoming somewhat more Orc-like after being cut off from Velen.
The obvious expansions are fine, but they're finite, and some of them Blizzard is probably going to want to sit on. There are some early quotes from Vanilla where some developer said that the Lich King would take eighty level 100 players to take down when asked what his power level was. Obviously, at this point level and in-lore power level are somewhat divorced concepts. There's no way that Garrosh, even covered with Y'shaarj's blood, was anywhere near as powerful as the Lich King or Deathwing. And neither of those guys (ok, maybe the Lich King) were as powerful as the Old Gods, one of whom we fought at level 60. I absolutely loved Wrath of the Lich King, even if I do remember things that rose-tinted glasses would usually filter out, but Blizzard is in the position now where they don't get to have Arthas around anymore, which is a little frustrating.
There's a reason Batman doesn't kill the Joker, and instead opts to send him to Arkham Asylum. It's because damn, DC doesn't want to be in a position where they can't use the Joker anymore.
But I think it's also good to try something new and shake things up. Frankly, for all the complaints about "whimsical Pandas," I thought the story of Mists of Pandaria was top notch - the only flaw being that Horde players had to make a sudden shift between standing behind Hellscream and fighting against him (though the Dagger in the Dark scenario was a pretty decent attempt at justifying that.) Personally, I wasn't that crazy about the aesthetics of a lot of the Pandaria zones, but it was a matter of personal taste, and not a judgment of quality (though I think there's nothing in WoW that's anything like Valley of the Four Winds - a zone where you can actually imagine people really living and not starving to death!) But regardless of aesthetics, the character of Pandaria was wonderfully rich and the story of the expansion felt fuller than any that had come before, even my beloved Wrath.
Warlords of Draenor cheats a little bit in its originality, but it's something I'm willing to let slide given that it's kind of a 20th anniversary celebration of Warcraft. My only real issue with that is that if Blizzard insists Warcraft's all about Orcs and Humans, when do we get to hear about the humans? Warcraft's the only fantasy universe where the "boring race they spend too much focus on" isn't humans. But still, it's cool to see Draenor as it was pre-Outland, and I'm overjoyed to have an opportunity for the Draenei to actually do something (mumbles something about the fact that only one of the major Draenei characters in the expansion is actually from our universe.)
But post-Warlords, what comes next? What are the less obvious expansion ideas? Of course, as the "less obvious ones," these are all kind of inherently less likely, and are kind of stuff I'm pulling out of thin air.
Further Exploration of Draenor B:
In an interview, Tom Chilton said that he'd love to explore more of Draenor, but right now it looks like at most we're going to be getting all the Outland zones to fill out the map of Draenor (except Zangarmarsh, but it's ok, because Blade's Edge Mountains and Terrokar Forest are each represented by two zones in Draenor.) Given that Draenor as we know it is really just one continent on a potentially larger planet, you could imagine all kinds of crazy parts elsewhere.
A Trip to Eastern Kingdoms Past:
Just like the previous example, I wouldn't recommend this as the immediate follow-up to Warlords, but given hat we're seeing what the various Orc Clans were like in the early days of the Horde (albeit different thanks to Garrosh's imported Goblin technology and foreknowledge) I would love to see the Eastern Kingdoms before the First War. We've never seen Alterac before it was a ruin, and we've never seen (in WoW) an unplagued Lordaeron (except in the Culling of Stratholme dungeon.) Stormwind probably looked totally different before the First War, and hell, Stromgarde used to actually be an important capital. And that's not to mention the various Dwarves, High Elves, or Trolls that populated the place. If we went back a few centuries earlier, you could even see the War of the Three Hammers, and see what Blackrock Mountain was like before it went volcanic. I know that Cataclysm already gave us a new version of the Eastern Kingdoms, but one wonders what it would be like if it were to be rebuilt from scratch the way they're doing in Warlords.
The Freaking Moon:
Elune has to exist in more than just a metaphorical way, because we've met her son, Cenarius. Azeroth has two moons (actually, so does Draenor... weird.) Is Elune up there on the moon? Is she somehow a spirit that resides within the moon? What is the other moon's deal? We seem pretty happy and have the magical/technological capability to go to Outland, which was a planet presumably thousands of light-years away, then became trapped in another dimension. And now we're not just doing that, but going to a version of Draenor in an alternate universe. Don't you think that at this point, the Alliance and Horde might get to the moon? And how much do you want to bet that the smaller, blue moon, is actually a massive orbiting Titan facility?
Wrath 2: The Rescourgening:
There's only one reason that "there must always be a Lich King." It's because Blizzard knows that the Scourge is the best group of villains they've ever come up with and they want to keep them around. But other than a Cataclysm-style or Warlords-style revamp/remake of Northrend, how the hell would you do another Scourge expansion? Well, Azjol-Nerub was a tiny dungeon, and far from the massive zone that we were all hoping it would be (and then of course, in the following expansion we got our massive underground cavern zone in Deepholm.) It does seem like there could be more nooks and crannies to explore in Northrend. Speaking of...
What I thought the Dark Below was going to be:
For some reason, the "Dark Below" to me did not immediately make me think of the Naga, as for some reason it made me think more about being underground than underwater. It strikes me that we could, at some point, have a massive Old Gods-themed expansion. Cataclysm was kind of that, but it was sort of diluted with all the Elementals and the Black/Twilight Dragonflight (actually, if you ask me we could have focused a bit more on the Black Dragons in Cataclysm.) But given that Azeroth is a quasi-artificial planet, one wonders if the whole planet has mechanisms like the ones you find under Storm Peaks, and if we could explore them.
While I'm happy to go to Draenor (go Yrel!) I'm also intrigued and perhaps naively getting my hopes up that we'll get another expansion announcement at Blizzcon this year (for the record, it's super unlikely, and the big reveal will probably be Legacy of the Void and maybe a new Diablo III expansion, as well as some news about the patches that will be coming with Warlords.) I'm sure there are plenty of ideas floating out there that would also make for great expansion ideas, but for a while now, we've been in a kind of "anyone's guess" state of the game. So for curiosity if nothing else, I'm excited to see where the game goes.
A Non-Evil Antagonist
When you watch this trailer, how do you react? Because with the exception of the very last line "But we will be conquerors," everything that Grommash does in this trailer is actually really awesome and laudable. He declines the demon blood offered to him by Gul'dan and he freaking kills Mannoroth in a manner that took the Pit Lord completely by surprise. This Grommash is just as heroic, if not more, than the one who died at the end of the Orc campaign in Warcraft III. This is one who never fell to corruption, who always stood strong against the Burning Legion.
The thing about the Iron Horde is that, in a way, they're just plain better than the Old Horde. Their industry probably doesn't run by EPA standards, but it's a hell of a lot less harmful than Fel magic. No matter what the Iron Horde does, it seems really unlikely that anything like Outland is going to be the result.
I mean, that trailer shows you exactly what you'd hope your people would do if a bunch of demons tried to corrupt them - not just defy the demons, but utterly defeat them as well.
The Iron Horde is not intrinsically evil the way that the Old Horde was. But are they good?
No. That's clear.
But they're only evil in the way that, to be frank, the vast majority of human history has been. Think about this: it's only in very recent years that the notion of international cooperation on a global scale has been even thinkable. The Orcs are a decidedly pre-Enlightenment society. Arguably, they're an Iron Age civilization, except that they've just been given a whole bunch of modern technology (well, I don't know exactly what stage of technological development an Iron Star is from, but I'd approximate Industrial Revolution-era.) If you handed a bunch of machine guns and tanks to a bunch of pre-Roman Celts, it wouldn't exactly be pretty, and it would hardly be surprising that they'd probably go on a rampage of conquest, with little thought to the consequences.
Is it evil? Certainly by today's values. And I'm not even saying that we shouldn't be applying those values. But the Iron Horde, unlike the Old Gods or the Burning Legion, wants conquest, rather than destruction.
How does this differ from Garrosh's "True Horde?" Well, the distinction is subtle. Indeed, one could argue that the "True Horde" were more of this mundane kind of "evil of the past." The only reason why I don't think this quite holds up is that Garrosh should have known better. The modern Horde is not modern in the real-world sense, but the culture of the Horde has progressed to the point where endless war and conquest is no longer sustainable or even desirable. Many of the Horde races are just looking to keep their own territories safe, and engage with the world in a position of strength. The civil war that took place in Mists of Pandaria was about establishing the character of the Horde. Garrosh felt it was a machine built for conquest, and Vol'jin felt it was a stable coalition of nations, united to protect each other and benefit mutually from their alliance.
On Draenor, the Iron Horde has never learned to exist in a stable global environment. Everything in Draenor is trying to kill you, and thus there's no incentive for peace. They are dangerous because they have an old-fashioned mindset, and Garrosh, being a real reactionary, went back in time specifically because he knew that those Orcs of Draenor would share his old-fashioned way of looking at things, and thus he'd have a Horde that would act the way that he felt it should.
What thus intrigues me about the Iron Horde is that, without demon blood crowding out any rational thoughts, I wonder what will happen as we begin to score victories against them. Obviously, the mechanics of the game do place some limits on the storytelling, but one almost wants to capture an Iron Horde orc, show them the kind of society that the modern Horde has become, and see if perhaps they'd far prefer that to the society that the Iron Horde is.
By taking demon blood out of the equation, the Iron Horde is no longer a group of supernatural monsters, but is instead a misguided population irresponsibly armed with dangerous weapons.
I suspect that for the most part, we'll deal with the Iron Horde as we have with any of the supernatural threats we did in the past. But this time, we're not fighting demons (well... maybe some demons, but not in the Iron Horde,) zombies, lovecraftian monsters, or evil spirits. These are people. And not just people, but, for at least the Orcs in the Horde, people who actually turned away from the evil that they or their parents' generation did not.
Saturday, August 16, 2014
WoW 2: What Would That Be?
The idea of a "World of Warcraft 2" has been floating around for quite some time, but it's always been something of a complicated notion. Certainly, there are sequels to MMOs, like Everquest and Guild Wars. But the problem with MMO sequels is that you either split the player base, or you essentially obsolete the old game.
Think about how many hours, days, or even months you've sunk into your characters in WoW. It would be pretty disappointing to find all that washed away, or at least stuffed in a crate with mothballs. MMOs end, yes (as all things must,) but the company that makes one needs to have some really compelling reason to do so - usually it means the money's dried up. And even though WoW is almost at half its subscriptions than it had at its peak, it's still the biggest subscription-based MMO in the world by a large amount (not sure how Wildstar is doing. I actually hope it does well, because it looks cool and I'd try it out if they made a Mac client.)
But apparently Tom Chilton, game director of WoW, says that Blizzard has, actually, considered doing a WoW 2. But I have no idea what form that would take.
Now one possibility is that this would be a new IP that takes the structure of WoW. This would be like what they did with Starcraft - taking what they had learned making Warcraft and Warcraft II and making a totally new setting and switching genres, but preserving the gameplay.
But generally, when I think of sequel, I usually think of a more direct sequel. In my mind, in order to be WoW 2, you'd have to make it set on Azeroth and deal with the Alliance and the Horde.
Of course, as mentioned above, the pitfall of an MMO sequel is that you set everyone back to one. If you needed to really change the balance of the game (perhaps by trimming classes, or splitting them - such as making the more nature-based Beastmasters a separate class from the more military-like Marksmen) you would have to bring everyone back down to level 1, and essentially have them start over.
New mechanics and new gameplay could certainly motivate people to do that, but you'd also probably lose a ton of players as well.
But of course, if you let people carry over their characters, you'd have to use the same classes and races, and at that point, isn't it just an expansion? You might totally revamp the early-level stuff, but of course, we saw that already in Cataclysm.
In a sense, we've already had WoW 2. It was called the Burning Crusade. We're about to get WoW 6.
But then, Blizzard has always been more about expansions than sequels. Sequels really need to fundamentally change the mechanics of the game. Beyond the Dark Portal and the Frozen Throne were not sequels, because they still worked essentially the same way. But a lot of other companies would be happy to call them sequels, because their campaigns at least are fully-formed, other games. Starcraft II is being released in three segments, but Heart of the Swarm and Legacy of the Void are not considered sequels. They are expansions.
So I don't really know if I'm going to hold my breath for WoW 2. This is something that's been talked about for a long time, and I think that until WoW's system is just totally ready to collapse (which I think is decelerated every time they do a big revamp, like the talent system in Mists) we're just going to be seeing expansions to WoW, and not a sequel.
Think about how many hours, days, or even months you've sunk into your characters in WoW. It would be pretty disappointing to find all that washed away, or at least stuffed in a crate with mothballs. MMOs end, yes (as all things must,) but the company that makes one needs to have some really compelling reason to do so - usually it means the money's dried up. And even though WoW is almost at half its subscriptions than it had at its peak, it's still the biggest subscription-based MMO in the world by a large amount (not sure how Wildstar is doing. I actually hope it does well, because it looks cool and I'd try it out if they made a Mac client.)
But apparently Tom Chilton, game director of WoW, says that Blizzard has, actually, considered doing a WoW 2. But I have no idea what form that would take.
Now one possibility is that this would be a new IP that takes the structure of WoW. This would be like what they did with Starcraft - taking what they had learned making Warcraft and Warcraft II and making a totally new setting and switching genres, but preserving the gameplay.
But generally, when I think of sequel, I usually think of a more direct sequel. In my mind, in order to be WoW 2, you'd have to make it set on Azeroth and deal with the Alliance and the Horde.
Of course, as mentioned above, the pitfall of an MMO sequel is that you set everyone back to one. If you needed to really change the balance of the game (perhaps by trimming classes, or splitting them - such as making the more nature-based Beastmasters a separate class from the more military-like Marksmen) you would have to bring everyone back down to level 1, and essentially have them start over.
New mechanics and new gameplay could certainly motivate people to do that, but you'd also probably lose a ton of players as well.
But of course, if you let people carry over their characters, you'd have to use the same classes and races, and at that point, isn't it just an expansion? You might totally revamp the early-level stuff, but of course, we saw that already in Cataclysm.
In a sense, we've already had WoW 2. It was called the Burning Crusade. We're about to get WoW 6.
But then, Blizzard has always been more about expansions than sequels. Sequels really need to fundamentally change the mechanics of the game. Beyond the Dark Portal and the Frozen Throne were not sequels, because they still worked essentially the same way. But a lot of other companies would be happy to call them sequels, because their campaigns at least are fully-formed, other games. Starcraft II is being released in three segments, but Heart of the Swarm and Legacy of the Void are not considered sequels. They are expansions.
So I don't really know if I'm going to hold my breath for WoW 2. This is something that's been talked about for a long time, and I think that until WoW's system is just totally ready to collapse (which I think is decelerated every time they do a big revamp, like the talent system in Mists) we're just going to be seeing expansions to WoW, and not a sequel.
Friday, August 15, 2014
A Bit of Time Travel Philosophy and How It Relates to Draenor
Time Travel is one of the most popular concepts in science fiction and fantasy. It's an inherently weird idea that can have really surprising consequences. We also don't know A. whether anything other than the most simple form of time travel (forward, 1s/s) is possible, and B. what rules it would follow if one was able to "sequence break" through time.
So let's talk about the various ideas. These aren't so much science and science fiction (except the first one) because we really don't have much evidence to work with.
1. Mundane Time Travel
Mundane time travel is the time travel that you are currently experiencing right now. Every second, you're a second farther into the future. Exciting, isn't it?
And yes, this is more complicated because of relativity, but in most situations, time appears to pass roughly at the same speed everywhere, and you're never going to be able to turn back the clock, even if you travel at relativistic speeds (as far as we know. Maybe if you break the speed of light you'll go back, but we also think that's physically impossible.)
2. Terminator 1/Twelve Monkeys Time Travel (Consistent Universe, Stable Time Loop, You Already Changed the Past)
In the first Terminator movie, the AI Skynet revolts in the distant future of 1997, turning the Earth into a nuclear wasteland. But a man named John Connor leads a resistance and is on the cusp of defeating Skynet for good. So Skynet sends one of its Terminator (robot assassins) back in time to kill Sarah Connor, John's mother, before he's ever born. However, as it turns out, it was this very act that led to John Connor's birth, as the humans send back Kyle Reese to protect Sarah, and Kyle and Sarah do that thing humans do and Sarah becomes pregnant with John. But unfortunately, the fate of the world is also sealed because when the Terminator is killed, human scientists discover a remnant of the robot and begin to research it. This research then eventually leads to the creation of Skynet. Hence nuclear near-apocalypse.
So the events of The Terminator are pre-ordained. Everything that happened had always happened that way, and the act of time travel has always been a part of those events in the universe. There's no strong paradox here, because everything is consistent, though there's a weak paradox in that the Skynet AI technology apparently sprang from nothing, with no inventor or creator.
The idea here is that the one timeline takes into account time travel anyway. Essentially, it means that if you travel to 1911 and take a picture of yourself, then before you even think of building a time machine, there's already a photo somewhere of you in that year, and no matter what, you will go there and you will take that picture.
3. Rubber Band Timeline (Final Destination?)
Rubber Band Timelines imply that there is some kind of fate that awaits everything, but the smaller details can change. If, for example, you have a prophetic vision (which is basically information time travel) that if your friend gets on a plane, he will die in a crash, it means that you can warn him not to get on the plane, but that he will then die in a car crash on the way back from the airport, or some such thing.
The implication of this style of time travel is that there is some kind of regulating force - either intelligent or just inherent to the universe - that causes certain important events to take place regardless of the smaller actions you take. It differs from number 2 above because in 2, it would just happen that you wouldn't have ever gotten him to not go on the plane, and the vision you received (assuming it was accurate) would play out either despite or even because of what you did. This version is flexible, but still unbreakable.
4. Back to the Future Time Travel (Paradoxes can happen, and they are dangerous!)
When Marty McFly goes back 30 years to the 1950s, he accidentally disrupts the moment that his parents met, thus endangering his own existence. Marty watches his siblings fade away on a photograph he had with him, and at some points, when his parents seem unlikely to get together, he himself begins to fade away. When this happens is perhaps a little arbitrary, but there also seems to be a bit of a rubber band here in that just getting his parents together is enough to satisfy the universe that he can still exist. His memory doesn't change even though his parents' history does.
This is a bit like rubber band time travel, but with the possibility of that band snapping, with seriously dangerous consequences.
5. Terminator 2 Time Travel (You Can Change the Past)
Ignoring later sequels, Terminator 2 ends with them destroying the last Skynet technology, which should theoretically prevent Judgment Day from ever happening. The Terminator did definitely come from the future, but it's a future that has been prevented, and the universe has switched onto a safer track. This one's a bit troubling, because there are some seeming Strong Paradoxes. For example, with no Skynet, there's no way for Kyle Reese to have gone back in time in the first place to father John or warn Sarah of the machines. But this version of time travel apparently allows for the new timeline to overwrite the previous one, so that essentially, the Terminator and Kyle just popped into existence at some point in the 80s, their origins forever shrouded in mystery.
6a. Multiverse Time Travel - Tangent Universes
This is one way of totally paradox-free time travel. The tangent universe version of the multiverse time travel concept works like this: if you go back in time to change the past, you create an alternate universe. The one that you came from continues to exist, and history as you remember it still has happened exactly as it did. But by interfering in the past, you spawn an entirely new universe, and in this universe your changes do have long-lasting effects. This may indeed be what people who think they're experiencing example 5 are actually living through, but with no way (or desire) to return to their original timeline.
6b. Multiverse Time Travel - Parallel Universes
This version suggests that rather than universes branching off into a giant tree, splitting each time there's a new interference or even just uncertain event in any universe (which, according to quantum mechanics, could mean new universes every... like countless times in the last second,) that there are and have always been a huge (perhaps infinite) number of universes that are somewhat different. In this case, time travel could actually have you hopping into a universe where your arrival was always part of its history, and the changes you wrought were always going to be a part of that universe. In fact, the universes might even be out of synch, so that one appears to be, oh, let's say 35 years off. Thus "time travel" in this case is actually just universe-travel, only appearing to be a difference in time due to the somewhat accelerated or decelerated history. Just like in 6a, you leave behind the universe that you are from, and it continues to exist and remembers you, and indeed, might be able to duplicate your technology or magic in order to follow you to this other universe.
So Who's the Lucky Winner?
Warlords of Draenor fits perfectly with 6b. Here's why:
Garrosh arrives in Draenor 35 years in the past. We follow him perhaps a year or a number of months later, and it looks like the same amount of time has passed for him as it has for us (this one's a little sketchy. I don't know how long they say that Garrosh was on Draenor before we show up.) He changes the past by convincing Grommash not to drink the Blood of Mannoroth (and gives him a kick-ass Iron Star to shoot at the Pit Lord,) but he doesn't really change the past, because we're all still here.
So why is it a parallel universe and not a tangent universe? Two things: First is that they're out of synch. Garrosh arrives in the "past," and the Iron Horde, in the "past," assaults us in our present. We follow them into the Dark Portal in our present, and arrive in this same "past."
The other, and far more convincing thing, is an Orc named Rulkan. Rulkan is Ner'zhul's wife. In our timeline, Rulkan had died years before the founding of the Horde, and it was in the guise of Rulkan's ghost that Kil'jaeden convinced Ner'zhul that the Draenei were intending to attack the Orcs, which began the war against the Draenei. And it was only after besieging Shattrath City unsuccessfully that the Orcs drank the Blood of Mannoroth to get an edge over the Draenei.
And in this Draenor, Rulkan's still alive and well.
Without a dead Rulkan, we really don't have the same motivations for the initial fight against the Draenei, and that's independent of Garrosh's actions.
So what it looks like we're dealing with is not a past version of Draenor, but a universe that is 35 years behind ours, and that was never the same Draenor that our Outland once was.
Not only does this mean that there's no risk of paradox, but it also makes it plausible why, for example, Orc and Draenei players wouldn't necessarily run into their own doppelgängers. If Rulkan is alive, then Spacegoatwarriorxxxawesome might have died on Argus, or maybe he was never even born.
The Iron Horde is not from our past, or even our alternate past, but is from a parallel universe. And while may seem like the past, our adventures on this "Draenor" are taking place in the present day.
So let's talk about the various ideas. These aren't so much science and science fiction (except the first one) because we really don't have much evidence to work with.
1. Mundane Time Travel
Mundane time travel is the time travel that you are currently experiencing right now. Every second, you're a second farther into the future. Exciting, isn't it?
And yes, this is more complicated because of relativity, but in most situations, time appears to pass roughly at the same speed everywhere, and you're never going to be able to turn back the clock, even if you travel at relativistic speeds (as far as we know. Maybe if you break the speed of light you'll go back, but we also think that's physically impossible.)
2. Terminator 1/Twelve Monkeys Time Travel (Consistent Universe, Stable Time Loop, You Already Changed the Past)
In the first Terminator movie, the AI Skynet revolts in the distant future of 1997, turning the Earth into a nuclear wasteland. But a man named John Connor leads a resistance and is on the cusp of defeating Skynet for good. So Skynet sends one of its Terminator (robot assassins) back in time to kill Sarah Connor, John's mother, before he's ever born. However, as it turns out, it was this very act that led to John Connor's birth, as the humans send back Kyle Reese to protect Sarah, and Kyle and Sarah do that thing humans do and Sarah becomes pregnant with John. But unfortunately, the fate of the world is also sealed because when the Terminator is killed, human scientists discover a remnant of the robot and begin to research it. This research then eventually leads to the creation of Skynet. Hence nuclear near-apocalypse.
So the events of The Terminator are pre-ordained. Everything that happened had always happened that way, and the act of time travel has always been a part of those events in the universe. There's no strong paradox here, because everything is consistent, though there's a weak paradox in that the Skynet AI technology apparently sprang from nothing, with no inventor or creator.
The idea here is that the one timeline takes into account time travel anyway. Essentially, it means that if you travel to 1911 and take a picture of yourself, then before you even think of building a time machine, there's already a photo somewhere of you in that year, and no matter what, you will go there and you will take that picture.
3. Rubber Band Timeline (Final Destination?)
Rubber Band Timelines imply that there is some kind of fate that awaits everything, but the smaller details can change. If, for example, you have a prophetic vision (which is basically information time travel) that if your friend gets on a plane, he will die in a crash, it means that you can warn him not to get on the plane, but that he will then die in a car crash on the way back from the airport, or some such thing.
The implication of this style of time travel is that there is some kind of regulating force - either intelligent or just inherent to the universe - that causes certain important events to take place regardless of the smaller actions you take. It differs from number 2 above because in 2, it would just happen that you wouldn't have ever gotten him to not go on the plane, and the vision you received (assuming it was accurate) would play out either despite or even because of what you did. This version is flexible, but still unbreakable.
4. Back to the Future Time Travel (Paradoxes can happen, and they are dangerous!)
When Marty McFly goes back 30 years to the 1950s, he accidentally disrupts the moment that his parents met, thus endangering his own existence. Marty watches his siblings fade away on a photograph he had with him, and at some points, when his parents seem unlikely to get together, he himself begins to fade away. When this happens is perhaps a little arbitrary, but there also seems to be a bit of a rubber band here in that just getting his parents together is enough to satisfy the universe that he can still exist. His memory doesn't change even though his parents' history does.
This is a bit like rubber band time travel, but with the possibility of that band snapping, with seriously dangerous consequences.
5. Terminator 2 Time Travel (You Can Change the Past)
Ignoring later sequels, Terminator 2 ends with them destroying the last Skynet technology, which should theoretically prevent Judgment Day from ever happening. The Terminator did definitely come from the future, but it's a future that has been prevented, and the universe has switched onto a safer track. This one's a bit troubling, because there are some seeming Strong Paradoxes. For example, with no Skynet, there's no way for Kyle Reese to have gone back in time in the first place to father John or warn Sarah of the machines. But this version of time travel apparently allows for the new timeline to overwrite the previous one, so that essentially, the Terminator and Kyle just popped into existence at some point in the 80s, their origins forever shrouded in mystery.
6a. Multiverse Time Travel - Tangent Universes
This is one way of totally paradox-free time travel. The tangent universe version of the multiverse time travel concept works like this: if you go back in time to change the past, you create an alternate universe. The one that you came from continues to exist, and history as you remember it still has happened exactly as it did. But by interfering in the past, you spawn an entirely new universe, and in this universe your changes do have long-lasting effects. This may indeed be what people who think they're experiencing example 5 are actually living through, but with no way (or desire) to return to their original timeline.
6b. Multiverse Time Travel - Parallel Universes
This version suggests that rather than universes branching off into a giant tree, splitting each time there's a new interference or even just uncertain event in any universe (which, according to quantum mechanics, could mean new universes every... like countless times in the last second,) that there are and have always been a huge (perhaps infinite) number of universes that are somewhat different. In this case, time travel could actually have you hopping into a universe where your arrival was always part of its history, and the changes you wrought were always going to be a part of that universe. In fact, the universes might even be out of synch, so that one appears to be, oh, let's say 35 years off. Thus "time travel" in this case is actually just universe-travel, only appearing to be a difference in time due to the somewhat accelerated or decelerated history. Just like in 6a, you leave behind the universe that you are from, and it continues to exist and remembers you, and indeed, might be able to duplicate your technology or magic in order to follow you to this other universe.
So Who's the Lucky Winner?
Warlords of Draenor fits perfectly with 6b. Here's why:
Garrosh arrives in Draenor 35 years in the past. We follow him perhaps a year or a number of months later, and it looks like the same amount of time has passed for him as it has for us (this one's a little sketchy. I don't know how long they say that Garrosh was on Draenor before we show up.) He changes the past by convincing Grommash not to drink the Blood of Mannoroth (and gives him a kick-ass Iron Star to shoot at the Pit Lord,) but he doesn't really change the past, because we're all still here.
So why is it a parallel universe and not a tangent universe? Two things: First is that they're out of synch. Garrosh arrives in the "past," and the Iron Horde, in the "past," assaults us in our present. We follow them into the Dark Portal in our present, and arrive in this same "past."
The other, and far more convincing thing, is an Orc named Rulkan. Rulkan is Ner'zhul's wife. In our timeline, Rulkan had died years before the founding of the Horde, and it was in the guise of Rulkan's ghost that Kil'jaeden convinced Ner'zhul that the Draenei were intending to attack the Orcs, which began the war against the Draenei. And it was only after besieging Shattrath City unsuccessfully that the Orcs drank the Blood of Mannoroth to get an edge over the Draenei.
And in this Draenor, Rulkan's still alive and well.
Without a dead Rulkan, we really don't have the same motivations for the initial fight against the Draenei, and that's independent of Garrosh's actions.
So what it looks like we're dealing with is not a past version of Draenor, but a universe that is 35 years behind ours, and that was never the same Draenor that our Outland once was.
Not only does this mean that there's no risk of paradox, but it also makes it plausible why, for example, Orc and Draenei players wouldn't necessarily run into their own doppelgängers. If Rulkan is alive, then Spacegoatwarriorxxxawesome might have died on Argus, or maybe he was never even born.
The Iron Horde is not from our past, or even our alternate past, but is from a parallel universe. And while may seem like the past, our adventures on this "Draenor" are taking place in the present day.
How Many Raid Tiers in an Expansion?
In a very interesting interview with Tom Chilton, WoW's Game Director talked about some intriguing details about Warlords. I recommend checking it out (it's on MMO-Champion and a bunch of other sites.) First of all, Chilton talked about how the WoW team grew by 80 members over the last year (not sure how much they had to start with.) The idea was that they wanted to get a quicker pace of expansions in the future, but they needed a bigger team to produce stuff in the volumes they need. The problem is that with so many new employees, they also needed to get those guys up to speed, which in the short term slowed down their development process. The hope, then, is that now that those guys are up to speed, they will be able to hit the pace they've been aiming for.
I'll believe it when I see it, but if this expansion-a-year cycle is what they're shooting for, what does that mean for raids?
To be clear, Chilton said that any raid tier is going to get a minimum of four months. They don't want another Ulduar situation, where the super-awesome raid everyone worked really hard on (and is beloved by players) gets obsoleted before people have had time to really work on it. But he also said that they want a maximum of six months, which is certainly very welcome given that we're in the middle of a fourteen month stretch of Siege of Orgrimmar.
The interesting thing about this, though, is that he actually said that they are considering not having multiple raid patches in Warlords, if they are able to speed up the expansion-building process. If that were the case, then we could very well actually wind up with only two raid tiers in the expansion.
Reflexively, the thought makes me shudder a little, but on the other hand, if we got two raid tiers and then another expansion (with another starting raid tier, of course) a year after Warlords, it would actually mean more raid tiers.
The question, then, I think, is how we want our expansions paced. Right now, and since WoW started, expansions have been a biennial thing. And in a lot of cases, it's worked out that with three raid tiers, you can sort of start with the expansion's headliner villains, then go and deal with a secondary threat, then return to take out the big bad. Think Naxxramas-Ulduar-ICC, BoT/BWD-Firelands-DS, or HoF-ToES-ToT-SoO. Scourge-Old God-Scourge, Black Dragonflight/Twilight's Hammer-Fire Elementals-Twilight Dragonflight, Sha-Mogu-Sha. Yeah, some of these are a slight stretch, but it works.
The thing is, if we wind up facing Grommash in the raid tier immediately following Blackhand, will that be enough of a build-up? And will Warlords feel kind of light as an expansion?
Really, what it kind of boils down to is whether we want to have two light expansions in place of one heavy one. And while the common response is quality over quantity, it's pretty clear that new expansions are exciting. If they can truly keep them coming once a year, you're far less likely to see these subscription drops (and while I do respect Blizzard as artists, they are also in the entertainment industry, and money is what keeps the gnomes in the giant hamster wheels that generate the power for Blizzard's headquarters fed,) which I think are often from lack of content (also bad decisions about daily quests. 5.0 was pretty rough.)
On the other hand, and this is very likely just because it's what I'm used to - is a year long enough for an expansion?
Leveling up is not a super-long process, at least the first time, which actually means that a huge amount of the work put in to build a new expansion gets consumed in the first week or two (though alcoholics like me can keep that going for a long time, though I am really sick of the Horde intro to Jade Forest, even if I've done it more on Alliance.) But still, it does take a little while to gear up, and to catch up and get your character in a position where you can feel really well-put-together. I'm at a point, for example, with my Paladin and Death Knight where I can stand back and say "yes, these guys really are outfitted as they should be at the end of this expansion." I feel powerful. I can take my DK and slaughter the Ordon Yaungol without breaking a sweat (except maybe the super-powered ones in the shrine.) Every expansion, though, that gets reset (to an extent, every tier, but someone in full ToT epics is still going to feel pretty powerful in most of Pandaria.) So the consequence of this is that if you got an expansion every year, you'd be back to leveling greens once a year.
And that might cut down on some of the alts I level, but on the other hand, I'm insane, whereas most players focus on one or maybe two or three characters. And I'm sure that now that they probably have all three of their hypothetical characters rocking nice sets of SoO and Timeless Isle World Boss gear and probably all of them glimmer with legendary cloaks (to be fair, I've only done that on the Paladin and DK,) they're really, really ready for something new, and likely find themselves in that position relatively often.
Granted, from a player's perspective it's not such a bad thing to be able to take a break from WoW for a while and not feel like you're missing anything, but Blizzard clearly needs, financially, to keep people engaged and playing.
So the year-long expansion cycle, if it is indeed possible, could be a good thing or maybe not. I think right now, Blizzard should try to see if it can pull it off (but for the love of the light, don't sacrifice quality for it.)
And give us some damn Demon Hunters already. Jeez!
Thursday, August 14, 2014
Warlords' Final Boss Revealed Plus More Details
I'm not going to put this in a spoiler-alert cut, because frankly, if I did, it would suggest a more surprising answer to the question: who is the boss of Warlords of Draenor?
The answer is the simplest one. Who is on the box art? Who is the main figure of the cinematic? Who's in the center of the reveal-poster? (And in case you were wondering, yes, I'm padding this paragraph so that if people want to freak out about spoilers, this way they'll have had to read through the whole paragraph, which makes it their fault.) Grommash Hellscream is the expansion's final boss, and let me just say here: well duh.
I always felt this held a strong possibility, and seemed to be the way that things were going, but I was sort of hoping for a twist. Unfortunately, I think that Warlords of Draenor's plot has been as straightforward as possible, to the point of being predictable. Now, I understand that a straightforward plot can be fine - look at Star Wars (the movie, as opposed to the series of movies, which got a little more complicated, and then stupid when they did the prequels.) But nuance was what made me interested in World of Warcraft in the first place, and unfortunately, the whole narrative of the Iron Horde removes a lot of the nuance from the Orcs as a people (one could make the argument that by revealing it wasn't just demon blood that turned the Orcs evil, you are adding nuance, but so far there doesn't seem to be a lot of reflection on that in the quests - though granted I've stuck mostly to the Alliance side in the Beta.)
Now, this is all somewhat pessimistic prognosticating, and the "Iron Citadel" final raid that I imagine basically looking like the Underhold in Orgrimmar or another Blackrock Foundry may not be anything like what I assume it will be. It might not even be Draenor B's Hellfire Citadel equivalent. And Gul'dan might wind up tempting Grommash with the blood of... well, some other demon, because Mannoroth is a little overdrawn at the blood bank right now.
So what's in the middle, then?
Well, Blizzard was very careful to use language that made no promises. In fact, I think technically they didn't even promise Tanaan (though that's a guarantee - the zone is clearly there and partially in-game, only inaccessible after the Dark Portal starting experience.
So while none of these are guarantees, here are some of the possibilities:
Tanaan Jungle and Farahlon will probably be added in as new zones.
New dungeons could come in new patches, though whether these will be truly new dungeons, or if they'll implement the "Timewalker" system (which will boost old dungeons to max level... perhaps the rationale behind the revamps to Blackfathom Deeps and Razorfen Downs?) My hope is both! But we'll see.
On flying, they say they'll be taking player feedback into account. If we want it by 6.1, it'll be there. If people are happy without it, it'll stay out. This will, I'm certain, be a divisive issue, but my recommendation would be to build, say, Farahlon and Tanaan around flight, the way Icecrown and Storm Peaks were. As the current leveling zones stand, I'm fine with flight being restricted until level 100, as they are clearly built with ground mounts in mind.
There will be a legendary chain similar to the cloak that you begin at level 99, and will grant a ring. The ring will have a visual effect (like that Black Diamond Ring from ZG, though presumably fancier.) They have said that the existence of the ring will not rule out tier-specific legendary weapons of the old style.
They're hoping to get a transmog system where you save the appearance of your gear to a collection and never have to worry about deleting it. This will not be in 6.0, but it's something they're working on. Very happy about this.
As usual, they're planning to go for an accelerated patch cycle, but they've acknowledged that it depends on how long the next expansion takes. They say that every raid tier will get a minimum of four months, which I think is wise. (No more tragedy of Trial of the Crusader obsoleting Ulduar.) There was some comment about maybe not doing multiple raid content patches, which I don't understand, and will have to look into a little more (there will definitely be at least one more raid patch, but I wonder if they mean there might only be two raid tiers, but with another expansion coming out the following year? Would that be good or bad for the game? This is PURE SPECULATION so don't freak out about it.)
They're not finalized on the patch cycle, because they want to take into account player feedback. Sounds good (just don't overcorrect!)
There are no plans for a new battleground, but they do want to make the new version of the Nagrand arena into an arena for Arena.
Garrisons will probably be getting some tweaks and upgrades as the patches roll out. Not exactly shocking, but good news.
There aren't any class quests planned, though that is not all that surprising. Green fire was a very specific thing that Warlocks had been asking for for a long time, and the fact that it was more than just a glyph or something is really amazing (honestly, I think the green fire quest chain is just pure fan service in the best way.)
Oh, and last but certainly not least - they assure people that there will be ample time to get to level 100 before the anniversary celebrations of Molten Core and Tarren Mill v Southshore go away. I hope that means like, two months (though I assume the Core Hound mount will be account-wide.)
The answer is the simplest one. Who is on the box art? Who is the main figure of the cinematic? Who's in the center of the reveal-poster? (And in case you were wondering, yes, I'm padding this paragraph so that if people want to freak out about spoilers, this way they'll have had to read through the whole paragraph, which makes it their fault.) Grommash Hellscream is the expansion's final boss, and let me just say here: well duh.
I always felt this held a strong possibility, and seemed to be the way that things were going, but I was sort of hoping for a twist. Unfortunately, I think that Warlords of Draenor's plot has been as straightforward as possible, to the point of being predictable. Now, I understand that a straightforward plot can be fine - look at Star Wars (the movie, as opposed to the series of movies, which got a little more complicated, and then stupid when they did the prequels.) But nuance was what made me interested in World of Warcraft in the first place, and unfortunately, the whole narrative of the Iron Horde removes a lot of the nuance from the Orcs as a people (one could make the argument that by revealing it wasn't just demon blood that turned the Orcs evil, you are adding nuance, but so far there doesn't seem to be a lot of reflection on that in the quests - though granted I've stuck mostly to the Alliance side in the Beta.)
Now, this is all somewhat pessimistic prognosticating, and the "Iron Citadel" final raid that I imagine basically looking like the Underhold in Orgrimmar or another Blackrock Foundry may not be anything like what I assume it will be. It might not even be Draenor B's Hellfire Citadel equivalent. And Gul'dan might wind up tempting Grommash with the blood of... well, some other demon, because Mannoroth is a little overdrawn at the blood bank right now.
So what's in the middle, then?
Well, Blizzard was very careful to use language that made no promises. In fact, I think technically they didn't even promise Tanaan (though that's a guarantee - the zone is clearly there and partially in-game, only inaccessible after the Dark Portal starting experience.
So while none of these are guarantees, here are some of the possibilities:
Tanaan Jungle and Farahlon will probably be added in as new zones.
New dungeons could come in new patches, though whether these will be truly new dungeons, or if they'll implement the "Timewalker" system (which will boost old dungeons to max level... perhaps the rationale behind the revamps to Blackfathom Deeps and Razorfen Downs?) My hope is both! But we'll see.
On flying, they say they'll be taking player feedback into account. If we want it by 6.1, it'll be there. If people are happy without it, it'll stay out. This will, I'm certain, be a divisive issue, but my recommendation would be to build, say, Farahlon and Tanaan around flight, the way Icecrown and Storm Peaks were. As the current leveling zones stand, I'm fine with flight being restricted until level 100, as they are clearly built with ground mounts in mind.
There will be a legendary chain similar to the cloak that you begin at level 99, and will grant a ring. The ring will have a visual effect (like that Black Diamond Ring from ZG, though presumably fancier.) They have said that the existence of the ring will not rule out tier-specific legendary weapons of the old style.
They're hoping to get a transmog system where you save the appearance of your gear to a collection and never have to worry about deleting it. This will not be in 6.0, but it's something they're working on. Very happy about this.
As usual, they're planning to go for an accelerated patch cycle, but they've acknowledged that it depends on how long the next expansion takes. They say that every raid tier will get a minimum of four months, which I think is wise. (No more tragedy of Trial of the Crusader obsoleting Ulduar.) There was some comment about maybe not doing multiple raid content patches, which I don't understand, and will have to look into a little more (there will definitely be at least one more raid patch, but I wonder if they mean there might only be two raid tiers, but with another expansion coming out the following year? Would that be good or bad for the game? This is PURE SPECULATION so don't freak out about it.)
They're not finalized on the patch cycle, because they want to take into account player feedback. Sounds good (just don't overcorrect!)
There are no plans for a new battleground, but they do want to make the new version of the Nagrand arena into an arena for Arena.
Garrisons will probably be getting some tweaks and upgrades as the patches roll out. Not exactly shocking, but good news.
There aren't any class quests planned, though that is not all that surprising. Green fire was a very specific thing that Warlocks had been asking for for a long time, and the fact that it was more than just a glyph or something is really amazing (honestly, I think the green fire quest chain is just pure fan service in the best way.)
Oh, and last but certainly not least - they assure people that there will be ample time to get to level 100 before the anniversary celebrations of Molten Core and Tarren Mill v Southshore go away. I hope that means like, two months (though I assume the Core Hound mount will be account-wide.)
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