The new Horde race for the World of Warcraft game, blood elves, will become available in next year’s expansion, and it was previewed by Blizzard Entertainment at BlizzCon in Anaheim this weekend.
A guildmate of mine pointed out that waiting in the 90 minute line to play the Burning Crusade expansion wasn’t necessary, since we could wait for two minutes at the Nvidia booth to play it there. So we did.
Pregenerated blood elves — mage, warlock, warrior and priest — were set up on all the demo machines at BlizzCon, and we each gave Blood Elves a whirl. Only one quest was initially available on Sunstrider Isle, although I suspect people before us did most of the level 1 quests. The one quest available was to kill mana worms — think tiny versions of the flying dragon snake thing in “The Never Ending Story.” But running around the island, we got to see hostile miniature treants, a banished blood elf warlock (hostile) and some small great cats, also hostile.
The blood elves are definitely not simply repaints of the existing night elf models. Their features are more rounded, their ears stick straight up, and their bodies are less muscular. All of their newbie gear has a more stylized look, including kukri-inspired daggers and swords, and newbie robes with gold ornamentation. They jump in sort of a flying martial arts pose and instead of sometimes flipping, they sometimes spin instead. Their dance is a 1950s style shimmy of the hips combined with rubbing a toe on the ground — I think that might be called the Mashed Potato, I’m not sure. It was too loud to hear any vocal emotes, if they’ve even been added at this point.
Their innate mana-draining ability is pretty impressive against level 1 and level 2 foes, but only the silence ability — which has a significant cooldown period — is likely to be useful past level 20 or so.
Sunstrider Isle looks sort of like I’d imagined: Take night elf art and architecture, rip out all the nature-based motifs, and replace them with a strong reliance on magic. Objects like bookshelves float or even rotate in the air. There are small translocation gates used to get around between floating platforms. Pet Siamese cats are everywhere. Life for survivors of the Scourge attacks on Quel’Thalas looks to be quite comfortable, even if they’re effectively just living in a small gilded cage.
The one quest text I was able to read specifically mentioned the destiny of the blood elves is on Outland.
Having seen the new race creation process through the alpha period, from this brief glimpse — only one quest, and I wasn’t able to get to the zoneline for the next zone, if it was even open, with a level 1 blood elf dodging angry treants — the polish and quality looks comparable.
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Jenn took a ton of pictures at BlizzCon:
Despite the creativity and work that went into these costumes — the murloc activist had a hilarious moment at one of the panels, when he railed at the developers for giving away a free in-game murloc pet to BlizzCon attendees — there were probably fewer than 50 folks in costume out of the thousands in the Anaheim Convention Center.
Blizzard Entertainment developers held a candid discussion of the bumpy learning process experienced when making player versus player battlegrounds for the World of Warcraft Friday afternoon at BlizzCon in Anaheim, including a discussion of two scrapped battlegrounds.
Alterac Valley was originally going to be a persistent — not instanced, in other words — and quests and non-player-character-driven content was added to give players something to do for the times when no one from the opposite faction was around. When the team ended up making the battleground instanced, the quests and NPCs remained, but Alterac Valley, as it was, had quests that took players away from trying to achieve victory conditions, had a high risk of player death due to NPCs instead of players and had several zone design issues that made achieving objectives harder than they needed to be.
Azshara Crater, which was to be the second battleground, was very similar to Alterac Valley, but given all the problems that had cropped up with the battleground, work on it was stopped, although its entrances are still located in the game.
Following the success of the “lunchtime battleground,” Warsong Gulch, which featured a PVP standard, Capture the Flag, Blizzard looked at using another PVP staple, single-elimination Deathmatch play. The battleground, Gurubashi Catacombs, was to be located beneath the Gurubashi Arena, in pens where dangeous animals were once kept.
But the 5 versus 5 single elimination match invariably turned into melee classes killing spellcasters immediately, which was great fun for the melee classes, but absolutely no fun for the casters: “Of course you’re going to kill the guy in the dress.”
The issue could not be resolved, the designers felt, without a fundemental class revision that would make every class equally able to survive an attack by any other class.
The battleground was scrapped, but group duels might be made a feature of the game independent of battlegrounds at some point in the future instead.
Learning from the mistakes of their past, Blizzard has plans for future and present battlegrounds:
They are looking at a variety of ways to get battlegrounds to the critical mass needed to start a battleground more easily.
They are looking into ways that, when possible, the game will automatically match up opponents more evenly.
They will attempt to even out the honor gained per hour in each of the battlegrounds, so that people will choose a battleground based on what they enjoy, rather on where they will get the most honor.
Battlegrounds will begin to have some sort of impact on the world outside of the zone.
More improvements to the queueing system will be coming.
Groups will automatically form when players enter a battleground.
Siege weapons are currently not being worked on, since they couldn’t be made cool enough, but will be worked on again in the future.
General PVP changes will be coming later, with announcements to follow.
And in the 1.9 patch, multiple battleground queues can be joined at once time, and those who /AFK out early will be assessed a penalty on their times for the next queues.
Blizzard Entertainment’s Rob Pardo presented an overview of the classes in the World of Warcraft, addressed questions about what raising the level cap to 70 in the Burning Crusade expansion would mean for characters and fielded audience questions Friday afternoon at BlizzCon in Anaheim.
For starters, he noted that on “normal” servers, players with level 60 characters respecced their talents an average of 2.8 times. On player-versus-player servers, the average was 3.6 times.
With the understanding that talents are important to players, Pardo said that they would be extending the talent trees up 10 points, so that players would have to choose between putting their additional 10 points in previously available talents, or going after new 41 point abilities.
But those won’t be the only new abilities player characters will be getting: Look for new types of abilities or spells between 60 and 70 — “probably four or five new spells, per character class” — and in time, the team would be going back and adding more new abilities between 40 and 60.
Also look for more racial differentiation within a class, similar to how priests have a special spell based on their race.
Paladins wanting a break from buffing, buffing, buffing on raids will be able to buff all the members of a class at once on a raid in the 1.9 patch.
Fire mages concerned about the high fire resistance on many current raid targets (although Pardo said fire resistance wouldn’t be an issue in the next two raid dungeons added to the game, the Ruins of Ahn’Quiraj and the Temple of Ahn’Qiraj) have some help coming in the form of the Spell Penetration ability on equipment, which will allow a spellcaster a better chance of penetrating an enemy’s spell resistances.
And Invisibilty, a spell that was removed from mages during the beta test, will be coming back in a significantly altered form as a post-60 spell in the Burning Crusade expansion.
Blizzard Entertainment’s Chris Metzen delved deep into the lore of Azeroth, Draenor and the rest of the Warcraft universe in a discussion with Blizzard gamers Friday at BlizzCon.
He started by discussing the just-announced expansion to the World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade.
“It’s the proper name of the ongoing war of the Burning Legion to snuff out all life,” he said. “The Burning Legion has wiped out thousands, tens of thousands of worlds.”
The only world to ever survive being in the demonic Legion’s sights is Azeroth — and the world has done it twice now, most recently at the climax of Warcraft III: The Reign of Chaos.
“The Legion has thrown themselves against this planet twice now,” Metzen said. Recognizing their problems with Azeroth, the Legion is changing tactics as a result: “The Burning Legion is going full court press on every other world out there. And the heroes of Azeroth are being called into the void to fight against the Cruasade.”
Although there are numerous other areas Blizzard could have chosen for this expansion — Metzen specifically mentioned Northrend, Undermine and the South Seas — the Burning Crusade’s Outland focus was chosen because it reinforced an important theme of WoW.
“At this point, we really want to stress that this is a cosmic conflict.”
(Northrend is also out for another reason: The expansion is only raising the level cap to 70 this tie. “I mean, come on. Arthas at level 70? No.”)
But there’s a wrinkle in the heroes’ fight against the Burning Legion. Illidan Stormrage, licking his wounds after his battle with the Lich King, has shut down all of the dimensional portals originally opened by the orc warlock Nerzhul to other worlds. Illidan is afraid the Legion will find him through the portals.
“We’re going to Outland to reopen these gateways and take the fight to the Burning Legion,” Metzen said. “Of course, Illidan is not going to be happy about this.”
Blood Elves were chosen as the Horde expansion race in the Burning Crusade because designers were thrilled with how well Samwise had redesigned the classic wood elves with the night elves. And they knew that, “one day, high elves are going to have to get a facelift, too.
“I don’t think anyone has abused high elves to this degree,” Metzen said.
Players surprised that the Blood Elves would have any interest in joining the Horde don’t know everything that’s going to lead the groups to joining up.
“Magic is absolutely corrupting. You shouldn’t play with it.” In the wake of the destruction of the Sunwell, the high elves of Quel’Thalas turned to demonic sources of magical energy to feed their magical addiction (which was thanks to thousands of years of constant exposure to magic, even for the high elves who didn’t practice magic themselves). But messing with “fel energy” is scary stuff, and it frightened the other races in the Alliance. “Dwarves and humans don’t want to hang around them. They’re not returning their phone calls.”
But the Blood Elves “could care less, they’re going to do whatever they have to do.” And thrilled by this new, seemingly endless supply of powerful magical energy, the Blood Elves have a unique take on the shattered planet of Draenor, now known as Outland. “They view Outland as an Eden. … Their homeland is great, but Outland is where their destiny is.”
The Blood Elves will leverage their relationship with Sylvanas, leader of the Forsaken and the former Ranger-General of Quel’Thalas. And more importantly, the Blood Elves will not come to the Horde, hat in hand.
“The Blood Elves are going to bring something to the table the Horde can’t do without.”
Look for the lead-up to the Burning Crusade to play out across World of Warcraft servers in the coming months.
The Alliance heroes of Warcraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal, who sealed themselves on Draenor as Nerzul’s dimensional portals tore the planet apart — and whose statues can be seen in the Valley of Heroes in Stormwind — will play a major part in the Burning Crusade.
“They’re still alive, and they’re kicking ass. They’re BAD. ASS. There’s a reason their statues are in Stormwind.”
The development team also fielded questions from the audience.
The two Hakkars that appear in Warcraft lore was Metzen’s fault, he said.
“The answer is my bad.”
He liked the name when he read it in drafts for Richard Knaak’s War of the Ancients novels, but forgot where he heard it, and when it came time to give the Soulflayer the Zul’Gurub trolls worship, the name came right back out.
“That happens daily” to him, he said. “‘Dude, there’s already a Luke Skywalker.'”
Lingering quest lines, including the intrigue with the Grimtotem Tauren and the fate of the King of Stormwind will be resolved, although the team couldn’t promise an immediate resolution. But things are happening: The King of Stormwind will be gone from the island prison many players have found him in when the 1.9 patch goes live.
“We know there are some unfinished quest lines out there that we’ll get back to,” Pat Nagel said.
The racial lifequests talked about for each race before the game was released have been scrapped. The idea had apparently been to give each player a storyline that would take them from humble beginnings to heroism, but while the quests felt great in a single player context, they didn’t work when thousands of undead were dealing with feelings of abandonment, or everyone was searching for their long-lost father, and so on.
“We didn’t want to make this canned story for everyone,” Metzen said.
Players wanting more interaction with the dragons of Azeroth will get it soon. Anachronus, the dragon guarding the Caverns of Time, will begin giving players quests in the 1.9 patch.
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