◊ arison

I agree with this; the lore is there. Usually it's pretty good, too! But it is easy to skip, and let's face it, most people don't read the quest text. I was pleasantly surprised upon levelling my second 70 to discover Pathaleon pops up in Hellfire. When I saw it the first time, I had no clue who he was, and it didn't sink in, but once I'd killed him umpteen times on my main, seeing him on my alt was pretty cool. It felt to me like there wasn't much introduction to the big bosses in TBC until you're at them. Sure, people mention them, etc, but (maybe just to me) it didn't really sink in all the time. Only after killing Kael and Vashj and having seen most of the game did it start really coming together for me.

The Akama story line really also stands out, especially once you get into BT and actually free him. Teron's storyline is good, too. I think by and large TBC did well with story and continuity.

It's been noted before, too, that quest text was *much* improved in TBC vs the old world. Clearer goals, more information, etc. It's almost a night and day difference, insofar as details you need to complete a quest. In terms of how to convey this information to players... The Magister's Terrace orb is very nice. The "welcome to Shattrath, let me walk you around on a slow tour explaining boring things while you gawk at a cool new city well, not so much.

Blizzard is improving, though, that's for sure. WotLK has me as interested and excited about levelling up and doing new quests as it does new instances and raids.

 

ildon

How much more obvious can it be than: Living things need water to live. Control all the water and all living things will have to bend to your whim or die of dehydration within two weeks.

This is basic supervillain stuff, does it really need to be explained any further? Maybe if Vashj was building a giant laser in outer space and demanding $1 million it would make more sense?

 

Morlark

I really think you aren't giving Blizzard nearly enough credit. Putting mana draining tubes dotted about all of the zones wouldn't make any sense. They're in Netherstorm because that's where the mana is. Netherstorm was so badly shattered that it has practically become a part of the Twisting Nether (hence the name Netherstorm) and that's where the mana is. Putting tubes all over the place would detract from the themes of the individual zones, and would destroy the very sense of lore and background that you're claiming it's easy to engender.

While it's true that the zones sometimes feel partitioned and separate, it's done that way to allow the storylines to be experienced in full by all players. Think how many old-world questlines many people never bothered with simply because they required you to traipse up and down the length of two whole continents to retrieve the miscellaneous knick-knack for Mr. Generic NPC. With TBC there's no such disincentive to experiencing the lore and the questlines in full.

The reason it's possible to do this without having the entire world feel entirely disconnected is because there is that one central theme that you pointed out, the Burning Crusade. And funnily enough, it's the Burning Crusade that is the name and theme of the entire expansion, not Kael draining mana, or Vashj draining water. Having one central strong storyline, with a half dozen smaller storylines that you can experience and complete one at a time is, IMO, a more fun and rewarding experience than having a half-dozen storylines that continue to hound you all at the same time but which you can't complete until you reach the end of the game.

As for your last few lines, they're just entirely nonsensical. You're claiming that while designing TBC, Blizzard had some intern just sketch a random map. And he just happened to come up with the exact same map of Outland that has existed for years? No, Outland looks the way it does because that's the way it has always been. Similarly, the Sunwell and BE starting areas are placed where they are because that's where they've always been. There's a hell of a lot of lore and background to the Warcraft universe that you are blatantly ignoring, and yet you then complain that there isn't enough lore and background for you.

 

Draegan

As mentioned before I think Blizz do a fantastic job with all the quests and surrounding areas leading up to BRM and everything in side. From the Ony chains to questing in BRD. I didn't see this much of a blending of the world in TBC.

Looking for a guild.

 

Nezralix

You're oversimplifying.

Vashj could be taking all the water to use it to run turbines to power machines of production or war.

She could be taking all the water to use it to craft armies of water elementals to use against her enemies.

She could be taking all the water to starve out the natural inhabitants of Zangarmarsh so that she'll be able to use the area for her own designs, without interference.

You're suggesting that she's taking all the water just to be a bitch, and that sounds pretty dumb.

And whatever the real answer is, it's not clear at all from the game, at least to those of us who haven't really been to SSC.

 

• Adoriele

Or it could be all of the above. She's an evil, manipulative, twisted bitch. Why have only a single reason to steal all of the water, when you could have many?

 

Nezralix

I suppose that's a fair point. I guess we'll just never know for sure, and it still seems fairly cheesy (as cheesy as it would in a Superman movie).

Oddly enough, playing the Warcraft 3 expansion, you really don't get the impression that Illidan/Kael/Vashj are that thoroughly evil as much as they are outcasts in their respective ways. I suppose all of that has changed in TBC, though.

 

Meddler

Something I've been wondering about is whether this will end up being the way Blizzard handle much of the Emerald Dream should they ever get round to actually implementing that. According to lore (from memory) the Dream's a copy of the normal world in a lot of ways, so setting up various zones with a Dream/Not Dream toggle on some of their features would make for a nice consistent way of implementing this and wouldn't require a duplicate set of zones out there in order to create the described scale.

Of course given game constraints it's also entirely plausible they'll simply opt for only portraying a small subset of the Dream as a couple of entirely seperate zones.

 

Douglas

Yup, I know LotRO does it that way (for those playing at home: zones being both geographical and temporal instead of just geographical), that's where I experienced it. The "a bit too much" is subjective, of course -- for me it was entirely positive -- zones were still full, but they weren't bursting at the seams, and they were full of people of about my own power level, and we all agreed on what had happened and what hadn't happened (didn't have one person saying "oh yeah, that town burned down" and another saying "wait, that never happened"). It was pretty perfect. (If enough other aspects of LotRO had been "pretty perfect", I'd be a LotRO player right now. I found several aspects better than WoW, and several not. I do really like the "one-deep pseudo-queue" combat mechanic -- it'd do wonders for WoW players with bad lag, and I hope to see WoW make it available as a preference setting.)

I do understand that for many people it would be entirely negative. Like many people do on many topics, I'm hoping that my tastes are closer to the average user's, and that Blizzard will move in that direction. I hope they at least experiment with it with one zone somewhere.

 

Douglas

Yeah, all the "storyline" quests I encountered were actually purely soloable, and I very much like that. LotRO does have raids, but they're all along the lines of the "loot dungeon" category you're talking about, no? I think it's critical for people to be able to solo to the endgame. (in fact, I think it's important that there be enough content that nobody is ever forced to do anything but solo, but that's a separate matter.)

Offering multiple paths (raid, 5-man, solo) could work, giving different rewards (eg. titles) but all progressing the story.

One person might progress the story by taking a quest to participate in a raid (eg. kill Onyxia, 40 people). Another might progress it by taking a quest to study the aftereffects of a raid (eg. pick through Onyxa's smoking corpse to figure out what happened, soloable). When they later meet up, one might say "i'm here having an audience with lord so-and-so because I wrote an important document describing how Onyxia died" (and this person has the "Scholar of Draconic Forensics" title), and the other might say "ah, I'm one of the band that slayed her" (and this person has the "Slayer of the Black Dragonflight Brood Mother" title). Then they both high-five and go kneel before the king of Stormwind. But they had a common reality before each participated in Onyxia's death, and they had a common reality after they each participated in Onyxia's death, and they agree on the nature of Onyxia's death, and how each of them participated in it, and how it changed the world.

 

Dancing Wu Li Master

Because that's where the Blood / High Elves have lived for the past 4 games. Quel'thelas had roughly its current location in Warcraft 2 (Image:War2.jpg - WoWWiki - Your guide to the World of Warcraft).

 

• _Retribute_

Is anyone else really happy with the change in atmosphere that we've seen in the screens that have been released and the info on the new raid instances? The game is going back to the killing dragons and zombies which I love(Im not a huge fan of the Outland lore/Blood elf lore) That part is the thing I miss the most of Pre-TBC. We were pretty much slaying dragons for gold like all the medieval stories, seems a little more "realistic" than alien zombies in a temple.

 

Amera

Realistic is probably the wrong word. It's more "high fantasy" rather than more traditional fantasy. High fantasy is more "anything goes" with more sci-fi elements or just generally more abstract things, like Netherstorm. The traditional fantasy/LOTR style is really so overdone that I think they just wanted to try something a little different.

 

crimsonsentinel

Breaking: Wrath of the Lich King is in alpha - WOW Insider

So internal testing has begun. This bodes well for a fall release.

 

Liebestod

That was one of my major grips about TBC, they basically turned Illidan into a villain "just because". Not that he was a great guy to begin with, but at the end of TFT the dude just wanted to be left alone. But apparently in order to set up some really cool lore fights, Malfurion implied in vanilla WoW that Illidan had gone insane (boo!), and apparently he had declared war on Shattrath for.... no reason at all, as far as I can tell, other than that maybe he wanted Outland for himself. Provides an excuse to kill him, though, and that's what counts. Yep, GJ Blizz for knocking off the most interesting character your verse had.

 

Emeraude

The testing going on right now is Dev Alpha, it's not F&F...yet.

 

Vaccine

The simple way to do this is to incorporate the Atlas add on into the game, albeit with a forced requirement to discover things first. So I enter Sunken Temple for the first time, my mpa is blank. Each time I kill a boss, that bosses section is added to the map (and possibly the loot it dropped) and from then on I can view that boss and part of the map. Once fully explored you could then view an instance map by clicking the world map button and move up and down levels, with ramps and stairs marked that take you to the next level. Think Zelda dungeon map with bosses marked on.

 

Talgog

That was Tigole's "excuse" for Burning Crusade, and it isn't really that accurate.

High fantasy means other world/universe from ours.

High fantasy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Low fantasy means in our world, a lost epoch of our world, something like that.

Low fantasy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It is true that high fantasy does not have any real "constraints" on what it could be as a genre, so it does include things like Star Wars, Warhammer 40K and Burning Crusade, but saying "Oh, TBC is whacked out with spaceships and rockets and other wild stuff because we decided to put some high fantasy in Warcraft" is dumb. Warcraft is the epitome of high fantasy - you have an entirely separate, fantastic world with a very high magic level, quests, dragons, and mighty heros struggling to stop all manner of world-consuming evils.

 

Treesurgeon

In a way, the nature of Wow is such that it holds your hand and force feed you alot. There's a ton of content (though some would argue this point) and raid zones already sitting there waiting to be attacked. Granted, the first guilds that got into SSC/TK and found it buggy, broken and all that noise.

With original Wow, you had alot more time to stop and smell the roses. Now, its a world of "instant quest text" Wowhead to find the exact coordinates of the quest item/mob, onto the next thing.

So alot of the built in story is there but glossed over and passed by many of the players in thier rush to scramble to the pinnacle or keep those directly in front of them for getting too far away.

People like shortcuts. Leveling guides sell. Gold selling is big business. Wowhead, Alla, Thot are heavily traveled. And its incredibly easy to get caught up in it because it has to an extent, become the culture....a very fast culture. How favorably do the accomplished raiders and PvPers view or talk about the true casual player? (as opposed to the whining and bitching type that wants something for nothing) They knda get lumped in together.

So we miss alot of it. We want the new fantastic stuff plastered all over the front page of news sites...they want to log into EJ forums and sound like they know what they are talking about..... not the next level 45 blue quest reward on our 4th alt. Everything is just a a means to get there. Not absolutely but it is certainly a driving force behind the culture of the game.

 

Starfire

Are we really going back to the "space doesn't feel like wow" argument?

I mean come on, from the very first Warcraft we had the orcs, from Draenor, attacking Azeroth. We've always had the Burning Legion looming. We always knew there was a wide array of planets out there, obviously some of them are going to be a bit more (or less) technologically advanced. Or magically.

Mages can teleport, why cant the Exodar (or Dalaran, apparently). Essentially Exodar was just a really powerful teleport, crossing planets, rather than crossing a continent/ocean.

 

Nezralix

The space angle is fine, and you can rationalize it however you like, but I think a lot of people will still be very happy to be getting back to Azeroth, and getting back to battling the Scourge.

My biggest gripe is more that Outlands looks like it's going to disintegrate within a year or two anyways, so what's the point?

 

Dancing Wu Li Master

I started playing 4 months after release, and at that stage Thottbot knew the answers to all the quest questions, and there were instant text mods. It's not changed in the slightest, from my perspective.

 

Liebestod

Actually, the Legion provides an interesting example of the evolution of WoW. In WCI and WCII they were just your usual classic demon alliance from Hell, kinda like Doom or something. In WCIII they became more of a universe-roaming alliance of corrupt races, not exactly hellish anymore but still close. Then in WoW they keep this image, but are given a cyberpunk architecture scheme and are now fodder mobs rather than special, powerful fear-inspiring creatures. And they're no longer the supreme villains of the Warcraft universe anymore, because you get to fuck up both their leaders in the first expansion. Keep in mind that Blizzard said that the reason they didn't put the Legion in WCIII (which was originally going to have 6 races) as playable was because they wanted Legion units to be special and powerful. No such deference in WoW, however.

Also, what bothers me about TBC's sci-fi fantasy or whatever you want to call it isn't simply that it's "out of place" in the Warcraft universe, but it'll probably come off as out of place in the overall Warcraft continuity. There's a reason why videogames tend to save their cool, alien environments for the end.... because it gradually ratches up the sense that the player has gone far beyond killing boars in Elwynn. So now we're going to be told "good job holding back the Burning Legion in the warzone of Shadowmoon Valley, now you are finally ready to face the murlocs of the Borean Tundra." Keep this going for 10 levels... I think people are going to get the distinct feeling that TBC felt like it should have come after WotLK, really, unless they make all the WotLK monsters ridiculously huge or something ("go bring me 30 blue dragon spines.")

I do keep in mind, however, that TBC was originally supposed to feature several zones in worlds beyond Outland. Obviously they didn't make it in for release, but I could see Blizzard revisiting these further down the line, and have some really cool endgame environments waiting. But it'll be quite a while, I'm sure.

 

Moogul

That's something that I miss. I seem to remember that the original, original trailer for TBC (way back when it was first announced) talked about how Outland was like a refugee ground for all these races fleeing the Legion, and that in TBC we were going to take the fight back to them, and we'd travel through portals (Ner'zhul's, presumably) to other worlds where the 'Burning Crusade' was taking place in earnest. It had this really cool extra-planar galaxy-spanning war feel, and I thought it was a pretty cool and brave direction to take the game in.

Then it's released, and we get Illidan. Now, Illidan is cool (though I don't think he's 'the most interesting character in Warcraft' as some people claim), and I don't *mind* him being the focus of the expansion (along with his henchmen Kael and Vashj), but it seems that they rather miss-sold the 'burning crusade' aspect. There's the invasion points through Outland, which are pretty cool, and certainly when you first come to Hellfire and see the fight at the portal you've got this nice war, but then the whole thing ends up being scryer+aldor vs Illidan, rather than Naaru + Everyone else vs. Legion.

Out of interest, does anyone still have a link to the original TBC trailer? Is it up on the main site still? (I can't check right now, still at work and worldofwarcraft.com is blocked)

 

flyingtoastr

I think this is the one you're talking about.

If not, there are a few more E3 videos up on youtube.

EDIT: It seems the videos are still up on the actual WoW site as well, here.

Divine Favor still costs mana.