Q u o t e:
Can you open up non-CoT Hyjal one of these days? It's sort of silly to have such a massive zone inaccessible. Hell, even if there's nothing added. Just allow the zone to be opened /shrug.
I've seen this brought up a few times, but we don't plan to implement things just for the sake of it. Anytime we develop something we hold it to a high quality standard and plan to do it right.
Q u o t e:
Yeah i've played this game since Vanilla WoW, just the map has changed so much i can never remember much of how it used to be
It has changed numerous times over the 4.5 years the game has been out. Sometimes we get new ideas and just need to do some land shaping to make it fit, nothing big.
Q u o t e:
That's the thing, though. Anybody that's used the WoW Map Viewer can tell you that Hyjal, as far as terrain and doodads go, is completely finished and bug-free. All you need is a little bit of time to drop in some buildings and NPCs (and I know it's not THAT difficult to do that, seeing how you guys use a beefed up version of the WCIII Map Editor for creating WoW zones).
In all honesty, current-day Hyjal sounds like a perfect candidate for a content patch.
How would it fit into the story? Why are you there? Why are the NPCs there? Who is there? What do you accomplish in the zone? Where are the flight paths? Where are the horde/alliance towns? Is it needed? What does it add to the game?
Figuring out the answers to these questions and then implementing these answers takes a lot more work than you are giving them credit for.
[ Post edited by Bornakk ]
Q u o t e:
So if I were to answer all those questions for you, would you consider adding Hyjal then?
The key word here is "consider" - we consider a lot of things on a regular basis, they may just take years to actually be released. Obviously we worked on Hyjal back when World of Warcraft first came out, so technically you can probably say we've been considering it for over 5 years now. The years will keep adding up on this until we feel it is right.
So what does this tell us? Well, I see two implications:
a) Despite what some may have you believe, Blizzard is not simply enacting a Master Plan that they've had in mind since Vanilla WoW concerning what content they'll have in game - things like Azuremyst Island were not in the Vanilla WoW map because they had not been envisaged yet. To me this is obvious but it's a subject of reasonable discussion.
b) (Present) Hyjal is not being worked on at the moment. This might not be a surprise, but it's an interesting reconfirmation since arguably not working on Hyjal indicates that Blizzard isn't working on the whole cluster of content that would probably be associated with Hyjal... *cough*Emerald Dream*cough* But I'm not going to break my no-speculation resolution that easily, just throw that out there.
One thing I'd like to see on this blog at some point are a series of posts which attempt to piece together how various unimplemented areas such as Hyjal and Azshara Crater and Uldum and Grim Batol, etc. etc. have had their plans changed throughout the development process. But I'm not going to half-ass it off the top of my head... it'd require a fair amount of data-gathering and so it'll have to be saved for a later date.
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