3.2 Previews

I've been negligent with posting the stuff everyone already knows, but here it is:

Bornakk Blue Poster

# 0 - Enter the Crusaders’ Coliseum - June 17, 2009, 6:06 pm In the next major content patch, the construction of the Crusaders’ Coliseum on the Argent Tournament grounds will be complete, and it will hold new challenges for players. We’d like to share some details on the new dungeon, which represents the next tier of content for the game, but keep in mind that this is still in development and subject to change. The Crusaders’ Coliseum will include: New epic 10- and 25-player raid dungeon with five encounters, with each encounter being unlocked one week at a time A more intuitive structure for harder encounters. This raid dungeon will have four different versions: 10-player, 25-player, 10-player Heroic, and 25-player Heroic, with each one using a separate lockout. Introduction of the Crusaders’ Tribute! Each of the Heroic mode instances has a new tribute system that will limit players on the number of attempts they get in the Coliseum each week to present a greater challenge for the most battle-hardened heroes. Additional rewards can be earned depending on the number of attempts left in the tribute run each week when the final boss is defeated. New 5-player dungeon with three encounters that will include Champion’s Seals as each one is defeated New tier of armor and weapons that are modeled with Alliance- or Horde-specific themes

Also, there's an "Under Development" page for new Argent Tournament content: Underdev link - Argent Tournament

Bornakk on Hyjal

I held off on posting this for a little while because I didn't want to make new posts every time Bornakk said something (or edit old ones), but since there hasn't been an update to the thread featured in the previous post in several hours, it might be prudent to discuss this now. So here are a few additional posts by Bornakk in that thread:

Bornakk Blue Poster

# 38 - Blizzard: Azeroth zones underdevelopment? - May 28, 2009, 11:04 am 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.

Bornakk Blue Poster

# 43 - Blizzard: Azeroth zones underdevelopment? - May 28, 2009, 11:12 am 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.

Bornakk Blue Poster

# 45 - Blizzard: Azeroth zones underdevelopment? - May 28, 2009, 11:15 am 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 ]

Bornakk Blue Poster

# 70 - Blizzard: Azeroth zones underdevelopment? - May 28, 2009, 11:39 am 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.

Update for Argent Tournament Dailies

Context: After completing the Valiant dailies for all factions at the Argent Tournament, that set of quests becomes unavailable. Some players remarked that it cut into returns from dailies, and the Blues have stated that there is a fix/workaround in progress to remedy this. However, Bornakk stated:

"Since this change will require a fair amount of work it won't happen until patch 3.2. And yes, we have more changes planned than just letting you do the valiant quests, a lot more changes really."

This matches with other statements made since 3.1 that there would be expansions to the Argent Tournament in 3.2, including the Coliseum announcements.

Bornakk on Unfinished Content

Not related to any specific lore, but some insight into the content development process:

What this question is really relating to is something that happens during development of any content so I will try and give a quick example that hopefully makes sense.

Lets say we start out with 10 (arbitrary number for this example) things we want to implement. During the development we cut out 2 of them that we feel weren't as cool as we originally we wanted, then later on, we cut 2 other things because we don't have the time for them and prefer to focus on the other 6 items. Just because these 4 things were cut doesn't mean they aren't in the game files in some primitive form (e.g. blank spots of land), they are just things that players don't have access to.

Any content that gets cut is something we may end up taking a look at it again in the future, but only if we feel it is a good time and will be a be a really positive addition to the game. We are totally fine with putting it off for years/indefinitely (hi Ravasaur trainer!) if necessary too especially when there are new ideas that we feel are better and will add more to the game, even if it means going in an Outland-ish direction.

Bornakk on Tyr

Source:

Tyr went on a path he felt he must follow... whether or not we learn about this journey remains to be seen.

Just to refresh: Tyr was a Watcher referred to in the Storm Peaks quests who was mysteriously absent from anything related to Ulduar. Whether Blizzard just "forgot" about him is unknown, but at least Bornakk was nice enough to imply that he hasn't been retconned out of existence.