Cataclysm

[March]

I think its fucking brilliant.

Adding two new races at level 1 and opening up new race/class combos practically screams re-do.

Besides the obvious - Faster Leveling Curve - I smell a 1-20 pace like the Deathknight; not saying that they are going to custom-story-line the 1-20 curve like the DK, just that the quests and rewards may as well be /Level20.

As for 21-60, I expect them to consolidate zones and kill the useless storylines (sorry lore-whores... it is a cataclysm, after all) and blast the zones with quests a'la LK.

As the game matures, Vanilla (and TBC) have been completely eclipsed by better quest/level/play designs... other than nostalgia, there's nothing in vanilla worth saving.

Cataclysm could offer a fresh start and a way to attract new gamers (it may sound odd, but any well run business always looks to add new customers, not just milk the old).

For those already at endgame, the new content will still be new, the zones fresh and the challenges appropriate... with the added benefit of filling up the gameworld for new, returning or re-rolling gamers; the old model of creating a new zone only serves to further fracture the player base and accentuate the massive distance between me and thee.

[Paelos]

Well, as usual, I don't understand how you people like doing the same thing over again even if it's tweaked. The Onyxia thing doesn't sound ragingly awesome to me, for example. Then again, I don't ever alt anything, and the idea of starting a new character doesn't amuse me at all. I have an awesome one now, and I have no desire to hit the reset button for a fucking furry whatever.

This again is all moot, because I don't believe the expansion will be what they are suggesting. Even if it's true, it's missing something large.

[Rendakor]

Well, if you don't like alts, you don't like alts. Can't argue that. All I can say is that you're in the minority, at least of players I know.

[Sjofn]

Well, as usual, I don't understand how you people like doing the same thing over again even if it's tweaked. The Onyxia thing doesn't sound ragingly awesome to me, for example. Then again, I don't ever alt anything, and the idea of starting a new character doesn't amuse me at all. I have an awesome one now, and I have no desire to hit the reset button for a fucking furry whatever.

This again is all moot, because I don't believe the expansion will be what they are suggesting. Even if it's true, it's missing something large.

You have a very odd definition of "tweaked."

Also, there are lots and lots and lots and lots AND LOTS of people who never did Onyxia when she was endgame, let alone a bajillion times like you apparently did. Not everyone who raids now raided then. It's not even close.

[Kail]

Well, as usual, I don't understand how you people like doing the same thing over again even if it's tweaked.

The old world content may or may not be revamped, that's all speculation, I grant you.

But I guarantee, you'll be doing the same thing over and over again regardless.

[Lantyssa]

I've never done a dungeon beyond Scarlet Monestary.  (Okay, I did go through Onyxia's lair once, tagging along at 55 behind a bunch of 80s.)  As I've had to level pretty much solo my entire way up to 65, it would actually be nice to have a chance to play the game with others at my level.

Kind of like what I've been doing with a Sunday night group that is in the mid-30s Horde side.  It's been a blast.  I'd like more of it.

[bhodi]

Hopefully an unannounced feature will be sidekicking/exemplaring people. That is one of the things that's truly, truly lacking in the WoW leveling. Friend played for one afternoon without you? OH WELL GUESS YOU CAN'T LEVEL TOGETHER ANYMORE!

[Selby]

Also, there are lots and lots and lots and lots AND LOTS of people who never did Onyxia when she was endgame, let alone a bajillion times like you apparently did.

In my guild right now it is me and one other person who ever saw Ony when she was end-game (I say "that's a fucking 50dkp minus" and no one gets it).  And the sheer amount of cockblocking that was required to get attuned and go to her was not something most people put up with or PUG'ed years ago (Molten Core was considerably less, but that place can go freeze in hell).  You had to have a guild or group of friends dedicated to wanting to see the endgame to actually get there (granted, it varies from server to server and the general population, but that is how my server was).  TBC was even worse with the amount of keying, heroics, and questing you had to do to get into raids.  It's nothing like that these days and I am glad.

I still have fond memories of Ony, even if it was just a wipefest most of the time.

[Ingmar]

Well, as usual, I don't understand how you people like doing the same thing over again even if it's tweaked.

I thought you raided. 

[Triforcer]

Well, as usual, I don't understand how you people like doing the same thing over again even if it's tweaked.

I thought you raided. 

 

[Jayce]

There are huge swathes of flat, empty terrain all over the place that would need to be filled. Sure it could be bordered off but that means there's an artificial border over the area north of Stormwind, for example, that you just can't get into.  Seems to me like there would be an expansions worth of changes and new content added just to fill these areas in.

Terraining is actually trivial, an area like the one between Redridge and Burning Steppes could easily be done passably in a day by someone experienced with the tools.  It's only when you start adding small things like little painstakingly decorated campsites and towns built on ground of varying height when world construction takes a lot of work, none of which these empty expanses actually require.

The capital cities being freakish when seen from above is due to culling of some sort, "fixing" it might be as easy as selecting and deleting meshes and scripts that partition the city in the way you see it.  If you want to see something comparable the technique is used extensively in Unreal Tournament with depth-less "sheet" brushes (which are invisible in-game but not in the editor) and zoneinfo actors.

Where's your red name?


Seriously, as a developer/manager, I inwardly groan everytime someone goes off about how "easy" some particular work is, that "it will only take a week" when the real deal ALWAYS takes longer than you expect by at least double if you don't map out each individual task and estimate at that level.

/estimation rant

[Sheepherder]

Took probably 30 minutes.  A couple of points:

1. This is a flyover area, it doesn't need much detail as long as it isn't flat.
2. Blizzard's tools will be scalable to larger sizes easier, I was working with an 8x8 brush on a 256x256 map.
3. This can all be done with a fractal terrain generator, which will spit out an acceptable result in minutes with no artist involvement aside from inputting parameters.
4. I chose Warcraft III because it's a Blizzard product, I can also do this in Morrowind/Oblivion.  I'm unfortunately not experienced with the terrain generator in UT2004.
5. The little red thing in the middle is a human town hall.

[DraconianOne]

Very clever.

I raise an eyebrow that you think Blizzard will just decide not to populate those barren areas with details and leave them as "flyover areas" though. When there's every chance that the explorers are going to land and have a wander around, I very much doubt they wouldn't stick in mobs, resources, perhaps a small quest hub or two and so on. If they'll put stuff in like camps and npcs in areas that you just can't get to but can see from a flight path then how likely is it they'll just make them "flyover areas"?

Also, do you not think that there will be copious amounts of meetings and planning sessions and artwork and pre-design to decide what these areas are going to be and how they're going to look?

[AcidCat]

Bringing characters closer together instead of further spreading out the playerbase by simply adding another landmass that everyone eventually congregates in is brilliant. They have so much world that is used so little now, I think it's a great idea.

[Gobbeldygook]

On ATITD, the developers actually built terrain on the live server.  I once bitched on IRC that the patch had broken the ability for me to walk to the river from my camp without taking a huge detour.  Teppy came over and smoothed out the hill right then and there.  The tools were simple enough to use that all of the GMs had the power to world build.

[Jayce]

Took probably 30 minutes.  A couple of points:

Did you test it by walking every square inch both ways to make sure there are no holes in the geometry that you can fall through or weird clips?  Did you fly every inch of airspace to make sure there are no weird visual issues? Did you go inside the town hall to make sure no hills clip up through the floor?   Did you check it out and into source control and make sure it got into the build OK and everything works? Did you have a meeting or get an assignment as to which section of the world you're responsible for so two people don't mistakenly work on the same part of the world? These are all complexities and timesinks of working on a team that you don't get working solo, and you have to account for them.

To get a little more "polish" which of course Blizzard is known for, is there a backstory or theme to the area? Possibly tied to some obscure lore? Are there some NPCs there? Do they have names? Any livestock? A field? Let alone any pathing NPCs, a mailman to two different farmsteads?  Flavor text?  A forest that makes sense given the local farms?

It all adds up.

[Sheepherder]

I raise an eyebrow that you think Blizzard will just decide not to populate those barren areas with details and leave them as "flyover areas" though. When there's every chance that the explorers are going to land and have a wander around, I very much doubt they wouldn't stick in mobs, resources, perhaps a small quest hub or two and so on. If they'll put stuff in like camps and npcs in areas that you just can't get to but can see from a flight path then how likely is it they'll just make them "flyover areas"?

Also, do you not think that there will be copious amounts of meetings and planning sessions and artwork and pre-design to decide what these areas are going to be and how they're going to look?

Do I really need to add creep spawns to my map?  More seriously, you don't do the fancy work until the major revisions are in place, which is editing height and placing doodads like boulders and trees.  But the vast majority of these transition areas are so small that they can't even realistically hold more than a few spawns of nodes/mobs, like the transition areas in most of the TBC/Wrath zones.  And depending on how Blizzard handles their fancy shit even "detailed" decorating like building bandit camps might be easy, it's largely dependent upon whether they do stuff like package a cluttered table as a single model.

You're also severely overestimating the amount of effort that needs to go into fixing up the edge of a zone.  A single zone is probably not an onerous project for one person if he isn't trying to build a new zone on an area equal to or less than the size of elemental plateau.  So you assign zones to landscapers so that nobody is working on the same area at once, they do a circle of the bounding mountain ranges fixing it up, then you compile the changes and assign the next set.  Eventually you work your way down to one or two zones that need work next to each other.  In which case you do them sequentially; or have the developers hold off on the shared areas until the rest of the zone is done and have a single person do the overlap.

EDIT: There is also every reason to believe they would just leave them as flyover areas.  Why?  Uldum. [/discussion]


Jayce, you're missing a crucial bit of information: the vast majority of unfinished spaces are simply inaccesible mountain ranges.  It doesn't need scripting, towns, farms, or anything except a quick pass by someone who isn't fuckstupid.  The other crucial bit your missing is that you don't actually need to check for missing geometry on a heightmap, because they are by design incapable of creating a voided space except in the presence of unpatched editor/engine defects.  The "strange visual errors" I assume are a reference to the way cities display from above, which is actually an intentional performance optimization used only in the cities which effectively cannot be duplicated by accident.

[tmp]

I really don't see how anyone can with straight face claim this kind of work could be done fast, when it's Blizzard that's supposed to be doing it.

[Jayce]

One question: have you ever done this kind of work in a team environment for commercial or open source release?

Two observations: the whole point of filling in these areas is to allow flying in Azeroth.  So why do you keep saying that they are only flyover areas where no one will ever land?  And second observation: I have a friend who fell through the world in Ashenvale a year or so ago, and about a month ago I fell through the a river in Durotar and wound up in the Hinterlands.  True story.

[kildorn]

Wait, are you (sheep) really implying that if they add flying to the old world in WoW, that random generated/NPCless terrain would be acceptable?

This is a playerbase that LOVES going anywhere no matter how stupid and hanging out. It would be massively unprofessional to just coat terrain with nothing. That's not how Blizzard has gotten where they are.

edit: to my memory, Uldum is not an empty wide space you can wander around in. It's never been Finished, but it's not like it's just Ironforge, minus any NPCs.

[Kageru]

It just doesn't seem to make any sense to me. Far too much effort with too little return, inevitable cries of laziness and losing lots of existing proven content.

I could see them doing enough to fill in the existing gaps, possibly with high level content that both requires and enables flying in the old world zones, but not much more than that. The maelstrom gives them a nice huge canvas for hidden islands, goblin pirates and sunken cities given that was the center of the ancient elven kingdoms.

[Paelos]

It just doesn't seem to make any sense to me. Far too much effort with too little return, inevitable cries of laziness and losing lots of existing proven content.

Thank you. My point exactly, and I wonder WTF they are thinking as well.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Let's put it this way.

NO ONE WILL HAVE TO PAY MONEY FOR REVAMPING AZEROTH.

that's the 4.0 patch, which will be part of the game, for free.

In addition to that...there will be an expansions worth of content, some zones will be on azeroth and some will be underwater, how is that hard to understand?

[Paelos]

It's not hard to understand at all. It's the OMG TALK. It's not that fucking exciting. When they release possible talk about expansions, the last thing I expect to hear is that they are gonna rehash shit.

Plus, you don't know. WE don't know. Nobody knows. It's that awesome force of ignorance right before the announcements.

[Sheepherder]

One question: have you ever done this kind of work in a team environment for commercial or open source release?

Nothing that's been released, mostly because mapping projects that require more than one person are a complete waste of time because one of the modders is going to turn out to be a complete wanker and give up (so I don't even try beyond submitting a script or what have you).  However, conflicts in map work is handled significantly more smoothly than code is (I presume you are a coder or web developer), due to the nature of heightmaps (terrain data is stored as [x,y,z] and no [x,y] pair can have a duplicate, not can there be two [z] values, ergo you cannot use one to make vertical surfaces, the slope between any grid reference and the adjacent references is easily extrapolated as a real number, and any conflicts result in one set of data being overwritten by the other and the editor simply extrapolating where the two sets of data meet without overlap).  The compile progress is stupid easy for every program I've seen heightmaps used in, you literally just load the files and save it to a third, and in the case of Bethesda's games precedence is determined by date last edited (which can be modified by a hex editor if you want a specific load order).

For these reasons, it is best practice to build the heightmap first and then populate it with doodads.  If you want I could build you a quick example of heightmap conflicts being merged at runtime, however if you've ever played a Fallout, Oblivion, or Morrowind mod which changes the landscape you've already seen it, and it's predictably boring.

Two observations: the whole point of filling in these areas is to allow flying in Azeroth.  So why do you keep saying that they are only flyover areas where no one will ever land?  And second observation: I have a friend who fell through the world in Ashenvale a year or so ago, and about a month ago I fell through the a river in Durotar and wound up in the Hinterlands.  True story.

Because they don't actually need to be anything other than flyover areas until Blizzard decides that they may want to do something special with it?  Because it's almost as equally trivial to populate it with ore/herb nodes and call it a resource gathering area?  Really, dig out one of Blizzard's world maps and see what kind of area there is left to work with, there isn't much, and the only really large sections remaining are places like Gilneas. ()

Also, I've seen my character fall through the world on several different occasions, this does not mean the geometry is at fault (I've only ever seen it occur due to server / client desynchonization, as far as I can tell).  The biggest indicator that it is a collision problem is whether the circumstances of the failure can be reproduced, however this is not necessarily indicative of a problem with the geometry (correlation vs. causation).

Wait, are you (sheep) really implying that if they add flying to the old world in WoW, that random generated/NPCless terrain would be acceptable?

This is a playerbase that LOVES going anywhere no matter how stupid and hanging out. It would be massively unprofessional to just coat terrain with nothing. That's not how Blizzard has gotten where they are.

edit: to my memory, Uldum is not an empty wide space you can wander around in. It's never been Finished, but it's not like it's just Ironforge, minus any NPCs.

Diablo II.

There's a lot of empty places in WoW, you fly over them all the time.  People bitch about them, but they haven't quit yet.

EDIT: I should stop talking, I might inadvertently convince myself that Blizzard is actually ever going to do this.

[Mrbloodworth]

Anyone who uses the word "Easy" to describe any aspect of game development, let alone MMO development, does not know what they are talking about.

[kildorn]

What empty space have I flown over in Northrend or Outlands? There're pretty much something going on within draw distance of everything. I've yet to see "wide open empty field"

[Sheepherder]

What empty space have I flown over in Northrend or Outlands? There're pretty much something going on within draw distance of everything. I've yet to see "wide open empty field"

You keep missing the "populate with doodads" thing, which I still consider empty, because it's non-interactive.  Just like the vast majority of mountainous shelves that exist in the aforementioned expansions, and the existing flyover areas on the old world flight paths.  Incidentally, the vast majority of the completely untouched flat sections of the old world would be in mountain ranges if they were made into anything (see DraconianOne's video post).

Anyone who uses the word "Easy" to describe any aspect of game development, let alone MMO development, does not know what they are talking about.

Mythic Entertainment.

Seriously, try modding for yourself, it isn't hard at all if the available tools are good.  Jayce is in fact correct in the assertion that the overhead is often worse than the actual development, I just disagree that the overhead would be onerous in this case.

[Koyasha]

The comments about the Council of Tirisfal in the few pages of the new World of Warcraft comic seem to confirm part of the story, at least the fact that there's presumably going to be a new Guardian.  This seems pretty likely to be largely accurate, or at least partly accurate, given that.

It's interesting and a somewhat interesting shift in the story, though it comes with it's usual story stupidity as they force the story into ways the characters wouldn't really go.  I agree though that the whole emphasizing the conflict between Alliance and Horde seems stupid since unless they start really expanding pvp areas on all servers (which I don't see them doing and with good reason) any war between the two factions is a stupid backdrop that doesn't penetrate into normal gameplay.

I have no idea if I'm ever going to play WoW again, but although I find some of this content interesting (and I always wanted to make a Night Elf Mage) this doesn't really seem to get me interested in playing at all.  Of course, by the time it releases probably mid to late next year that may or may not have changed.  Although I personally hope I'm not interested at the time cause if I am it means every other game between now and then has failed to hold my interest.  Still, if I wasn't tired of the game itself, a complete revamp of Azeroth would really get me excited.

[WindupAtheist]

I agree though that the whole emphasizing the conflict between Alliance and Horde seems stupid since unless they start really expanding pvp areas on all servers (which I don't see them doing and with good reason) any war between the two factions is a stupid backdrop that doesn't penetrate into normal gameplay.

Unless you do Battlegrounds. Or Wintergrasp. Or want your black war bear. Or are hanging around a capital city when the opposite faction decides it wants black war bears. Or play on a PVP server.

[Soulflame]

On a PvP server, the world PvP is largely confined to bored overgeared players massing up to gank solos who are fighting mobs.  Sometimes the PvPers even spice it up by going after people who are close to their level, but only if their numbers/class/gear disparity guarantees them a win.  You know, how PvP usually goes in an open environment.

Sometimes you'll see fighting around a summoning stone, but it's largely pointless around raid stones, as a warlock will fly in, make a TV, and start chain summoning the raid.  Very rarely it gets more interesting around 5 man instances, mostly not though.

Not that long ago, maybe a month, an alliance guild "took over" Orgrimar for a few hours.  Nobody on the horde side noticed, or even cared.  Except that one guy who was trying to turn in his quest to Thrall.  He was kind of pissed.

I don't even regard battlegrounds to be PvP, they're mark dispensing mini-games that are then used to convert to honor so I can buy gems.  Oh boy.  Regrettably, I have to rely on my team to get three marks, rather than the usual one.  WG is a big honor dispenser.  Black war bear is largely a PvE event, it only gets interesting in Stormwind/Org.  Sometimes Ironforge.  The rest of the cities are entirely PvE, as no one even is there to put up a fight.

[Lakov_Sanite]

What exactly would you say IS pvp? short of true death it's got just about every flavor of it to some extent.

[WindupAtheist]

"I don't know why they would want to put a war in the story. Just because the game has two factions, and organized mini-games dedicated to getting them to kill each other, and rewards them for doing so, and encourages them to kill each other's faction leaders. I mean what the hell. When I signed up for World of Warcraft I expected a game about the Horde and Alliance learning to get along peacefully while teaming up to kill the REAL threat, whatever loot pinata is new this patch cycle!"

Yeah, no.

[Soulflame]

PvP that matters in some way.  Such as DAoC's relic system.  Yeah, it was flawed, but it mattered.  More importantly, it mattered in a way that didn't cripple the losing side, and gave incentive for the side without relics to try to get them back.  Of course, there were problems with it, mostly population, but it was more meaningful than anything in WoW.

None of the PvP in WoW matters, not a single bit.  At most, it inconveniences a few people because they can't do a quest turn-in to an NPC that's been PvEed down.  Or you have to run back to your corpse, and then possibly wait five minutes for Ganker McJackass to get bored with waiting for you to show back up.

AV is a hilarious example of a "PvP" BG gone utterly wrong.  The "correct" way to play it is to avoid the other side entirely, and turn it into a PvE race of "who can down towers the fastest?"  Since most people are there for rewards (honor, maybe marks) it is actually beneficial to win a mark every 10 minutes, rather than doing some "awesome" PvP turtle that turns into an hour long grind down of reinforcements... and generally ends up in being one mark anyway, if you're horde on Nightfall.

I'm on a PvP server with medium pop.  Nobody cares if Thrall is getting killed, and as for the other cities?  Forget it.  There's maybe a few RPers in Silvermoon, or lowbies in TB or UC, but no one is going to bother to roll out to try to battle it out with roughly 40 enemies who really just want to get an achievement out of the way, and won't hesitate to run you down if your name shows up red to them.

I certainly wouldn't mind WoW becoming more PvP oriented, but so far their Big Ideas have been zone bonuses no one gives a damn about, or control of a zone that gives special currency when you kill heroic bosses, and access to multiple loot pinatas.  Except they messed up and made it the best honor/hour, and everyone wanted in on it as often as possible.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Wintergrasp and to a lesser extent the spirit towers in terrokar introduced tangible benefits to wow pvp. The difference between that and daoc's keep relics? just a matter of which stats get buffed and what those benefits are but it's essentially that same system.  The thing is, in daoc that's about all there was to do and lets face it, the game was never widely popular.  At the end of the day, people just don't care that much about real world objectives and even interesting they'd get boring after a while. 

PvP purity in online games will always be niche because even for people like me who enjoy it, most simply don't want to have to deal with it every single time they log on. Whether in the form of a debuff because another realm owns the foozle or by getting ganked when they just want to finish a quest it tends to annoying after a while.

Now, that said I think wow could use a lot of improvement in their pvp, I actually liked warhammers pvp level system or how about making battlegrounds useful or giving team based objectives that multiply honor.  Maybe make the wintergrasp buff more tangibnle or pvp rewards in general but the basic systems wow already has in place are pretty much all you're ever going to expect from an online game.