This is the first plausible BlizzCon rumor I came across.
Most "leaks" talk primarily about plot instead of features. This one includes a few things that make it on point.
It references things already known from data mining the client.
It's pretty boring in terms of scope.
Expansion of support DPS as a role to another class. A new spec instead of retooling enhancement is similar to what they did with the druid to split Feral.
Bringing back an old idea because their new ones suck (gems).
The torghast-inspired feature is what seals this for me. They are on record saying that they can't respond in under two years when players like a feature like the mage tower or have torghast feedback due to how they plan and work concurrently on expansions. (Which sounds bonkers from a business perspective.)
Perhaps the most interesting thing to discuss generally is the notion that they might add a new secondary stat ("modifier") to the game. Would be interested in what people would like to see. A lot of their design space is consumed by haste at the moment since it affects resource generation and casting and other things too. I would hope that they don't add another stat that does different things for each class.
WoW Stormfall
Max level is 80
New island continent with 6 zones and a giant hole in the middle. Capital city is a vertical Ironforge named Khaz Algar.
No new races and class. More customizations and support spec for shaman.
Open world faction free content. Warmode is open PvP.
Big feature is Exploration. Torghast like content where you explore themed dynamic dungeons. This time, it is infinite and has a leaderboard. Gives item for Great Vault and a lot of cosmetic.
Keyforging allow you to add modifiers to your key like Bloodlust has a 5 minutes CD but now enrages the nearby enemies.
Dragonriding for gryphons, hippogryph, wyvern and bats. Renamed into Sky Mastery.
Itemization revamped. New item modifier. Old gem system is back.
Spell cosmetic. You can disable them.
Hearthstone
Monk class
Chi (store mana between turns)
Simmer keyword (card improves each turn it remains in hand)
Last edited by J1M on October 16th, 2023, 14:44, edited 2 times in total.
Expansion of support DPS as a role to another class. A new spec instead of retooling enhancement is similar to what they did with the druid to split Feral.
They could add drummer or officer to warrior (uses shouts or music to buff up other players), or bard to rogue, or Blood Mage to mage (sucks HP from enemies and redistributes it to allies, removes dots from allies and gives them to enemies).
The announcement of Hearthstone's new Wild West expansion invalidates the above rumor, but suggests another possible outcome.
Another game had its announcement before BlizzCon like this: Heroes of the Storm. The year they stopped working on it and put it into maintenance mode, lol.
I know a lot of Diablo 4 streamers who are coping like crazy are hoping for an expansion announcement.. the game has been out for like a few months.. they already want an expansion lol.
I know a lot of Diablo 4 streamers who are coping like crazy are hoping for an expansion announcement.. the game has been out for like a few months.. they already want an expansion lol.
Brood War launched 9 months after StarCraft. Lord of Destruction launch 12 months after Diablo II.
Also, expansions were announced for Diablo 3 and 4 before those games launched. So basically the only thing to show or not is a CGI trailer.
I know a lot of Diablo 4 streamers who are coping like crazy are hoping for an expansion announcement.. the game has been out for like a few months.. they already want an expansion lol.
Brood War launched 9 months after StarCraft. Lord of Destruction launch 12 months after Diablo II.
Also, expansions were announced for Diablo 3 and 4 before those games launched. So basically the only thing to show or not is a CGI trailer.
Season 2 basically already redesigned the entire game from the ground up when it comes to uniques and paragon boards.
If the New expansion is just like a new area and a class.. it's gonna be pretty disappointing.
The real issue with Diablo 4 is it's boring and there's nothing to do. This expansion needs to be a new fucking game.
(The Blizzard CEO also said "You won't need to wait as long for Diablo 5 as you did for Diablo 4" like a month after it released.. they were already discussing Diablo 5 development before the beta ended rofl)
Last edited by Shillitron on October 19th, 2023, 20:32, edited 2 times in total.
No new class or race. Instead the remaining class/race restrictions are removed. To lower art costs new races don't get custom forms like druids and fat humans did but they add some additional moonkin colors.
Partial world revamp repairing a lot of Cata damage. Theme of exploring the hidden corners of Azeroth.
New land mass in the form of filling out ignored areas of the world map and extensive underground caverns (Blizzard's take on the "Underdark") that you dive into with a flying mount to access.
Rogue gallery of troggs, kobolds, earthen, elementals, and silithid.
"Torghast 2.0" dungeon experience feature.
Solo-queue rated battlegrounds.
"Player housing 0.1" as an additional set of slots to collect transmog appearances for.
TLDR: They are out of ideas and tried "dragons". Now they will try "dungeons".
Last edited by J1M on October 24th, 2023, 21:12, edited 1 time in total.
Here's my totally unrealistic wish list for getting me interested in raiding again.
A single raiding difficulty. I don't care if the race to world first is over in 20 minutes.
Fewer mechanics per boss.
Layout with multiple hallways to the end so there's always at least 3 bosses available. Allows for more niche boss designs because every guild doesn't need to complete the vehicle encounter to finish the raid.
Combat revamp. More significant DPS niches. For example: melee, mid-range skirmisher, ranged artillery, pet master, buffer. Difficulty can come from different roles relying on each other and coordination instead of complexity and stimulus overload.
Spec revamp. Every class has at least two combat roles. Prune or change specs that do the same group niche for a class.
Warrior: Fury becomes a mid-range skirmisher. Basically the same except throwing weapons instead of swinging them.
Death Knight: Unholy officially becomes a ranged pet class. Leans really hard into the necromancer fantasy so players stop asking for a necromancer class.
Hunter: Beast master stays a ranged pet class. Survival stays melee. Marksmanship as the 100% pet-free artillery option.
Shaman: Enhancement becomes a spec that hands out strong group buffs as it was always intended to be, similar to the augmentation evoker.
Evoker: Additional body types that players actually want.
Rogue: Combat becomes a mid-range skirmisher like Fury. Assassination and Subtlety merged into a single melee spec. Tell players they will have the best abilities from both so they don't cry about it.
Druid: Class has too many buttons. Remove some.
Monk: Cannot gain any additional experience points. Exclusive quest chain that instructs them to return to the wandering isle that rewards a level boost token on completion. Stagger mechanic salvaged as a new tanking stat so nothing of value is lost.
Demon Hunter: Spell glyphs to fix the color of abilities inherited from covenants.
Mage: Arcane becomes a healing spec similar to Discipline utilizing arcane wards and time magic. Fire and Frost replaced with a new Elemental spec that combines both elements. Twenty fire spells is not interesting.
Warlock: Affliction spell range and cast times reduced so it can fill the mid-range skirmisher role as a caster.
Priest: Pointless Shadow revamp because shadow gets a revamp every expansion.
Player housing doesn't make a lot of sense in a murderhobo game. The entire theme of the game is around being a psychotic homeless man. Having an actual home would largely undermine that.
Player housing doesn't make a lot of sense in a murderhobo game. The entire theme of the game is around being a psychotic homeless man. Having an actual home would largely undermine that.
It gets players more invested into the game, help selling the fantasy that they "live" there. Acquiring furniture and materials and then building your house can be a fun endgame activity in of itself. Personally I like AFKing at my house in FF14. During MoP I would hearthstone back to my farm at Hallfhill at the end of a session.
Last edited by Val the Moofia Boss on October 28th, 2023, 02:06, edited 1 time in total.
No new class or race. Instead the remaining class/race restrictions are removed. To lower art costs new races don't get custom forms like druids and fat humans did but they add some additional moonkin colors.
Partial world revamp repairing a lot of Cata damage.Theme of exploring the hidden corners of Azeroth.
New land mass in the form of filling out ignored areas of the world map and extensive underground caverns (Blizzard's take on the "Underdark") that you dive into with a flying mount to access.
Rogue gallery of troggs, kobolds, earthen, elementals, and silithid.
"Torghast 2.0" dungeon experience feature.
Solo-queue rated battlegrounds.
"Player housing 0.1" as an additional set of slots to collect transmog appearances for.
TLDR: They are out of ideas and tried "dragons". Now they will try "dungeons".
/ 5
Edit: Panel today implied solo queue rated battlegrounds too, lol.
Last edited by J1M on November 7th, 2023, 00:05, edited 2 times in total.
They brought Chris Metzen out to announce three new expansions and try to spin them a planned out trilogy, called The Worldsoul Saga. Except Blizzard had already repeatedly stated in the past that they always plan two expansions ahead of the current one. So Blizzard hasn't actually changed their development philosophy, the only difference is that they are telling us what's coming down the line and telling us how they view their expansion stories has interconnected rather than leaving it to players to infer (like the overarching Sylvanas/death storylines of Legion -> BFA -> Shadowlands).
Once you look at the actual content of the expansion, it appears to be the most lackluster one yet. You only get four questing zones at launch. That's in line with the last two expansions, but at least Shadowlands had 2 more launch zones with the new starter zone of Exile's Reach, and the Maw endgame area, and Dragonflight had the Forbidden reach starter zone (which was later turned into an endgame rare hunt zone in a patch). The War Within doesn't appear to even have a starter zone or an endgame zone. You only get the four questing zones, period. (Remember when we used to get 8 zones per expansion?). And then outlook of patch content is bleak. The last two expansions only had two major content patches each, and one of them didn't even introduce a whole new zone. 9.1 introduced a small fraction of a new zone in Korthia, which you could run from one end to the other in under a minute. And now Chris Metzen is saying that Blizzard going to pump expansions out faster. The last time Blizzard attempted annual expansions, we got WoD, an expansion that only had one major content patch. We will be very lucky if we even get 2 major content patches for TWW (again, remember when we used to get 4 or 3 per expansion?). Perhaps only one.
Next, we have content and features. A key selling point of WoW expansions was experimental new content and features.
Mists of Pandaria introduced scenarios, which was short, objective based three man instances. MoP also introduced scaling raid sizes, so you could have any number of people in your between 10 and 30 and people could leave or join at will.
Warlords of Draenor introduced garrisons, an unfinished but unique attempt at player housing with an RTS base building flavor. It also introduced Ashran, an ambitious attempt at a non-instanced PvP war zone like Alterac Valley.
Legion introduced mythic+, which is an alternative form of endgame progression where you speedrun dungeons on a scaling difficulty with additional, randomized obstacles added called affixes. Mythic+ also made old expansion dungeons relevant again. Legion also introduced artifact weapons as another form of character progression, and also had a lot of class exclusive content.
Battle for Azeroth introduced Island Expeditions, another variant of scenarios from MoP but this time more refined and more difficult. Personally I quite enjoyed island expeditions and preferred queuing for them to reach level cap since I found the levelling questlines to be mediocre. Island Expeditions were also an alternative form of PvP as well. BFA also introduced Warfronts, an attempt at portraying huge battles, though they wound up being too easy and there was no danger that you might lose. The final BFA patch introduced corruptions, where you would get gear that had detrimental effects, which added an extra layer of character building and challenge.
Shadowlands introduced Torghast, which was a roguelike dungeon with a randomized layout. Shadowlands also introduced Covenants, which were four new factions that you could join.
Etc.
Dragonflight was the first expansion not to introduce new, experimental content and features at launch. I don't consider dragonriding (aka griffon riding copied from GW2) to be content. It's a travel mechanic that gets you to the content... which is the same as before. The 10.1 patch did add a new universal item upgrade system where you could obtain currency from any current expansion activity to upgrade the ilevel of your current expansion gear.
But what does The War Within bring? The only new thing is Delves, which sounds like 5 man scenarios, or just dungeons. The only thing of note here is that you get an NPC party member. WoW has experimented with advanced NPCs before, such as in the WoD proving grounds or the NPCs in the BFA island expeditions. At first I thought that Warbands would allow players to build parties/raids of NPCs like in Guild Wars 1, Star Trek Online, Final Fantasy 11, etc, but no, it's just a few QoL features like sharing reps across all of your characters.
This is the second expansion where is nothing interesting about this expansion in terms of content. I've seen this happen before with other MMOs like GW2 or FFXIV, where eventually the devs just stop experimenting with new content and features, and you just get the same cookie cutter formula and eventually the quality and quantity declines over time, until you get to today where the latest GW2 and FF14 expansions are embarrassingly light on meat. I wonder if Blizzard too has finally ran out of creativity, and from now on expansions are just going to be 4 new zones, a new raid, and maybe a reskinned race.
So I feel like the "announce the next three expansions at once" is a ploy, trying to deflect people's attention from how light the expansion's content is by trying to get them excited at the idea of overarching storylines, which we already had. I think once people get their hands on TWW and the novelty of the gorgeous new zones wears off, people will realize that the expansion doesn't have meat and opinions will sour. We're already seeing people reevaluate Shadowlands' qualities due to how bland and lackluster Dragonflight is in comparison.
The new cinematic had incredible CGI. I think that is the most convincing CGI human I've ever seen. I think it's how jerky the movements are that sell it, since it doesn't look fluidly animated/interpolated like your typical CGI animation. I do think that it is odd that Blizzard chose to announce their Worldsoul Saga with a boring scene about two mopey characters talking, rather than trying to get people excited by depicting action. Yes, the action cinematic will probably come later, but this is the moment that will have the most eyes paying attention to WoW (given that Blizzard is locked in for the next 3-6 years, WoW might not ever get this many views again), and they chose to show this instead.
Last edited by Val the Moofia Boss on November 4th, 2023, 05:48, edited 2 times in total.
@Val the Moofia Boss Metzen basically apologized for the cinematic as he teed it up. I suspect this one was already in production before Metzen came back since "characters talking and nothing happens" is the hallmark of Steve Danuser and his writing staff.
Last edited by J1M on November 4th, 2023, 12:32, edited 1 time in total.
Mike looked so appreciative at Blizzcon this year. Jen Oneal would probably have a stroke if she knew how much Microsoft gave him on the side to make this Xbox thing happen. But he deserves it. Was only there for 2 years before he became head of Blizzard and they tendered the initial offer. And he sells M+ boosts on his character for some reason. Busy guy, lol.
Last edited by J1M on November 6th, 2023, 00:13, edited 2 times in total.
Overwatch
Dead game, but serves as diversity lawsuit shield
Diablo
No trailer or details about an expansion due in 10 months, that shit is getting delayed.
StarCraft
Sequel clearly moving to a Microsoft studio. Given how similar the units in Stormgate look to SC units, maybe Microsoft will just buy them and reskin the game.
Heroes of the Storm
No announcement, but two patches since the Microsoft deal finished. Coming out of retirement to game pass. Probably waiting until it runs on Xbox to announce.
Hearthstone
Dead game, coop battlegrounds might be fun for some people because coop is usually fun
Rumble
Mobile trash, if it has depth you'll never collect and grind enough to ever see it
World of Warcraft
With Alex Afrasiabi at the helm, we got a controversial cinematic where the sky was ripped open. Under Steve Danuser we got a cinematic where two characters talk and a man cries. Amazingly, the latter was actually better because executives saw what was happening and brought Metzen back to be in charge as a result.
In terms of the new expansion, they are doing some nice quality of life improvements which made the seals clap, but the big news is actually way more positive and impactful to the game than most people are suggesting. This expansion will be the first time since Legion and the introduction of Mythic dungeons that they are changing the endgame.
Delves will be 1-5 person challenges that scale to reward gear on par with raiding. The fact that they are making 13 delves for launch and only 8 raid encounters says something. With Warfronts and Torghast they sabotaged themselves via difficulty and reward design. Sounds like they finally decided to get out of their own way on this one. The Niffen treasure hunts and Zskera Vaults are a prototype of Delves and the only enjoyable/novel questing experience in Dragonflight outside of flying. Hopefully they can add enough variation to keep Delves from becoming boring too fast.
The addition of Brawler's Guild and solo-queue rated PvP will complete the ability for players to experience endgame activities without friends. Which is what the retail game needs even if it isn't in the spirit of what launched 20 years ago. I expect solo-queue Mythic+ for the expansion after this one.
World of Warcraft Classic
Cata Classic is a wet noodle, but nice for those born in 2003 to get a chance to see it I guess. Regardless, launches like this help keep the subscriptions active when the retail team keeps striking out.
Classic+ season sounds great, especially the lvl 25 cap so people can try the new content with a much smaller time investment. Nice of them to give so many other classes the ability to tank via the power creep system. Should make grouping easier.
Last edited by J1M on November 6th, 2023, 01:34, edited 2 times in total.
