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Today Jesse Cox hosted a live one on one with Assistant Game Director Ion “Watcher” Hazzikostas about LEGION and we had some big announcements.
The main announcement:
Development of the World of Warcraft: Legion expansion is well underway, and we’d like to take some time to update everyone on how things are progressing.
Assistant Game Director Ion “Watcher” Hazzikostas will be joined by online gaming personality Jesse Cox to discuss a number of topics, including Class Halls, max-level content, the Demon Hunter, and a status update on what our next priorities are for Legion development.
We’ll be going live at 9:00 AM Pacific/12:00 PM Eastern time on the official World of Warcraft Twitch channel at twitch.tv/Warcraft. We’ll see you then!
Yep, Alpha is over… Beta is Thursday!
WOOHOO!!! and even better folks, loads of beta keys will be going out AND a load more will be offered from bigger sites, including our friends over at wowhead. So keep an eye here for news on that!
Talking about WoWhead, Perculia did a great job of live blogging (saved me a ton of writing) and here’s the full run down of points from the live chat:
Beta Information
– At BlizzCon, many people remember that beta would “start in a couple of weeks.” However, when they thought about it more, beta in the industry is a polished demo. The WoW beta would be pretty unpolished (like 2/3rds of specs unimplemented.) So an alpha happened instead with invite waves over the course of a few months.
– Finally at a point now where all specs, artifacts, dungeons etc are implemented. Legion right now is in the last stretch where it still needs to be polished.
– Ready to move into a formal beta! Current plan is to take alpha down over course of next day and send out big beta invite wave. 2pm Pacific on Thursday is when the formal beta for Legion begins. Characters will be wiped.
– Plan for only one character wipe, so they can get solid feedback from leveling up again.
– In the beta, you will start by completing the Broken Shore scenario, and then move into Legion content in new Dalaran. New Legion content starts with the artifact acquisition questline for your spec.
Class Order Halls
– Class Orders. Garrison 2.0? Not really. The Garrison was a personal private space. Fantasy was raising up an army. The Class Order Hall is a shared social space, a clubhouse for your class. There’s a different sort of customization and interactions. You are a paragon of your class and shape how your hall grows. The Order Hall serves the other core world content, while the Garrison felt like a standalone feature. The Order Hall has content that leads you out into the world.
– There are personalized class-specific quests in the Order Hall, you can recruit great champions. There are missions but they are very pared down–not dozens like Warlords. The missions have greater impact and are much less frequent. We know some people are scarred by the mission table!
– One problem with the Warlords mission system was that it competed with other content. It became a way to easily get anything–crafting stuff, items, currency, gold. When faced with a choice of going out or doing a mission for same reward…pushing the button was a compelling choice.
– There are dungeon and raid missions in Legion, but the reward will be a quest item to send you into the instance to get an item, not a cache that has an item.
– Order Resources – get them out in the world. At the start, you’ll likely send resources on your Order Hall tech tree.
– Order Hall customization – you could customize Garrison (guards, music, buildings). Order Halls have less visual customization but you can customize the gameplay. Order Halls are iconic locations that have been around long before you–you wouldn’t totally redecorate it. However, the Artifact Weapons have visual customization.
– Order Hall fantasy – you are a champion but also part of a group of famous peers. Think King Arthur and Knights of the Round Table.
Legion Questing
– There are several quest systems in Legion. There is a one-time epic storyline that unfolds over course of leveling which you unlock at your own pace (tracking down conspiracy as a Mage, raise new set of Four Horsemen as Death Knight, etc).
– Complementing that is a World Quest system – at a given time, everyone in your region can do those quests. The genesis for that idea was Garrison Missions for players–open up a map and see whole array of things for you to do with various objectives.
– What if you have limited playtime? The more rewarding quests will be around for a few days (chance of a mount, cool item drop). You won’t miss it because you were at work. The quests that have a short timeframe (eg 4 hours) will have generic rewards like gold.
– Every day when you log in, there is an emissary that asks you to do specific sets of world quests to aid a faction (eg all Dreamweaver faction quests in Val’sharah). Do four quests for the emissary and get an awesome chest. These emissary quests kind of work like Hearthstone dailies – they pile up for a few days, so you can catch up on ones you missed.
Legacy/Pristine Servers
– Heated topic with lots of feedback from fans.
– The developers on the Warcraft team are not directly involved in meetings – they’re focused on Legion.
– Response to Pristine Servers – the pros and cons. A big con against it, which is valid, is that it’s still the same, fast, leveling experience where you end up in your Garrison in a few days.
Leveling Experience
– The leveling-up experience in classic zones is pretty broken right now and not well tuned. It’s way too easy and it was neglected for a bit. Due to ability changes over the years, you basically feel invincible (even before heirlooms). You’re running around more vs actually fighting. The pacing of the game isn’t what it should be. They’ve been looking to fix this (even via hotfixes now).
– Barriers of entry to new players – Blizz realized around the time of Cataclysm/Mists of Pandaria that it was a daunting experience for new players who wanted to play with their max-level friends. To help this, they made leveling through past expansions faster and faster…but now leveling isn’t paced correctly. With the addition of max-level boosts, there is less of a need to rush people through leveling, it can be a satisfying well-paced experience. You shouldn’t be out-leveling zones before you finish a story.
– Potentially able to add flexible zone tech to old zones. They’d have a wider level range so you could stay in the zone without skipping the story.
Demon Hunters and Classes
– Demon Hunter double jump is awesome – you could probably double jump/Glide from Highmountain to Azsuna.
– Ion partially picked a Shaman because he wanted to tank!
– There will be 3 in-game cinematics just for Demon Hunters which you won’t see in the beta. You’ll have to play one on live!
– Demon Hunters: very flashy, high-mobility, a lot of fun to play.
– What about other races for Demon Hunters in the future? Anything is possible. The lore dictates that only Elves can be Demon Hunters and they went back and forth on it for a while. For anyone who had a picture of a – Demon Hunter in your mind, you think of Illidan. So they wanted to deliver on that fantasy. For the future…Demon Hunters could instruct other races in their rituals…but that would be something to consider for the future.
– Other race/class combos? Gnomes can be Hunters in Legion with awesome Mechanical pet family. However some don’t work, like Tauren Rogues. (Although Dagg the Subtlety Rogue Ogre is awesome.)
Artifact Weapons
– The concept of Artifact Weapons: incredible weapon of power and lore. You can level up and customize a weapon for your spec. From an art perspective, they worked closely with the art team. The Ashbringer was the first artifact weapon created since they had a solid idea about the fantasy. However they didn’t want everyone to have exactly the same powerful weapon. So they had the idea from the outset for radical visual customization. Challenge was to keep weapons distinctive while maintaining silhouette.
Some appearances are easy to unlock but others reflect significant accomplishment like killing a Mythic Raid boss or PvP. There are even secret appearances that you need to figure out how to unlock!
Dungeons and Raids
– “Done a disservice” to dungeon gameplay. Right now, dungeons are fun for the first month – run a few each night, find people in guild. Then…raids open and that dungeon loot becomes obsolete. That’s been the story for the past many years.
– Mythic Dungeons in 6.2 were a trial for how to keep dungeons relevant in Legion. In Legion, when you beat Mythic Dungeon, you get a keystone that lets you run them at a higher level.
– Definitely some inspiration from Greater Rifts, but some key differences. If players run dungeons for longer period of times this expansion, they need more variation. Mythic dungeons will have affix modifiers that appear at different threshholds/levels. Affixes do things like “massively reduce tank threat,” “when you kill a non-boss enemy, it explodes to buff other enemies.” The affixes are fixed for the entire world for a given week, so there isn’t heavy RNG where one group has it easy and the others do not.
– These affixes will change how you approach the dungeon week to week. They will also create group variation–there won’t be one set group of specs that is best for every set of affixes.
– Dungeons are being set up as an alternative path, or a complement, to raiding.
– You can keep leveling up your keystone by completing the dungeon in a certain timeframe. These are less hectic than Warlords Challenge Mode times. If you handle the difficulty comfortably, you can move up to the next one. For the highest level dungeon you clear in one week, the next week you’ll have an awesome chest in your Order Hall with loot, as well as a new keystone that’s around 70% of your past best, so you don’t need to grind from Level 1 again. Similar to when a new season starts in Hearthstone – you lose some ranks, but you don’t go back down to Level 25.
Transmogrification
– You will be collecting and permanently learning new appearances in Legion. It will be easier to customize your character’s look.
– Artifacts: visually, you’ll be sorting through dozens of potential appearances. But you can also transmog over your artifact.
World Quests
– World quests are evolution of system. In Mists of Pandaria, there were a lot of daily quests. However the negatives were the reward structure (Valor Gear behind reputation), and limitation of daily quest system (you were behind everyone else if you missed a day). There was also a lot of repetition. If you did the quests diligently, you rescued the same panda dozens of times.
– World Quests improve upon daily quest structure. There is far more variety with hundreds of world quests and variety of quest rewards. You won’t see same quests over and over again.
– There are Legion factions with cool rewards when you hit different levels, but it’s not like the MoP system where you had to do dailies for reputation for Valor Gear.
– Ion admitted to feeling daily quest fatigue in Mists of Pandaria. The moment the game feels like a chore, the moment its less what we want it to be.
– What about the people that liked familiarity/getting dailies done quickly? The map is very user-friendly, it’s easy to see what the rewards are at a glance and where all the quests are.
– In Legion, outdoor world quests have story component. Giving people variety (can meet objectives 6 ways) is good but you need context behind it, not just raw mechanics to kill and loot things. Story is essential, which was lost sight of a bit in Warlords.
– “Gameplay first” doesn’t mean “gameplay only.”
Disney is putting an end to their Disney Infinity toy-game line and discontinuing their “self-published console games business,” the company said today. After June, Infinity will stop getting new updates.
Disney is also shutting down Avalanche Software, the Utah-based studio responsible for Infinity. As a result, around 300 people will lose their jobs.
Along with cancellation of “Infinity,” Disney is closing Avalanche studio in Utah. Close to 300 jobs will be cut.
“This was a difficult decision that we did not take lightly given the quality of Disney Infinity and its many passionate fans,” Disney said in a statement.
There will be two new Disney Infinity releases in May and June before the series ends for good: one based on Alice Through The Looking Glass, and a second from Finding Dory.
“Our goal for Disney Infinity was to bring the best of Disney storytelling to life in homes around the world, and with your support we accomplished that,” GM John Blackburn wrote on their blog. “We hope you had as much fun playing the game as we had making it.”
This news comes just two months after Disney announced that there will be no new edition of Infinity this year, as there had been since the series launched in 2013.
Disney says they plan to continue licensing their properties to other video game publishers but will no longer make their own console games.
On a call with investors this afternoon, Disney boss Bob Iger said that “the risk had caught up with” his company and that they were pleased with the success of the first Disney Infinity, but sales went downhill after that. “[The video game] business is a changing business,” Iger said of the company’s pivot out of making games. “We did not have enough confidence in the business in terms of it being stable enough.”
Pokémon fans, it’s the moment you’ve been waiting for! Earlier today Nintendo released the first official footage of Pokémon Sun and Moon, confirming such details as the next generation of Starter Pokémon, the name of the next Region, the games’ release dates and more!
Pokémon Sun and Moon will be set in the Alola Region, a name that immediately springs to mind Hawaiian Islands or such similar climates, though it’s unclear as yet just where the real life basis of the new region may lie if any. Artwork of the new region was shown during the footage and appears to depict an island with various different land types, which may make for a very varied journey.
But what’s a new region without new Pokémon? As always, the next generation of Pokémon introduces a bunch of new critters to catch; and as always, you’ll start the game by choosing your starter from the standard mix of a Fire, a Water or a Grass type. Gen VII’s Water-type is known as Popplio and is based on a performing seal, who appears to like to blow bubbles and balance them on his nose. The appropriately-named Litten is your Fire-type choice, being a kitten capable of breathing fire; and the trio is completed with Rowlet, a Grass/Flying-type Bird Pokémon capable of launching its feathers like Razor Leaves, at least so the art implies. You can see all three in action in the video below. Oh, and apparently, the character who gives you your starter will be named Hala, though this may be different in other regions.
A lot of people complained about the character customisation options introduced in X and Y being taken out of Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, and while it has not yet been confirmed if full character customisation is to make a return in Sun and Moon, the footage appears to show the character’s shirt and shorts differing in certain scenes, hinting to a potential return. Nintendo HAVE, however, confirmed that you will be able to change your skin pigmentation, as with X and Y, so it seems some customisability is planned at least.
The very last thing revealed today was the official box-art for English-language regions, which you can see above (click them for a larger image). This artwork also offers one more tantalising new fact – a look at the Legendaries of the two new games. Sun’s legendary seems to mix Pyroar with Reshiram in the appearance stakes; while Moon’s entry seems to be a very cool anthropomorphic bat with crescent-shapes on its wings and head.
Pokémon Sun and Moon will be released on November 18th 2016 in the US, Australia and Japan; and November 23rd in Europe – WHY NO SIMULTANEOUS RELEASE, NINTENDO?!? You proved it possible with X and Y, after all… Oh well, a five-day wait doesn’t seem all that bad. Hopefully we’ll have more tantalising info to share about Pokémon Sun and Moon coming up in the remaining six months to launch, but until then, take a look at the footage below. Until next time, Pokémaniacs!
New details have been made public for Rainbow Six Siege’s next bit of free content, Operation Dust Line.
Already known was that it was going to bring the new ‘Border’ map (described as being the most open and destructible map yet) and two new operators that you could play as; Valkyrie with her sticky cameras that anyone on the team can access, and Blackbeard with his rifle-mounted shield to protect from small arms fire.
The update will also come with the ability to customise your operators between rounds to help teams be a bit more reactive to opposition instead of being stuck with a disadvantage all session; and also the ability to disable the placement of gadgets during a match enabling players to get down to just shooting at each other instead of using traps. There will also be a post match screen to show the winning team and highlight the most valuable player in a match.
Of course there’ll be tweaks to existing content too, with side protection being added to Montagne’s shield and Tachanka’s machine gun being made easier to place among other changes.
The new map will release for all players free on May 11th, which is also when Season Pass owners will get instant access to both new characters. Everyone else will have to wait a week for them to unlock on the 18th, and then will have to purchase them through in-game currency Renown or the microtransaction-based R6 Credits.
Once again, we have a leaked release date, courtesy of someone somewhere pressing the wrong button too early.
The Witcher 3: Blood and Wine expansion is coming quite soon, and it seems that someone got overly excited, making the Steam page for the expansion live with the unannounced release date before removing it quickly. Oops.
Unfortunately for whoever set it live, the Internet has many eyes. Tweeter @Wario64 not only posted the announcement of the date, but then followed it up with a screencap moments later when the date was taken down:
The Steam description listed that Blood and Wine would take players on a 20+ hour long adventure in an area that rivals No Man’s Land in size, and even mentioned something about Geralt having access to his own vineyard. There’ll also be new gear, with armour being dyeable now and Gwent players getting a new set of Skellige cards for their collection.
So, keep your eyes on the Interwebs for the official confirmation of the release date as May 30th, provided this leak is accurate information.
