wow TradeChat's BlizzCon Dev Interview with Alex Afrasiabi & Chris Robinson

[Stan 5,240]

Panser sat down with Alex Afrasiabi (Creative Director) and Chris Robinson (Senior Art Director) at BlizzCon to talk about Battle for Azeroth!

• The chronological order for narrative in World of Warcraft is tied to level, so they decided to shard everything out. If you make a newbie Night Elf, you will still go through the same starting zone experience, but once you hit level 110 and have Battle for Azeroth, then you'll go through the entire storyline that culminates after that (The Burning of Teldrassil). Some of the world changes will be permanent through sharding.
• Sharding creates the opportunity to go back and look at something that has a tangible meaning to players and update it in a way that is relevant to what's happening in the storyline.
• A great example is Undercity; the upcoming conflict will update the visual and functional side of the city.
• Flying in Battle for Azeroth is similar to what we have in Legion. You need to master and get familiar with the new continent, so it's coming later in the expansion.
• There will be no Followers next expansion.
• World Quests in Legion offer progression and the team is happy with how they worked out, so we're going to see them as well.
• Both factions have their own continent for leveling and at max level, you can do World Quests on the opposite's faction continent.
• PvP becomes a mode that you opt into. If you want to (world) PvP, you simply toggle the mode on and you will be sharded with all the players that want to PvP.
• Now that you can go to the opposite faction's continent at max level the team wants to do something cool with the new PvP Mode.
  • (Tentative) A bounty goes on your head and people from all around Kul Tiras start knowing your exact location.
• Zone scaling won't affect soloing old content, you can go to Ahn'Qiraj and kill C'thun.
• Classic WoW is very early in development, both Alex & Chris have not answered any questions.
• In Warfronts, players literally act as Warcraft 3 characters.

[jinsu2301 273]

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• There will be no Followers next expansion.

That's a shame. I was hoping they would maybe dive a bit deeper and do something meaningful with it, the follower quests are one thing I really enjoyed in SWTOR.

I assume that also means that mission tables are gone? Good. Such an unnecessary feature...

[Rhondis 148]

1 hour ago, jinsu2301 said:

That's a shame. I was hoping they would maybe dive a bit deeper and do something meaningful with it, the follower quests are one thing I really enjoyed in SWTOR.

This is WoW not SWTOR. Besides the followers were only there to help in questing and world objectives in Broken Shore and Argus, they didn't really add any benefit in dungeons, raids, or pvp.

1 hour ago, jinsu2301 said:

I assume that also means that mission tables are gone? Good. Such an unnecessary feature...

No, they are still looking for ways to implement this feature. There's nothing wrong with it, I found it to be quite unique in Legion in terms of having to send out your own people to accomplish tasks in order to progress through your class storyline. Plus they are great with getting some rewards for those who don't have time to do all the bounties or content.