Yet, you used BIG attractive stars to distract our attention from reading what you have written.
Look, I’m not asking you to explain your formatting philosophies. I’m just trying to give you feedback on why the formatting of your post might not have been the best choice for the Target audience.
And by Target Audience, I don’t mean who you had hoped would read your post, Target Audience is defined by who is going to read it because of where you posted it.
Just feedback. Don’t take it offensively, take it as an opportunity to grow. (For further reading, see Johari Window Model).
Yes I have. I’ll save you the time if it’s that important to you.
Go and watch the Preach interviews. Particularly on the Modular development, where they talk about their production.
But don’t stop there. Also go back and watch VOD of the Stream where Preach returned how, and he speaks about how they were having meetings for the next 10 years of Warcraft, and he explains in detail how they plan and create their expansions.
Blizzard revamped the entirety of the questing experience in The Jade Forest in the Mists of Pandaria Beta. The final gameplay experience wasn’t finalized before 4 months prior to release.
The reason why every Beta usually roll out the zones one by one is because they’re not finished.
Blizzard definitely starts early expansion development with broad concepts and general narratives and plotlines, but the nitty-gritty quests and NPCs come way later in the development process and is usually created in the spur of the moment by the individual designer.
WoW has some key story and quest elements that Blizzard have clearly spent time preparing far in advance and taken time and effort to make with careful consideration to their over-arcing narrative. But that’s like 10% of the whole game experience. The remaining 90% is random world quests and side quests that simply act as filling and where the preparation and guidance only goes so far as to ensure that it is in harmony with the general tone and theme of the expansion.
I mean, Blizzard will put a lot of planning and preparation into a quest like The Dreamer with Ysera and the green dragonflight.
But a quest like killing 10 gnolls that’s threatening the Kirin Tor camp is made on a Tuesday to fill a quota for a certain number of quests in a zone.
I don’t know. I quite appreciate the posts Ishayo made and I always appreciate his input and it’s usually detailed and in-depth like mine. He’s a fair example of my targeted audience, and I usually hit that quite nicely I think.
The fact that I also have to tolerate the likes of you who is obviously not my targeted audience because you have nothing but dislike for what I have written or how I have written it, that’s just unfortunate. But my written English is not good enough to type a post that manages to please everyone on this forum. I perhaps ignorantly assume that those who are not interested in my style of posting are wise enough to ignore it and spend their time elsewhere. But I can see that doesn’t apply to you, since you’re spending a lot of time in this thread that you seemingly have nothing but issues with. That is crazy to me, but you do you.
I did, and none of what you said is being told there only that they’re creating concepts, design of zones and a bit of what the expansion’s story will revolve around.
The actual quests that fill in the zone are done probably a year prio to release.
It’s just that this guy seems to think we have claimed an absolute, everything is written boxed up and sat on a shelf ready to sell 10 years in advance.
Well we all have to live together on this planet. So it’s better that we at least try to get along, rather than try to segregate ourselves to exclusive groups based on perceived “education” in public forums.
Then you may find it easier to use Bullet points with shorter sentences. Keep things simple and don’t be tempted to over complicate.
You seem to imply here that Blizzard only writes a few dozen side quests prio to the expansion launch here?
They have “main concept of the story” ahead, yeah, which can change a lot during the line.
The actual “fleshing that story out” is done 1 year ahead of expansion launch.
So really, ask yourself what you added towards this discussion because I fail to see it. I don’t think Dragonflight as a concept is bad, just the WAY they portrayed it and wrote it.
I believe the argument is whether Blizzard had a carefully plotted and prepared story for Dragonflight, or whether it’s a mix of random mish-mash put together by different designers.
And the answer is that 10% is carefully plotted and prepared story that the big brains at Blizzard have carefully crafted with delicate care.
The remaining 90% is random mish-mash of irrelevant side-quests and world quests and other filling that there isn’t much rhyme or reason to.
And as far as criticism of the story and questing experience goes, I have noted that there’s way too little of the carefully crafted and plotted story stuff that tends to highlight the leveling experience in an expansion, because there’s way too many random quests that tell unimportant stories and introduces irrelevant NPCs.
Hence it’s 2 stars and not 5.
If you think the story experience is 5 stars, then you can tell in elaborate detail why it beats the story experience of Mists of Pandaria.
Well Steve Denuser in his interview with Nobbel stated that his interest in in the Small stories. And there are some great small stories in Dragon Flight.
However as I highlighted in my original reply to this thread:
They seem to have struggled pulling it all together. Which is the only real let down of the story.
However we’re in patch one of the expansion, and we’re yet to see how it all goes. The story is still good.
However, that doesn’t mean that the Story of the expansion isn’t conceived and prepared years in advance. It also doesn’t mean that it’s not changed or rewritten in the lead up to it.
I have only rated the box product experience of Dragonflight and compared it to the box product experiences of the other expansions. That’s a fair apples to apples comparison.
Even so. Dismissing all the internal jargon at Blizzard and how their production process operates, then the final experience still falls flat.
Take The Ohn’ahran Plains in Dragonflight.
That zone is 99% about the Centaur.
Blizzard goes to great lengths to tell us a very long and elaborate story about the Centaur.
Okay.
Name 3 memorable Centaurs from that zone.
I bet you can’t.
I can barely name 1!
It’s a huge zone with a ton of story and quests, and it falls completely flat, because it’s so forgettable. There’s hardly more than a few highlights at most, and if you try to summarize the story there’s not much originality to be found.
So why should I cheer and applaud Blizzard for a job that is clearly not very admirable?
Teera and Maluuk, the first ancestors of the Centaur.
Balakar Khan - Big Baddie.
As a bonus - Ohnara the Wind Bird God thing.
Also Tomei (I think that’s how it’s spelt) - the Hunt Master.
Then there are a few memorable dragons from the Green Dragon area, I’m terrible with names though.
But rather than trying to isolate individual Characters. Maybe we’re supposed to look at the Centaur as a whole, rather than an individual. Have you considered that? Maybe we’re supposed to think of the Centaur as a race. and it’s the Race itself which will drive the story forward, and not just 1 hero.
And do you feel that these characters compare to other major zone characters in past expansions, like The Winter Queen, Ysera, and Mueh’zala in Ardenweald? Or King Rastakhan, Bwonsamdi and Zul’jin in Zuldazar?
I mean, Blizzard are kind of scraping the bottom of the barrel here.
It was REALLY popular to hate Blizzard coming in to Legion. REALLY popular. Legion was coming off Warlords, and by the end of Warlords a whole lot of people were ready to declare WoW dead. (Well, there’s always some, but by end of WoD there were a LOT.)
And Warlords in turn was following on the heels of Mists, which turned out to be a top-prate expansion, but got incredible hate for “Lol Kung-Fu Pandaz”. So Legion was coming in to a very sceptical playerbase.
Legion earned its popularity. OK, it earned some of it with cheap tricks, but it still earned it. They pulled everything out of the box, reached to the bottom of it, and reached some more. Those Artefact Weapons and the questlines to earn them and their forms, the Class Halls, and especially the 77-day cycle made Legion like nothing WoW had done before.
Legion pulled WoW up from where it was. It also planted some long-term poisons in the philosophy, like eternal grind, and borrowed power, that sickened the following two expansions. But don’t underestimate the response to Legion, or attribute it to some fluctuation in the demographics.
And while Legion laid the lore fan-service on thick, maybe too thick for my taste, it was at least quality-approved Warcraft-feeling lore.
I was pointing out the long-term badnesses of Legion while it was current, and I still believe that now, but that doesn’t take anything away from the effect of Legion at the time.
I added this about the time that you wrote your response, so I’ll copy and paste.
Rather than trying to isolate individual Characters. Maybe we’re supposed to look at the Centaur as a whole, rather than an individual. Have you considered that? Maybe we’re supposed to think of the Centaur as a race. and it’s the Race itself which will drive the story forward, and not just 1 hero.
I was about to start, but we’ve done that discussion forty-leven times already. With graphs. And right now I’m more interested in discussing Dragonflight. So I apologise for the incitement to derail, and I’ll pass on further previous-expansion discussion, except as it pertains to a Dragonflight comparison.