[spoilers] 8.1.5 discussion thread

That did not stopped them from killing Vol’jin.

That’s a fair point.

Vol’jin’s death, to me, proves that they don’t plan out expansions years in advance like they’ve said they do.

Oh we’ve got this expansion coming up with Zandalari and Kul Tirans, two races with a bunch of story with the Darkspear and Vol’jin in particular. Lets kill him off the expansion before lol.

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Based on Warlords of Draenor I think it was a good call.

He have been more active as a ghost in BfA than a Warchief during WoD.

I think you mean Sunwalker Teco.

But yeah. If they kill Baine… what other named tauren are left? Aponi? Magatha? Both of which had pants-on-head stupid moments in Legion but that’s all we’ve had from them since Cataclysm. And the latter is a villain (A really good one at that who I dearly hope isn’t just killed off).

Bring back Tagar.

It’s actually Sunwalker Dezco.

Sunwalker Tesco? :thinking:

Praise the £3 Meal Deal.

Idk lately I’ve seen him demanding a 370+ ilevel for normal Uldir as well as linking curve so I’d say he’s more of a Sunwalker Waitrose at this point.

Daily reminder that they initially confirmed that only Varian would die, but they then changed it to “Vol’jin dies aswell” after alliance playerbase reee’d.

Look how well that went.

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Certainly explains why Varian/the Alliance get 3/4s of the supposedly horde-focused cinematic if he was planned as the only death originally.

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This is why they shouldn’t try to please both sides equally every time. I mean, if we go by the equality, then Varian’s death evened us because we lost Garrosh. This was just lame.

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I don’t know about that. Based on what little knowledge I have of game design processes, it’s probably split into three or so stages.
Stage One. Brainstorming about expansion mechanics and systems probably starts about three years before an expansion’s release. This process of throwing ideas at the walls and seeing what sticks probably takes up to a year and is limited to a small team of designers.
Stage Two. Once they’ve latched onto a dozen specific ideas that they’re certain will be successful, that’s probably when they start carting in the other departments, like the story team and art design and so on, who work on representing those ideas with a narrative and concept art. Half-way through this period, basic development of the expansion begins, if only to provide a skeleton that’s presentable to the public when the expansion’s revealed.
Stage Three. A year before the expansion’s release, it’s revealed and it’s crunch time. The majority of development is moved over to this expansion and most resources are devoted to transforming this skeleton into something playable. During this period, development might discover that some of the early design team’s ideas were unworkable and they get chucked out. According to customer feedback on the reveal, some early design features or sections of the narrative/art might be altered dramatically as well. Meanwhile, the early design team moves on to Stage One of the next expansion.
Then the expansion’s released into the wild, likely very different from what the early design team originally thought up and quite different from the narrative and art design originally put out.

Judging from how late we got the Vol’jin revelation through Legion, I’d say that it was decided that he would be killed off at some point during Stage Three of Legion, while the early design team was already working on Stage One of Battle for Azeroth.
I wouldn’t be shocked if the designers had already settled on Zandalar being a great continent for the Horde for the next expansion, due to the Horde having a troll leader, only for them to find out that the story team had just killed off Vol’jin at the very end of Legion’s development.
In short, it’s not that Blizzard doesn’t plan things out in advance, it’s more that Blizzard’s probably got a lot of different departments that don’t communicate very well with each other when putting together expansions.

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No, you got it wrong. It’s

Donde esta la biblio

Me llamo T-Bone
La araña

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I misspelled Tesco but Teco is also hilarious.

Originally, Vol’jin was missing. But that lasted I think one week Before they just changed it to saying he got killed.

Feels like the change was far too sudden to be due to feedback.

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Shower thought: what if all this stuff about light and void of late will lead into a new kind of faction system? I was playing SWTOR lately and I noticed that most content is now divided up by Light v Dark instead of Republic v Empire. BGs, dungeons and so on let you pick a side when the queue pops, and many story elements orbit light v Dark now.

For the last few expansions you were a neutral force, but could align with the light or dark. Only recently has the faction war shown up again, but even so it seems you’ll get to choose Republic or Empire. Regardless of what faction your character started as all the way back when you made them.

In theory WoW could go a similar route, with a choice between good or evil rather than Alliance or Horde. Or otherwise should shuffling/rebranding the existing factions and what they represent, then letting players choose which they want to join regardless of race.

There has been talk of a timeskip of some kind, which while weird isn’t impossible. SWTOR did it with your character getting put into stasis for years iirc.

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Damn, that sounds cool. I wish someone could redpill me on the swtor storyline from start to now.

I haven’t looked up a summary (Kinda want to do the story stuff myself) but I have read up that at the end of a questline in 5.9’s content, you do indeed straight up pick Republic or Empire, with 5.10 being a focus on the war again. Interesting. Will be a bit weird on my Dark Side Sith tho lol.