The Boomsday Project Arena Meta Report - Meta and Tier PredictionsNew Darkmoon Faire Toy - Hot Buttered Popcorn
The Darkmoon Faire is live for the week and with it comes a new toy, Hot Buttered Popcorn. This toy causes your character to pull out a box of fresh popcorn and eat it and has a 50 second cooldown. It also causes an emote in chat that says "(character name) munches on some popcorn." Pick it up from Stamp Thunderhorn for 50 Darkmoon Prize Tickets!
Battle.Net Beta Update
The Battle.Net Beta client has been updated to add:
- Notification Center - See all of your social notifications in one place.
- Giphy Support - Do a /giphy to embed a random giphy image for that term
- Link Previews - Get a preview of what awaits when you click that link!
- Mentions - Use @group member, mods, and leaders in Blizzard Groups.
- Improved Patching Order - Games will now patch in the order they were most recently played and with less Battle.Net App restarts required
The Evolution of World of Warcraft Storytelling
ScienceAlert has posted a three part interview with Alex Afrasiabi called "How Warcraft Builds Towards Stories Players Care About." We previously covered Part 1 here.
Part 2
- Before Mists of Pandaria, the team would only plan one expansion ahead of time for the story, but now they keep the previous and future expansions in mind when telling the story.
- There is some truth to forum posts that say "WoW's running out of bosses to kill. The Warcraft 3 well is nearly dry."
- It took a couple expansions to take Garrosh from a relatively unknown character to a boss.
- Saurfang was added just to be an NPC to turn in Onyxia's head to. Alex wrote his gossip text at three in the morning and it turned into who we know today.
- New expansions allows the tea to create new heroes and new villains for us to face.
- The lore team helps to keep facts straight for storytelling.
- The Chronicles are historical, so they are helpful for fact checking WoW's history and providing inspiration for the story.
- Story is a motivational factor in the things that you do and your actions in the world. It gives them consequence, weight, and adds emotion.
Part 3
- At the start of an expansion, the team talks about what expansion is going to be about, the primary characters, the direction they're heading, and the tones and themes.
- From there, all of the books, novellas, comics, short stories, audio books, and all of that stuff originates from the game team.
- Alex tells the designers to not depend upon quest text to tell their story or the story of the world and the characters.
- The team should focus on when they have the player captive and able to listen, rather than relying on them not to just hit accept and move on.
- The team wants to continue to try to and improve the ways in which they deliver the story so that you aren't bound by WoWpedia or the quest text.
- The goal is for players to feel something, so that may be anger, happiness, sadness, excitement, or other emotions.
Dark Legacy Comics #643
DLC #643 has been released!
https://www.mmo-champion.com/content/78 ... ng-DLC-643
