May 10th Legion Dev Update Liveblog

by JR Cook - 8 years ago     show comments

Boisterous Youtuber Jesse Cox sits down with Ion @WatcherDev Hazzikostas to drop science about LEGION and we here to tell you everything that went down. Some analysis will follow depending on how quickly Crow can type.

To watch the VOD, skip on over to Twitch, or just read on for Crow’s recap.

Alpha to Beta Transition:

Hazzikostas led off with this big announcement: this week, provided nothing explodes, the Legion alpha will be wiped and replaced with a more stable beta build. Invites for the beta test will be going out throughout the week, and the plan is for the beta realms to come back up at 2PM PST on Thursday (5/12) for testing.

Much news was made of Legion going into beta in 2015 after it was announced at gamescom, but the devs later took a step back and realized that while previous beta tests had a degree on incompletion to them, the industry has evolved to the point where betas are more polished than that. This is why it was termed an alpha to start and why now, months later, they are more comfortable with calling it a beta. It’s still not finished, but the number of people in the beta will be greater than the alpha population and more stress testing will take place.

Hazzikostas did mention that this should hopefully be the only character wipe necessary going forward, but beta is beta, and anything can change.

Crow’s Edits: it’s not an open beta (Blizzard doesn’t really do those very often) so you still need to opt-in in order to be eligible for an invite, so get on that if you haven’t already.

Also, this detail from server testing turnip deity Zorbrix:

@Pallimmanis Not yet; character copy brings valuable testing but it's not the testing we want to capture quite yet.

— Zorbrix 💙 (@Zorbrix) May 10, 2016

Class Orders are not really Garrisons 2.0

Hazzikostas moved on to address one of the greater concerns that’s been cropping up throughout the alpha, which is the worry that Order Halls will carry over too much of the Garrison functionality. Point by point, he did a great deal to dissect that notion, noting that that Garrisons were a feature unto themselves in Warlords (which put them in competition with other features as content), but Order Halls are more a gateway to content in Legion.

• Yes, the mission system is there, but instead of having an army of followers to send out, you’ve got a handful of champions.
• The missions themselves are not so much sending your champions to do stuff for you, but scouting missions that then enable YOU to go out and accomplish something for an additional reward.

He went on to discuss that while the Garrison had a great deal of customizability to it, because you’re the commander and it’s your garrison, the Order Halls aren’t going to have that as much. Because they are places where the classes are gathering together to do work, they don’t really belong to the player, so they’re not really your places to customize. However, being able to choose how to spend order resources in order to direct how the order’s tech tree evolves, and being able to customize your artifact’s appearance (which is also something you do in the Order Hall) will still allow some customization into play.

Crow’s Edit: No mention from Watcher about whether they’ll use a different model for the mission table, since that doodad alone seems to be triggering people into nightmares about followers going out adventuring while we sit in the garrison pushing papers around, but we’ll see. Beta is beta.

World Quests

At two points during the hour, Hazzikostas talked about the world quests paradigm as a system, noting how they’ll offer variety in terms of what you can do, but hopefully also offer a balance between players who need to complete 100% of the content put in front of them and players who have more limited playtimes and just want to do enough to feel like they’re getting something for their time invested.

World quests are poised to do that, and interact with Order Halls through the faction emissaries that will offer bonus rewards and reputation if you do world quests in specific areas. In addition, these emissaries will stack up over the course of a few days (similar to daily quests in Heroes of the Storm and Hearthstone) so if you haven’t got time to log in every day, you won’t miss out on the opportunity to clear them.

Hazzikostas also talked about Mists of Pandaria‘s daily system informed the world quest design a great deal, since it was great for getting players out across the continent but suffered from being repetitive, from punishing players who couldn’t log in every day to keep pace, and because of how reputation gated access in unintuitive ways. Hence, world quests will try to mitigate that by having a much larger pool of activities to draw from, a more varied pool of rewards from those activities, and dramatically less pressure to feel like you need to chore through stuff every day in order to keep from falling behind.

Finally, max-level areas like Stonefury Cliffs and Shattrath City in Warlords of Draenor were good in that they gave you the versatility to play those areas the way you like, with the option of killing mobs vs. using items vs. collecting things. The drawback was there was no story context for WHY you were doing any of those things. World quests will have a story wrapper that will deliver on that context in order to ground the story of what you’re doing so that it doesn’t just feel like busy work.

Some notable quotes from Hazzikostas in regards to world quests and what informed their design:

• “The moment the game starts to feel like a chore, that’s not a good place to be.”
• “Gameplay first doesn’t mean gameplay only.”

Crow’s Edit: Getting a clear idea of how past designs inform the current design is really a pleasure to watch, because it helps to demonstrate in sharp relief how iterative design works. You’ve got to try something before you really know everything it’s going to do, where it succeeds and where it fails. I think world quests are going to really hit the mark that Blizzard has been shooting for with end-game content, but we’ll need to play it to know for sure.

Legacy Realms

Hazzikostas was quick to point out that anything involving the recent legacy servers debate was above his paygrade: a lot of that takes place at a corporate and legal level that he’s not privy to as a designer, even as a design lead, but especially not at the moment because Team 2’s focus is on developing Legion.

However, he did point out that all of the discussion on the pristine realms concept brought a couple details to the surface about WoW as it currently stands. In response the suggestion of pristine realms, some players reportedly said “what’s the point of having a closed-off realm if I’m just going to log in, level to max, and just sit in the garrison?” Hazzikostas and the team realized that this is something that should be improved about WoW in general. “It’s pretty broken right now,” he said. “It’s way too easy. It’s not even about difficulty, it’s about pacing.” “The amount of time you spend fighting vs. the amount of time you spend completing quests is out of whack.”

After going into a little more detail about what they shoot for in balancing how long combat should take at different levels in the game, Hazzikostas pointed out that how it plays at very low levels isn’t as satisfying as it is at max-level, and that’s a problem they can address. Moreover, he reflected on how with each successive expansions, leveling through past expansions got accelerated so that new players weren’t kept from the newest content for too long. These days, though, between Warlords and Legion, the boost token solves that problem.

Other notable quotes:

• “If you want to level from 1-100, that should be a satisfying experience.”
• “Leveling out of a zone before you finish the story isn’t right. Doing one dungeon and leveling out of the zone you were questing in isn’t right.”

Crow’s Edit: After spending a lot of time talking to people about the pristine realms concept since Brack suggested it, this detail about the leveling experience not being satisfactory is a godsend to hear. It also demonstrates that Blizzard doesn’t necessarily have to open legacy servers in order to fix the problem, but can tune the existing dials in the live game in order to address it. If the reason you want legacy realms is to play with the old talents or play through the old zone narratives, yeah, this doesn’t fix that, but if what you want is leveling to be challenging and a worthy time investment, that can be done with tuning.

“Play a Demon Hunter”

Hazzikostas affirmed that demon hunters had been a consideration as a new class for a long time, but Legion quickly became the best time to do it. Cox followed up with asking if having demon hunters of non-elf races was a possibility, and Hazzikostas’ response was nuanced: namely, it was something they went back and forth about internally, but at the end of the day, the silhouette of the demon hunter as a class is Illidan’s silhouette, and delivering on that experience really meant delivering an elven demon hunter. Down the line that situation might change, just as they’re iterating on other race/class combos all the time (gnome hunters got a special shout-out) but for now, demon hunting pandaren aren’t in the cards.

He also offered that the class itself has been playing pretty well and the starting experience for them is a great standalone experience. Hazzikostas also pointed out that one thing specifically being held back from the beta are the in-game cinematics that help really sell those experiences, but they won’t be implemented until the game goes live in August.

Crow’s Edit: The part about the demon hunter starting experience is fairly boilerplate when it comes down to it; that’s not to say that it’s boring, but that it’s not unexpected that a hero class experience like the Death Knight experience in Wrath of the Lich King was an important, self-contained bit of storytelling that was also an integral part of the expansion’s overall story.

Artifacts

Hazzikostas went a bit into the history of how artifacts came about: namely, he told the story of how Ashbringer was the first artifact they conceived of, and everyone really knew what to do with it because they understand the fantasy of Ashbringer from knowing its history. When the art team was able to deliver on offering a bunch of different visual customizations that maintained the spirit of the weapon while looking really unique, they knew the idea was solid and carried on with inventing other artifacts for other classes.

In turn, he talked about the dynamic of appearances, where some will simply be color variations to match your personal style, but others will be more emblematic of the effort involved with unlocking that particular appearance. And he also mentioned secret appearances that you’ll have to figure out in order to unlock them… but also pointed out, after some ribbing from Cox, that if you wanted to mog it to look like a pitchfork you could do that.

Crow’s Edit: No indication what the pitchfork comment means about existing transmog rules, or if they’ll find some way to keep Wowhead from just datamining out the secret appearances and posting a guide on how to get them. Overall, this seems to be a way of resurrecting that classic-era concept of “that guys got a full set of Tier 2 warrior armor, he must be a badass” and generally speaking, in a post-transmog world, I think that’s a good direction to go by.

Mythic Plus

Hazzikostas is normally something of a cipher to read for reactions, but you can tell how excited he was to talk about Mythic Plus dungeons. He dug into a bit of the history of how dungeons came into play in expansions (you enjoy them in the first couple months but once raids open you basically never go back) before mentioning that they felt they could do better, and Mythic Plus was a way they could accomplish that.

Cox pointed out the similarities with Greater Rifts in Diablo III, and Hazzikostas confirmed that watching the iteration of grifts (both what was finally released and what they saw being internally tested during Reaper of Souls’ development) did inform the design for Mythic Plus. Having the affixes cycling out week to week, with higher difficulties having more affixes, creates a scenario where changing up your gameplay or party composition in order to confront different affixes or affix combinations will be a part of the challenge.

Meanwhile, the weekly reward cycle of Mythic Plus (where you get a loot chest based on the highest tier you completed in the previous week along with a fresh keystone) helps to sell the idea that this mode for dungeons can potentially be a parallel or complementary progression path to raiding.

Crow’s Edit: If the idea of Mythic Plus as being “what you do with your guild on an off-raid night” sounds familiar, it’s because that was exactly the justification offered for heroic dungeons back in Burning Crusade. That’s not a bad thing or a knock against the idea in any way, but it definitely shows that Blizzard has come back around to recognizing that dungeon content should have a longer shelf-life than it’s had in the last several expansions, and mythic plus sounds like a great platform to do that with.

That wraps up the recap of the dev update. Tell us what you liked/disliked in the comments, because this is a lot to unpack, and best of luck getting into the beta this week!