Q: But what didn't work out so well? We really spread ourselves thin and taxed the team. The original plan was to totally re-do a handful of high-priority zones, but to leave a lot of the zones that worked mostly alone.
We categorized them into "red," "yellow," and "green" zones. The idea behind the green zones for example, Loch Modan was just to tweak the quest flow to be a little smoother, but not to make any major changes. The reality is that even the green zones really needed a lot of love. Once we got in there, it was all or nothing: we ended up completely re-doing a lot of green zones so that they met our new quest design standards. We came up with a nickname: "watermelon" zones.
They were green on the outside, until you got in there and started poking around. Where that hurt us was when it came time to do the max-level content, the zones.
The content there turned out well, but the experience is inconsistent across the board -- Uldum feels totally different from Hyjal, which in turn feels different from Vashj'ir. The design decisions and efforts we made didn't always yield the desired results. We were aiming for a really global feel with Cataclysm, so we set the max-level zones in varied environments all over the world underwater, across deserts, in the elemental plane of earth, etc.
However, as a result, they ended up not feeling as connected as we'd like. That's something important that we're keeping in mind moving forward — World of Warcraft works best when there's a sense of place. A connected world to explore. We feel the storytelling in Cataclysm was strong.
Players participated in stirring stories, like bringing the Dragonmaw into the Horde via a violent coup or reuniting the Wildhammer Dwarves with a crazy wedding. These were memorable moments and shared experiences. The downside to creating these stories is that the zones on the whole ended up being way too linear. For example, because we wanted to show your character re-growing the burning devastation of Mount Hyjal, there was really only one way to play that zone: you started at point A, and you worked your way through to point Z.
Pretty glorious the first time, but frustrating on your second or third character because there's only one way to do it, and no way to skip around. We want big sweeping stories, but we want to give players the freedom to explore those stories on their own terms. Q: Places like Hyjal also used a lot of phasing to show the world changing.
We have a massive phase shift halfway through the story that changes the terrain for nearly a third of the zone. It's epic, right? But it can be a real pain for players when so much of the world changes like that.
Phasing is like a story sledgehammer: it gets the job done, but at best it splits up players and at worst it totally confuses them. We're going to be a lot more careful going forward. The Firelands dailies in patch 4. For the most part, everyone is playing together on the same map.
Q: Talk more about the 4. With those dailies we were able to engage a lot of players, myself included. I was the first quest designer on the team to get the mount and all the achievements on the live servers -- suck it up, slackers! Previously, "doing dailies" meant hitting the same quest givers for the same three quests, usually in a static place.
Here we were able to deliver a sense of progression and a story that unfurled over the course of a few weeks, all as you did a constantly changing set of quest objectives in a dynamic environment. We think that worked out well.
Moving forward, we're going to look for more opportunities like this -- ways to keep people engaged and cool things to do solo with your max-level character. We've got ambitious plans. Q: Patch 4. How do you feel about Thrall's character development? The essential story is a good one, and we really wanted to portray all the inner struggles Thrall is going through. We figured out a way to show all that internal tension, and we wrapped it up in a story that demonstrates how his mate, Aggra, will literally go to the ends of the world to pull him through this.
But we had to do a lot of things to make it work in the game. We needed to make a quest that people could do simultaneously without getting in each other's way. We wanted a quest that players could do solo, no matter what their skill level.
We somehow made all of it work under those restrictions, and we filled the screen with some killer imagery I love the vision of Thrall immersed in the Abyssal Maw. But ultimately the quests themselves ended up not being as compelling from a gameplay perspective as we would have liked. Many players blew through them once and never looked back. I really think we can do better.
Going forward we want to convey a clearer narrative, delivered in the context of solid gameplay. This is important to us -- we talk about ways to tackle this problem all the time.
The central area of the Isle contains the multi-tiered Temple of Five Dawns. It is the religious center of the Isle, yet boasts very few actual inhabitants.
This is where the ancient spirits must be returned. This is the starting zone of the playable pandaren. As such, there is no way to get to the Isle via normal means from the outside.
As already stated, it does not show up on the world map. Once pandaren depart the Isle, they cannot return, much like the goblin Lost Isles.
If a player attempts to swim beyond the limits of the island, the screen will black out and they will find themselves passed out at the dock at Morning Breeze Lake. There are no flight masters , boats , or zeppelins. Master Shang Xi is the pandaren that players meet first, right when they begin their adventures on the Isle. He is an old elder, seemingly in charge of training would-be monks and fighters. Players encounter him at all the pivotal points in the Isle's quest lines, as he tests players and sends them to gather the ancient spirits.
He eventually ends his journey at the Wood of Staves before passing into the next world. Two other notables are his students, Aysa Cloudsinger and Ji Firepaw.
Their relationship might best be described as sister-brother, if not for the fact that Ji seems genuinely attracted to Aysa. Though they share in the players' adventures and assist in removing the thorn from Shen-zin Su's side, what might be the beginnings of love cannot progress: Aysa joins the Alliance, while Ji joins the Horde.
By and large the main story arc concerning the Isle is to discern what ill has befallen Shen-zin Su, the giant turtle the Isle rests upon. This involves gathering the ancient spirits before talking with the giant turtle himself.
Once the cause of his discomfort is established, players are tasked with fighting off saurok while attempting to remove an entire boat from Shen-zin's side. Smaller story arcs mainly consist of proving your prowess, as well as helping to insure the continued prosperity of the pandaren by defending their homes and crops against the hozen and virmen. Post away! Log in , it's free! An alternative version of this wiki is now operational and ready for use.
WoWWiki Explore. WoW info. Gathering Production Secondary. Allied races. After the bureaucratic roadblock Blizzard faced in China regarding Wrath of the Lich King's undead theme, basing an entire expansion around the adventures of comical anthropomorphised pandas in a cartoon kung-fu wonderland initially seems suicidal to the game's success in the country.
In fact, it's quite the opposite. The Pandarens are represented as a philosophical, noble and good-humoured people who participate in conflict through a sense of honour and adventure rather than bloodlust.
The music is pure Crouching Tiger and the stories tip the nod to the balanced mysticism of Eastern myth. There's surely an extent to which this expansion is for Chinese fans. WOW wouldn't be the first MMO to try to curry favour with Asian players this way and perhaps it is a sign that Blizzard has one eye firmly on its growing audience in the East.
There's another side to Pandaria's lyrical mood, though. It's more reminiscent of the measured unfurling of the Nordic continent of Northrend in Wrath of the Lich King than the disjointed fantasies of The Burning Crusade and Cataclysm. Lead designer Tom Chilton speaks about wanting to "get people back into the world". Like Cataclysm, Mists of Pandaria will present five large high-level adventuring zones spanning five levels the level cap will be raised to But like Northrend, Pandaria will be a contiguous and coherent landmass rather than a series of showy ideas.
You'll see rice paddies, coastal jungle, great breweries the Pandarens like to eat and drink , elegant temples, lush rainforests and stone spires. Questing through this land will be emphasised at the endgame as well as during levelling, and the idea is that level 90s will have many more options for progressing their characters than PVP, dungeons and raiding.
Every activity will award the Valor Points used to buy the best gear in the game, including questing and the new scenarios. Scenarios are one of the most interesting developments in Mists of Pandaria: the soundbite is that they're "PVE Battlegrounds", and they seem to be the public quest idea from Warhammer Online and Rift crossed with Lord of the Rings Online's Skirmishes.
Seen as a replacement for group quests, these mini-adventures are multiplayer, multi-stage dynamic events which can be played by any assortment of characters - you won't need to form up with tanks, healers and damage-dealers.
They'll be instanced, and there'll be a queue interface for them much like the Dungeon Finder. Between scenarios, much more questing and the amusing but surprisingly deep pet battles, Mists of Pandaria will have a lot of options for the endgame player who's tired of the raid treadmill, or scared of it.
Meanwhile, hardcore dungeon fanatics will be catered for by a sporting new Challenge Mode. Challenge Mode is comprised of dungeon time-trials inspired by the "minute Baron run" in the classic Stratholme instance. In these, you'll aim for bronze, silver and gold medals, visually striking armour sets, and most importantly bragging rights on leaderboards; crucially, a system that automatically normalises your equipment to a predetermined level will ensure the playing-field is level and the focus is on player skill and teamwork.
Mists of Pandaria is currently least convincing, surprisingly, in its biggest new feature. The new monk class is a hybrid hand-to-hand melee fighter and can be specialised to tank and heal as well as do damage - although even the healer will supposedly be capable in combat. For the first time in WOW, the class has no auto-attack; every strike is a key press.
It's a mouthwatering prospect, flexible and dynamic, and the animation is fabulous. Some skills, like the long-range flying kick opener, are great wire-fu wish-fulfilment. But over those first ten levels, the Monk doesn't really hang together. Its resource system is muddled and, rather than flowing "like Street Fighter" as the developers intend, the real-time combat rotations feel forced, wearisome and lacking in tactics.
Variety and refinement will no doubt come with more development; Blizzard hasn't made a duff class yet, so there's no reason to assume it will start now. Similarly, it's likely that the new talent system will offer elegant simplicity rather than crude dumbing down, even if the intention that it will banish "cookie-cutter" character builds forever is probably too much to hope for.
But this WOW expansion isn't really about the big changes and box-ticking bullet points of new race and class. Challenge Mode aside, it's not about the dungeon-crawling endgame either. It's about something that WOW offered with rude brilliance in its original release, and later perfected in Wrath of the Lich King: adventure and exploration.
The discovery of an extraordinary new world with thousands of other players by your side. It's an expansion for Asia, certainly, but it's also an expansion for the silent majority of casual WOW players who always preferred exploration to poring over stat sheets.
Maybe Blizzard feels that the hardcore has started to slip away from it and that WOW's future lies elsewhere. Maybe it's right, and this artful and fun expansion will refresh the game all over again. Mists of Pandaria is not the shark-jump it looks like. WOW's best years may be behind it, but it's growing old gracefully. Sometimes we include links to online retail stores. If you click on one and make a purchase we may receive a small commission.
Read our policy. Jump to comments World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria.
0コメント