Last night we were treated to Blizzard's "Warcraft Direct" stream, which was generally seen as a sort-of replacement for BlizzCon this year. And they still know how to draw numbers - I was watching on Twitch (because I could earn some free mounts in the process) and the viewer count sat pretty steadily at around 170k concurrent... and that's without counting those who were watching through other channels, such as YouTube and TikTok.
I'll start off by pointing out the one thing that kept bugging me stylistically: whenever they kept changing the camera angle without changing the way the speaker was facing. That was just such a weird artistic choice and constantly distracted me. It's strange when someone talks to you on screen, seemingly addressing you but staring off to somewhere vaguely to the right! Stop doing that!
Anyway, with that out of the way, the announcements started with the more boring stuff first (no offense to anyone who was thrilled by more Hearthstone expansions) - I guess they knew that the vast majority of people were there for WoW and therefore saved that until the end. Early on we got a shout-out for The Remarkable Life of Ibelin (about which I still mean to write a separate post) and its associated charity drive, which I thought was sweet and in which Holly revealed that she personally met his parents.In terms of actual game news, Mists of Pandaria Classic was confirmed for next year with its own launch trailer. I already mentioned a few weeks ago where I stand on this one.
However, there will also be "Classic Classic" launching in only a week! I guess the "fresh lovers" got their wish at last, though it's also been confirmed that these servers will be progressing into Burning Crusade, which may muddy the waters for some people? Because once again, where do those characters go after? Interestingly, a new hardcore server will be launching at the same time, and that progressing into BC would be something new for sure. Can't wait to see the clips of someone suffering permadeath at the feet of a fel reaver or something.
Again, as I said previously, this isn't really for me. I can't deal with the rushing, FOMO and mega-server environment any longer, but it'll be interesting to observe for sure.
On the retail front, it was confirmed that while we're still awaiting patch 11.0.7, 11.1 after that will take us to the underground goblin capital of Undermine, something that had already been speculated about for a while. I can't say that this sounds like the most appealing location to me, but we'll see.
What intrigued me about this one was that there was talk about us getting a special car ground mount which sounded like it will feature dynamic ground riding, which was another one of those things dataminers had found hints about some time ago. Curious how that will pan out.
At this point in the stream I was kind of like: okay, all of that sounds decent but I can't say I'm actively excited about any of it. Then Ian concluded his segment by saying that there was just one more thing they wanted to show us, and a little trailer began playing, showing a male human warrior in the new tier two armour entering a house. "Now what's this," I wondered, and it slowly dawned on me as the camera showed him walking past a bunch of decorations including an Ony head on the wall.
The trailer then shows him comfortably sitting down with a mug that says "home sweet home" and we get the tag line "your next adventure begins at home", followed by the logo for the next expansion (Midnight). I was keeping some notes already and just wrote down "HOUSING" in all caps. Good job, Blizzard, for saving the biggest hype feature until the end.
It's funny because I'm not even the biggest housing enthusiast myself, but it's just felt way overdue for the game at this point. Ian Hazzikostas actually commented in an interview a few years ago that they were finally looking into it, and I already half-expected a housing announcement at last year's BlizzCon; it just felt like it had to happen eventually, and here we are now.
I just have this feeling in my bones that player housing would be a one-expansion (or in this case three part expansion) item, just like Garrisons and the Artifact Weapon were for WoD and Legion.
ReplyDeleteAnd an excuse to sell stuff on the Cash Shop. That too.
DeleteI don't see any reason to assume that housing would just be for one expansion. They left that ethos behind in Shadowlands, said they were no longer going to do that, and have actively delivered with Dragonriding not just carrying over into War Within but being expanded upon.
DeleteAs for the cash shop, I'll be very surprised if there are no housing items available for real money (I'm sure whoever pitched that feature made sure to point out its potential as a money-maker too) but they're still pretty good about keeping the vast majority of cosmetics in game, so I'm not particularly worried on that front either.
Blizzard did say that "Our new Hardcore Anniversary realms will not progress to Burning Crusade Classic. Hardcore has always been focused on the Classic 1-60 journey, made truly viable and approachable thanks to Classic’s original mechanics and difficulty. Burning Crusade brings with it a level of challenge (and randomness) that we feel doesn’t fit Hardcore".
ReplyDeleteI suspect Hardcore just doesn't have a large enough player base to justify a Hardcore realm. That said, if Hardcore suddenly became a major player place I could see them changing their mind. I guess we'll see.
Aw, I hadn't seen that; that's disappointing. I've got to admit I don't really see the point of a fresh hardcore realm then, considering that the hardcore population is already low for the two servers per region and the very nature of the mode means it really doesn't benefit as much from "fresh" as regular Classic.
DeleteI guess after 20 years housing should be a feature :P
ReplyDeleteSomehow I don't think they'll get it right though, a bit like the cosmetic system 1.0. I don't know how many iterations it took to make cosmetic management halfway bearable....they have a penchant for over-complicating things and limiting players. But hey, who knows!
Housing won't bring me back to WoW. I could see myself enrolling on a legacy server without a rush, just vanilla. It appears that is no longer a choice, either.
They'll definitely be facing a lot of challenges and I'll probably make another post about that in specific. Even as someone who sees their current direction as positive overall, other games have had (sometimes excellent!) housing for decades, so there's a lot to live up to.
DeleteChill Vanilla without the rush is still a thing! Just look for the Classic era tab in the Classic client.
Syl, like Shintar said, if you want the Vanilla Classic experience (as much as possible, anyway), the Classic Era servers are the way to go. People who sell boosts and GDKP runs there are very much in a minority, and you can go at your own pace. The Era servers are in clusters, so while the server population may say "Low", there's actually quite a few people playing on the Era clusters.
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