Not really… they HAVE been working on letting us know more of their plans – after all, they’ve been giving us a road map for DF! So this seemed like a logical development to me. Road map for current expansion → brief introduction to the next few expansions.
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Also, I almost forgot but the Season of Discovery is looking sick. Really looking forward to playing it at november 30!
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Biggest screams from opening ceremony:
- High elves - expansion two upon ‘uniting elves’ teased by Metzen (I admittedly cheered very loudly too
) - Season of Discovery
- Hero talents
My entire high elf community is SO excited, words cannot express it. I hope there is more information from the QnA. Quel’thalas! A Quel’Danil Lodge with actual quel’dorei architecture, high elf customization? Oh my!
A lot of folks seem very intrigued by the Classic Season, it is such a unique and cool concept. I hope it becomes more than a season as it could really make an entire new style of game much like Hardcore.
The hero talents look mega cool. I hope it will provide lots of options so we are not constantly serving one meta everyone plays for that class/spec, respectively.
Amazing Opening Ceremony and happy to be here!
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With all due respect and sincerity, I found the beginning of this year’s Blizzcon presentations to be one of the most boring to watch to date. Overwatch 2 is not a game that excites me or generates more interest.
The announcement of the Diablo 4 expansion in the way it was done was better not to have been announced at all as has happened in other editions with other games.
Hearthstone also doesn’t generate as much interest as it did at the beginning and Warcraft Rumble, despite the fun cinematic, is not a game genre that I like to play on cell phones, I prefer turn-based RPG games.
Cataclysm Classic
I have to be fair, the cinematics with the game’s characters were very good. Unfortunately, this expansion never really pleased me, but I’m sure it will please those who will have the opportunity to play it for the first time. I think the big problem with this expansion was that it was the successor to the Lich King expansion and had a boring final raid patch.
The War Within
The announcements for World of Warcraft have been overwhelmingly positive. It was good to see Cris Metzen again in charge of directing the game’s story and announcing three expansions, which left me with the feeling that we now have a captain to guide us through the sea of stories that will be presented.
Hero Talents
I love any talent tree system that allows me to change how a certain class plays and this option has me very interested but I prefer to test it first.
Dynamic Flight
I’ll love it if the Hivemind mount is included.
I would like a three-player flying mount that is easier to obtain than the hivemind being available in the game.
Dive into Deves/Forge Your Warband
First impression I liked solo content with decent rewards equivalent to endgame content for groups but I need to test it. I have a long-standing criticism of the World of Warcraft Follower System: I hate that I can’t carry followers from Legion, WoD, and BfA to the other expansions. It would be a lot of fun to be able to do missions around the world, raids and old dungeons accompanied with them. I hope that one day this can become a reality.
It looks like fun but I’m not going to create expectations ahead of time.
Transmog
I loved the option that we can finally learn what any equipment looks like with any character. My Lifetime sent thanks to the game team for this.
Cinematics to Excite Players
Look at the difference from one expansion to the next.
Boring Cinematics to Watch
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I’m not frustrated or excited about the content that was presented. The first impression was positive but I prefer to wait for more information and test the new features in the beta.
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Really enjoyed almost all the new information about the direction of Retail WoW. The one thing that I’m not a huge fan of is the Early Access paywall. I understand that Blizzard is trying to run a business and has to generate income and whatnot, but I think this just stuck out as really egregious. Looking at Reddit, Discord, Twitter, and other socials, there are tons of people that have an issue with it as well.
- Having access 3 days early is a huge advantage for player power, knowledge, and economically with the initial price surge of gatherable materials.
- This ruins the launch experience that is such an important part of the MMORPG landscape. This is very exclusionary to people who can’t afford it and will potentially separate them from their friends. Some group launch experiences will now turn into solo catch-up missions.
- This seems more like a 3 day delay for people not willing to fork out $90 than it does “early access”. There will be people who pay for the expansion, are playing the live game, and will not be able to access the areas that people on their friends list will be. Early Access feels much different for a live game such as WoW vs a new launch like Diablo 4.
- The cost to play WoW at the “same time” as everyone else will now be 89.99 USD before taxes up from 49.99 USD.
I love WoW and Metzen had me super hyped during the entire presentation, but that Early Access paywall was a huge damper on what was otherwise phenomenal news for the future of WoW.
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I had an idea to throw in the ring as far as Warband Reputations go. In the Warcraft Wiki interview with Morgan Day (https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/Forum:BlizzCon_2023_Q%26A#Interview_notes) it was mentioned that The War Within reputations/renown would be account wide- but prior expansion reputations are still being decided on.
I think the issue with it being fully account wide at all times is that it incentivizes having more alts to farm the rep quicker if every point counts. Obviously this would suck.
So there are 2 options from my perspective. #1) you count which character has amassed the most reputation and give all characters that level, or at the end of each week you snapshot the reputation to the highest character on the account and move all other characters up to that level - doing this would mean that doing weekly quests on multiple characters would not assist, but that a different character could be used week in and week out to gain reputation at the same speed as someone using the same character the whole time.
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Been looking through all the info I can on Wowhead and the one thing that really has me scratching my head is the 3 day early access to The War Within expansion. The thing a lot players including myself love about the release of an expansion is everyone jumping into it at the same time. I understand this has tech problems that inevitably happen with every expansion release but seeing how busy and chaotic it is, is the best part about a release.
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It was really good to see blizzard lay out the next 3 expansions, I was not expecting that.
What I now find myself saying is there wasn’t that much there in regards to features, yes there was quality of life stuff that is really good but outside of raid and M+ there is no substantive thing thing to sink time into. Yes it’s early days and something may come but outside the announcement of the story, direction and QOL stuff there was nothing. The principle of evergreen was mentioned and it would have been great to see a substantive feature added with the principle of evergreen taking it forward, say with something like player or guild housing/halls.
I love the idea of hero talents and having sub specs, what baffled me was the comment from the dev on the follow up pannel, when talking about the talents whilst looking at them in the UI they said you will get all of them anyway. If that’s true then what is the point of adding this system? Could it be clarified if we get all the talents within the sub specs plz. If it is the case then I question why? We don’t have a choice other than two pre defined sub specs that will play the way devs want and not how we choose.
One thing I’ve heard from many is the concern over expansion pricing, increased frequency of expansion launches and the fact we still have a sub on top of that. I think bliz need to clarify the speed at which things are going to come out.
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So far so good.
Everything seems to be goin the the right direction as long as what Chris said will come true.
We want a better story.-
We want to say wowwww once again.
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But there is? They announced delves which is supposed to be an evergreen open world alternative to m+/raid/rated pvp. They’re even adding a new row in the vault specifically for world content (based on these delves). While the information is a bit low at the moment, this sounds like a step up from the events we had in Dragonflight.
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It was also mentioned that the hero talents included a number of choice nodes, so that is where the decision making factor comes in I presume.
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Not really, as you said, it’s an alternative to M+ or raid and looks to be focused on thoes who mainly do world content.
As as i clearly said, a feature along the lines of player housing/guild halls, not specifically thoes but something we can build and grow on going forward, a thing we can develop and collect for.
Delves just are not that from what we saw and heard, we may find out differently today but we’ll have to see.
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I hope so as choices and decisions on builds is infinitely more interesting than a situation similar to what we had with artifact weapons.
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The screenshot circulating that is of the druid choices has 3-4 choice nodes in the 2 trees showing.
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Yes, this is why I’m confused by the devs comment. Hopefully this is cleared up today in the deep dive.
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I assume the meaning is that you will have enough points to unlock all the nodes, but given the choice nodes there will still be talents you can’t get - but routing won’t matter in end game because youll be able to get every node.
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No, all that was said was that they want to bring us content “quicker than before” but whether that means faster releases (every 12-18mo vs. 24) or just providing us more information on future content has not been confirmed.
I personally felt like they just wanted to give us hype and hope for what’s to come in the future, kind of like when Marvel Studios does their “Phase 1, Phase 2” etc stuff and shows us what titles are going to be released (that’s what I’m hoping at least).
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This was the first BlizzCon opening ceremony in awhile that I had TEARS in my eyes from sheer joy and overwhelming feelings of happiness about the things announced regarding the future of World of Warcraft.
First off, seeing Chris Metzen back on the stage was an emotional rollercoster for me. Seeing ‘my’ war chief up there hyping us up was definitely a highlight. And then we got not just one expansion announcement, but THREE expansion announcements with the overarching storyline of the World Soul Saga? Be still, my heart!
While I’m not a huuuuuge lore buff I have read/own several Warcraft books and read extensively on certain aspects of the world/character on external sites. To say I’m excited about the lore surrounding what the Nerubians have been up to and Xal’atath in The War Within, and returning to Quel’Thalas and stop the void and unite the elven tribes (High Elf allied race, anyone? Azshara?!?!) in Midnights is an understatement. I’m excited for The Last Titan as well but I don’t feel like I know enough details about what we are going to be doing in the expansion to hyperfixate like I will with the two expansions before it.
I thought the main stage looked phenomenal this year. Huge kudos to that team. I didn’t attend BlizzCon in person this year but I absolutely loved the idea that there was a preselection for the main stage. Hopefully that eliminated people cramming into eachother and making us feel like canned sardined like it had the previous years (I’d gone 2014-2019). I also like the layout/map that different IPs were groups together in different rooms - like your Diablo Room, Warcraft Room, etc. Very cool and I hope these ideas stay going forward with future BlizzCons.
Looking forward to seeing what’s in store on Day 2 for World of Warcraft and the other titles I enjoy. 
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2 questions regarding the early access (which shouldn’t be a thing in the first place):
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How does it work with multiple WoW accounts on the same bnet? I assume each WoW account will need to buy the early access separately (because anything else would be inconsistent with the predatory/greedy design of offering it in the first place)
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How does it work with the physical CE? With those going via the Blizzard store, do we get the code/account upgrade immediately on preordering?
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I apologize if I missed this question in the thread, but I do have one question…
Why is “static” flying not available until level 80, while “dynamic” flying is immediately available off the bat? May we hear your reasoning for this, please?
(I love dragonriding, so I’m very happy it’s an evergreen feature. But there are legitimate complaints of players with motion sickness… this will impact them negatively, so I think they deserve an answer.)
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