Danuser Radio Interview

Community General Discussion
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interesting:

Timestamp 01:14: Watcher Karinos
Is Watcher Karinos going to be our kind of guide through this expansion, much like Bolvar or Magni were before him?

Watcher Karinos is the last survivor of the group that was charged to watch the shorelines. He was there when the Dragon Isles and Tyrhold were the pinnacle of the dragons’ kingdom so he will have insight and knowledge that we can get from him. He has a special place within the hearts of Alexstraza and some of the other dragons, and he’ll certainly be a presence. We will get to know him better, but he won’t be directing everything like Khadgar did in Legion.

Timestamp 3:28: Other Dragon Flights
So the flights like the Chromatic, or Netherwing, are we going to see those in the expansion as well?

One of the big themes for Dragonflight that they fixed on right away was Legacy. When the dragons left there were only five flights of dragons and one was already splintering off and causing all kinds of chaos. In the time since they left there have been a lot of changes and a lot of new dragon flights. Alexstraza and the others will have to face the question of whether to reclaim the old Legacy and put things back the way they were, or think about a new kind of future and include more voices at the table. This will unfold in the story and quest lines of the expansion.

Timestamp 5:23: A Main Antagonist
Will we be dealing with a sort of main antagonist through [the expansion], or is it going to be a sort of medley of different adversaries?

There is no shortage of adversaries in the dragon isles. There will be local threats like the gnolls. The Djaradin are a more widespread threat across multiple areas.

The history that was presented in Chronicle has huge gaps. When the first dragons were infused with the magic of the Titans and became the Aspects, not all of dragon kind that existed felt like this was a good idea. What started off as a philosophical difference long ago grew into hard feelings and resentments, and resentments led to conflict, and conflict led to war with the Aspects and their followers on one side, and primal dragons who turned back to the elements to infuse themselves with their strength on the other.

The leaders of this primalist movement were four dragons who were the incarnates of the elemental forces that they had embodied and they were on par with the Aspects. It took all the coordination and skill of the Aspects working together to defeat and imprison these Primal Incarnates in the past, and now that the Aspects have given up their power to defeat Deathwing they’re at a disadvantage. With the Dragon Isles awakening, these four Primal Incarnates are in danger of being released into the world. They’ll definitely need the help of their mortal allies.

Timestamp 11:31: The Status of the Current Dragon Flights

Red: Alexstraza still leads the red flight.

Bronze: Nozdormu still leads the bronze flight, but he faced many challenges during Cataclysm where we saw his future self turning into Murozond and becoming infinite. He knows that is coming at some point and that weighs heavily on his mind. He’s having trouble seeing the time ways clearly.

Blue: The Blue Flight was almost wiped out and those that survived have scattered. Kalecgos was only an Aspect for a very short period of time. so how does he rebuild that flight? His Aspect and leader Malygos turned very dark and had to be struck down, so that’s also a legacy that haunts him.

Green: Ysera was killed in Legion and is now bound to Ardenweald in the Shadowlands. Her daughter, Merithra, has had to lead, but she faces questions about herself and her role. The Green Flight has a lot of things to answer and explore in their legacy.

Black: Wrathion had a very unusual origin and he’s made some choices that other dragons would find very questionable in terms of tactics. Ebonhorn/Ebyssian confined himself mostly to High Mountain and living amongst the High mountain Tauren, but now that he’s come out into more of the world, seeing that relationship between him and Wrathion build will be interesting. They both have things to learn from one another. The future of the Black Dragonflight is certainly the most tenuous of all the Dragonflights right now.

Timestamp 17:11: Azeroth
A lot has been happening in Azeroth while we’ve been absent in the Shadowlands. Are we going to see that story move ahead?

In Shadowlands Patch 9.2.5 we’ll see some things happening back in Azeroth and learn of some events that have transpired. We’ll have pre-patch events where we find out what’s going on in Stormwind and Orgrimmar, how the Horde has been faring with their new counsel, how the Alliance has been faring with Turalyon at the helm, and what’s been different about that since then.

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Indeed. :thinking:

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Ok, now that sounds rad. The concept art for them is dynamite as well.

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they do look awesome!

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The Netherwing Flight

“The what now?”
-Danuser, Probably

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18:30 Manny: I am definitely excited for this story, but I’m just gonna quickly turn the interview over to a couple of more mechanical questions. Part of what we’re doing is having crafting being put forward and not just crafting, but all professions, having more prominence. So with a professional identity, are we going to have to make everything at these work tables or will there be some things that we can make away from the crafting tables?

Steve: That’s something that we’re still kind of debating and working out, we realize that there’s big things that people make that are more like one of a kind or rarer things, and then there’s other commodities that you need to make more frequently and might need to make with shorter notice. Potions for your raid, things like that. So we’re certainly keeping that in mind you know, we’ll look for ways to… we really want these crafting stations to feel relevant and like important places to gather in the world, but we also don’t want to completely inconvenience players and make them go out of the way So we’ll try to find a balance there, I think. I’d say it’s still a work in progress and it’s something that we’ll definitely be interested in having people who are playing the Alpha and the beta later, when those are released to get feedback, because that’s something we would definitely respond to based on how our players feel about it.

19:53 Manny: Great! Okay, and so then I guess with the big projects and that sort of thing. Legion had a lot of professional quests. When you were getting to the higher levels of expertise, you would do these sorts of quests. Are we going to see a return of any kind of professional quests?

Steve: We felt like you know, the Legion profession quest had some interesting ideas and some of them worked really well and then some of them weren’t, you know, they didn’t feel as connected and so we really wanted to focus on the system side of, especially the gathering and crafting professions, to really try to revitalize those and come up with some fresh new gameplay for them, and focused less on wrapping them inside specific quest lines and things like that, and we really want the systems to stand on their own, you know, that said, I wouldn’t rule out in the future, something like that, but I think right now the emphasis is on making these systems feel as cool and dynamic as they can and really help you forge your sense of identity as a crafter and we’ll see how that feels for players, again, listening to their feedback.

20:58 Manny: Awesome, okay, we’ve heard about the dungeon Uldaman and it was hinted at before. In the past, we’ve always had, well not always, but in general, lately, we’ve had two dungeons per zone; are we looking at a similar thing for the launch of this expansion?

Steve: We didn’t want to confine ourselves to saying, “well every zone has to have two dungeons in it” so we’re not following, that’s not a formula that we’re following, some of them do and some of them don’t. Uldaman is an example that we know where that is in the world, It’s you know, far off and in the old world. And so this was a chance to revisit a fan-favorite dungeon, one of those, you know, original dungeons from back in the day and we get to see it in a new light and there’ll be some familiar parts of it that will go into and we’ll see brought up to modern fidelity and it’s really amazing to see some of these rooms like the, of course, you can’t go to hold them on without seeing the map room, and so to see that brought up to modern standards, it’s just Chef’s Kiss, it’s just such a nostalgia hit, but it looks so good. And then there’ll be new parts of the dungeon that will venture to as well and what’s sending us back here is again, because Alexstraza wants to find a way to regain the power of the Aspects. She knows that Uldaman held the disks of Norgannon back in the day and what she learns is that there were other disks brought there as well, one of which contains some of the knowledge of Keeper Tyr, and because Keeper Tyr isn’t around anymore, that knowledge he holds, she hopes it has some clue in there that might help them; so she’s asking adventures to brave the depths of Uldaman and go in there, but of course, there will be some complications that players will meet along the way, some impediments to their progress there, and so we’ll have to wait and see how that story unfolds for you once you experience the dungeon yourself. But it was great to go back there. It’s a fun location and, like I said, seeing it brought up to the modern styles of art is just really amazing.

23:03 Manny: I always love when we go back to those vanilla dungeons and get the revamped Scholomances, that revamp was amazing so, I’m looking forward to this. Talking about revamps, the talent system is getting a big revamp in this expansion. So the way that it used to work is that your spec was determined purely based on what you had the majority of your talents in. For this one, you’re going to be choosing your spec and that’s going to influence it. So, I guess the hybridization is going to be coming mostly from your class talent tree. How do these two talent trees balance against each other? Are you getting like one talent for one and then for another, do they interact between each other?

Steve: Yeah, you’ll get two different kinds of points. So there will be spec points that you can spend on the spec trees and then a class point that you spend in the class trees and a big impetus for that was that our class designers of course see how often, like in the current talent system, when you have something that’s competing, you know, that a DPS boost that’s competing against some kind of utility, every guide is going to push you towards the DPS boost; and so they wanted to break some of those things off so that you didn’t feel like you were making a bad choice, just because there was some cool utility or class-specific kind of flavor that you wanted to pick. We wanted to move off a lot of those power choices into the tree that felt most appropriate for them and at that spec level, so that’s going to give you a lot of more flexibility and again, wanting to, to encourage experimentation and trying different things; that was one of the cool things about the old tree system was for as much as there were always like recommended paths and things like that, every once in a while someone would find this offbeat combination of things that would suddenly blow up and people would gravitate to and be like, “oh, this is so fun, this is so different!” And we wanted to give some of that feeling back to it as well. So it’s really fun to see the work that’s been done so far and the class team is busy iterating on all those trees and giving lots of flexibility and lots of freedom. We just think it’s going to bring back a lot of fun to that sort of gameplay for everyone and enjoy that feeling.

25:20 Manny: That is awesome. Okay, I know you’re gonna get a lot of questions about the new Evoker. I will leave that to other interviews, but I did want to ask as we’re going from 60 to 70 in this new expansion, are we going to see some new goodies for the old classes?

Steve: Well, yeah, like we’re still continuing, we loved bringing class sets back for Eternity’s End, and that’s something that we’ll continue to see going forward. way and the revamp of the talent system brings a lot of flavor and choice back to classes that might have felt fairly rigid or static for a while so that, you know, those things all combined to really bring back a lot of flavor for the classes. So people don’t have to be jealous of the Drakthyr Evoker all the time, they’ll have plenty of fun new things for their classes to do and they’ll have a sense of power as they’re exploring the Dragon Isles as well.

26:23 Manny: Okay, well, I’m almost out of time so I’m gonna ask you one last question, what is the new class color for the Evokers?

Steve: (Laughs) it’s a shade of green that’s different from the other shades of green and not being an artist that’s about as specific as I can get for you, but it does read well, they all are artists put a lot of effort into color choices and they know about balance and what, you know, all those different elements of color, God bless them, because that’s not my wheelhouse so I leave it to them, but it looks really good on the breakdown of classes when you see them in a raid team together.

Manny: Okay, thank you so much for your time today. I know you have a busy day and thank you so much for answering all my questions.

Steve: It was a pleasure! Thanks for the great questions! Talk to you next time!

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Gnoll raid confirmed!

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I love what they showed on the updated gnoll models.

I would be down!

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We’re going to get a shoehorned political message, aren’t we?

Like I just expect it hearing this from Danuser, regardless of how otherwise “okay” the concept is.

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I read that too and my immediate thought was “Ah, so they’re doing the ol’ bait and switch in regards to directing the game back to it’s more grounded setting the fanbase fell in love with.”

I absolutely wont be surprised if the message of the expansion is a thinly veiled jab at the player base for wanting the game to be like how it used to be and the success that Classic has seen in SPITE of the development team and their views.

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I just think Danuser focuses too much on politics and not enough on “this is cool let’s do it”.

It’s why Metzen will always be better than him. Put cool story moments in the game, that’s how low the bar is, and you can’t even do that.

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I don’t disagree…. Unfortunately I think 10.0 and 11.0 are being planned on staying safe after the big blizzard bust.

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why did danuser reference Chronicle here? Didn’t danuser officially retcon Chronicle to make “the first ones” work in SL?

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Good point, anyone got a link to that source? Would be interesting to compare side by side.

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I believe that was just in regards to the cosmic forces and “the bigger picture”.
The Chronicle’s still have a lot of relevant, correct information regarding all things Azeroth, like the Dragons and Elementals.

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I mean… it makes some amount of sense, lore-wise.

Look at the five “good” flights so far. We’ve had to bag and tag 4 of out of the 5 aspects because they lost their marbles. Maybe diversifying this thing is a good idea.

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The concept is fine, I just expect some unnessecary real-life anecdotes presented with the subtlety of JAB’s pins.

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This was honestly the only part I wanted to hear about at the moment. I figured most of the other questions would be answered pretty vaguely since we’re early on, and also having the reveal that was pretty ambiguous overall as well.

I’m hoping for some sort of bigger pre-patch to get 10.0 hyped up.

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I feel the problem is when game devs decide whats right on players behalf

Like in last of us 2…it should have been left to the players to decide whether to take revenge or not and showing consequences based on that.

That would have been more organic way to teach that revenge is bad

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Last Jedi really kicked off a big ol’ hack writing trend, sadly.