Blizzard’s fundamental lack of communication I believe is one of their biggest weak points as a company. They don’t talk to us, they don’t listen to us. They just do their own thing and if we don’t like what they do they are somehow confused about it. Like I also play a lot of indie game devs and they are SO involved with the playerbase sometimes directly asking what they want to see in the future. I get blizzard isn’t indie but they could stand to communicate much, MUCH better. It’s just such night and day. We get virtual radio silence 99% of the time from Bliz and now they’re encrypting their test builds even heavier than before. They’re going BACKWARDS not forwards.
Literally a game I play recently had a dev go “okay so a lot of people don’t use this thing that’s in the game. I want to hear from everyone including current players of it those interested in it and anyone else who have feedback about what they want this to become I am willing to start from the ground up if it is needed” from the lead dev. Literally willing to rebuild a skill from the ground up based off of player feedback. And instead of making assumptions or just doing their own thing they ASK what we want. Sometimes they add things that they want but they also talk to us about it. It’s so nice. Hell even FFXIV communicates better than this and they’re also from a fortuna 500.
A couple of voicelines were datamined about Genn Greymane talking about the Alliance version of going to Tirisfal Glades to spy on Calia and the Forsaken. Nothing really ground breaking, but worth noting:
Wouldn’t it be interesting to see San’layn there, causing Alliance to freak out some, only to have Calia talk on their behalf and getting the Alliance to calm down some about it? I mean, I know Calia isn’t liked and all, but if it got playable Horde San’layn, I’m for it. Obviously, they’d have their own leader and such. It’d just be for the purposes of the questline.
It’s interesting how we see tidbits of the Alliance version of this but not much of anything the Horde version. Really suspicious…
Will continue to keep an eye out for anything of interest to report!
I know everyone has their preferences and that’s good we don’t want everyone liking the same thing because it gets old fast. More options are always welcomed. Still don’t like that we don’t have a height and weight selector. Kind of boring seeing the same sized character of every race.
Only overly beefy race I can think of are the BE males and probably the VE males since they use the same body. When they updated the models they got all juiced. I do prefer the new look to the old but I’d rather have a look somewhere in between.
Can’t speak for Alliance races because I just can’t play them no matter how much I try. But I do like the Kul’Tirans I just never unlocked them. I would trade HM Tauren for them in a heartbeat that is how much I like them and dislike HM Tauren though I like their customizations. I just don’t understand how we didn’t get a Jaina model also. Right there is one example of where more options would’ve been good since most players I remember wanted a skinner model.
As far as San’layn models go I would prefer a model closer to BE’s then to NE’s. Even though all the San’layn we see, except Lana’thel, are NE models. It makes no sense to me how BE’s turn into San’layn and now look like NE’s. Definitely NEED an updated San’layn model IMO but most players probably prefer the NE version.
And with all the customizations Blizz has been adding I could definitely see them being able to add in one for San’layn that allows you to choose how long your fangs are, if you’re missing a fang or it’s chipped, your wing type and look, a more monstrous bat look vs a more BE look and possibly claws showing or not. Stuff like that goes a long way for me personally.
I think Tirisfal is one of the locations San’layn could be but definitely not my first choice personally. I’d rather them be in the Nerubian tunnels underneath Ice Crown and we get to explore them during the unlock scenario.
My question is where would/could they be hiding in Tirisfal? Are there any mines big enough for a group to go unnoticed for this long? Would be cool to have them there though to keep the Worgen in check. But I’m pretty sure we would’ve heard something by now about any conflicts between the two.
Hm, more and more stuff from these quests, tons of encrypted stuff, no one quite knows what’s going on. I dunno. All I know is if it is an Allied Race or customization, it might indeed be related to the undead. And hopefully will get us vampyr & dark rangers. Here’s to hoping.
When we’ll know, of course, well only the gods & blizzard know that.
A lot of the heavy lifting for customization is in the .db2 database files. These store the options for all the races in one big table (well, there’s a few files to set up categories and such, but they’re all shared across races).
If we were to just get customization of existing elves, or an AR based on same, there wouldn’t need to be lots of new files since the base face and body meshes would already exist.
The .db2 updates can be encrypted in smol versions of the file which get appended to the primary version later.
Huh that’s fascinating, so in that case, there could very well be an Allied Race hidden within those 200 files. That makes sense, I can imagine they’d use a lot of what exists already and just add quite a few options.
I won’t get too excited, granted, but it is super curious indeed that so much is encrypted.
Fingers crossed for knowing sooner rather than soon ™
Edit: Omg I didn’t know the ™ actually became smaller
Yea, it’s possible, but I think customization options are more likely.
Assuming whatever might happen is to have Blood and Night elf-ish versions, any new geometry would add up quick. To add, say, one new hairstyle, they’d need 4 models and at least one texture. Could still squeeze a bunch of those into the unknown files, but they’ll need some room for the new story stuff too lol
Yeah, true. I hope the customization is more extensive than just eyes and skins, though, but I’ve said that like a thousand times now, so there’s that The fun thing is the number of them could imply, if it’s customization, that it could have more meat to it than ‘Night Warrior’ did with its single skin & eye color.
Fingers crossed.
Alas, was nice having likes very briefly on the vampire, but she ran out.
Yep, I saw that already and there’s a thread on it I commented on the vampire. I 1000000% want cross faction guilds. Like legit, it would make me consider coming back sooner. They’re needed. I hate faction war nonsense, and have ever since the start of BfA. Faction-obsessed folks can keep their locks but those of us who want neutral stuff should be allowed to dictate how our guilds work.
As far as file size for customization I’d say it would depend on whether or not just the part being altered is imported/changed or if these are entire body parts with the alterations changed.
I’m thinking it is cost-effective and easier to just have each changeable part on its own layer but contained within the head model that way all you have to model/import are those alterations, and it allows players more customizable freedom. Plus, it is going to be way smaller to do it that way.
My models range from under 1,000kbs for low polly to as much as 300,000kbs for higher polly and that is just the model without any clothes. Individual customizable parts would be a lot smaller but if you have a lot of them then it would add up over time.
Use to be normal to bake a higher polly onto a lower polly so that it looked good but cost less to have in games but haven’t kept up on that stuff so could be different now. That would give you a model that looked good but was cheap to render.
If Darkfallen are a customization for Blood Elves and Night Elves, I have to wonder what the preorder incentive would be for Dragonflight. I can’t imagine locking customization options behind a preorder tier being a good preorder incentive, moreso since things like mounts and transmogs only go so far. Maybe there could still be new races as an incentive for Dragonflight preorders, but we’ll have to see what actually happens I guess.
There is also the worry that Darkfallen would be treated as LARPing Blood/Night Elves, with little voice changes, possibly no storyline presence, no real identity and being referred to as if you’re playing a regular Blood/Night Elf, and the lack of San’layn features. For these reasons and several more that I’ve grumbled about many times, this is why I’d prefer Darkfallen to be their own race.
As for that cross faction guild, I’m hoping it’ll be something we see someday. I’d love to be able to make a guild for all my Horde and Alliance characters as opposed to having to deal with two getting made. I know there would be a lot of issues to iron out, but I hope it isn’t impossible.
Hopefully we see a reveal of 9.2.5’s contents sooner than later.
The fun thing is the number of them could imply, if it’s customization, that it could have more meat to it than ‘Night Warrior’ did with its single skin & eye color.