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Warcraft Deleted Scene, Leveling Path Guides, Highmountain and Val'sharah Zone Previews

Опубликовано 2016-08-19 в 10:52 perculia

Deleted Warcraft Movie SceneFlicks and the City 2novelizationavailable on DVDLeveling Path Guides@TemerityMyst

Val'sharah Leveling Path

Stormheim Leveling Path

Azsuna Leveling Path

Highmountain Leveling Path

Highmountain Preview

Blizzard

In this zone preview, we sat down with Game Designers Zachariah Owens and Ryan Shwayder and Senior Level Designer Matt Sanders to learn more about Highmountain and what you’ll experience there. The location of one of the largest mountains in Azeroth, Highmountain is a rugged and beautiful place. Here, three tribes of Highmountain tauren are locked in a bitter struggle against the savage drogbar that threaten their lands.

Highmountain Journey Composed by Glenn StaffordQ. How would you describe the zone’s ambience? What’s it like?Matt: The inspiration for Highmountain is a mix of Yosemite, the Swiss Alps, and Everest. We wanted to give players the sense that is the highest mountain, the tallest peak, in the game. We wanted to make parts of it seem almost uninhabitable, with glacial terrain and the kind of treacherous conditions you’d expect to find at such incredible heights. Because it’s the highest peak in World of Warcraft, so far at least, we wanted to give players a sense of progression within the harsh environment that the tauren and the drogbar have been living in. We wanted to acknowledge altitude, proximity to the ocean, exposure to the sun and shade, and what season it is. Currently it’s spring, so the climate is mild to temperate. Crops are growing, and plenty of food and other resources are readily available. But imagine how cold it would be in the winter. It would be brutal, and most visitors probably wouldn’t survive through the season. So there is always a huge effort to stock up on supplies and protect them from would-be invaders. Ryan: If you’re familiar with the War of the Ancients, you might recognize the namesake of the zone—Huln Highmountain, a renowned tauren who helped defeat Tichondrius many years ago. After receiving the Blessing of Cenarius, the tauren here have changed—they have moose horns instead of normal tauren horns, among other things—and we think players will enjoy getting to see a unique take on one of the game’s most familiar races.

Matt: Long, long ago, Highmountain used to be the home of the Black Dragonflight. We didn’t want to dig too deep into that for Legion, but there is definitely some interesting history in Highmountain that we can continue to expand on.Because the waters of Highmountain flow into Suramar, Stormheim, and Val’sharah, the area also serves as the lifeblood of virtually every region on the continent. There’s a lot riding on the taurens’ ability to maintain balance in the zone. As part of that, the Rivermane tauren established a fragile peace pact between the Highmountain tauren and the drogbar as a means to survive in relative peace. As part of this agreement, they mutually benefit from one another’s resources through trade at designated areas outside drogbar caves.Drogbar dwell in the infinite caverns deep within Highmountain, serving as overlords of the zone’s “underworld,” if you will. They provide spell components from inedible plants, rare minerals, gems, and other rarities as a trade offering to the tauren. In return, the tauren bring the drogbar grain, fish, leather goods, and lumber. They make a mutual exchange at these ritual sites, then go back to their respective homelands. It’s a symbiotic relationship—they don’t like each other, but they needed each other. We tried to subtly establish that throughout the zone.Then there are the harpies and kobolds. The tauren used to keep the harpies at bay with the Hammer of Khaz’goroth—until it was stolen by the drogbar. Now, the harpies have been emboldened. The kobolds offer stolen and scavenged trinkets, oftentimes items that would be broken and worthless to anyone else, and the harpies provide protection for their offerings of obedience. The kobold are very prolific and have now become a noticeable nuisance. It is said, “For every kobold you see, there are a hundred more.”Ryan: The Hammer of Khaz’goroth has always been the tie that binds in Highmountain , and as soon as that was taken by the drogbar, each tauren tribe suddenly had their own priorities to deal with. The Skyhorn have to deal with the harpies, while the Bloodtotem warriors—who’ve always been the jerks of the bunch—no longer want anything to do with the rest of the tribes. Meanwhile, the fishermen and farmers of Rivermane have to deal most directly with the drogbar, which isn’t really in their nature.Matt: Yeah, the Rivermane have always been the diplomatic, reassuring caretakers. The Rivermane just care about the agriculture and their shamanistic ways. They’re very peaceful, and you’d never see them getting into boxing matches or big fights like the Bloodtotem.The Skyhorn are essentially the wise masters of the skies. They can get to places no other tauren can because of their relationship with the eagles in the area, and help players navigate all the way to the peak.Because of that, the Skyhorn are also the tribe that’s sort of “running the show.” But that’s caused some tension with the Bloodtotem—the first chieftain of all the Highmountain tribes was a Bloodtotem, and they’ve long felt that they’d make the best leaders because they’re the strongest. That’s made them more reclusive, and unwelcoming to outsiders. They also have a predatory side—you’ll walk into their area and they’ll be watching you, but you’ll never know it.Zachariah: That’s where you get all of your Feral and Guardian Druids—the savage bear forms. They were the warriors of the tribes, the enforcers.Matt: They’re kind of a mix between the personalities of the trolls and orcs. The trolls have a very rich and mysterious culture, but it’s one that outsiders can never truly know. The orcs are very savage. If you are not as strong as a Bloodtotem, they’ll probably kill you because they can’t stand you. And if you are stronger than they are, they’ll try to kill you because they want to prove themselves. So the challenge comes in finding a way to make them think you’re useful. For example, the Rivermane provide them with food, since there’s no longer enough to hunt because they killed everything off. But you still know the Bloodtotem are looking down at them thinking, “pathetic little Rivermane.”Zachariah: All of the tribes had a very strong dependent, symbiotic relationship with each other. They also had a symbiotic relationship with the drogbar that ran deeper than either side would wish to acknowledge. They all kind of required each other, so when a wedge gets driven between them all, it essentially becomes chaos.

Q. Which locations would you say are some of your favorites, and why?Zachariah: Highmountain Peak. Just the hike up to the peak is such an amazing experience. You can just see the diversity of the ecosystems there. And there are just some places that are so harsh, places where nothing really lives, that make you feel like an explorer.Matt: You feel like you’ve climbed Everest. You’re able to look down upon Suramar, which is beneath two completely separate layers of clouds—sort of like what you see when you’re climbing or descending in a plane. That helps further establish the feeling that this is a place where no one—certainly no outsiders—could naturally survive. So when you see those huge, isolated outposts up there in the freezing cold, you know how challenging that outpost must be to maintain.One of my favorite aspects of Highmountain is its cavernous nature—it’s not just a solid piece of rock. It’s riddled with networks of tunnels, with steam and warmth radiating from its caves, implying potential volcanic activity without showing lava.If you go through Neltharion’s Vault and start navigating the passageways between the mountains along the main road, you realize how deep things go, giving you a sense that you could keep going down and down and down until you reach the coast—or just get completely lost. But my favorite specific place is a cave where you emerge from a tunnel and see all these drogbar bridges that keep going into the depths. If you look down, you think, “Wow, there’s a whole world within this mountain that is left up to the imagination.”Ryan: My favorite place is the beaver dam in Pinerock Basin where the rapids give way to calmer waters. The river cascades its way down toward the farms, Thunder Totem is behind you, and you're surrounded by beauty in all directions.

Zachariah: The zone is full of little surprises here and there. We try to reward exploration in all our zones. If something looks like it’s a trail that might lead off somewhere interesting, chances are it does. You will keep finding new places, treasures, and events as you explore.Q. Why do you think a player would want to start in this zone first?Matt: Tauren are awesome. So are kobolds. Other than that, I’m torn. In one way, it’s fun to do Highmountain last, and eventually be able to look down upon other zones you have explored. On the other hand, you could always take the Demon Hunter gliding into Suramar or fly into Stormheim, and have a cool sense of scale based on where you just came from. From the height of the mountain, the possibilities seem endless—“OK, I’ve conquered the mountain, now what am I going to do?”Either way, we wanted the ground path between Highmountain and Val’sharah to be awesome. Same with going to and from Stormheim. We wanted players to feel just as rewarded by just traversing the land the “classic” way, walking or running on their mount. There are a lot of World of Warcraft players out there who love to explore this way, and we tried to provide them with plenty of those opportunities.

Q. What is it that will bring them back to this zone?Matt: Unlike some of the other mountains in World of Warcraft, if you go mountain climbing here, you’ll find that it’s filled with playable space and tons of stuff to discover. You’ll stumble upon a vignette here or some kind of a camp there, or a story—we really wanted to reward exploration.Ryan: Sometimes it’s just finding somewhere that you’re going to decide is your favorite place—maybe just an awesome view. There might not be anything there, but it could be like, “This is where we’re going to hang out. Me and my wife really want to chill here all the time.”Q. Is there anything else players should know about this zone?Zachariah: I would say this is the “explorer’s” zone. This is the zone you go to when you just want to happen upon things, go on a spontaneous journey up a path, or wander down to the coast. Every nook and cranny has something.Ryan: There’s a lot of cultural exploration, too. The tauren here are familiar, but different. The drogbar are completely new.Matt: And everything is interrelated. The harpies are in some way related to the Skyhorn. The drogbar have a relationship with the Rivermane.Ryan: It’s like an ecosystem.Matt: Even the murlocs on the coast—the kobolds would bring these trinkets to the harpies in return for their protection. A lot of these trinkets would fall down the side of the mountain and land on the coastline where the murlocs would find them.Ryan: “Mglrmglmglmgl!” Translation: “The murloc gods have blessed us.”

Zachariah: Just another note for when you’re in Thunder Totem: leave the music and sound on, especially when playing through the first time. There are a lot of sound treats in general, and a lot of great voiceover in the right places to get the stories across.Matt: There are so many subtle details, and we really wanted to show a visual progression based on an awareness of the geography. We have different types of erosion because of the harsh climate. We considered details based on whether an area is shaded, whether snow would be melted in a particular location, or whether you’d encounter more plant life in an area. There are some cool and rewarding reveals, like a cave where you’ll come upon a spot with a marine layer and full sun. Little spots where plants grow and proliferate.Ryan: Highmountain is really about exploration and discovery. We never direct you to most of the stuff that’s in the zone—but if you keep your eyes open, there’s plenty to see.

Val'sharah Preview

Blizzard

In this zone preview, we sat down with Senior Game Designer Steve Burke to talk about Val’sharah and learn more about what you’ll experience there. Within these densely forested lands, you’ll find the very heart of druidism. This is the location of the Grove of Cenarius, where the demigod first met Malfurion Stormrage and later began his training.This is also where the Emerald Nightmare’s influence bleeds into Azeroth, corrupting the land. You'll also find key places such as the tainted world tree Shaladrassil and the dungeon Black Rook Hold—an elven fortress that dates back to the War of the Ancients.

Enraptured Woodlands Composed by Edo Guidotti and Jason HayesQ. How would you describe the zone’s ambience? What’s it like?Steve Burke: We were really shooting for what would be the closest to the Emerald Dream realized on Azeroth. Every square inch of this forest has been manicured by the druids for hundreds of years. We’ve got the Grove of Cenarius here, so that’s the fount of all druidism, right? That’s where all these uber Arch Druids have trained, so a lot of big history has happened there.

Then juxtaposed with this, we have the Emerald Nightmare. It was exciting, but it was tough for us to pin down how we would execute on that. We had some fits and starts, but I really like where it landed. You’ve got this big transition of “Hey, in the last week or two the World Tree that’s there has become completely corrupted.” It’s spreading throughout the forest, and I think we’ve got that really cool battle line drawn right through one of the Arch Druids’ groves. It’s just being taken over so you really get to see that cause and effect and contrast. Seeing what it does to the druids and the creatures—the centaur and the dryads—is really cool. We also have Xavius, who’s a villain who has a little bit of familiarity, so we didn’t have to do too much to establish him. You get to hate him right away.To break that up, we really felt we needed Black Rook Hold for something a little different. We have a Gilnean village at the foot of Black Rook Keep, where they’ve carved out their own little area that wasn’t being used by the druids. It’s that classic little village in the shadow of the keep above.Q. Which locations would you say are some of your favorites, and why?Steve Burke: Black Rook Hold is definitely one of my favorites. This point of interest (PoI) in particular is my favorite because I had a blank slate. I could say, “OK, as a designer what makes the best PoI?” Not just art, but the gameplay and hitting that fantasy. I sat down with Julian Morris and other leads and talked about previous points of interest where you could stand in them and just digest the whole thing. It’s not accessible, and you can’t necessarily reach it, but you can get that goal of, “Oh man, I can’t wait to get into that place or up over the hill.” It kind of tells its own story just by looking at it. The setting already kind of speaks to you, and then we can focus on the little local stories and just have fun weaving you through. Especially something this epic where you gradually get there in the end. You’ve kind of solved a mystery—or set the stage for a dungeon, in this case. It’s really great.

Another one is the Grove of Cenarius, and that is one of my favorites just because of all of the history. This is Cenarius. This is where he is. It was hard making this zone just in regard to how much druid lore we have out there. All these big characters—how do we do service to them all? If we threw everything in here, your head would be spinning. You’d get to spend two seconds on this character, and then you wouldn’t be able to really know them.So we’re talking about the story that we want to tell as you go through the zone that takes up a little bit of player bandwidth just to say, “Ok there’s Xavius again and the Legion has empowered him. They’ve kind of resurrected him and now he’s impacting this force.” So a part of the story. How many characters do we get to fit in here without blowing the player’s mind? It was just clear Cenarius had to be here, but he’s so big and he’s so powerful, how can we have a crisis here if he’s part of the picture? He can just blow anything away, right? I like the way it landed where he’s just so interconnected with the Emerald Dream that when the Emerald Dream is under assault by the Nightmare, it has affected him in a very serious way. So we got to have him in the zone visibly, just not in a state where he can really impact events.

We can also still play with big characters—we’ve got Malfurion, and later we have Tyrande in there. That was tricky, since both Horde and Alliance interact with her. With her chasing after Malfurion, who’s been lost, there was enough urgency that it felt OK for her to use you as a Horde player, to set our differences aside for right now. For her, it’s a matter of making some very difficult choices between her husband and her duty to the Temple of Elune.With the Temple of Elune, it’s under siege, and there’s a lot to lose there. This was something I always wanted to build towards—we’ve never seen anybody of Elune’s stature physically in the game. How do we get that to happen? Q. Why do you think a player would want to start in this zone first?Steve Burke: I would say they shouldn’t—they should save it for last. It’s tricky though. All of the zones are great. I hope this is where druids are going to want to go. They should feel like this is their place, and if they don’t, I’ve done something wrong. That was day one where I was like, “Ok, I get to play with Val’sharah. Obviously, we have got to play these druids up in a way we just haven’t done before in the game.”There’s been a lot in our lore that talks about how important they are, but here I just wanted to give them a story that would be super intimate to them—playable and appreciable by everybody, but one that would really resonate with them. Their Class Hall is here, but I wanted the zone and the zone story to be something they could connect with in a special way, so hopefully we did that.

Q. What is it that will bring them back to this zone?Steve Burke: Mechanically, we have World Quests—that’s the easy answer. Storywise, there’s an epic story that goes through and touches on Black Rook Hold with Illidan. We’ve got the level-up dungeon, which is the Darkheart Thicket underneath the World Tree, and we’ve got the max-level dungeon with Black Rook Hold, so that will definitely bring you back.But yeah, the World Quests—hopefully we set the table for you so that it will bring you back and put you into that familiar setting where you can keep helping to push back the Nightmare.

Q. Is there anything else that players should look forward to here?Steve Burke: There are a lot of little touches everywhere, but I don’t want to spoil anything for anyone who’s looking forward to that exploration.

Комментарий от Kornilius Keep firing! Let none escape!

Another down! Do not relent! Комментарий от Draccy Thanks for the leveling paths, although I'm still not sure where I would like to start my Legion-ing. Комментарий от Wolffange Highmountain was a fun zone to level in during beta. :) Комментарий от perculia Thanks for the leveling paths, although I'm still not sure where I would like to start my Legion-ing.Комментарий от arddrie3451 "A warrior is not made with magic, they're forged in battle" ~ Best quote! Комментарий от jglonek Considering I don't think Grom or Kilrogg said a single word in the theatrical cut of the movie it is sad to see that this scene was cut. One of many, we will find out, I think. Комментарий от KittyKatBar that scene would have been so nice to see... I have a feeling there are a lot of cut things that would have done well for the movie to be in it. :/ Комментарий от Kjflood I personally found,"yes, but you're ...Green." to be the best...guess I needed the funny. Комментарий от jglonek I personally found,"yes, but you're ...Green." to be the best...guess I needed the funny.Комментарий от VidPrime I loved all those Orc scenes in the movie, and I'm not even an Orc player. Hell, for a time I mained a Draenei Warrior who's an Orc hater (for obvious reasons). Комментарий от bass679 I do wish the profession quests were spread to different zones, I'm afraid we're all going to swarm Azsuna immediately to try and start our professions. Комментарий от bass679 Considering I don't think Grom or Kilrogg said a single word in the theatrical cut of the movie it is sad to see that this scene was cut. One of many, we will find out, I think.Комментарий от jglonek Considering I don't think Grom or Kilrogg said a single word in the theatrical cut of the movie it is sad to see that this scene was cut. One of many, we will find out, I think.Комментарий от ladyrhees Getting to test the alpha and later the beta, I'm like a kid with a HUGE secret I'm dying to share but can't because I don't want to spoil it for anyone else. Legion can't get here soon enough! Комментарий от ladyrhees I do wish the profession quests were spread to different zones, I'm afraid we're all going to swarm Azsuna immediately to try and start our professions.Комментарий от Draccy Thanks for the leveling paths, although I'm still not sure where I would like to start my Legion-ing.Комментарий от D00MZDAY The deleted movie scene is cool. I'm wondering about some of the potential easter eggs I see. Paused at 1:05, who is the orc on the left side of the screen? He's brown and appears to be a burn victim of sorts, not sure if his arm is missing? Also, on that same screen in the back behind the the orc... wtf is that a gnome? Комментарий от ArticSkoll what do the little blue an green circle things mean on the zone maps? Комментарий от flig999 what do the little blue an green circle things mean on the zone maps?Комментарий от darksilent "But you are green."

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