Just chatted with a coworker who worked at pixar on two separate occasions. They are about 1000 strong at peak of production with 2 films in the pipeline.
Blizzard cinematic department is not nearly that large.
You went from having "inside sources" to a "a guy who knew a guy". I am here relaying information from an actual Pixar animator. Besides, half the veterans on this forum are from Blizzard so they may be able to give you some clarification on that as well.
It is not subjective, you were just making things up or were misinformed. It's allright, it's not illegal to be mistaken. Happens to all of us.
Also, don't backpedal. We're not out to get you.
Fuse, I dont know if you intend it or not, but your choice of words and comment style can be perceived as elitist and self serving .
I also did not back peddle, but I did re-articulate since many went on and made broader assumptions when objectively there was nothing there to begin with. The number of people I have heard this from includes some inside sources (in the industry), former workers, teachers, associates of such people and even one creative director who taught one of their leads. Now, maybe they were wrong, or maybe that info has changed over the years...maybe they were just pimping their own...Maybe it was taken out of context and spread.. I dont know but I clearly made room for them being wrong and or error. You chose not to see that.
This was never a black and white issue, though some tried to turn it into one. At the core of all this is merely praise for their what their cinematics have done, even if you dont like the actual game.
If you can, please be aware of any confirmation bias you may have that would lead to broader assumptions. Be able to comprehend comments that are written in such a way where it is friendly for discussion without calls for either or. This is not a witch hunt.
The animation isn't that great at times and in sections some of the materials don't look that great - it would probably lose a lot if they removed the camera shake and post process grunge.
I'm not a Pixar fanboy actually, I haven't even seen all of their movies. Thanks for accusing me of fanboyism and calling out vargatom's artistic skills, that shows a lot of maturity on your part.
he asked me first, so read before talking bullshit
It seems you must hold a grudge against me o what? do i need to ignore you?
Vargatom, about the discussion of quality, all is very subjetive, very personal, and i think we live in different worlds. I just find the Blizzard's CG overwhelming, astonishing, and with more than 8 years or work on my back, i perfectly know how much work is behind their work. Not all people can achieve those results, but cartoons are watched everyday in a tv spot.
I asked about large scale productions, because in my experience it's quite different from being part of a relatively small team... Never questioned Blaizer's skills, in fact I used to direct newly hired modelers to his blog to learn.
Kind of amused. Apparently you can get to the area where the cinematic takes place and if you straighten the candle holder that the Orc used as a weapon you get an achievement. Looking forward to getting the collectors edition so I can zone out on the art book and soundtrack.
Man Blaizer/Justin every time I see you two go at it I can't tell if you're best frenemies or something or really good pals engaging in some tandem trolling.
So for me, talking pandas are VERY silly. Kinda ruins whatever immersion the game has.
Now I know, I know, someone is gonna say "But Tauren?" or "But Orcs?", and you're right. But for me the Pandas cross a line. The line is that the Tauren are basically minotaurs. They're a mythological creature which was updated to work in the Warcraft universe. Likewise with elves, orcs, all that stuff. Talking pandas though? It's a bit much.
Then comes the second ingredient, which is really a matter of taste. And that is that minotaurs, elves, etc, are from folklore I'm already familiar with and love. It's just a new take on it. More specifically, western folklore. The Pandas bring in a whole lot of eastern themes, which I don't find as appealing.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. They even include a lot of eastern design elements in the Night-Elf cities. But they do it in such a way that it's an influence, and the thing ends up looking just Night-Elf at the end. But one look at the Pandarian environment and you know you're in East Asia on earth, and not on Azeroth. Again, it serves to break whatever immersion I had.
Just my two very exaggerated and irrelevant cents.
So for me, talking pandas are VERY silly. Kinda ruins whatever immersion the game has.
Now I know, I know, someone is gonna say "But Tauren?" or "But Orcs?", and you're right. But for me the Pandas cross a line. The line is that the Tauren are basically minotaurs. They're a mythological creature which was updated to work in the Warcraft universe. Likewise with elves, orcs, all that stuff. Talking pandas though? It's a bit much.
Then comes the second ingredient, which is really a matter of taste. And that is that minotaurs, elves, etc, are from folklore I'm already familiar with and love. It's just a new take on it. More specifically, western folklore. The Pandas bring in a whole lot of eastern themes, which I don't find as appealing.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. They even include a lot of eastern design elements in the Night-Elf cities. But they do it in such a way that it's an influence, and the thing ends up looking just Night-Elf at the end. But one look at the Pandarian environment and you know you're in East Asia on earth, and not on Azeroth. Again, it serves to break whatever immersion I had.
Just my two very exaggerated and irrelevant cents.
this
and the fact that the latest blizzard releases werent really that entertaining for me.
Wasn't going to reply to this cause I thought it might be derailing but looking at the last two pages who gives a shit:
But WoW's PvP was always really lame. It's the most unbalanced thing I ever seen. It shows especially with the arena. There's always a flavor-of-the-season setup, especially in 2v2, and each class will have a must-have spec, and that's it. You happen to play the wrong classes? Tough luck, can't make any progress. I remember the season we decided to quit the game was when I tried playing my Priest with my friend's Warlock in the arena. We went from being 2200 the previous season, to barely making it out of the 1600 bracket.
I doubt you're going to find many people defending the 2s bracket as its always been more about statistics and countercomping than anything else... Which I think is why Blizzard removed gladiator from it and more or less ignored it after season 5.
2s and Season 5 aside I think WoW was pretty balanced, some seasons better than others. S7 probably being the best. S3 was also great as long as you weren't a paladin...
I think a lot of its problems would be solved if they just adopted a guildwars approach where you could make a new character whenever you want, queue for PVP and everybody would be level capped with access to the same gear. Because I don't think all team compositions need ot be glad viable, but at the very least it shouldn't be an insurmountable grind to build a decent team if your friends don't all happen to play classes with great synergy.
Oh they removed 2s? Makes sense I guess, but that's kinda sad. In my mind PvP gets better the smaller the scale. I always wished they would add a 1v1 arena. Then you would really see how balanced it is.
I guess that's what my problem with it always was. That the PvP is balanced (barely in my time) around group vs. group, where I was more interested in person-on-person, or maybe 2v2 with a close friend. Anything over that and it becomes a clusterfuck.
That was also my problem with Warhammer, but that's a whole different pandora's box.
I used to play WoW pretty damn intensily, it was probably the best gaming experience I have ever had in my life and I dont think anything will ever capture that again for me. I quit about a year and a half ago but upon watching this cinematic i immediately pre-ordered the collectors edition.
I know I wont get back into the game, I will probably play for a while on release but the cinematic just reminded me why I got into 3d. To make fucking epic shit. I have fond memories of this game, and although It has been dumbed down a lot and there have been some very questionable changes, I look forward to revisiting it, even if it's for a week or two.
I really dont care much for this whole Pixar and Blizzard debate, to me, the Blizzard Cinematics will always be my favourite. This is because of the shear amount of weight and effort they put into something that let's face it, they do just for the sake of being badasses, not because their business revolves around it.
2s is still there, there's just no rewards for playing beyond 1800 rating. They basically tried to push everyone into 3s.
And yeah if you pitted everybody 1v1 it'd be a joke but I mean that's kinda like saying DOTA or HoN are imbalanced because the heroes don't all do well 1v1.
I think the nice thing about balancing around team play is that you can give classes more diversity in abilities because they can lean on teammates to cover their weak areas which makes teamwork a big part of success. The drawback is of course that it becomes very problematic the smaller teams get but I'm okay with that... Just my opinion tho.
I used to play WoW pretty damn intensily, it was probably the best gaming experience I have ever had in my life and I dont think anything will ever capture that again for me. I quit about a year and a half ago but upon watching this cinematic i immediately pre-ordered the collectors edition.
I totally hear you on that. The game was very special to me too. I was so engulfed in it when it first came out, like I have never been in any other game.
I remember being genuinely scared when the lvl20 Tauren Shaman quest sent me to the Eastern Kingdoms. It was such an unsettling feeling, and I just wanted to "get back home". Never had such feelings from a game.
2s is still there, there's just no rewards for playing beyond 1800 rating. They basically tried to push everyone into 3s.
And yeah if you pitted everybody 1v1 it'd be a joke but I mean that's kinda like saying DOTA or HoN are imbalanced because the heroes don't all do well 1v1.
I think the nice thing about balancing around team play is that you can give classes more diversity in abilities because they can lean on teammates to cover their weak areas which makes teamwork a big part of success. The drawback is of course that it becomes very problematic the smaller teams get but I'm okay with that... Just my opinion tho.
From a game-design point of view though that's a cop-out. It's saying that they couldn't balance the game, so they just force you to play in a group, that way you wouldn't feel the imbalance. It's pretty blatant in their case because they never even considered 1v1, and their 2v2 failed because of this reason. So they just took the shortcut and removed those from the game instead of doing the work to actually balance it.
That's different from group-play though. The gameplay of 1v1 and Team vs Team is totally different. That's what Warhammer did pretty well actually. It brought the whole Tank/Healer/DPS dynamic to group PvP. But it had basically no small-scale.
I feel like WoW falls between the cracks. Their group PvP is too flat, there isn't enough interaction between the characters. And that's why they cap it at 5v5 max, otherwise the imbalances would again pop up. And it doesn't do 1v1 PvP well at all, so it doesn't even try the smaller scale stuff.
And yeah, DOTA and LoL are incredibly imbalanced too. They get around that by having so many heroes (I think 83 in DOTA2) that they trust the average player never wrapping their mind around it. It's the clusterfuck approach of Marvel vs Capcom. Just throw so much shit at the playerbase that they'll never figure out what's what. Those that do the research though, will find some heroes that are clearly superior to others. It's Marvel vs Capcom where I'm really looking for Street Fighter.
I guess I was just looking for something that was never there.
MMO. Remember what those M's stand for? 1v1 balancing would conceptually require the elimination of support/utility classes. Any support class that is viable in 1v1 against every other class will be overpowered in larger teams.
I mean... assuming equal skill levels, is 1v1 Medic vs Heavy a fair fight in TF2? Assuming no teammates are involved and it's a fight to the death?
Yeah, you're absolutely right. That's why I said the 1v1 game is separate from the Team vs Team game. And I don't know that it's practical for Blizzard to tweak their game for 1v1 at all for that reason, and also because of how that would affect raiding.
You would pretty much need separate classes dedicated to 1v1 that could do nothing but 1v1.
They probably should go for more large scale Warhammer-esque Team vs Team play. Maybe bring the Tank/Healer/DPS to PvP even. Make taunt work in PvP, and allow tanks to redirect damage from others to themselves. Especially since they claim they want to focus more on the Horde vs Alliance war now. But that could backfire too. Two-faction large-scale PvP didn't work out too well for Warhammer.
Ok, so I might come off as over-analyzing or whatever and with somewhat stretching conclusions but it seems to me that the WoW cinematics seem to have a theme based off of a certain feeling in each expansion intro;
- The Lich King intro was all blue'ish and somewhat sad with the king talking about how his son would become a great hero when it ended with the total opposite.
- The Cataclysm's main color theme seemed to be red with a really angry dragon.
- In this latest intro the characters look somewhat more cartoony to me and there is a lot more humor here, therefore joy.
- I guess the TBC one could be fear with Illidan trying to scare off players by saying that they are not prepared and what not. I'm not so sure here...
Anyway, probably just me stretching but it would be pretty cool if it was deliberate.
Amazing cinematic as always though.
Ok, so I might come off as over-analyzing or whatever and with somewhat stretching conclusions but it seems to me that the WoW cinematics seem to have a theme based off of a certain feeling in each expansion intro;
- The Lich King intro was all blue'ish and somewhat sad with the king talking about how his son would become a great hero when it ended with the total opposite.
- The Cataclysm's main color theme seemed to be red with a really angry dragon.
- In this latest intro the characters look somewhat more cartoony to me and there is a lot more humor here, therefore joy.
- I guess the TBC one could be fear with Illidan trying to scare off players by saying that they are not prepared and what not. I'm not so sure here...
Anyway, probably just me stretching but it would be pretty cool if it was deliberate.
Amazing cinematic as always though.
It'll all mix out and end up as a dark purple color. That will be the main color theme for their next exp after MOP.
Supposedly they're making a second cinematic about the siege of garrosh, so this one is probably supposed to be a bit lighthearted and the next one will be insanely brutal
I am so glad they went this route for the intros. I just wish they could do more stuff like this for important storylines. There is something very anticlimactic with watching the NPCs walk around talking with speech bubble for major quest chains. I can understand it for small stuff, but this is where it is at.
They seem to have taken a more light-hearted approach to this one and I can't say I'm a huge fan.
It's just that up until now, they have all been so epic and inspiring. I don't know why they decided to pull a U-turn and really solidify this Kung-fu panda vibe we're all picking up on. WoW has just never been comical to me and now this far down the road it feels forced.
Thrall isn't warchief anymore. He left in Cataclysm to go back to being a Shaman. Garrosh Hellscream is the current Warchief of the horde.
Also FullSynch, WoW has always been comical and lighthearted to me. Maybe it's because I play Alliance or something (I don't know how Horde plays). I know there are some serious parts in the game, but this really doesn't feel like a 180 to me at least.
It's just that up until now, they have all been so epic and inspiring. I don't know why they decided to pull a U-turn and really solidify this Kung-fu panda vibe we're all picking up on. WoW has just never been comical to me and now this far down the road it feels forced.
Supposedly they're doing a second cinematic for the "siege of garrosh" and its supposed to be epic and brutal. Remember the first half of the expansion is "discovering pandaria"
I'm honestly waiting for it to be something regarding the Shadow Council and demons blood. Garrosh has to do something that is brutal enough to make the Horde turn against him for that to play out. If he were to think he was strong enough to resist the taint of demons blood and drink it, I think the orcs would freak out about the idea of being enslaved again. I don't know, I'm just interested to see how it plays out.
Well I can't wait to see the Garrosh cinematic then. Is this supposed to be the last expansion? I remember back in TBC me and a friend always speculated that the last expansion would have something to do with the Emerald Dream, but as far as I know they didn't go anywhere with that?
Any speculation on whats next for the warcraft ip?
EDIT: It's weird, warcraft just excites me, but I just can't play WoW the way that it is.
If that development timeline that leaked for Blizzard a while ago is correct they have at least 1 more expansion to go. I would think they might stop at level 100 so either one more 10 level expansion or two more 5 level ones.
What happen with his game? PVP is disaster, full of bots, some people in week got pvp gear. Does Blizzard care about the bots at all, or they don't give a fuck about it, because they lose some $$$?
I don't wanna jump on the bandwagon, but I really wish they hadn't added the LFD tool. The areas I used to explore in Vanilla and BC don't have anyone in them anymore, as people now seem to just sit in town and spam LFD, rather than how it used to be with gathering a party and exploring one of the dungeons. Having said that I will probably give the expansion a shot, the art looks amazing!
I don't wanna jump on the bandwagon, but I really wish they hadn't added the LFD tool. The areas I used to explore in Vanilla and BC don't have anyone in them anymore, as people now seem to just sit in town and spam LFD, rather than how it used to be with gathering a party and exploring one of the dungeons. Having said that I will probably give the expansion a shot, the art looks amazing!
I disagree, but not completely. I don't like that the world exploration element is much less of a "thing" now, but holy-fuck is the game easy to play. Everything is very accessible, and feels very rewarding. Being a purist, and having played wow since early alpha stages, I think they've made the game significantly better recently. It takes all of the gunk and grime off of "mmo" and makes it a very cool, long-lasting game. The LFD tool means I actually do SFK, or Deadmines, or Maradon. Its awesome!
I do miss 40 ma UBRS, attunments, farming for FR gear, outfitting the entire 40 man raid with Onyxia Scale Cloaks, getting 60+ people bug mounts, etc, etc, etc... but having not played in 3 years, and playing a few other recent games - the changes Blizzard has made to WoW are great. A little magic is destroyed, but the game itself is a lot more fun because of it!
That said, the change to shaman totems is really dumb, and destroyed was was awesome and special about that class. The monk however is rad, ninja kicking, rolling, and punching things rules
I have mixed feelings on the LFD tool. On one hand it really shows the ugly side of the WoW community at times and people are way too quick to vote kick for little to no reason. However, I always had trouble talking to people in the game (I was painfully shy about MMOs) and the LFD opened an entire area of the game that I would not have otherwise seen. And now with the LFR tool on top of that, I can finally see raid content I would have missed out on.
How do you know they're bots? Maybe you (or your team) just suck.
I don't know what's going on these days in WoW's PvP. But when I played the allegations for bots compared to who really was botting were trivial. The only bots were the people who would have multiple characters all bound to the same keys. So they'd have like 4 elemental shamans all casting lightning bolt at the same time and moving together. But even this still required one player to actually play the game.
Myself, I got accused of botting quite often. Just cause I'd kick someone's ass and drop him in like 2 seconds, they'd assume that they can't possibly suck that much, so I must be cheating.
I know, because they don't do anything, just follow, going at one flag at time, mount at the same time, the just stay at one point, no casting, no fighting.
PvP was never WoW's major feature anyway, the game has simply not been designed with PvP in focus, which is why rebalancing skills around PvE or PvP results in these "Messes".
Especially now after the release of the new expansion, Blizzard has to collect a lot of information about how balance is, how skills work, how people are using some of the new features etc, things they couldn't test out in a proper scale during the beta.
As for Bots: Deal with it, you will NEVER have a popular game of ANY kind without cheaters, much less so an MMO with a userbase of over 10 million active users. Some people make a living grinding gold in this game, hence bots, some are just lazy but the majority are just goldsellers or hackers.
If you want to avoid bots and REALLY care about PvP, play arena, thats what all serious PvPrs do anyway.
As for class imbalance, it'll be sorted with time.
Also, removing LFD would be the dumbest thing ever. Having to run out to every single dungeon again would mean they'd have to redesign the entire loot system again or accommodate for the horrible slow grind doing so is.
Having to manually enter a dungeon with a pre assembled team of players has been brought back anyway, in the Challenge modes, which cannot be done with LFD.
So, the trailer for the 5.4 patch came out today. Even if you don't play the game... DAT ANIMATION! I've heard that Blizzard is making new models for the character races and they'll be out "When they're ready" but this really shows off what new models, rigs, and animations could breath into the game.
That cinematic is badass! First time since Illidan that they've had a villain that has had some serious "oomph" to him. Arthas was cool, but didn't have the same unbridled rage they gave Garrosh and Illidan.
Although i no longer play the game, it is still very special to me and i love it when this sort of stuff gets put out. It really is a testament to their skill and production values. Although there is obviously post, FX and all that jazz, blizzard continue to show what you can do with skilled artists and stonecold-mother-fucking-bitching-ass-diffuse maps. For me, this style has and continues to hold up next to anything I see these days. I'll take a sweet ass diffuse-only model over a compressed grunge tiled detail map with shitty shading the second it's not in a perfect lighting situation any day.
Also, the music and composition continues to be scored excellently... 1:55 FUCK YES.
makes you just wanna shout "YOU ARE NOTHING LIKE THEM!" (ok maybe just me )
Just the attention to the overall picture and the amount of polish that is now going into their ingame (ish) cinematics is very inspiring. Great stuff!
makes me wanna play again.. or do more diffuse only stuff.
Everything I would say about how amazing this is, the extreme quality and passion the fantastically talented guys over at Blizzard put into there games has already been said. Hats off once again.
Replies
Fuse, I dont know if you intend it or not, but your choice of words and comment style can be perceived as elitist and self serving .
I also did not back peddle, but I did re-articulate since many went on and made broader assumptions when objectively there was nothing there to begin with. The number of people I have heard this from includes some inside sources (in the industry), former workers, teachers, associates of such people and even one creative director who taught one of their leads. Now, maybe they were wrong, or maybe that info has changed over the years...maybe they were just pimping their own...Maybe it was taken out of context and spread.. I dont know but I clearly made room for them being wrong and or error. You chose not to see that.
This was never a black and white issue, though some tried to turn it into one. At the core of all this is merely praise for their what their cinematics have done, even if you dont like the actual game.
If you can, please be aware of any confirmation bias you may have that would lead to broader assumptions. Be able to comprehend comments that are written in such a way where it is friendly for discussion without calls for either or. This is not a witch hunt.
he asked me first, so read before talking bullshit
It seems you must hold a grudge against me o what? do i need to ignore you?
Vargatom, about the discussion of quality, all is very subjetive, very personal, and i think we live in different worlds. I just find the Blizzard's CG overwhelming, astonishing, and with more than 8 years or work on my back, i perfectly know how much work is behind their work. Not all people can achieve those results, but cartoons are watched everyday in a tv spot.
Now I know, I know, someone is gonna say "But Tauren?" or "But Orcs?", and you're right. But for me the Pandas cross a line. The line is that the Tauren are basically minotaurs. They're a mythological creature which was updated to work in the Warcraft universe. Likewise with elves, orcs, all that stuff. Talking pandas though? It's a bit much.
Then comes the second ingredient, which is really a matter of taste. And that is that minotaurs, elves, etc, are from folklore I'm already familiar with and love. It's just a new take on it. More specifically, western folklore. The Pandas bring in a whole lot of eastern themes, which I don't find as appealing.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. They even include a lot of eastern design elements in the Night-Elf cities. But they do it in such a way that it's an influence, and the thing ends up looking just Night-Elf at the end. But one look at the Pandarian environment and you know you're in East Asia on earth, and not on Azeroth. Again, it serves to break whatever immersion I had.
Just my two very exaggerated and irrelevant cents.
this
and the fact that the latest blizzard releases werent really that entertaining for me.
I doubt you're going to find many people defending the 2s bracket as its always been more about statistics and countercomping than anything else... Which I think is why Blizzard removed gladiator from it and more or less ignored it after season 5.
2s and Season 5 aside I think WoW was pretty balanced, some seasons better than others. S7 probably being the best. S3 was also great as long as you weren't a paladin...
I think a lot of its problems would be solved if they just adopted a guildwars approach where you could make a new character whenever you want, queue for PVP and everybody would be level capped with access to the same gear. Because I don't think all team compositions need ot be glad viable, but at the very least it shouldn't be an insurmountable grind to build a decent team if your friends don't all happen to play classes with great synergy.
I guess that's what my problem with it always was. That the PvP is balanced (barely in my time) around group vs. group, where I was more interested in person-on-person, or maybe 2v2 with a close friend. Anything over that and it becomes a clusterfuck.
That was also my problem with Warhammer, but that's a whole different pandora's box.
I know I wont get back into the game, I will probably play for a while on release but the cinematic just reminded me why I got into 3d. To make fucking epic shit. I have fond memories of this game, and although It has been dumbed down a lot and there have been some very questionable changes, I look forward to revisiting it, even if it's for a week or two.
I really dont care much for this whole Pixar and Blizzard debate, to me, the Blizzard Cinematics will always be my favourite. This is because of the shear amount of weight and effort they put into something that let's face it, they do just for the sake of being badasses, not because their business revolves around it.
And yeah if you pitted everybody 1v1 it'd be a joke but I mean that's kinda like saying DOTA or HoN are imbalanced because the heroes don't all do well 1v1.
I think the nice thing about balancing around team play is that you can give classes more diversity in abilities because they can lean on teammates to cover their weak areas which makes teamwork a big part of success. The drawback is of course that it becomes very problematic the smaller teams get but I'm okay with that... Just my opinion tho.
I totally hear you on that. The game was very special to me too. I was so engulfed in it when it first came out, like I have never been in any other game.
I remember being genuinely scared when the lvl20 Tauren Shaman quest sent me to the Eastern Kingdoms. It was such an unsettling feeling, and I just wanted to "get back home". Never had such feelings from a game.
From a game-design point of view though that's a cop-out. It's saying that they couldn't balance the game, so they just force you to play in a group, that way you wouldn't feel the imbalance. It's pretty blatant in their case because they never even considered 1v1, and their 2v2 failed because of this reason. So they just took the shortcut and removed those from the game instead of doing the work to actually balance it.
That's different from group-play though. The gameplay of 1v1 and Team vs Team is totally different. That's what Warhammer did pretty well actually. It brought the whole Tank/Healer/DPS dynamic to group PvP. But it had basically no small-scale.
I feel like WoW falls between the cracks. Their group PvP is too flat, there isn't enough interaction between the characters. And that's why they cap it at 5v5 max, otherwise the imbalances would again pop up. And it doesn't do 1v1 PvP well at all, so it doesn't even try the smaller scale stuff.
And yeah, DOTA and LoL are incredibly imbalanced too. They get around that by having so many heroes (I think 83 in DOTA2) that they trust the average player never wrapping their mind around it. It's the clusterfuck approach of Marvel vs Capcom. Just throw so much shit at the playerbase that they'll never figure out what's what. Those that do the research though, will find some heroes that are clearly superior to others. It's Marvel vs Capcom where I'm really looking for Street Fighter.
I guess I was just looking for something that was never there.
I mean... assuming equal skill levels, is 1v1 Medic vs Heavy a fair fight in TF2? Assuming no teammates are involved and it's a fight to the death?
You would pretty much need separate classes dedicated to 1v1 that could do nothing but 1v1.
They probably should go for more large scale Warhammer-esque Team vs Team play. Maybe bring the Tank/Healer/DPS to PvP even. Make taunt work in PvP, and allow tanks to redirect damage from others to themselves. Especially since they claim they want to focus more on the Horde vs Alliance war now. But that could backfire too. Two-faction large-scale PvP didn't work out too well for Warhammer.
- The Lich King intro was all blue'ish and somewhat sad with the king talking about how his son would become a great hero when it ended with the total opposite.
- The Cataclysm's main color theme seemed to be red with a really angry dragon.
- In this latest intro the characters look somewhat more cartoony to me and there is a lot more humor here, therefore joy.
- I guess the TBC one could be fear with Illidan trying to scare off players by saying that they are not prepared and what not. I'm not so sure here...
Anyway, probably just me stretching but it would be pretty cool if it was deliberate.
Amazing cinematic as always though.
It'll all mix out and end up as a dark purple color. That will be the main color theme for their next exp after MOP.
Not at all, it's good use of colours, motion, sound and music to portray a feeling
Which in this seems to be a sense of wonder about pandaria and its awesome inhabitants.
[ame="
I am so glad they went this route for the intros. I just wish they could do more stuff like this for important storylines. There is something very anticlimactic with watching the NPCs walk around talking with speech bubble for major quest chains. I can understand it for small stuff, but this is where it is at.
(don't see it posted)
[ame="
They seem to have taken a more light-hearted approach to this one and I can't say I'm a huge fan.
It's just that up until now, they have all been so epic and inspiring. I don't know why they decided to pull a U-turn and really solidify this Kung-fu panda vibe we're all picking up on. WoW has just never been comical to me and now this far down the road it feels forced.
Wait dafuq happened to Thrall ? (havn't played wow since vanilla)
Also FullSynch, WoW has always been comical and lighthearted to me. Maybe it's because I play Alliance or something (I don't know how Horde plays). I know there are some serious parts in the game, but this really doesn't feel like a 180 to me at least.
Any speculation on whats next for the warcraft ip?
EDIT: It's weird, warcraft just excites me, but I just can't play WoW the way that it is.
I disagree, but not completely. I don't like that the world exploration element is much less of a "thing" now, but holy-fuck is the game easy to play. Everything is very accessible, and feels very rewarding. Being a purist, and having played wow since early alpha stages, I think they've made the game significantly better recently. It takes all of the gunk and grime off of "mmo" and makes it a very cool, long-lasting game. The LFD tool means I actually do SFK, or Deadmines, or Maradon. Its awesome!
I do miss 40 ma UBRS, attunments, farming for FR gear, outfitting the entire 40 man raid with Onyxia Scale Cloaks, getting 60+ people bug mounts, etc, etc, etc... but having not played in 3 years, and playing a few other recent games - the changes Blizzard has made to WoW are great. A little magic is destroyed, but the game itself is a lot more fun because of it!
That said, the change to shaman totems is really dumb, and destroyed was was awesome and special about that class. The monk however is rad, ninja kicking, rolling, and punching things rules
I don't know what's going on these days in WoW's PvP. But when I played the allegations for bots compared to who really was botting were trivial. The only bots were the people who would have multiple characters all bound to the same keys. So they'd have like 4 elemental shamans all casting lightning bolt at the same time and moving together. But even this still required one player to actually play the game.
Myself, I got accused of botting quite often. Just cause I'd kick someone's ass and drop him in like 2 seconds, they'd assume that they can't possibly suck that much, so I must be cheating.
Especially now after the release of the new expansion, Blizzard has to collect a lot of information about how balance is, how skills work, how people are using some of the new features etc, things they couldn't test out in a proper scale during the beta.
As for Bots: Deal with it, you will NEVER have a popular game of ANY kind without cheaters, much less so an MMO with a userbase of over 10 million active users. Some people make a living grinding gold in this game, hence bots, some are just lazy but the majority are just goldsellers or hackers.
If you want to avoid bots and REALLY care about PvP, play arena, thats what all serious PvPrs do anyway.
As for class imbalance, it'll be sorted with time.
Also, removing LFD would be the dumbest thing ever. Having to run out to every single dungeon again would mean they'd have to redesign the entire loot system again or accommodate for the horrible slow grind doing so is.
Having to manually enter a dungeon with a pre assembled team of players has been brought back anyway, in the Challenge modes, which cannot be done with LFD.
[ame="
/dream on.
awesome!!
Although i no longer play the game, it is still very special to me and i love it when this sort of stuff gets put out. It really is a testament to their skill and production values. Although there is obviously post, FX and all that jazz, blizzard continue to show what you can do with skilled artists and stonecold-mother-fucking-bitching-ass-diffuse maps. For me, this style has and continues to hold up next to anything I see these days. I'll take a sweet ass diffuse-only model over a compressed grunge tiled detail map with shitty shading the second it's not in a perfect lighting situation any day.
Also, the music and composition continues to be scored excellently... 1:55 FUCK YES.
makes you just wanna shout "YOU ARE NOTHING LIKE THEM!" (ok maybe just me
Just the attention to the overall picture and the amount of polish that is now going into their ingame (ish) cinematics is very inspiring. Great stuff!
makes me wanna play again.. or do more diffuse only stuff.
Everything I would say about how amazing this is, the extreme quality and passion the fantastically talented guys over at Blizzard put into there games has already been said. Hats off once again.
DO IT