Taliesin & Evitel Interview Preview - Dalaran & Teldrassil Differences

The War Within Posted 2024/04/18 at 3:27 AM by Anshlun

Blizzard won't be testing the intro scenario -- Gotta wait for pre-patch/launch to learn what happens!
Nerubians attacked Dalaran
But where was Dalaran? Still over the Broken Isles? Moving?
Unsure of what happens with Khadgar, but it isn't good. Is he dead? or captured?
The idea behind having Dalaran happen at the start is similar to Legion, to show players the risks of the expansion.
There was a lot of internal discussion about Dalaran, but devs agree that it is important to have stakes for storytelling, and if nothing changes, nothing changes.
Teldrassil was often brought up when discussing Dalaran. Devs believe it won't be the same because this time, players are losing together and not in aggressor/victim roles

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Comment by EragenaI get what they're trying to do, but it still feels EXTREMELY cheap shock value.

We watched as Dalaran withstood assault from the Legion, but is now suddenly taken out behind the scenes by spider people? I still don't agree with it being thrown away like that after how memorable of a City it was. It being a "neutral" loss doesn't make it a good decision.

Just kidnapping Khadgar would be enough of a power display.Comment by ShuurahBlizzard boiled down to creating stories from shocks, involving the destruction of the lore itself.

It's as if a whole new generation of people are at Blizz and look at the game in a totally different way - or indifferent way, to put it better.

Honestly, I don't feel that attacked by the destruction of Dalaran, the city is historically destroyed and rebuilt. But what is the need this time?

And another, considering the things they tried to implement in the DF, like Bel'Ameth as the capital of the NElfs, I get the impression that the main reason for this was to eliminate the players' hub 'competition' - remember that Blizz has already announced that DF will become the default experience from now on and Dalaran posed technical issues such as high resource consumption and graphical weight etc.Comment by FlasKamelI support Blizzard on this 100% and I'm hyped.Comment by FlasKamelHonestly, I don't feel that attacked by the destruction of Dalaran, the city is historically destroyed and rebuilt. But what is the need this time?Comment by ShuurahAnd "shock value" is just one way to look at it. It's also about having powerful events that show the world changing, developing, and being at risk. Sure you could just burn some random village but truth is most of us won't really care; It's World of Warcraft, stuff like this happens. Sometimes we need to lose some of "our" stuff too. So I really love this.Comment by ShuurahI understand the need to do things in the game to make it feel and change and move.

I just don't know who they're doing it for.

The end of Shadowlands and almost every DF showed this: this conflict of narratives and objectives. Bel'Ameth's backlash and such.

I just really don't know what they're doing with this game anymore.Comment by oomuboring shock value.

they destroy settings when they should redo them more beautiful, bigger, with more quests to do in it.

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it's LAZY when it's ALL the time two tropes:

- kill that beloved character
- destroy a stuff

"ho no beloved character is killed/a stuff is destroyed, the new evil is EVIL !"

Blizzard needs a THIRD trope. (and please, no, not the "ho no Bob the cute friend is now Corrupted by Evilness from Evil-land !"Comment by RebemmaDalaran is my fav city but I like this a lot no idea why.Comment by PriestessAur"We destroyed Dalaran to hype our new expansion"Comment by KatsutomaiDon't you think that the crash site is a bit... badly designed? it's meant to be a whole island with buildings and we only see a few broken towers and flat surface... unless the rest of the city is elsewhere.Comment by tupolew519So nobody is going to die by then?Comment by LandaiWowhead sure doesn't like to be called out for not putting a spoiler warning, they keep deleting all the posts about it. Don't like accountability, Wowhead? shockingComment by TromellWowhead sure doesn't like to be called out for not putting a spoiler warning, they keep deleting all the posts about it. Don;t like accountability, Wowhead? shockingComment by KerathrasIf they touch Dalaran I will end them all! Leave my city alone! 😤😤😤Comment by DextersDrkThank god. Get rid of plot armor. I don't want to sit in the same city for 20 years.Comment by GrothrillSo Blizzard Devs are stilll blowing up cities in WoW....Well done. Way to go out like Theremore and Mists of pandaria Vale. What an crappy intro to the War Witin "Saga start".....#Sadpanda .Comment by AdinarL take from the Blizzard story devs (and Tali who is defending them) as usual.

"For the stakes" is only an argument if you're telling a story for 9 year olds who don't understand hypotheticals. "If your ice cream cone falls into the ocean, you"ll be hungry and it will be bad, so you should probably stop that from happening." They need to lose their sweets and feel hunger and sadness to understand that ice cream + gravity = bad. But if we're dealing with adults (I have my doubts), we can conceptualise the potential damage and disaster that would happen if something came to pass or if someone wasn't stopped. We can visualise things, we can empathise with the prospective suffering, we can exercise rational self-interest and be motivated to prevent such an eventuality without experiencing bad things personally first-hand.

And these "stakes" are utterly pointless when they require upping the ante anyway. Okay, Nerubians destroy Dalaran out of nowhere... cool. How does the destruction of Dalaran relate to the ongoing threat? Oh yeah it doesn't. There must be an even bigger threat, otherwise Dalaran is already destroyed, they did it, it's over, we can all go home. But no. And if the ongoing threat is some cosmic void scheme that's being orchestrated to unmake our world itself, then surely the severity of the situation is enough to impress upon us that "ohboi, Xalatath and them Nerubians sure be dangerous, we should probably not let them destroy everything", no? The world hasn't ever been destroyed, we still understand that letting it get destroyed would be bad, and the people capable of pulling such a thing off unless they're opposed with extreme force are dangerous. We get it. Which just highlights how pointless the whole demonstrating the stakes thing is.

If the Legion arrived by warping a bunch of command ships into orbit (they did), and they opened a giant green rift across the sky (they did), and started raining felfire on this world (they did), while their commanders stated time and time again that their goal is corrupting or killing everyone on the planet (they did), did we really need to see "Varian and Vol'jin and Tirion" die to comprehend and feel the threat of the legion? Was it really the death of three dudes that did it, or were the stakes already obvious because we're not freaking five? Can destroying a player hub (which has negative consequences not just on the lore but on players and RPers) come anywhere close to the stake and threat and dreadful awe that a single bossfight in a single raid already showed us far more efficiently? What stakes does careless dev destruction accomplish, that seeing entire worlds enveloped by the void and the fel across the empty vastness of space, as shown to us by Star Augur Etraeus in Nighthold, didn't? That Algalon's eloquent, incredibly evocative, and eye-opening speech about entire planets' worth of life being extinguished in a heartbeat without a moment's hesitation, didn't? The devs truly lack any comprehension of the story and the franchise that was (unfortunately) left in their care.

Call a spade a spade, Blizzard is doing nothing but taking cheap shots for quick shock value to try to manufacture gravitas for their randomly-came-out-of-nowhere villains and story arcs. They would rather tear down and destroy the legacy of established lore and beloved iconic warcraft locations as a shortcut than put any actual effort to build up and flesh out their transient threats du jour. Terran Gregory and Sean Copeland gave an interview after the Burning of Teldrassil saying that "negative reactions are also reactions, and that means they're telling a good story" and they couldn't have been more wrong. The reaction and the emotional connection are the result of the painstaking care that other devs have put into the franchise and nourished it over two decades, by building and adding, not by destroying. Undoing that in a single second is not an accomplishment, it has nothing to do with them. Just as I wish the franchise as a whole would have nothing to do with them (and the other devs who trample all over other people's sandcastles acting and thinking like children).Comment by SharkTribeI love T&E but hate that incorrect usage of the hyphen in the thumbnail textComment by jac121No spoiler warnings for alpha stuff?Comment by YodasEvilTwinIt’s just gross negligence at this point. Which is surprising to me, as Wowhead is typically pretty good at identifying spoilers.

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