After two and a half years, at the "World of Warcraft" content update announcement live event on April 20, Blizzard Entertainment officially announced the latest promotional animation of the 10.0 version of "World of Warcraft" and introduced the featured content of the new version, "Dragon Age" is coming.
Here's Blizzard's official "Age of dragons" promotional animation:
The promotional animation is based on the perspective of one of the caretakers of the Dragon Islands. Ten thousand years ago, the Burning Legion invaded in full force in the War of the Ancients, the Great Schism tore apart the entire world, the Dragon Legion had to leave the archipelago at that time to "help" and guide the historical development of the entire continent, and the caretaker hid the archipelago in the mist after the dragon left to protect the former kingdom.
Ten thousand years later, one of the caretakers on the island woke up and remembered his mission, so he began the classic climb of the blizzard, dispersing the fog that hung over the archipelago, pointing the direction of the archipelago for the dragon, and the whole CG ended after the Red Dragon Queen soared over the archipelago with the same caretaker in her hand.
According to the plot of the official website of Warcraft, with the return of the dragon, their ancient nemesis has also awakened, such as the elemental half-giant Jardin, who wants to rebuild the dragon kingdom, and the loss of the huge dragon legion in the previous version needs the help of the heroes of Azeroth.
The whole CG is different from the Convention of World of Warcraft, full of smooth battle screens or "All of you, waste!" Such famous lines, alone, the death of a companion, climbing the tower and other elements, make the entire animation from the storyboard to the emotion is more similar to the Blizzard "Overwatch" small beauty CG, which also makes the animation have a mixed reputation among players after the launch.
What's more, in the same live broadcast of the press conference, Blizzard also announced the "World of Warcraft Nostalgia Suit" "Lich King's Wrath" promotional film, later this year, "Lich King's Wrath" will officially land in the nostalgic suit, in addition to no random version, the first Death Knight character does not make additional requirements, the version of the content will be faithful to the original version of 2008. In the comparison, the player evaluation of this new animation is even more precarious.
As of the time I finished writing, on Youtube, the "Dragon Age" animation had received 1.2 million views, 33,000 likes, and 22,000 clicks.
Become a dragon, yay!
Returning to the featured content of the new version, according to the official introduction, the Dragon Islands will have 4 new regions, including the Awakening Coast, the Ornhalla Plain, the Blue Forest Sea, and Sodrasus.
Each location also has a unique ecology and key characters, such as on the Awakening Coast, where the Red Dragon Queen Alekstasa and the Red Dragon Legion will be more knowledgeable, of course, it is still important to find ducks, while the Ornhara Plain is the habitat of the Green Dragon Legion; in the Blue Forest Sea, the player can see the Walrus family, and of course the Blue Dragon Legion; and the final Sodrasus is the location of the Bronze Dragon Legion, and the Tyre Fortress built by the Titan Guardian Tyre.
Many elements throughout the map echo the "Wrath of the Lich King" of the nostalgic suit that was also announced at the same time, which should also be Blizzard's intention.
In addition to the expansion of the new map, one of the most important updates to the new version is probably "Dragon Hill Summoner", which is a new racial class combination in version 10.0, with a level of 58 and an exclusive novice area. Players can choose the form of a human and a dragon, and the official state is that in the tuanben, the player can transform into a dragon.
"Dragon Hill Magician" also has two specializations in career growth, namely DPS and healing. The former DPS specialization, players will be able to use the magic of the red dragon and blue dragon, while the healing specialization is naturally the magic of the green dragon and the bronze dragon, and also adds a mechanism for the use of magic.
On the talent system, version 10.0 has found the well-received dual talent tree system, one talent tree focuses on career functionality, and the other talent tree focuses on specialized performance, and it is all three choices. Although the community will have the best plus solution soon after the game is updated, at least Blizzard gives players room to choose, after all, not all players have always pursued the optimal solution when playing games.
Blizzard officials also said that players have the "ability to change talents at the current frequency", players can configure and save their own bonus plan, and quickly load the configuration on different occasions, "the choice is really returned to the player's hands".
In addition, although the name of the entire version is called "Age of dragons", in 10.0, players can still use dragons as their mounts and soar in the sky with dragon taming, but it should be noted that unlike flying, dragon taming requires players to constantly hone, equivalent to a skill. For their own young dragon mounts, Blizzard also gives a certain degree of customization freedom, including the nose, armor and other elements players can customize.
However, with the dragon taming technique and the new version of the dragon race, the classic "Goofy Slip Pluto" scene is probably not uncommon.
Finally, on the basis of the above new content, Blizzard also announced the optimization and redo of the game UI interface and manufacturing system in version 10.0.
Since 2004, Blizzard has not carried out large-scale updates to the UI of "World of Warcraft", it may be that the official also feels that this set of interface logic for more than ten years can not meet the needs of players only by tinkering, Blizzard said that in the new UI interface, the official added some new features and updated the design of the art.
Now players can not only freely move, edit, copy, rename different interface elements in the screen, the system also supports players to automatically switch in different scenarios, when players switch their own specializations, the interface layout will also change.
As for professional skill redoing, the biggest impact is the manufacturing system, where players can now seek help from other players or NPCs without learning the corresponding skills, and even the production of soul-bound items can seek help from other players.
Seeking help from players requires other players to help build the required materials in front of them, while NPCs are similar to auction houses, where players need to issue orders to unions or specific player groups through NPCs, and rewards are used to motivate other players to help.
In addition, the relationship between the grades of items and materials and their attributes is also more rigorous, simply put, high-grade items, which are bound to have better results and higher item levels.
Blizzard Pictures rolled over
As a classic game for more than a decade, even if Blizzard has disappointed some players, most players currently have a "make it easy to play, you can get away from it" attitude. Interestingly, in fact, as early as 2017, there were netizens on the NGA who accurately predicted the content direction of the 9.0 and 10.0 versions, and it was reasonable, rather than the blind cat encountering the dead rat.
On the one hand, of course, this may be a coincidence, but on the other hand, it also shows that after decades of development, the content that can surprise players, exceed players' expectations, and turn the world around is decreasing.
For the content in the live broadcast of the content update of the World of Warcraft, although it is not a very surprise, in terms of gameplay and systems including talent trees and dragon taming, most of the players' evaluations are actually relatively positive.
But the reason why Blizzard's live broadcast can still see a lot of criticism on social media, almost all because Blizzard, which was once known as "Blizzard Pictures", did not meet the expectations of many players. Even The European and American players who are usually the best at "more understanding and tolerance" have expressed their dissatisfaction in the front row of the official video tweet.
Some netizens even said that it was like a high-scoring series of movies out of a bad movie, "have you seen the mystery of Dumbledore where the magical beasts are, is that feeling."
As GameLook said at the beginning, the tone of the entire short film is more inclined to the CG of the little sister of "Overwatch", known for its emotion and bland narrative, this style as the character's personal CG is naturally perfect, but as a large version of the foresight, there are obvious deficiencies in the amount of information and the ability to mobilize emotions.
Not to mention that the protagonist of CG is an unknown NPC (there may be a certain role in the game plot), unlike the character CG, the player can attach various qualities conveyed by the CG to the specific important image, and the entire CG emotional foreshadowing does not have an object that the player can pin on, and the audience will naturally feel empty.
The sentence "The age of the dragon will be re-unfolded" in the CG has triggered many positive complaints from players. You know, in the previous version 4.3, the Red Dragon Queen herself said that "the age of the dragon is over, and it will be the era of your mortals."
epilogue:
As an MMORPG that has been on fire for nearly 18 years, "World of Warcraft" can be said to have accompanied the growth of generations.
Below the official new version of the tweet, there are sad foreign netizens who said that they only hope that World of Warcraft will update the content instead of various systems that need to be learned, "I don't want any new systems (even dragon taming)", just because the netizens' daily game time is only after dealing with various miscellaneous affairs, which also means "no time to play games".
Although the player's attitude of rejecting everything new is too extreme, it also illustrates from another perspective that the current player ecology and development stage of World of Warcraft, Warcraft is no longer young. As for the subsequent development of the 10.0 version, GameLook can only wait for the good news.
····· End ·····
GameLook Daily Game Industry Report
Global vision / depth is material