Another year, another blog post reflecting on it. This one has been a rollercoaster. I started these reflection posts in 2022 and I can with confidence say that this year is the lowest of lows so far, while also having some highs in terms of what I've been working on.

I'll start with all of the major updates to the projects I've been working on this year as well as looking forward a bit to the plans I have for various projects next year. I'll end the post with personal updates, that bit is largely for myself as I've talked about in previous reflection posts, but feel free to read it regardless.

A short but needed blog post.

In today's Midnight Deep Dive, Blizzard introduced us to "The Arcantina", the model of which is based on the Hearthstone Tavern interior model.

Yes, the Hearthstone Tavern model I've mentioned many times before, even while on the Community Council AND modded a whole exterior for (see those posts for some history on the tavern model both from the game and in canon outside of it).

This means the tavern "far away from her (Xal'atath) reach" (#1, #2) from the Seasons comic was what we now know to be the Arcantina.

With it now being a 'story hub', my battle for its use in the game is over. Thank you, Blizzard.

Since my last post on Player Housing, Blizzard has released a few more blog posts and has demo'd player housing/given interviews at Gamescom, leading to many more thoughts! Here we go.

This post was mirrored from my Patreon. TL;DR: Blog posts will still be freely available on this blog but I will likely start doing monthly update posts on the Patreon. Only this initial announcement was mirrored.

Housekeeping/TL;DR​

Hello again! Earlier this month I sent out a message to all (somehow still) active members that the Patreon had a chance of being reactivated and clearly I've come to a decision, if you're curious why etc, keep on reading, if not; if you are still subscribed to the Patreon and are willing to support me again, you will likely have to reselect a membership tier.

I'm hoping existing members won't get automatically charged again (would be weird after years of inactivity and me removing all old tiers), if you do I apologize and do not blame you for canceling.

With that out of the way, here's something I wrote up about reactivating the Patreon...

Much to my annoyance, at an increasingly frequent rate, the "WoW needs a new engine! It's still based on Warcraft 3!" discussions show up again. First, I don't think that's actually what people want when they say that. Second, there's very little if anything from the Warcraft 3 days left.

Blizzard is unlikely to tackle this topic directly outside of the "we're constantly upgrading the game" quote they've used before. There's few people outside of Blizzard who are qualified to speak on this, and I'm not one of them, but given my experience, I feel like I can at least try.

Intro​

I've been over this on both this blog and on Twitter many times before. I'm a big fan of the Hearthstone Tavern model that Blizzard added back in 8.2.5. I even made thread in the community council about it. The model is great. It has an amazing atmosphere and is what I believe genuinely a work of art. However, it was never used.

More info on how the Tavern was supposed to be used in WoW can be found in an earlier blog post here.

I've been wanting to use it in some projects over the years, but I always run into the fact it has no exterior model. Granted, there is a good amount of mystery around the tavern (see the lore section later on) so it not having an exterior model isn't a huge surprise, but I wanted to take a stab at it anyways. This is largely going to be a learning project as I struggle my way through giving it an exterior. Come with me on with me on this journey and maybe we'll both learn something.

Huzzah! Blizzard released their first blog post talking about Player Housing! They explained the design pillars of player housing that they're keeping in mind while designing the system, as well as some other bits. I have a lot of thoughts, so I wanted to write up this blog post instead of making 40 posts on BlueSky. I was already going to make a player housing speculation blog post at some point, so I just collapsed that idea into this one and put all the fun future speculation bits at the end/in future posts.

I've been writing one of these posts every year, so why not keep the tradition going? Even if only for myself, reflecting is a good thing to do every now and then. A lot happened this year, but at the same time also not much. Time to look back, review and look forward to 2025.

Making a zone from the ground up is hard, especially if you're doing it on your own. Thankfully, throughout the years Blizzard has given us various peeks at their zone design process (sometimes intentional and sometimes not). I wanted to write up this post to document what (to me) appears to be their process in the hopes some of it could be useful for artists wanting to make stuff or learn/take inspiration based on how Blizzard does it. I'm a huge fan of world building (specifically in the more literal sense like this) and all the steps that go into it, so expect a long post.

Note that while these steps are described one by one for readability, in reality these likely overlap a lot with multiple of them starting at the same time or being revisited throughout the process. I will try to show/link to examples of the things I mention in each part for the visual learners (like myself).

As I've talked about before, I'm a sucker for passion. Recently through my efforts in trying to make WoW modding and specifically map making/world building more accessible, I've seen a lot of that. It's reaffirmed my beliefs of so many talented people being out there that simply haven't messed with it due to its lack of accessibility or it being so stuck in the past. It has also reinvigorated my spirit when it comes to the WoW modding community, as my previous experiences with it haven't been as positive as the ones I've been having recently.

The modern WoW modding Discord has been popping off a bit and is at almost 800 members, but with that it has also been bringing up some of my history with communities. This post with will largely be a rant about said history/sentiments with some minor plans/updates around WoW modding at the end and how I think it can be different compared to what came before it. Feel free to skip to the last 2 paragraphs for those plans/updates!