8 posts tagged with "world-of-warcraft"

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.

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).

What if you could change anything about WoW and you didn't have to care about all the things Blizzard has to care about like dev resources, player reception, future content, backwards compatibility and all that. Just complete freedom with no consequences whatsoever.

It's a fun thought experiment that will yield very different results depending on who you ask. Hell, most of the things I list probably 99% of the playerbase won't care for, but in this context, we don't actually have to care! Many ideas here aren't necessarily mine either but stuff the community has talked about for ages. Either way, here goes.

There are many tools out there to support WoW modding, but as these posts will only be focusing on modern modding we'll focus on tools that can help with specifically that. First up: Noggit!

I love modding games. I love WoW. Following that logic, I've been dipping my toes in WoW modding for a bit now and wanted to do a bit of an intro post on it. Many people won't be familiar with it (for obvious reasons we'll get into), but I still think it is pretty neat and has the ability to be even neater in the future.

This is the first post in a series of posts I plan to make around datamining and what goes into various parts of it. Off we go!

Back in patch 8.2, Blizzard removed the primary way for us to verify guessed filenames for World of Warcraft's files. These days, only interface files ship with official filenames and everything else has to be guessed by the community, with no way to verify. Said guesses are then stored in a listfile.

One of the harder categories of files to automatically generate names for are the tens of thousands of WoW's voice-over audio files. This post goes into some of the work we've had to do in the community to be able to name these files so people can actually find them (for whatever reason).