Blizzard geeft informatie vrij over nieuwe patch

Gatenkaas

Blizzard maakt zich klaar om patch 4.2 uit te geven voor World of Warcraft en het is schijnbaar qua grootte een “vrij goede patch” volgens lead gamesystems designer Greg Street, voor sommigen beter bekend als Ghostcrawler. Blizzard heeft nog geen releasedatum voor de nieuwe patch vrijgegeven.

In een interview over de komende Firelands patch op games.on.net, zei Street dat het doel van de patch is om content te verzorgen voor spelers van elk level, ongeacht of de speler endgame material bespeelt. Daarnaast moet de patch ook de Encounter Journal introduceren.

“The story is that the players are working with the druids of Mount Hyjal trying to invade the Firelands and get a toehold there,” zei Street, “and since they’re druids the way they do that is by planting a tree. And as you complete quests the tree grows larger and larger until eventually it’s just this gigantic tree in the center of all of your base there.

“Every player has their own version of the tree, and they can be in different stages along the progression path there. And as your tree grows, different rewards open up for you, ultimately you can get a new flying mount

“One of the reasons the Firelands raid feels so new and unusual is because you’re not going into a big dungeon or a big cavern like Molten Core. Even though you’re surrounded by fire and volcanoes it feels like you’re outside, and players can mount up and try to decide which boss they want to travel to and in which order. It feels like you’re crossing a continent rather than a very linear dungeon. It’s a very unusual feeling for it.”

De Encounter Journal moet spelers informatie geven over diverse boss-encounters. Ook moet het videos weergeven voor uitleg. Het is echter niet de bedoeling dat de nieuwe feature complete strategieën uitzet voor de speler.

“[It] will show you a particular dungeon and you can look at all the bosses in that dungeon and we explain what their abilities are, and kind of give you a sense of whether the ability is interruptible, whether it targets the ground and you should run out of it, or whether it’s the kind of thing you just need to heal through,” volgens Street.

“We’re trying not to give you strategies like, “Oh, Phase 1, stand here, and then the hunter goes in the back”. We don’t want to get to that detail. But we want to provide enough information to players that they can say ‘Oh! Okay, this is the dragon breath that we read about.’ And in addition we’ll show things like the loot list of items that the bosses drops, and players have access to that information anyway, so we thought we’d just make it more convenient to see. And otherwise we’re just trying to give players a lot of information they can go through as they’re preparing to go into a dungeon or raid."