Mists of Pandaria Press Tour - Media Presentation Transcript (part 1)
We announced this expansion at Blizzcon and there was some degree of shock. Everyone wanted to know where the global villain and global threat were. Mists of Pandaria has a different tone than any expansion we have tried so far. In some ways it is more of a spiritual successor to classic WoW, with the call to adventure. It wasn't about a giant world boss or big overarching problem, it was just about exploring. Experience this faction, see the world, engage the cultures, have an adventure, that was the spirit of the first game. In many ways Mists of Pandaria gets back into that. There was some level of shock at Blizzcon because it was such a different idea and not what people were expecting. In many ways this expansion isn't predicated on a new world boss or global threat. The global threat that is coming to define the next few years of WoW's gameplay is war itself. The idea that the Alliance and Horde are going to be going at it in a way that we haven't seen in a very long time. Battlegrounds are great, but this is gearing up to be something that we all believe that players have been wanting for a very long time.
In a way, we have been thinking of the Pandaria expansion set being made of two parts. There is the box product, which is a contained adventure. You go to Pandaria, both factions arrive in very small numbers, almost like commando teams that air drop into Pandaria. We meet its cultures, see its indigenous creatures and races, help solve problems, and we are following a very specific storyline. That storyline will resolve at the end of Pandaria. There is an innate mystery about what has been brewing here for 10,000 years. The realization of this story happens at the end of the box product. We tried to do something different with the patches this time. When you buy the Wrath of the Lich King box, you know that you will ultimately face the Lich King. It might take X numbers of patches to do so, but you are pretty confident you are going to run into the Lich King at some point. The patches typically have helped to flush out the storyline and realize the higher end dungeons. What is interesting about Mists of Pandaria is that we conceptualized the patches for this game almost as a squeal to the box product, meaning the story kicks into a different gear. As the box product wraps up and you have helped the Pandarens save their land and discover the nature of the mystery that is playing out, that is epic in and of itself, you get on the phone and say "We are fine here, this place is great, no need to show up, we are fine.". "Sorry Lieutenant, we are already here" and then the tanks roll up onto the beach. That is the end of the box product, everything kicking into second gear. All of the heavy armor and wrath of these two great factions begin to collide, and the story really starts going from there.
We had said before that this expansion isn't defined by having a huge villain, but the box product has a huge central storyline. The villain comes into play with the patches. The final patch of this expansion does not occur in Pandaria. The war between the Alliance and Horde heats up as they roll into Pandaria, and it will serve as a major battleground, but things get so gnarly and out of control, and war crimes are committed by one side, it begins to spiral into crazyville. The final patch of Mists of Pandaria will be the Siege of Orgrimmar! Both factions, for various reasons, lay siege to the city to bring Garrosh down and end his reign of Warchief. We are leveraging a lot of our main characters and we haven't had this much fun building a Warcraft story in many years. We are really pushing the factions forward and showing what happens when you are a big jerk as a Warchief. We are really really excited about where this expansion goes and we wanted to tell you that so you understand that this expansion is not a joke. It is not light and fluffy, although the Pandaren are fun and super zen. A lot of people at Blizzcon thought that the expansion seemed light and silly to some degree after things like Wrath of the Lich King, Burning Crusade, and Cataclysm. We want to be very clear that the conflict between Alliance and Horde is gearing up to hit a fevered pitch unlike any we have ever seen. We were very dedicated to bringing the Alliance and Horde war back. If anything, the lightness and serenity of Pandaria and the Pandaren specifically were meant to be a wonderful contrast against the warfare to come. It will feel tragic and super heroic by the time it is done. Both the Alliance and Horde are going to have some really really epic and heroic stuff to do by the end.
Why this and why now? In many ways, we believe that this is the perfect expansion set at this time. We are always working on what comes next, what is after this, what is after that, and we are always seeing where this world is going to go. Even after this game the concepts we are thinking about are fairly heavy. It is called World of Warcraft, not World of Peacecraft, so at some level you have to keep driving hard hitting ideas. In a way, this expansion is throttle off chapter. The box product is a fun and rich adventure with some dark components. It is transportive and filled with imagination in a way, we are off this linear track of supervillains, and it feels like it opens up again. In light of what comes down the road over the coming years, we are going to want a vacation like this, a chapter that feels like adventure before things ramp up.
We have a lot of people wondering about "Pandarens, really? They are so cuddly!", almost innately silly. Pandarens are an idea that we have been thinking about for many, many years, something like twelve years. Initially they were drawn by Sam Didier, who loves these characters. We hooked a few of these characters into the Frozen Throne in Warcraft III and have always been in love with the idea. We got to debut Pandaren as an April Fool's joke many years ago and people feel that it is innately comedic based on that. No, April Fools was just a fun opportunity to show the idea. Many of you may not know that Pandaren were in serious consideration for the Alliance race in Burning Crusade, that is how serious we are about the idea. We have always loved Pandaren, we have always wanted to put them in the game, and for a number of reasons now is the time. It is not a throwaway idea in any way. In many ways they are the perfect race to include right now, as things start to ramp up. As the factional hate and societal rage rises to sweep the world up into war once again, the Pandaren will distinguish themselves on both sides and hedge the bet that against total calamity. They have a very distinct role to play, both culturally and factionally, so it is perfect that they dropped at this time.
We have a new player model you might dig, the Female Pandaren.
I'm Dave Kosak, the lead quest designer for World of Warcraft. I'm Cory Stockton, the lead content designer for WoW. We are going to log in here and show you live game footage running on the server right now. Let's open our map. We are going to tag team this to give you a whirlwind tour of everything we can show you in Pandaria. This is the continent map and The Wandering Isle is not shown, it is off wandering the oceans somewhere. This map has changed quite a bit since Blizzcon. Back when showed this at Blizzcon we had five zones on the continent of Pandaria and the main thing you will notice now is that we have seven. We have added two more zones to the continent. There are a few reasons for that; we wanted to get more content into the game, as we felt like there were a lot of stories we can tell and there are a lot of things to do here. Secondly, it gives us a less linear progression for players when they are coming through for a second or third time with another player. They don't really have to go the same path that they took before.
We are going to start off with a look at the Jade Forest. We didn't just split the zones up, we actually added a lot of terrain. Valley of the Four Winds was a whole zone but we were building an area that felt like a subzone, so we decided to break it off and make it into a zone. By doing that we had to add a lot of new area to support all of the quests and characters to make it feel like a full fledged zone. The Temple of the Jade Serpent is here. There is a concept that I want to talk about called the Sha. In Pandaria, negative emotions like fear, hatred, and anger take on a physical presence or dark energy called the Sha. The Sha is going to cause a lot of problems in Pandaria. This temple marks a special place in Pandaren history, because this is where the last emperor defeated the Sha of Doubt and imprisoned it in the ground. This temple was built to commemorate that. This temple is also our first dungeon. When the Alliance and Horde come on to Pandaria and they bring their war with them, it is going to cause the Sha to erupt all over Pandaria. This temple is going to be completely overwhelmed by this dark energy, so you are going to have to go in and clear it. The first dungeon in any expansion takes on a new importance for us as it sets the tone for the expansion, so as you can see we went all out with this one. It is just as beautiful inside as it is outside. The Jade Forest has a lot of bamboo jungles and stone structures. There are four ancestor spirits that guard over Pandaria, this is a statue dedicated to one of them, the Jade Serpent, with the temple also dedicated to her.
The Alliance and Horde are coming into the Jade Forest from the North and South and you aren't coming in with a giant army, just the survivors from a shipwreck. You are going to try and make war with whatever you have, getting together with the natives and recruit them into a proxy war. This all comes to a head in the middle of the zone with a huge battle around the statues with terrible consequences from that battle. One of the first races you come across is the Jinyu. They are an aquatic fish-man race that lives near fresh water across all of Pandaria. They are looked up to as an elder and wise race, even by Pandaren. This group in the village is recruited by the Alliance to go into battle against the Horde and Hozen. There is an upper caste of the Jinyu called the water speakers, which are the spiritual leaders of the Jinyu. They can take their staffs and place them into the river water to listen to what the rivers are saying and hear the future. They have always been fighting with the Hozen, who are more like a group of 14 year old boys running around together in the jungle, equipped with machine guns and weapons from the Horde. They are an offset to the Jinyu in this zone. They are all over the world, even in a dungeon that we will show you a little later. These are the jungle Hozen; the mountain Hozen are a little bit different, a heartier race. We have a new component on our creatures now that lets us dress them up in a lot of armor. These guys are very lightly armed, but you will see a lot of other Hozen later on in the expansion. The Horde are going to work with the Hozen here and recruit this tribe to help fight their war. We are going to give the monkeys machine guns and rocket launchers. This is a good plan; nothing could go wrong with this plan.
We really want to give players a lot of things they can do with their character, especially at max level, regardless of what type of player you are. The Pandaren have trained and raised these cloud serpents as mounts. Would you like one of your own? Of course you would! You can work with these guys over the course of 20 days or so to raise your own cloud serpent. You find an egg, choose what color of cloud serpent you want, then you will get a tiny pet cloud serpent with you for a while. You will have to do daily quests with it to train and raise him until you get a full size dragon that you can ride, then you have to train your cloud serpent by doing some more quests until you have finally trained your cloud serpent which you can ride around all of Pandaria. One of the things you will have to do is race through stone pillars. There will be Pandaren in the stands, cheering you on as you come roaring across the finish line. That is just one of the things you can do at max level. We are really trying to have a lot of things that you can do with your character in this world. It is a really rich environment where you can do all kinds of things.
After the Alliance and Horde make a mess of Jade Forest, you have to win over the Pandaren again in the Valley of Four Winds to the west. It is a different feel than Jade Forest, as it is the heartland of Pandaria. This is where they farm and harvest food to feed their culture. What's neat here is you get to see Pandaren in their own world. You just went through a big conflict in Jade Forest and then you can come here and see how they live on a day to day basis. They grow extremely large vegetables here because there are waters flowing down from Vale of Eternal Blossoms. That zone is full of sacred waters that have been flowing into this valley for millenia. The Pandaren are chill as a culture but don't do anything halfway.
This is the farmer's market here, which is the social hub of the Valley of the Four Windows. We have a faction called the Tillers and every day different farmers will come by the farmer's market with different problems, providing different daily quests that you can do for the Tillers at max level. We want to make factions more than a bar that grows across the bottom of your screen, with a story that you can be engaged with while learning about the people. This is Farmer Yun on the Songsong Ranch and he needs your help, as he isn't a very good farmer. His fields are overgrown and covered in rocks. This will become your personal farm and show your progression with the Tiller faction. You will help Farmer Yun by clearing out these plots of land and planting things. You can plant your own crops and come back the next day and harvest the crops. You will be able to plant cooking ingredients, herbalism nodes, gifts for the different NPCs to build your reputation, as well as a pet that you can grow. You will be able to decorate the farm as you go with some pigs and slop, some other animals, grow an apple orchard there, and it really shows your progression with this faction.
Across the valley you will find the Stormstout Brewery and Chen Stormstout is delighted to find it when he comes back to Pandaria. You will be adventuring with Chen here in the Valley of the Four Winds. This is another one of the dungeons and it is at full size out in the world so that you can see just how big it is. Things are not going well in the Stormstout Brewery and you will have to clean house with Chen. We can use the dungeons that are full scale in the world for questing content as well, it doesn't just have to be a dungeon for five players. This will give you a better idea of what is going on.
Moving on to Krasarang Wilds, we find a new zone that used to be a subzone of Valley of Four Winds. It is a coastal rainforest that had a lot of story in it, so we thought we should add a significant amount of space here to make it into a zone. One of the reasons there is so much culture here is the Mogu. The Mogu are the original rulers of Pandaria, ruling the land 10,000 years ago and actually brought it all together into an empire. During that time they built temples all across the world, which are now ruins that you will find while questing. They want their land back and this is another threat that you will be dealing with the entire time. We wanted an aggressive and big race that would be fun to fight and you will see them all across the world. You will see them in raids and dungeons as well, which is why we tried to make so many unique looks for them. We are doing a lot of armor sets across the creatures so that you are not just seeing the same creature with a different texture, but a whole different silhouette and different look, similar to what players have. The Mogu united the empire 12,000 years ago by fighting, enslaving, and capturing everyone else to build their empire through force. You can see some of their grand architecture still remains, but they are a nasty race. If they get their empire back it would be bad news for the Pandaren, which is why they are such a big threat.
The Saurok are a race of lizard men that were created by the Mogu. The Mogu themselves are flesh-shapers and can create other creatures. When they made them, the Mogu just wanted them to be smart enough to use weapons and fight for them, but over the years a number escaped and formed groups of bandits and thieves that are causing trouble across the entire continent. The Saurok will also appear in dungeons throughout the game. In one of the patches, the Alliance and Horde will roll up onto the beach along with their fleet, armor, tanks, and this is where the Horde will build a fortress on the island. The world will change over the course of the patches, especially this area. In Patch 5.1 the beach on Krasarang Wilds will erupt into a battlezone. You will see Pandaria evolve a little bit as the story evolves. The Horde and Alliance will assault different parts of the beach and there will be awesome fighting. Turtle Beach is another important historical part of Pandaria. We have 14,000 years of history that we want to show off and talk about as players go through Pandaria. We are trying to build it into the land and into the game. This is where Liu Lang, the first Pandarian explorer decided to see what was beyond the mists, so he set off on the back of a giant turtle. This turtle eventually grew into a giant, becoming the Wandering Isle zone. The Pandaren have commemorated this with a statue of Liu Lang. There are little historical points of interest all around the world and you will be able to visit all of them to collect the story.
Moving north we have Kun-Lai Summit, which the coldest climate in Pandaria. The zone is broken up into two separate areas, the lowland planes and the highest mountains in Azeroth. The Yaungol are another new race here, descendents of the Tauren. Their situation is similar to the Taunka in Northrend, as they got separated when Pandaria broke off from the main continents. They have been forced out of their homeland by the Mantid in Townlong Steppes. They are aggressive here because they are looking for a new place to set up their homes. Part of the problem solving here in Kun-Lai is the Yaungol threat, a nomadic warrior race that is very dangerous which is storming across the wall in great numbers. You go through several pieces of terrain as you cross through the zone. As you climb the slopes you will encounter another race, the Grummles. They were also created by the Mogu as a slave race to haul things around. They make good guides and can carry many times their own weight. They have a trade route that stretches across the zone called the Burlap Trail. They will need your help with their trade route as this is very dangerous area. Their route leads up to a faction called the Shado-pan and the Shado-pan Monastery. The Shado-pan are the most elite warriors of the Pandaren society and they understand the threat of the Sha. We describe them as the Sha police. They have to keep their emotions in check to keep the Sha out of their mind. The entire dungeon is in the outdoor world. You have to earn the trust of the Shado-pan and work your way up through the ranks.
Moving south we have Vale of Eternal Blossoms, which is the real heart of Pandaria of a whole. It is the original seat of the Mogu empire, which you can see with all of the original architecture and statues that are still here. There are a set of sacred pools here that the Mogu used to build their empire. Everyone that is here in Pandaria is fighting over the pools to take control of the power again. Both Alliance and Horde will have their own player hub here, which will include an auction house, bank, and general vendors. However, there won't be any of the ethereal vendors or class trainers. The Vale of Eternal Blossoms will be under siege by the Mogu, who want to take their land back. We are trying an experiment with this zone, which is a level 90 zone. It is based around the Golden Lotus faction, who were chosen by the Celestials to be the guardians of this zone. There are not enough of them to fight the Mogu, so they need your help. They don't trust you at first, so you will have to earn their trust. A different part of the valley will be under attack by the Mogu every day. When you first start working with the Golden Lotus they won't send you to the front lines, instead you will do some exploration and discovery. One of the ways we show progression is with the huge Mogu vault which is sealed at first. As you progress with the faction more of the doors open and you can score more and more of the vault.
The Mantid will try and storm the great wall, which will be defended by you in one of the dungeons. As you earn the trust of the Golden Lotus, they will send you to the front lines. As you collect the stories from the historical points of interest around the world you can bring them back to the Vale to the Lore Walkers. The Lore Walkers are responsible for holding all the lore of Pandaria, so you can bring back the things you find and ask them about it, and they will walk up on stage and give a presentation about the Mogu. We have so much story and history of Pandaria that we wanted to put into the game, so this is one of the ways we did it. All of the factions have scenarios associated with them. We are experimenting with the Brewmaster faction. You will find them scattered across the world looking for rare ingredients to mix into their brews. When you find the Brewmasters you will unlock a scenario. Doing these scenarios will give you faction with the Brewmasters.
We aren't talking about release dates yet, but I will tell you that Kun-Lai Summit, Jade Forest, Krasarang Wilds, and Valley of the Four Winds are all filled with content and ready. Townlong Steppes and Vale of Eternal Blossoms are mostly complete. I can't tell you a release date, but we are dedicated to getting this into player's hands as soon as possible. We are really excited about this content, there is so much to explore here and so much to do, and we are really trying to make it happen. You can see we made a lot of progress since Blizzcon.
We are really excited to show these two new battlegrounds off. If you remember Blizzcon, we talked about three different ideas we had for battlegrounds. We ended up picking two and moving forward with those, so those are the two we are going to take a look at today. The first one is called The Temple of ??? and it is a completely new ruleset, something that we have never done in WoW before. We are in an ancient Mogu temple that located in the Vale of Eternal Blossoms; you can see it has the same art style as the Vale. That was an important piece we wanted to make sure that fit and make it feel like part of the world. There is an ancient artifact here and whoever has the artifact has great power. The way that translates into the game is that you will have a damage buff while holding the artifact. You will also be gaining points for your team. If you can pick up the artifact and keep it, you will earn points for your team. The artifact has a curse as well, damaging you over time. The longer that you hold it, the less healing that you can take. It is going to be difficult for one person to keep the artifact for the whole time. We also wanted to really use the space in here and really get a good vibe for the sense of the area. This inside area, right in the middle, will be worth the most points when you are holding the artifact. This patio outside with tiles will be worth a smaller number of points, say 3 points. If you are in the outside area, all of the terrain is playable as well, if you hold the artifact out here you will earn one point. Essentially, the Horde and Alliance are going at it to try and gain the artifact to gain power for their side. Whichever team can hold the artifact long enough to earn the points will end up winning the game. We have done a good amount of internal testing on this and it is a really awesome, fast paced gameplay. It feels very different than our other battlegrounds, so we are excited to get into player's hands for the beta and get feedback.
The next battleground that we are going to take a look at is called the Silver Shard mines. This battleground takes place underneath Stranglethorn Vale in an Adventure Company goblin mine. It has a completely new ruleset. Something we were trying to get with these new battlegrounds is new gameplay for the players. We have obviously had success taking some of our old battlegrounds, creating a new area, and using the same ruleset. Here we wanted to try something different. The concept here is essentially we are in a mine that is full of mineral rich resources. Both the Alliance and Horde are trying to get a hold of these. In the center of the map we have a depot that minecarts take off from. They head to the three different supply chains at the end of each rail line. Imagine these individual mine carts as capture points. As they are on the way to the depot, you can capture them in the same way you capture points in Eye of the Storm, except it is moving. Alliance and Horde will have to claim it before it gets to the depot. The carts follow the rails and there is a little bit of a twist. Along the the rails we have splits, where the cart can actually be sent left or right. We have checkpoints that switch the rails and send the cart the other direction. Imagine the Horde has a cart and is getting close to one of their depots, but the Alliance can channel on the switch long enough, it will switch the course and send the cart the other way on a longer path. This would give the Horde time to reclaim it. We have it in internal testing and have played it a number of times and we are still playing with the ruleset a little bit. It is another one that really feels fresh and completely different; another one that we are hyped to get in to player's hands and get feedback on.
We are trying to inundate you with information so that you go back to your editors and say 1,000 words is not enough, I need more! We have so much content here to talk about. The talent system we are going to show off is essentially what we showed off at Blizzcon, it hasn't gone under any major renovations. I want to talk about our philosophy here. If you think back to the original World of Warcraft, it was in the beta before the game launched that we added a talent system. The idea behind the talents was adding a way for players to differentiate themselves. Once players got to level 60 they felt like "Hey, I'm a warrior and I look like this warrior next to me, we are doing the same things in combat, and neither of us have any abilities different from the other guy." We added the talent system to allow players to customize their abilities and utilities. Unfortunately, the expansions kept growing the talent trees so that they wouldn't even fit on one page anymore, you would have to scroll down. If you came back to the game you would have to relearn where everything is and the experience that we all had is going to a website and find the right build for your spec. You would just copy the build down, take that, and never interact with the talent system again. This is really unfortunate, as it is the thing that is supposed to add so much customization to your character.
We are trying to fix that now, in a couple of ways. First of all a lot of the new talents don't add player power directly. They might give you a new tool, crowd control, a spot ability button???, or a way to move faster, that are very difficult to solve mathematically. You can't say this is a 5.4% DPS increase. In the case where the talents do provide power, they are on a tier with two other talents that provide an equal amount of power. It might be different ways of measuring the power, maybe it is a random proc versus something you can press on demand, but they will play into player's different playstyles. You shouldn't feel like you have to take a certain talent if you are a healer. You can take any of the three talents and have fun with those. At absolute worst, some of these may have situational value. If you are fighting a boss where there is no AE necessary, then AE talent's won't be super sexy for that moment, but it might be for the next boss. We will see players switch their talents out between different fights. You can see here Scott has been dropping talents and picking up new ones. The Tome of the Clear Mind is the new consumable used for changing glyphs and talents. It costs a little bit of gold, because we don't want players to feel like they have to switch talents constantly, but if you get to a situation where you want a big AE snare you can switch pretty reasonably. In addition to letting players min-max the situation, we hope this allows them to change up their playstyle if they get tired of the current one.
We will start with a video that shows the Monk in action with a lot of the abilities. We have a ton of new animations for the Monk and a lot of spell effects that are in place now. As a reminder, you can be almost any of the existing races and be a monk. You will be fighting a lot of Mogu. You will be fighting a lot of porcupines, huge porcupines. Breath of Fire was a classic Monk move from the RTS. We really wanted the Monk to look and feel differently when you are playing them. A lot of our existing classes have to share animations, but this time we have pulled out all the stops and the artists delivered a lot of new animations for the Monks. Almost every ability has a unique animation. This is true not just of the Pandaren, but the older races as well. If you are in healing mode, you will be using slightly different animations than if you are in melee DPS mode.
I'll talk about the resource bar a little bit, you can see it up in the upper left hand corner. We have revised it a little bit since Blizzcon. The way it works now is, if you are in melee or tank mode, you have an energy bar, much like a rogue or feral druid. There are only a few abilities that use energy. We basically like energy as a resource because it stops us from having to add cooldowns on everything. There are a couple of attacks that use energy, which builds up a second resource, which are the white spheres there, called Chi. Unlike a rogue, who wants to get as many combo points as possible before using them, the monk has abilities that cost one, two, or three Chi. We are really trying to capture the feel of a button masher fighting game where you might chain combos together. You will do a three sphere, then a one sphere, then a two sphere, then another three sphere, then three one spheres in a row, and get that hyperreactive, push a button and see something happen combat. Monks also have a lot of movement abilities, as we felt it was iconic for a martial arts warrior. We don't want it to feel like our existing warrior class, so they don't have a Charge, but they do have a Roll that works more like a Blink.
This other ability that Scott has been using to get around the battlefield lets you fly until you hit the button again and then you come down. You can control how far you move across the battlefield. This is our Spinning Crane Kick, their big AE damage spell, which is why there are so many white feathers there. One of the artists calls it Poultry Slaughter. That is Fists of Fury, one of your big three combo point attacks. As a reminder, there are three specs to the monk. Windwalker is the melee DPS spec, Brewmaster is the tanking spec, and Mistweaver is the healing spec. If you become a Mistweaver, your energy bar is replaced with a mana bar, and you can cast heals much like our other healers. We also like this idea that healing monks stand toe-to-toe and do some melee damage. If you are familiar with how Atonement priests heal in Cataclysm, there is a little bit of that. The Monk can be doing a little bit of damage that translates into healing. That is our reintroduction to the Monk class. Now I'll hand it off to Scott and let him fly through some of our new dungeons.
Thanks, Craig. So, Mists of Pandaria is going to have a pretty amazing set of dungeons and raids awaiting players. We're gonna have 9 level 90 heroics for players as well as 3 raids with 14 raid bosses. And the raids are all going to have 3 difficulties. Normal, heroic, and all of them are going to have the Looking for Raid system that we debuted with Dragon Soul. That feature has been a real huge game changer for us. We've seen a lot of people that had given up on raiding, didn't have the time for raiding, had schedule conflicts that are now able to raid and really experience how much fun it is.
Facebook
Twitter