#World Of Warcraft Cataclysm Areas Free To Travel

The matter-of-fact tone in which he discusses the game's protagonists and locales is exactly how you'd discuss the latest football result. ThanksLike many of Blizzard's senior development team, lead World of Warcraft world designer Cory Stockton - the guy in charge of rebuilding the game for the incoming Cataclysm expansion - has been working on the IP so long he talks about the virtual world and its denizens as indistinguishable from the real one. How do I get to the areas or start the questlIne I know originally it came from a heroes call quest, but it is not on the board for me. How do I start the Cataclysm quests as an Alliance level 120 I have done BFA and I am trying to get to the Cataclysm areas in order to level alchemy for a guild achievement.

If you can stomach the playful use of anachronism and satire, this is some of the best that World of Warcraft has to offer.Not that Stockton has trouble differentiating reality from gaming. Rolled a new Undead Rogue post-Cataclysm and was surprised by the phasing and the linear progression of the story. For Alliance players, youll find The Eastern Earthshrine in.World-of-warcraft Starting Areas changed in WoW Cataclysm.

World Of Warcraft Cataclysm Areas Free To Travel

We sat down for a chat with Stockton to see where Blizzard's content team is at with Cataclysm, and what it's hoping to accomplish - and the one design trait Stockton attributes to the MMO's ongoing success.VG247: Cataclysm features massive geographical upheaval in the game's original environments. Stayed where they were as Thrall guided Garrosh to the private areas of Grommash Hold, where they could speak without. Drop in Blackwing Descent raid that became available with the Cataclysm World of Warcraft.Starting areas are where players begin the game in World of Warcraft as level one characters, based on their selection of race.Players are more or less free to travel wherever they want from the starting location, but it is generally recommended that one complete the character and race-specific quests in and around the character's starting location.Book One of Cataclysm Christie Golden.

We were going to pick the zones that needed the most changes. Originally we thought we were gonna make a large number of changes to a certain amount of zones. In most cases, we've changed way more than we thought we would.

But I think it's all for the good. We've ended up changing way more than we thought. So you gotta go in and make changes.I think that's the biggest thing. If you redo this zone and you go to the next zone, you see the quests there are six years old, you feel weird. I think that just comes from the Blizzard mentality and it catches us. Zones that we thought would only get a week worth of work - of quest rework - have ended up getting five weeks worth of quest rework.

The idea of maybe going with something more Azshara-based, her being one of the big crazy bosses like Arthas style. Were there any other solid contenders for central themes in this expansion?Cory Stockton: The other biggest theme was the South Seas in general. I really don't think people are going to feel like they're missing anything if anything I feel they're going to get a better version of what they remember.When we last spoke you said Cataclysm's demolition of parts of the game world was Chris Metzen's idea.

The Twilight's Hammer is that invisible connection between the old gods and Deathwing.WoW's well over half a decade old. With Cthun and Yogg Saron - they corrupted these great leaders and that's what you're seeing here with Deathwing. He'd gone crazy and so the idea of bringing him back and having him be empowered by old gods was just a huge, cool thing.That never came around until we played with the old god idea so much. You know he's been around forever, but he got owned way back in Grim Batol and nobody had ever heard from him ever since. He's such an old character. We did do some research into that and got kind of far into it - but it never really lead to anything that was huge, you know, that really grabs you and would make you feel like 'what's gonna make you play this expansion.'A couple of new islands, some pirates - that's cool: but what's the hook? And from that we kind of developed and kept going to the idea of 'who is the protagonist going to be?' and Deathwing came up.

We've closed off areas that lead to old zones a zone like Hillsbrad Foothills is Horde-only now. You're not going from zone to zone to zone to zone. Not only are you playing through entirely different quest lines, but the zones that have a completely different flow. The experience is completely different.

The idea of the mastery system coming in and the way the new talent trees work (where you get all your passive bonuses come from the amount you've spent in the tree), we've been able to remove all those passive talents the 5 percent crit, the 5 percent defence. The quests - that's going to feel completely different that's a given.Besides that, Cataclysm's easily the biggest change we've ever made to our classes by far. So, you're going to see a different flow that's going to feel completely different. Barrens has been broken into two zones - northern and southern.

And then players that have already done it multiple times, I would hope, will see the new race and class combinations. Number one, I feel it's going to be better for new players or new players that we might have lost at some point along the way - to feel more compelled to get all the way through. And I think that's going to be compelling for. It's not going to feel like just the world has changed the way that you play your class all the way through will feel very different. We've been able to pull all of those out, and put them into the mastery system and replace those with ones that feel cooler.I feel like that, combined with the whole new game experience is going to really feel different.

That's why we offer it.Our idea is hopefully the content is compelling enough that you would want to go through it, just because you think it's going to be good. We don't really have any issues with race changes. All those kind of things that people have always talked about - like a Night Elf Mage - being able to make that class and do that fantasy, along with everything else I think will be big.What would you say if you encountered Sceptic A on a message board asking, 'Why don't I just pay for a race change and skip the new levelling flow?'Cory Stockton: I think if they want to pay for a race change that's totally fine. A Tauren Paladin, you know, an Undead Hunter, a Gnome Priest.

Like you could roll a new character and level up all the way through that. If that feels weird or if it feels good - that's something we're going to have to watch.Do you think there's a risk of people will skip much of the new content by constantly queuing up via the game's random dungeon tool?Cory Stockton: Totally, I think it can happen now. Nothing's going to happen obviously any time soon, but we're going to watch Outland pretty close over Cataclysm and see how people transition into it.

And I think that alone - considering the number of dungeons you want available to have enough to level in - is going to hopefully discourage that somewhat.It's something we should have had originally, to be honest. Then you play it.So you at least have to travel there to be able to do it. When you go to Wailing Caverns and you walk in and it says 'Wailing Caverns', it'll unlock it with a little message saying it's unlocked. So when you see the list of dungeons, they're all going to be locked. And so one of the new things we're doing in Cataclysm is you can't actually queue for a random dungeon until you've done that dungeon for the first time.

They would die in the Icecrown five-man dungeons and have no idea where the entrance was on the side of the tower.