Ask-CDev
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Ask Creative Development Round III answers revealed
I have kind of a vested interest in the lore of World of Warcraft, so it was with great surprise and not a little excitement that I heard via the twitter grapevine that Ask Creative Development Round III had finally answered all those questions. There's a lot of answers here to questions I've seen posed quite often. A few highlights are as follows: Wrathion thinks he's the last black dragon, but Sabellian is still in Outland leading the black dragons there, and there could even be black drgaons in Azeroth Wrathion doesn't know about yet. Ever wonder who Garithos was, exactly? Now you can find out. It's not an Old God under Tirisfal Glades. What is it? No one knows, but it's bad, and it's not an Old God. You should probably leave it alone anyway. The New Council of Tirisfal done broke up, like most supergroups, and no one knows where Med'an went. The secrets of Gilnean harvest magic, priest mental magic, and blood elf green eyes are all revealed. So head on over to the forums and take a gander at Ask Creative Development III's answers. It's open warfare between Alliance and Horde in Mists of Pandaria, World of Warcraft's next expansion. Jump into five new levels with new talents and class mechanics, try the new monk class, and create a pandaren character to ally with either Horde or Alliance. Look for expansion basics in our Mists FAQ, or dig into our spring press event coverage for more details!
Ask CDev #3 is looking for your questions
Have you got any questions for the Blizzard creative development squad that concerns the lore of Warcraft, your favorite characters, or some lingering plot points? Blizzard has just opened the doors to Ask CDev #3, where you can submit your questions on the official Blizzard forums and hopefully get an answer or two from the lore gods and goddesses on high. The last two Ask CDev features were informational and fun from a lore standpoint. While this question-and-answer format does not lend itself well to the class and systems balance types of discussion, the lore question and answers with the CDev folks usually provide some decent results. I would still love a chance to get a live chat going with the creative development people, much like how the class Q&As were broadcast in real time. Head over to the World of Warcraft official forums to ask the creative development team your questions (North American or EU). You can see our previous coverage of part 1 and part 2 of the Ask CDev feature. Blizzard's full announcement after the break.
Know Your Lore: The clever ins and outs of Ask CDev Round 2
The World of Warcraft is an expansive universe. You're playing the game, you're fighting the bosses, you know the how -- but do you know the why? Each week, Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney make sure you Know Your Lore by covering the history of the story behind World of Warcraft. Creative Development is one of those tough jobs that doesn't seem that difficult until you really start to think about it. Creative Development is responsible for the world of Azeroth as we know it -- every story, every lore point, every moment of an NPC's life is documented and written by the folks over in Blizzard's Creative Development. Without the world, we wouldn't really have a game to play, would we? But it goes beyond merely writing the story as it stands today. The Creative Development team also has to figure out where the story is going in the future. Then they have to keep track of the miles of story that have already been written and figure out whether or not, in the context of what has happened already, the thing that they would very much like to happen can actually happen. If it doesn't fit, they have to write it to make it fit. That's where it gets tricky and devs have to start being clever regarding what they say, because anything that is said to players is set in stone as "this is something that in the story of the game actually happened." Some players (like the guy in the video above, or -- let's face it -- like me) are notoriously anal about keeping these facts straight, and when the story doesn't line up with what they were told, these people are very, very quick to point it out. When you're simply writing a book from beginning to end, you can catch these inconsistencies before the novel hits the printing press; when you're working on an ongoing story like Warcraft, it gets much harder. Enter the Ask a CDev 2 thread, a thread created in February that didn't get its answers revealed until yesterday, four months after the fact.
