Developer Log - July 2023
The end of the month is approaching, so that means it is time for our July Developer Log. This is a brief summary of some of what the team has been actively working on over the course of the last month. While this does not include details about absolutely everything, we hope these sneak peeks pique your interest.
During this month, we also hit our 1-year anniversary of Project Epoch becoming publicly announced to the world, and we are very proud of both the progress since then and the community we've built over the course of our two public betas. Thank you for joining us on this journey of development.
To celebrate that, we released a preview of our Goldshire Overhaul. For those who did not see that, you will find it at the end of this post.
World Locale - Valormok
Once a humble grouping of two tents and a caravan, the might of the Horde has decided that is simply not good enough right in their backyard of Azshara, behind Orgrimmar. With this in mind, the Warchief himself has decreed that it must be upgraded. We're happy to introduce you to the all-new Valormok with a new scale, layout, NPCs, and much more to explore. Who knows what the Horde may uncover if they dig deep enough under Hyjal...
Bugs - It's Honest Work
As ever, each month we are churning through our bug reports to fix what we can, with a particular focus on quest and world issues. This has been spearheaded by Magic, who has closed nearing 50 bug issues alone. This includes drastic improvements to the rates of greens and blues dropping from world creatures and chests, fixing references to future expansions, creature type flagging, and through to ensuring that packs in the world correctly aggro together. We thank you all for your reports during Beta 2 to help us narrow down and focus on these problems to lead to as smooth of a launch as possible. Over the course of the next month ahead, we will be heavily focusing on class-related bugs alongside these world ones.
Quest Showcase - Biz With the Fizz
It's been some time since we last showed off a detailed summary of our new quests. Lots of effort and planning goes into creating immersive storylines for the server. With that in mind, we wanted to share one of our new chains that takes place in Winterspring.
In this new quest chain, you follow a Steamwheedle Cartel merchant in Winterspring who needs an adventurer to retrieve a missing potion shipment from her unreliable assistant. The assistant convinces the player to perform tasks of questionable importance, culminating in an epic finale surrounding the owlkin of Winterspring.
Blackrock Depths
One of the most intricate and iconic dungeons within Vanilla is the fan-favourite Blackrock Depths. This dungeon features thousands of individual creature spawns, hundreds of individual game objects such as chairs, quest givers, doors, and more alongside detailed RP events such as the Grim Guzzler.
Over the course of this month, we've had two active lanes of internal development focused around this dungeon; on the one hand, Design in the form of new quests, overhauled mechanics for every boss encounter, and preparing to seed new max level pre-Raid BiS gear within. With more than 20 encounters to overhaul and redesign, this has been a large endeavour by one of our most recent designers.
On the other hand, has been a focus on the technicalities and details in the form of a detailed analysis comparing the Blackrock Depths that exists as stock within our core as well as the true Blizzlike version that exists on WoW Classic. This included checking every pack of trash and every bit of important scripting and RP. The result of this was a firm decision that the stock Blackrock Depths simply wouldn't do, and so we've endeavoured to do a ground-up rewrite by first removing every spawn, unlinking every script, and starting from scratch.
Through hundreds of hours of recorded footage combined with packet sniffs, we've been able to very accurately replicate Blackrock Depths as it should be to serve as our base for adding custom tweaks on top.
Some of the outcomes of this are primarily accurate Blizzlike spawns, pooling, aggro linking, patrols, emotes, RP events, and much more. Our firm commitment is to make this dungeon one of the most polished experiences down to the little details on any private server.
Below you can find a short demonstration of what this impacts in even just one small section of the dungeon, the Detention Block.
Molten Core Attunement
While development of Molten Core is progressing nicely, we're not quite ready to discuss or show off the contents within; we are, however, happy to announce and elaborate on the all-new way that you will gain entry to the Molten Core.
On Project Epoch, you will be sent on a 5-stage world, trading, and dungeon-spanning quest chain beginning from Lothos Riftwaker, who leads you to working with Duke Hydraxis to gain a powerful aquatic blessing that will allow you to withstand the brutal heats within Ragnaros's lair. Without this blessing from the Waterlords, any who enter will perish. We hope you enjoy this all-new adventure with your stalwart allies so that you all can face Ragnaros together.
World Locale - Blackmaw Village
During the War of the Ancients, the Blackmaw fought against the Burning Legion, and Unng Ak served as their representative in the Kaldorei Resistance. The Blackmaw would later become one of the few tribes of furbolgs to have escaped corruption after the Third War and would later settle in Blackmaw Village in northwestern Azshara. Resigning themselves to a life of harmony with nature and greeting all who travel peacefully to spend time amongst them, learn the legends of their people and perhaps even find somewhere to spend a few weary nights fishing away under the stars of Azhara.
Their leader, Ungarl, however, keeps a watchful eye from his seat of power with an ever-growing awareness of what truly lies within the nearby Timbermaw Hold and what his people may have to do.
Warmode Quests
In prior betas, we have received feedback that some of the benefits and bonuses of Warmode didn't quite encourage actually engaging in World PvP as much as they should, and we are taking that to heart in many ways. We decided today to show one of those ways in the form of a new Warmode-only series of quests to hunt down and destroy members of the opposing faction, and in the process, gain large chunks of experience and a guaranteed source of Bloody Tokens for you to spend.
In each zone of an appropriate level for your character, you will be able to find at your faction's encampments new notice boards providing access to these new Warmode exclusive objectives. For example, a quest for slaying the Horde given to Alliance players in Arathi will be available at Refuge Point, and the Horde's equivalent to slay the Alliance is available at Hammerfall.
However, to encourage venturing around the world, we have included these notice boards to Faction Capitals too. The ones present in a Faction Capital provide access to all zone quests for all the zones that you are within level range of.
Community Shoutouts
We wanted to ensure that where possible we shout out those in the community who have gone above and beyond and contributed to Project Epoch. This month we, once again, wanted to give a special thank you to Toscar for providing us a wonderful new map for Orgrimmar which includes the new Zeppelin Quarter.
Goldshire Overhaul
And finally, for those who may have missed it, we recently posted a teaser of our overhaul to Goldshire as an early treat for the community ahead of this post. This is a ground-up remake of Goldshire inspired by its Alpha variant with our own custom spin on top. We look forward to you exploring it in Beta 3.
Conclusion
This has been a very busy month behind the scenes in all aspects of research, planning, and development, and we're happy you've come along for another look into what we do. We look forward to the next update at the end of August.
