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Blizzard Pax East News

Pax East has started and Blizzard is their with some announcements!

First off Heroes of the storm, 4 new heroes have been announced:

Brightwing has a trailer to go along with it!

Quote from: Blizzard

LiLi

  • Lili is a new support hero with an ability set that helps her to very effectively aid her teammates throughout the game.
  • She has lots of ways to protect herself and allies, and she doesn’t need to be babysat.
  • You’ll see a lot more from her in the showmatch commentary at the end of the panel.

Brightwing

  • Brightwing has the ability to passively heal any allies nearby.
  • She can also transform enemies into animals.
  • Brightwing is a versatile support hero capable of teleporting from ally to ally, healing them and providing them with the help they need to succeed in battle.

Zagara

  • Zagara has map-wide components to her design.
  • She can drop Creep Tumors to spread Zerg Creep, which helps speed up her movement speed, as well as the speed of her summons.
  • What’s more, Zagara can use her Nydus Worms to hop back and forth around the map, giving her plenty of opportunity to Creep up and siege multiple lanes at once.

Murky

  • When we talked about putting Murky in the game, we initially struggled with what to do with him. Making him a really powerful hero just didn’t seem to fit quite right (he is a Murloc, you know.) Instead, we chose to make him very, very weak, but incredibly persistent.
  • Murky can lay an egg which he can use to respawn near instantly upon being killed. If his egg is destroyed, Murky will face the same respawn timers as other heroes do, so be sure to hide it well!
  • Murky is going to die A LOT, but he’s a hero who eventually overwhelms enemies across multiple battles. He doesn’t need to win every fight; he just needs to win once.

We also shared a sneak peek of three additional new heroes who are also in development: Chen, Kael’thas, and Sylvanas!

Pax East panel video:

Now onto Hearthstone, where we’ve gotten the first preview of the PvE adventure mode!

Quote from: Blizzard

Hearthstone’s highly anticipated single player Adventure Mode has been officially announced today at PAX East: Curse of Naxxramas, A Hearthstone Adventure!

The Curse Comes!

The ancient necropolis Naxxramas, a base of operations for the powerful lich Kel’Thuzad and his plague-bearing undead host, comes to Hearthstone in a single player PvE Adventure that anyone can undertake! Progress through one of the five unique wings of the dungeon and gain new cards for your Hearthstone collection by defeating the iconic bosses that you’ll face along the way – the oversized arachnid Maexxna, the fungal horror Loatheb and the shambling abomination Patchwerk are just a few of the horrors that await your challenge. Each boss has their own unique cards and Hero Powers at their disposal to challenge even the most seasoned of card-slinging adventurers!

New Cards!

Progressing through Curse of Naxxramas and overcoming the challenges that lurk within will reward you with all new Hearthstone cards! Once you earn these cards, you can start playing with them in your decks right away. A total of 30 new cards will be added with Curse of Naxxramas – Check out a few of the shambling creatures of the undead that are just dying to be a part of your collection below!

Peer Into the Plague Quarter

One of the bosses you’ll be pitted against within the Plague Quarter is the devious plague cauldron master Heigan the Unclean! His Eruption spell will put your minion’s dancing skills to the test, and Mindpocalypse will make you think you’ve got the upper hand! Speaking of hands, Heigan definitely never washes his. Gross.

Defeating Heigan will net you a brand new card to add to your collection, and the completion of each wing will reward you with a guaranteed new Legendary card!

All New Game Board!

Curse of Naxxramas will have its own unique game board Hearthstone players battle on while they are in the adventure, complete with brand new interactive corners! What could possibly lurk within that quivering mass of eggs? Do you really want to find out?

Test Your Might with Class Challenges!

On top of all of that, nine unique Class Challenges lie in wait within Curse of Naxxramas. These challenges put a difficult twist on existing encounters within the adventure and will put your Hearthstone skills with a specific class to the test! If you’re able to overcome the Class Challenges that face you, you’ll be rewarded with new class-specific cards to add to your collection.

Make Tracks to Naxx!

Curse of Naxxramas will open its gates to challenge Hearthstone players over the course of 5 weeks, opening wing by wing. The first wing of Curse of Naxxramas, The Arachnid Quarter, will be available free for all Hearthstone players. If players wish to venture further into Naxxramas to collect all of the new cards for their collection, each wing besides the Arachnid Quarter can be purchased with in-game gold OR real money. As each wing is released, the cards available in each wing will also show up in your Arena picks, even if you have not earned them for your personal collection yet!

Beware the Necropolis!

We hope you enjoyed this first look into Curse of Naxxramas, A Hearthstone Adventure. Curse of Naxxramas is planned to release simultaneously for PC, Mac and iPad. A release date will be announced at a later time.

Blizzard Introduces Azeroth Choppers

Update on how the ingame chopper will be chosen and how you’ll be able to get them:

Quote from: Blizzard
Earlier today, we announced the Azeroth Choppers head-to-head match-up between the Horde and Alliance, and we’re very excited to share the upcoming episodes and final bike creations with you. We saw a few questions following the announcement and wanted to take a moment to clarify things.

First, we want to make it clear that players globally will be able to vote for their favorite faction bike—either Alliance or Horde. Second, the bike that receives the most votes will then be made into a faction-specific-only mount and be available FREE to all players (usable when playing characters of the winning faction, of course). Your vote will be very important and could just be the one that lands your favorite faction a shiny new mount. If you haven’t watched the trailer yet, check it out here and stay tuned to Azerothchoppers.com for more details!

Quote from: Blizzard

Led by legendary chopper builder Paul Jr., Team Horde will face off against Team Alliance to determine which epic custom-built bike will come out on top in the ultimate showdown. When the dust settles and the final designs are revealed it will be YOUR vote that decides which of these mechanical marvels will be recreated as an in-game mount.

Meet the Blizzard Teams

Alliance
Chris Metzen
Terran Gregory
Monte Krol

Horde
Sam Didier
Jason Hutchins
Gary Platner

Don’t miss out on all of the action! Azeroth Choppers premieres 4.17.14 on http://www.AzerothChoppers.com

Female Draenei Character Model Preview

Blizzard came with quite a surprise tonight! After yesterday’s Tauren preview they have now released a female Draenei model preview, which is of course the real one and not the april fools one. Check out the preview below!

Quote from: Blizzard

Hello again! I’m Senior Art Director Chris Robinson, and today we wanted to give you a super quick look at our current progress with the new female Draenei.
After the April Fools’ joke we wanted to ensure you weren’t waiting too long to see where we’re at with her actual character model update. Keep in mind that she’s still in-progress, and doesn’t have any animation to pose her body or face.

Animation is a big factor for the female Draenei specifically, so it’s important to keep it in mind when comparing the two. The original female Draenei has some fairly extreme posing that happens when she’s animated. If you were to see the static model of the original without any posing you’d see that it looks very similar to the new one. With her pose applied her shoulders stretch backward, her pelvis rotates forward, and her chin lowers—causing her head to angle downwards. The curvature in her lower back, and why the head shape looks slightly different, are also due to the new model not having the same posing applied yet. She also looks a lot taller! Ultimately all of those things will be addressed when we animate the new model, they just don’t take place until she’s rigged and sent on to the animation team.

We hope you enjoyed this super quick look at where we’re at right now, and we’ll continuing sharing more in-progress art as we go forward. The next article in the Artcraft series we’re planning is a look at the creation of the Spires of Arak, a new zone coming in Warlords of Draenor. Thanks for stopping by!

Senior Character Artist Joe Keller did the majority of the work on this revamp, with direction from our Lead Character Artist Tyson Murphy (@tysmurph), and myself (@artofcgrobinson).

Tauren Male Model Preview

Blizzard came out with the next character model preview surprisingly quickly! Not only just model previews, but animation previews too!

Quote from: Blizzard

Hey there everyone, I’m Steve Aguilar, lead animator for the World of Warcraft animation team. Today we’re showing off the male Tauren, and with some help from the rest of the animation team, we’re going to give you a look at the animation processes we use to bring this big guy to life.

Before we even started animating him, we already knew the Tauren was going to be a blast to work on based on all of the detail the character art team added.

As we begin applying animations, we’re extra careful not to stray too far from the original. It’s important to us to retain the essence of the original animations, because how a characters walk, move, and carry themselves help to define their personality. We use all of the original animations as a starting point, and then go through the process of cleaning them up and adding additional articulation. Let’s delve into what that process looks like.

The Re-Animator

Steve Aguilar: The normal “stand” animation is one of the most important animations because this is what you, the player, see the majority of the time. When you stop moving or walk up to an NPC, the stand is the key pose that is being used. A huge chunk of animations also rely on this pose so they can easily transition into and out of it.

Dev Interviews About WoD Alpha – Final Boss.TV

warlords banner small

The second interview that took place today was over at Final Boss.TV! Again Zarhym and Celestalon joined them! Check out the transcript below, with a special thanks to Mario for transcribing it while it aired!

Jonathan Zarhym – JZ
Chadd Celestalon Nervig – CCN

Q: What do you do at Blizzard?

Title: WoW Senior Community Rep.
JZ – Is a weird title. Most people know us as Community Managers. Posting on Forums, Manage Official Pages (Face, Twitch, Youtube, Twitter), PR Marketing Campaigns, Community Feedback.We take seriously what we do.

Title: WoW Technical Game Designer
CCN – I work closely with the games mechanics designers. Systems design. I talk a lot with the core designers of the game. The main aspects of the game and how the class design and collaboration between the various departments that fine-tune the game experience.

I got started in Blizzard during WoTLK – during ICC. I was a theorycrafter. And back at that time, there were a lot of issues with “armor penetration”. So I created a few spreadsheets with numbers and calculations on the subject, to improve the mechanic of the game which seemed broken at the time. So I posted onto Blizzard pages and the next few days, I received a letter from Ghostcrawler that said: “Hey, I like your ideas, let’s have lunch”. And that’s how I ended at Blizzard.

Q: How do you feel about your job?

CCN – I think is important to follow what the community has to say about the game; I like talking to people and seeing what and how things are at all levels. Reason why I stay up late most of the time.

Q: Overall, does your information have a positive effect?

CCN – Absolutely yes. Players is what makes WOW alive and it inherently, makes the game better. We spend a lot of time on the patch notes to explain to the community everything about the changes or everything that we intend to do with the game. It helps the players to see the bigger picture with what we intend to do with the changes.

Reason also why we redesigned the patch notes format. People now can click directly on their class and skip down to that particular section, instead of reading through all the text.

Dev Interviews About WoD Alpha – Convert to Raid

On Sunday Zarhym and Celestalon are on to two other podcasts Convert to Raid and Final Boss.tv . And they are interviewed about the Warlords of Draenor Alpha. Check out the transcript from the Convert to Raid interview below. We might have missed some questions/answers but once the VoDs are up we’ll go back to see what is missing.

Convert To Raid:
Q: What is happening with the Alpha right now? How many people etc?
A: Right now it’s internal employee take home alpha. The reason we made the announcement, is that we plan on inviting a small amount of people soon. For that to happen the files need to be uploaded to battle.net. Which means that it could be datamined. So to not cause confusion we announced everything we have, so people know what’s going on.

Q: What does the roll out look as far as timing goes?
A: It’s still To Be Determined. The time frame is still uncertain. Even this week the announcement was delayed due to a problem with the 64bit client.

Q: Open beta, no open beta?
A: I don’t know. Generally it might be more limited than mists.

On time between Blizzcon and these patch notes:
Q: Did you guys encounter some problems? or was this the intended time line?
A: We didn’t want to step on D3 and Hearthstone’s thunder. But also the problems that occur like the client issues and builds that didn’t work. The stability of the builds is often suspect.

A: We have been in Alpha for a while now. It doesn’t mean much to the public but it’s still been a mile stone. All blizzard employees now have access to the Alpha, which in and of itself is a milestone.