Blizzard explains the origin of the Skyborne in an interview with GameSpot
Blizzard has explained where the Skyborne come from. The idea started with questions to Chris Metzen, says senior game designer Josh Greenfield in an interview with GameSpot. World of Warcraft: Forever also adds around 1,000 quests to 3,000 existing ones.
Where the Skyborne come from
Everyone on the team is a fan of elves, says Greenfield. The team brought Metzen a set of ideas and variants, and he pushed for something bolder. Blizzard then designed the race together with him.
The architecture and the culture of Skywall had been left unused since Cataclysm, says Greenfield, with one dungeon and one raid built around it. The team picked that up for the new race.
The flight from Eldre’Thalas
The Skyborne were part of the Highborne of Eldre’Thalas, the city that players know as Dire Maul, says Greenfield. Ten thousand years ago, after the War of the Ancients, the leader of the Highborne summoned demons to hold on to power and immortality.
A rebellion followed. The rebels won battles but lost the war, fled across the sea and were pursued. They reached an island on the far side of Azeroth, where wind elementals raised them out of the world.
They have lived in Skywall ever since. Their wind spirits have now vanished, and that crisis is where the player meets them, says Greenfield.
The split that decides the faction
The Skyborne disagree about who they are. One group wants to return to the elementals and the old ways, and another, descended from the Highborne, wants to lean on its arcane heritage.
That split is the faction choice. The player makes it at character creation, says Greenfield, and not later in the game as the Pandaren do.
The pact with the wind lords holds the design together, says Blizzard. From the eyebrows of the race to the buildings on Zephras Isle, wind runs through the whole zone.
A thousand quests on top of three thousand
The original game holds around 3,000 to 3,500 real quests, says Greenfield, once the tracking quests are left out. Forever adds more than 1,000 to that.
Four new zones carry much of it, with 50 to 200 quests each. Wetlands and Azshara were filled out with new quests. From about level 5 onward players run into new material, says Greenfield.
The team looked at the ground level tone of the original quests. Greenfield names The Missing Diplomat as the kind of chain the team wants, and calls The Green Hills of Stranglethorn a terrible quest that stayed memorable anyway.
Some of the new quests are dark. Zephras Isle looks bright, says Greenfield, but the story there is not.
What Season of Discovery left behind
Season of Discovery was seasonal and experimental, and that allowed risks a permanent game does not, says Greenfield. The lessons carry over, the most far fetched ideas do not.
The Warlock tank and the Shaman tank are not coming back for now, says Greenfield, who does not rule them out later. The Mage healer is gone.
Familiar but new
The team wanted new zones that a player would not be able to place as new, says Blizzard. Riverglades is the example named in the interview.
Blizzard calls the world the main character of Forever. New rendering work went into water and fog, players can switch between the HD and SD models, and transmog can be turned off.
Forever launches on 4 November. The beta is live from 17 September.
Source: GameSpot