Ünicorn's Blog

Even though the Atari 2600 games were already outdated when the development for World of Warcraft began, Jeffrey Kaplan still seemed to be a fan of them. Or at least his coworkers thought that when he presented his design proposal for the second PvP zone. Blizzard actually shared this historical artwork and the story behind it  for the 10 year celebration of World of Warcraft . And I must say that compared next to the minimap of the final product, not much seems to have changed from the initial pitch. The only visible difference is the position of the gold mine and the lumber mill moving closer to the center. If I was asked to draw the Arathi Basin map today, I would have drawn something very similar. "This was the entire 'design' for Arathi Basin. I made that map instead of going to E3 one year. My team teased me and called it 'The Atari Map'" , was Jeffrey Kaplans explanation below the image at BlizzCon. And even the adjustments for the mine and mill locatio...

Your experience bar turns blue after you logout for a long time or if you're in an Inn, or both. If your bar is blue, you get double the experience from killing NPCs. That is probably what most people know about the resting in World of Warcraft. To come to this simple system, there were a few major changed during the development. The system was first introduced with patch 0.6 during beta testing to "broaden and balance some of the gameplay elements" . With the introduction of inns, Hearthstone s and the rest state, Blizzard tried to promote "exploring other aspects of the game without penalty, such as tradeskilling and social activities" . Patch 0.6 screenshot of the character selection showing your current rest tier. (©Richter @ Beta Server) And this promotion came not only with the positive resting effect we know nowadays; it came with five different levels of rest. Your character would go down from well rested, rested, normal, fatigued to exhausted as y...

Well today maybe not so helpful anymore, because all the raids have a flexible size, right? But it still remains for the older raids from Wrath of the Lich King were the different sizes were introduced to Mist of Pandaria, where they were abandoned. The skull for the heroic version was always obvious to me. It is an easy indicator to tell, that you are set to the heroic version of the raid. We also knew that from before, as the Burning Crusade alsready had those for the dungeon portals. But that is not the only indicator on the Portal. Besides the difficulty setting you can already see the raid size. You might have noticed them, but didn't know what they were about. There are actually orbs floating around the raid portal. Each orb symbolizes one group of five people. So if you set the raid size to 10-man, you will se two orbs circling around the center and if you set it to 25-man, you will see 5 orbs. The raid portal for the Icecrown Citadel with 10-man, 25-man and 25-man heroic di...

The song I Am Murloc from the Elite Tauren Chieftan , makes it sound like Murlocs are even parts fish and man - both a little more than. " I am more than a fish;  I am more than a man;  Death will rise from the tide;  I am Murloc!".  But this ratio of fish to man used to be a little different, swinging more into the fishy parts. Early screenshots during the development of World of Warcraft actually show models, which have a lot more finy and gilly parts. Early World of Warcraft Development; Swamps of Sorrows. Early World of Warcraft Development; Swamps of Sorrows. Early World of Warcraft Development; Westfall. Early World of Warcraft Development; Redridge Mountains. It's interesting to see, what the early design versions looked like and which changes were made, that led the Murlocs to become the unofficial mascots of the game. In another timeline they would have stayed the horrific way they were depicted on the concept art or as their early ingame models. That didn'...

Even before The Burning Crusade launched, people got going and farming their Exodar reputation for the sweet sweet Great Purple Elekk  or one of the less desirable colors, if they lacked the taste needed. Twenty-five days before the launch, Insalubrity from the Illidan US server started what he smartly called the Exalted with Exodar Club . That means he only needed seventeen days from the expansion pre patch 2.0.1 to get the 42.000 reputation points needed to go from neutral to exalted. Screenshot from Insalubrity @ Illidan US. But how did he do it, if he can't visit the Exodar yet to gift them tons of Runecloth ? That's how you would get reputation with the capitals back then, right? Every Additional Runecloth stack you had laying around, could be exchanged in the capitals for 75 reputation in return. But at that point in time, the exodar hadn't crashed yet? At least it couldn't be reached yet. So what he did, is farm resources in Alterac Valley. The battleground has...

[T]he Defias Brotherhood has taken up residence and turned the dark tunnels into their private sanctum. It is rumored that the thieves have conscripted the clever goblins to help them build something terrible at the bottom of the mines - but what that may be is still uncertain. It's a ship. With giant cannons. Every player in Azeroth knows that. The Deadmines is one of the most known instances in the game, I would say, if not the most well known. But the Ending on the ship in the massive cave didn't always look this way. Early art of the instance only shows it as a big thieve lair with the only ship part being a lookout as a bridge part? Original concept art for the Deadmines. (©The Art of World of Warcraft) The Juggernaut, which is the official name of the ship monstrosity, was actually located outside at first. Blizzard hasn't shared the reason behind this move, but my guess would be, that they didn't want the ship visible in the outside version of Westfall. It would ...

The Black Qiraj Battle Tank , the only legendary mount in the game, was a ground mount. If you were around during classic, you were able to get this one, by being the first person to ring the gong or within 10 hours of the first person. And it wasn't just any mount, it was better than the other ones. Of course there was the feature, that you could use it outside Ahn'Qiraj as well as inside, which no other mount could, but there was more. It had two special features, that no other mount had. The first one was, that you could mount up, while falling. And the second one, that you could start the summon in combat and if you weren't any longer in combat upon finish, the cast would go through. This would allow for a tinier timeframe needed to mount up, as other mounts couldn't be cast during combat. But apparently Blizzard had thought about adding even more features to the mount. Not only being usable inside Ahn'Qiraj and outside, but also as a flying mount once the Burni...

You probably know about the Fortune Cookie , that was introduced with Cataclysm, which contains a  Mysterious Fortune Card . This wasn't the first fortune cookie item in the game though. Already back during the Burning Crusade expansion there was one. The Ogri'la Faction isn't so well known because it's just a bunch of Ogres, trapped on a plateau in Blade's Edge Mountains, surrounded by a bunch of Crystals. Even the rewards for the faction aren't that spectacular. Most people might only know about them, because of the two dailies Bomb Them Again!  and Wrangle More Aether Rays! , which also give you reputation for the Sha'tari Skyguard . What I want to establish is, that it isn't a widely know popular faction to have contact with. And right there in that lesser known town of Ogri'la is a probably even less known food vendor. The Ogri'la Grubgiver  has two items in stock, that you can't get anywhere else in the World of Warcraft. The first one...

... and the Alliance. She doesn't see faction association apparently. Little Adeline is a small girl in the Fragrant Flowers shop, located on the outer canals side of the Trade District in Stormwind, facing towards the Old Town. She is there helping Bernard Gump and  Felicia Gump , which they themselves might be a reference to Forrest Gump? Because they are the Florists Gump? Bernard Gump even has the tag <Florist>. Anyways - if you interact with Adeline, she has the following dialogue: The Gumps are letting me help them run their shop! I just love flowers. <Little Adeline suddenly squints at you, looking very serious.> Do you like flowers? And if you answer the question correctly, with the only available option there is, "Yes I do!" , she'll cast a Cascade of Petals onto you. This applies a buff with a 1min duration and an effect of rose petals falling around you. And according to a wowhead comment, not only if you're a handsome gnome, but also any...

Feedback during beta tests seems to work? For the longest time during the development of World of Warcraft, any back-slot item wasn't visible on your character. But then the beta started and people seem to have complained. Because Patch 0.6 featured the following update: Due to popular demand, cloaks have been made visible. This will help players customize their characters even more than before. And that is true. My character is more customizable with cloak. How else would I cosplay as a small Superman ingame? And if you don't like it you could just hide it in the Interface Display options. Nowadays you visit your Transmogrification to do that, and even more options are being added, like the Black Dragonscale Backpack . But maybe a backpack is cheating, because it isn't really a cloak, even though it makes sense to be a back-slot item. Another cloak improvement we're just now getting to see in the game, as far as I know, is cloak improvements with the Visions of N'...

Well, not totally totally, but there are a bunch of changes. You might have seen a few early design maps for World of Warcraft floating around without sources , but this is certifiably the real deal. During the BlizzCon 2014 and for the 10th birthday of World of Warcraft, Blizzard shared a bunch of pictures from the early days. You could only find them online as blurry pictures of the monitor. And then Dave Wilson, who works as Talent Attraction Guy for Blizzard, shared the originals on his twitter account.  And now it's double legit. So what are the differences, between this early concept and the final product, that was shipped to the players? I did a little painting to make comparing the early design map and actual release a little easier. The early design has a color for each zone, with the dividing mountains in a brown, swimmable water in a light blue and a few connecting ways for the zones in yellow. The names of the zones are white, level-ranges of the zones in red and d...

Do you like reading books? Yes? That's good, because you can find a bunch of them in Dalaran. Some are good to do some Higher Learning , and others are just informativ, like the  Thinking with Portals - A Memorandum on Proper Portal Usage . Of course a mage centric book, as most things in the city in some way relate to magic. It literally keeps the city afloat. This book has eleven pages you can read in the game, each detailing an important aspect of proper portal usage. The page that I found most interesting, when reading, was page 10 though.  Here we learn about the liquid filter, which keeps the fluids on the correct site of the portal. And apparently, you can, but shouldn't, remove it. As a cautionary tale, it mentions the Moderately Severe Claims Disaster Case 34-zz: "The Great Lakeshire Drought & The Great Ironforge Flood of 24 A.D." Sounds to me like, some mage emptied the entire Lake Everstill in the Redridge Mountains into the Ironforge. Must've been ...

I almost never look up in game. I have been a bunch of times in the Black Temple. I have been enough times in the Black Temple to get myself a pair of Warglaives of Azzinoth . But I never noticed, that you can actually see Azeroth in the sky. Every part of the raid, that takes place outside, you can just look up, and there the orb is. But why can we see it? Outlands and Azeroth isn't supposed to be so close to each other. If that were the case, we should be able to see it from anywhere in the Outlands? Well we got the lore explanation in a twitter thread, that started with the question, if Draenor and Azeroth are in the same solar system. The answer is no, they aren't. The answer to our question then still remains, but was answered a few tweets below. This wasn't answered by Blizzard directly, but the answer has been certified with a like from Ex-Lead Narrative Designer Dave Kosak. @useless740 @DaveK...

When you first come to Draenor, Garrosh's Army is waiting for you. You can see hundreds of them all looking at you in the distance, as well as being attacked by a few close by. And those are the only real threat there is, because the Army in the distance is only made out of cardboard? Either this is a trick by Garrosh himself, like the Dummy Tanks during the World War. With inflatable and cardboard tanks, both sides tried to trick each other, into thinking that there were greater numbers of artillery around, than there really was. Or its just Blizzard saving resources with Billboarding. "In three-dimensional scenes, the term billboarding is applied to a technique in which objects are sometimes represented by two-dimensional images applied to a single polygon [...] This technique was commonly used in early 1990s video games when consoles did not have the hardware power to render fully 3D objects." -  Wikipedia Whatever the reason, they aren't real and can't hurt yo...