WoW's Lead Cinematic Designer Explains Wrathgate _ Asmongold Reacts

 That's something that was really interesting in the early days of World of Warcraft, that a lot of the voices were done by staff, as Bolvar, as he was walking past the battlefield, heard various Alliance soldiers, one of whom was me, oh [ __ ] i me didn't know that, but yeah, I mean, I knew medicine accounts for a lot of it. Hello, I'm Taryn Gregory, Lead Cinematic Narrative Designer for World of Warcraft. Today we are going to talk about wrath of the lich king more specifically in game cinematics and how they became warcraft 3 actually ended on a cliffhanger arthas blamed frostmourne claiming his soul and here is the tower of icecrown citadel dude, whenever they spawned like wrath i thought thats what icc ice crown would do looks like i thought i never liked ice crown in wrath because i expected it to look like this man towers over the frozen wastes. The story continues in World of Warcraft. Yes, Blizzard has always had a legacy of just great cinematics, the video team had a blast putting these gameplay trailer moments together, including the black temple zulaman, the sunwell, and even side projects like gnomeregan news, i love news, so good, that they should add more world of warcraft leadership team See these have greater potential so we looked at in-game cinematics for the first time. Yes, they came to us with a script and it was obvious on the pages that this was a pivotal moment, this was the first time the Lich King would confront the players in the flesh. I will show you the true meaning of fear. Well it's also like it shows how strong the Lich King was because it's like how strong this guy really is who is this Lich King dude and then [ __ ] you know Sarfang goes up against them, literally competes against them [ __ ] one shoots at them and it wasn't even a big deal and people like oh [ __ ] okay alright so we started drawing storyboards with our storyboard artist pen on paper and painted created over 400 line drawings and it only revealed the sheer scope of the project's complexity, leaving a handful of video artists involved

It was an exciting and almost terrifying opportunity to make a movie with the in-game engine, but the engine really wasn't designed for it. There have never been cinematic expressions in World of Warcraft, except for these gameplay trailers, which we were. So we have to innovate, we have to try new things, and we ended up doing a whole lot with the engine that we never planned for would have kept possible. The single most important part of any filmmaker's tool kit is the camera, and we really didn't have camera technology, but a connection was created that was actually called commentator esports, in the early days, but they needed the skill, uh, a really good one Having a camera to follow the action and so connecting to the Game Engine commentator gave us the opportunity to write a wow add-on called Camera Guy, just like your damage meter is just like your UI. Wow. This tool allowed us to do things that we'd never done before in the engine End-to-end and it could buffer and smooth out the actions and then we could play that path back again, allowing us to capture a background, a foreground, and a middle ground that they layer together. This allows us to improve visual fidelity and really get depth into our scenes, and it's still producing some pretty good results 14 years later. Cameraman basics and our add-ons are still used by our video department to capture in-game footage makes sense so the Wrathgate ended up being the confrontation of three armies in each battle What you see on screen, were NPCs that we created specifically to fight each other, but if we actually needed them to move from point a to point b, we didn't yet have the tech to do it 40 quality assurance testers who joined us in the voice chat and we would put the raid together and they would actually take their places one two three and they would happily run from here to there sometimes we would have a custom model s and when

We would oh my god this is [ __ ] amazing wow alright guys start hitting each other ok we roll who are these custom models they really just loaded them on the computer who was our camera, some of the amazing testers that worked Our actors didn't see what we saw through the camera lens when loading into the game. They saw little squares of blue and white checkered patterns they kept asking the voice but are you sure it looks good, does it look right? Your side yeah yeah I know it looks amazing I wonder if they toured man like bro they actually taped the Wrathgate movie on Vince [ __ ] just like a random uh machinima -Video wow yes team speaks yes and it looked good my favorite shot was when the horde army actually descended from their fortress and rode up the steps of the anger gate on the backs of their wolves and if you look at this shot you'll see that it's actually a whole line of players lined up, they're all running, they're all hitting the bull's-eye and it's all played out in real-time, just like a role-playing session, since each role player would invent his scene and play a high adventure. This is an amazing part of the charm of the Wrathgate cinematic part is that it's really in the game and keeping it in that art style I think has value in creating a more cohesive experience for the player, which isn't to say we didn't do any cosmetic work on the characters, but we actually beefed up the featured characters from Wrathgate quite a few times before character models were reworked in Warlords of Draenor, the human male face had eyes with six sides to the pupils and not even teeth, and we had to do a lot of work in that area to make it deform in a satisfying way, but we made it so that it didn't stray from exactly what you thought the characters looked like, no, no, that actually didn't that's a really good point yeah i thought it was like oh it's bolvar yeah it's bulvar von cour se

Holy [ __ ] The thing about the Wrathgate is that probably over 90% of the shots were made with animations that were already in the game. The hill just talks, it just does the slash-arc animation, but at about three percent speed you just slam the speed control all the way down and he actually does it off camera. The smarter it is that this was really just an emote, I never knew that holy [ __ ] one shot where Bolvar runs into the frame and the undead with him an uppercut, if you could actually pull this shot apart you could see that it was a hard swap from one animation to another that was just being obscured by that foreground object, we used a lot of tricks to make sure we got the animations in the used the game effectively. My team started to really innovate with vehicle tech. Players had to somehow attach to another object and drive around. At the end of the big scene with the dragons laying down the red dragon fire we needed dragon breath instead of doing it with traditional compound methods and in the end we built a vehicle out of the fire on the ground the pillar of fire would sit in the fire seat and then the dragon would burn on the pillar and the whole line wasn't we'd just drive around the battlefield and it looked like a dragon firing at it when it was really just this vehicle driving around it was really smart holy [ __ ] One of the things that made the Wrathgate so memorable was that it wasn't just the movie, and one of the coolest things that supported the Ralph Gate was the new phasing technology. When the base technology came online, the events happened of the movie actually in game and seeing how dynamic the world had become before and after the game was a big [ __ ] deal and phasing is the technology that e s allows

That this happened as the Wrathgate began to come together actually inspired the content and quest design team to consider what needed to happen in the sequel that we now needed to follow the events of the Wrathgate directly in the quest follow-up and that's how the fight came to be the lower town, yes, when things come online and other designers see what other people are working on, they can reflect and push the story forward. Soon we are marching on our fallen city and reclaiming it and the death of the living Guy just killed everyone when he went live in this beta program and we started to get the feedback and it was some of the most positive feedback we've had more immersive, as if the story was coming to life, and it had a profound effect that continued throughout World of Warcraft through all subsequent updates. The in-game cinematics became an integral part of all the important moments in the game I will never forget working on the Wrathgate, the amazing crew that worked with me on it and oh my god working on the Wrathgate, the wonderful holy [ __ ] crew look at that wow like the old tvs a lava lamp holy [ __ ] holy [ __ ] yes there is box tv yes i worked on it with me and how much it meant as a gamer, as a fan, as someone who just loves Warcraft, and even 14 years later and dozens of in-game cinematics that have resulted in hindsight, there's nowhere else I'd rather be, there's nothing to which i would rather work thanks for taking this journey that [ __ ] as i remember whenever that happened i was like a north end take care yeah true yeah that was it was like Dude, that's really, that was really [ __ ] good man, hey eng [ __ ] I said girl bro yeah that was such a good [ __ ] video It used to be a good game but now you know hey I mean we're bringing it back But that's how it's really good. This is a great [ __ ] video holy man [ __ ] I love it

Soon whenever I actually do it, um, I don't have to see it today. Reverses the Garrosh shadow and film. Well, the Guerra shadow and the cinematic were really, really good. Use endgame models and try to make them look a little better than actually trying to make the cinematics look a little better now and it's like looking at the garage models and all that just not that amazing that you know you see it the way other animators have done it and whatnot and it could just look way better, the lip syncing was so bad I don't think it's that big a deal cinematics are like that though the wrathgate cinematic was very but very i don't really know what you were it was very rudimentary right it didn't look good or anything or whatever it was just [ __ ] badass like some of the cutscenes, but like me if you watch the illidan cutscene like this with sargeras honestly that cutscene was [ __ ] great ig this was a legitimate [ __ ] badass movie that was in the game there are only a few that aren't necessarily as good as Daenerys' was really [ __ ] good, I liked it that much. I'd say most of them looked pretty decent. I think the garrosh that likes it heart and soul was like [ __ ] amazing but the graphics themselves just weren't super great you know the rejection of the gift yeah think of that holy [ __ ] Man some guy worked on The Garage Movie Yeah I think that makes sense why it won't be as detailed. Let's see what some of the others are that they even did. I'm trying to remember. Let's see one day I'll like Janet or Mama a lot too. Yes, I think the Jana quest line. In my opinion I would say that objectively speaking the Jaina quest line in the Kult Tiras quest line and BFA was the stage like it was actually like some kind of quest line in the cinematics was great the flow was great it was really really really good like bfa has many systems like bfa was a good expansion strangled by bad systems when it was

Azerite the artifact azerite power er the essences or corruptions it just got choked to death or islands got choked to death by bad systems and I hope that's what dragon flight is really trying to avoid. CG cinematics were super expensive otherwise I do them why not all on cg um I get that the actual how fully rendered CGI cinematics are ridiculously hard to do as in insanely [ __ ] hard how every single frame is rendered will they be like terabytes of about a size like yeah a million dollars a minute yeah so they did four for bfa yeah bfa had a lot of these cinematics hopefully they had more of these uh why nobody cares her, I think people care about it like you can always go back, like the cinematics with every wow I think it's super iconic, even like the shadow and cinematics like the, um, I'd say the Misa Pandaria is so iconic because it was so weird, but like when you go back and watch the war in Lords of Draenor cinematic, was it a waste of money to make it that good, no no, it wasn't that much money they put into it spent h But it was worth it, with more like the Lich King, now I can't know the most about Blizzard cinematics, yeah exactly which one was your favorite, if you want me to be completely honest I think the wad is my favorite , like the wrath it's my favorite nostalgic but i think objectively and like what it meant in the story and everything i think the wad was 100 the coolest man i remember as soon as i saw it , as soon as my mom and I saw it, whenever it came out, we immediately went back and watched it again. Here let's see that my Muffs account has been suspended until the 29th. I have to tell you every day [ __ ] day I have people who come and they try to tell me they got suspended or they got in trouble or something because they are an evil bully. Please guys stop breaking the rules it's just crazy how is that hard t o stop breaking the [ __ ] rules what are you all doing, talked about it in the past yeah stop making a name for yourself to do, I called everyone in my raid a cock-sucking idiot

and i got suspended man this new social contract sjw [ __ ] really [ __ ] great really grinds my gears here. Let me explain something to you as someone who has been reported to have probably been suspended 10 times from World of Warcraft. I got suspended a whole bunch of things you could have done. I got suspended for some bad stuff and I got suspended for some not so bad stuff. In 2017 or 16 I got suspended for starting a group called Throne of Thunder Big Dick Just putting Big Dick in the name got me banned and my viewers reported me which I think I would have done the same don't bother do, and um yeah, that's this shit, that's always been against the rules, there's always just a few people out there that just can't [ __ ] get through their heads that you can't just break the rules , and the thing is with the social contract let me put your mind at ease someone who reads the blizzard terms of service very, very carefully so i know what i can and can't do why more people are being suspended now is because of that that the social contract put the idea of ​​punishment for certain things in the minds of people who break the rules for it and then they do it, you see how that happens. Yes people know reporting is exactly effective now but I'm a sovereign citizen and well I don't raid I travel I know I'm safe and uh social contract highlight social engineering experiment, there's nothing like social engineering, it's just that they don't want to deal with the likes of these, like weird [ __ ] kids who can't control their emotions and get angry and have verbal diarrhea everywhere [ __ ] keyboard whenever someone says something that upsets them, that's the reality, like nobody wants to deal with it, nobody wants to deal with it emotionally

unstable 31 year old male who starts berating and berating everyone [ __ ] because his alterac valley is decreasing no almost everyone else doesn't want to deal with it [ __ ] just keep it to yourself [ __ ] oh wait no , I'm getting banned, you see what I'm saying is simple, stop it's a [ __ ]. Uh words uh so bad I can't ban or block them but if words are so easy to avoid why is this person using them why is it your responsibility now to isolate yourself from this toxic person why is it now a person's emotional er like [ __ ], their inability to control their emotions and their impulses now requires 39 other people to act around you see what I'm saying why does everyone else have to adjust to your emotional outburst ? Get [ __ ] out of here, safe space. Yes we need to provide you with a safe space to have your emotional outburst because the video game isn't spinning out of the way you want why not harden the [ __ ] get up and stop crying. I don't want to deal with emotionally unstable male kids who get angry and jump off every game I play. I don't want to deal with crying babies who can't control themselves every time. It's tiring. Yes, these people should play them on pg. Yeah right I've seen you absolutely want it but I'm not doing it in game because it's against the rules, you see what I'm saying so basically like I know I'm for ninja looting being suspended i wouldn't be doing ninja looting right now if i knew i was going to get in trouble for quitting but i'm not going to get in trouble so why would i quit see what i'm saying it's common sense isn't that why you right click ignore and there are mute features how don't you find that selfish

someone thinks they are emotionally out of their emotional outburst like the solution to their emotional outburst is for 39 other people to mute them instead of just sitting the game a person like everyone else protecting you and a safe space around You gotta bid around so you can vent so you can vent it's utterly unfair it's ridiculous like go go somewhere else go go go to chipotle and do that you'll be out be, go to Barnes Noble, and do that, you'll be out, go to Home Depot and do that, you'll be out, you'll be out somewhere else, the whole thing, it's the claim, yes, it's the claim, they think they have the right have to have this [ __ ] burst and everyone else has a right to hear it Get the [ __ ] out of here what games are going to work like that is impossible monitor 24 7. it is but it isn't impossible for people to report it when it gets really [ __ ] annoying. I think that's the whole point of what I'm getting at here and uh yeah t that's a they think they are. Yes, they think their frustration about something is so important that it should outweigh everyone else. They're just trying to enjoy the game. It's crazy. You're forced, yeah, because you can't really mute someone personally, um, to speak up in real-life situations. Well they can mute you, they kick you out of the store so they absolutely can, yeah they kick you out of the [ __ ] store, that's it Just yeah, a bunch of autistic kids, I just hope that like all these kids who can't control themselves, I really hope that more people start realizing that it's actually them who are being reported and getting in trouble all the time, they're the ones who need the safe spaces, they're the ones who can't just act normal and be normal, they are the ones who need everyone else to conform to their worldview