Senior Quest Designer from WoW Team Answers Player Questions About “Ascension of the Red Dawn”
The quest chain “Ascension of the Red Dawn” became available for testing on the PTR with the release of patch 11.1.7, and players have had several questions and critiques about the story. Kit Riley, the senior quest designer from the WoW team, who contributed to the creation of this storyline, took to X/Twitter to answer some of the community’s inquiries.
Storyline
The plot reveals that the Red Dawn faction consists of individual groups from the Scarlet Crusade, the Brotherhood of Justice, and the Syndicate, rather than the organizations as a whole. These factions continue to exist and still follow their respective leaders. The storyline in patch 11.1.7 takes a slight departure from the main “The War Within” arc. The developers decided to refocus on the “humans and orcs” theme, returning to the roots of the classic Warcraft games. However, the storyline gives more attention to humans, as that is the main focus of this narrative. In this plot, the developers aimed to show that each faction has both heroes and villains.
The central character of this story is Feryn, who is supported by Geyya’ra and Danath. The developers chose not to include superstars like Thrall and Jaina to avoid overshadowing Feryn, although they do play important roles in the “Homeland” story. When characters from certain Alliance races, particularly humans, worgen, and kul tirans, first arrive in Stromgarde, there are unique dialogues tailored to these races.
Technical Details
The events of the quest chain take place in a specially designed version of Arathi Highlands and will not affect the main version of the zone, where everything will remain the same, including the frontlines, local quests, rare enemies, and so on. Most of the location used is similar to what was seen in Battle for Azeroth. For the most part, the quests for both Alliance and Horde players differ only in terms of additional dialogues, while the objectives of the tasks are the same for both factions. There are only a few unique quests for each faction. Currently, technology does not allow developers to create quests with different objectives for different factions; they can only create completely separate quests.
The developers are not opposed to creating distinct storylines for the Alliance and Horde, but getting approval from the leadership team is challenging. Primarily, this is because creating two separate storylines requires twice as many resources as creating one, and only half of the player base will experience each storyline. This often results in the story for each faction being cut down to half its intended length.
The developers do not plan to make Stromgarde a full-fledged city or capital, as this would require an immense amount of time. The team typically only has the capacity to create one full capital per expansion. They aim to choose quest locations and storylines that are tied to the current update. For example, with Midnight, players will return to Quel’Thalas, so the storyline will focus heavily on the development of elven themes. Obviously, since Sethrak and Vulpera are not yet involved in the main story, their cultures will not receive much attention for the time being.
Initially, the developers planned to reward players with heraldic capes featuring old models for completing the storyline. However, they decided that these capes were “too outdated” and replaced them with updated versions.
