The Forest of Elwynn in WoW with full voiceover and better story? An ambitious fan project is almost finished.
Although the old areas of World of Warcraft were brought up to date with the “Cataclysm” expansion, this update is now over 6 years old. Compared to newer zones like Suramar, the starting zones look quite outdated.
The team behind the YouTube channel BellularGaming has taken on quite a large project: a complete redesign of the old zones with interconnected stories, full voice acting of NPCs and dialogues that start in the “open field”.
What initially sounds like an unattainable pipe dream has actually made significant progress. With a total of 4 developers and 8 voice actors, the team has already addressed the story surrounding the Forest of Elwynn and is now in the final testing phase.
The most interesting thing is that this project is not about content for an illegal private server, but at its core, it is a complex interface addon.
The whole thing seems quite well thought out, and the examples given fit much more strongly into a larger story than the original quests from Blizzard could. While as a human, you slaughter kobolds in the Jasperlode mine, a small dialogue from Defias thugs runs in the background. This dialogue becomes important afterwards and is picked up in the subsequent quests.
How does it work?
Even though BellularGaming doesn’t go into the exact details, the video reveals a lot about how the addon proceeds. The original quest texts are not displayed but are replaced by the texts from their team. Particularly long texts are read aloud during the journey to the destination, so players do not have to wait long at the NPC – similar to Suramar, where Thalyssra keeps chiming in.
The project is set to be released episodically on a 6-week rhythm. It starts with Elwynn, followed by Westfall and the Redridge Mountains. Afterwards, the team hopes that enough donations come in through Patreon to also revamp more zones with multiple voice actors. Those who want to support the project can do so on the Patreon page of the “Warcraft Tales” team.
The goal was to “reach the quality of Blizzard’s newer zones and to unify the often loose story arcs into a larger narrative”. Whether they will succeed can soon be tried by players.
Episode 1: The Forest of Elwynn will be released on April 6, 2017, in English.
The title image is from Konstantin Turovec (Link to DeviantArt account).
Meanwhile, WoW is significantly increasing its prices for additional character services.
