This year is the 20th anniversary of World of WarcraftAs well as the arrival of the War within expansion. First revealed last fall, the new release will add a host of features to the game, from expansive new zones for players to explore to a myriad of life improvements. It is the first of three expansions to come out as part of the World Soul SagaA trilogy planned for the Wow Franchise.
There are many innovative ways that developers have added more depth to the long-running game. A new race, the Earthen, is introduced, Delves now allow fans to engage in shorter-form gameplay, Warbands provide the option for account-wide progression between characters, Hero Talents offer more ways than ever to progress and improve, and Many more exciting features have arrived with The war within. If the first expansion is any indication of what’s to follow, fans also have a lot to look forward to in the future of the franchise.
Related
Screen Rant Interviewed World of Warcraft Associate Design Director Maria Hamilton and lead software engineer May Flores-Garcia at Gamescom to discuss the process behind designing new areas, how Earthan fits into the existing lineup of races, and the biggest ways fans can expect the game to change with The war within.
Create a new WOW: Trilogy
Begin an epic three-part saga with The War Within
Screen Rating: When you have such a big new area, a big undertaking with something like this expansion, how do you even begin to know where you want the new area to go artistically and in terms of the experiences it offers players?
Maria Hamilton: When we’re planning a new expansion, we think a lot about what our story is and where we want to take the players. In the case of the war within, This is the first chapter of an epic saga trilogyThat’s how we knew that we would go down first. It was very important. This turns out to be a thread from a time ago where a sword was thrown into the planet, and we wanted to remove ourselves there.
When we thought about it, we thought, “Well, we better develop the technology that we need to make it so that we can make underground areas feel good and feel right.” We’ve contacted May’s engineering team for help with this, and I’m sure she’ll have some things to say about it, but we’re aware that underground spaces can make people feel claustrophobic.
We wanted to explore ways to make sure the descent was fantastic – it didn’t feel like underground. It didn’t feel tight and constrained. We also heard feedback from players about an underground area we tried in Dragonflight called Zaralek CavernAnd wanted to consider all the things that they have to tell us about that experience. That’s where we started.
May Flores-Garcia: As Maria said, once the design knows what they want, the direction they want to go, we start thinking about what it is that we need on the technical side to really get the feeling that they are looking for. In this case, for the underground zones, there were a couple of new techniques that we had to look at and implement. One that we call Airlock, which is actually something that allows us to have this kind of seamless transition between zones without a loading screen.
It’s one of the things that we wanted, when you go from the outside to the underground, that it looks like you just walk there, no loading screen – Very, very seamless. It really helped with the feeling of, “This is a real world that is cohesive together.” Another one, we have this crystal in the middle that actually brings the light into the zone. That’s another aspect where we have to be like, “Okay, do we have the tech to do this?” We do, but not for this kind of setup, so that engineering is looking at what you need to create for the expansion.
Likewise, in this way, it is obviously also the brand new race of the earth. When you introduce a new race into this existing group of races that are in the world, how do you manage to make them feel unique and special with the new things they let players do, but also feel like they’re cohesive and not Too overpowered or too different from everything that exists?
Maria Hamilton: There are so many different groups involved in making a new race, from the artists who are conceiving the look and getting the right balance and all possible customizations, so players can feel unique and different, to the animators who give. Us cool moves that fit that kind of new race. In the case of the Earthen, they are hard, blocky, stone and mineral-encrusted, gem-encrusted creatures, thus making the animations look and feel right.
Part of the effort, storytelling, is to set up some backstory and help us understand their place in the world. In this case, it was all about being created by the Titans, given specific edicts, specific things they were to do in the world, and then left to their own devices for far too long. The Titans did not come back, and Now they are starting to question whether they should really be doing these things. They have lost a lot of expertise and memory of what they used to do long ago. It’s just building the culture from scratch and thinking about: what makes this an appealing and interesting race of people? How do they fit with our story?
The Titans are key to the history of AzerothSo we go into a lot of depth, a lot of detail. Then, when the art teams go out there, they start thinking about: what are the appropriate props, and what are the appropriate types of objects that they would use in their everyday lives? For example, the earthlings are stone, they like warmth, that’s appealing to them, they bathe in hot springs. You will see them sitting in bubbling hot springs, it is a kind of healing for them, and entertaining, the beds they rest on look to us like barbecues.
I don’t think we’ve done anything like this before in terms of planning something that would take such a long time. Personally, I’m very, very excited to see how it goes and see how people react. – May Flores-Garcia
Another exciting concept to this is Delves, which is a fun way for players who are busier to still be able to get bursts of playing. World of Warcraft. Can you talk a little bit about where the idea came from and where you hope to see it when it’s available to players?
May Flores-Garcia: I think for us, one of the things that We’re trying to focus on a site is to make the game accessible to any player, to give something to do for everyone. For a long time, I think we’ve focused a lot on a player who really likes raiding, people who really like PvP, but not really a whole ton on people who, as you say, may not have a lot of time, may just Have 15 minutes to do something particularly quick, and maybe solo players too. For us, I think Delves was a way to give something that players who like to be more solo players, a little more casual, could do on their own or a group of people in their time.
Maria Hamilton: Yes, I would say so too We keep an eye on what players are doing and what players are enjoyingAnd we have pretty good data on who is engaged and who is less engaged, and there was a real opportunity here recognizing that a lot of people just don’t have that much time. That’s part of what made us think, “Oh, we should do something for the people.”
When you first had the idea of ​​wanting to make some sort of shorter form experience, did it always look like Delves do now, or did it go through a lot of iterations in that regard?
Maria Hamilton: I mean, we always iterate. Design is all about iteration, where we’ll try something and change it, try something, and we’ll change it, until we get it feeling where we really want it. After we get some feedback on it, we may change it again. This is normal. What we wanted from Delves, the goals for Delves were really, again, that shorter experience, that experience where someone could play solo, or they could play with their friends; If they chose to go solo, that’s fine, they could do that.
We want it to be progressive, so you can unlock things that make it easier for you to do it as your pace gets better, you can make it harder, you can choose a difficulty level and add more challenge. It was your ability to control it yourself. Then, of course, on the rewards front, we talked a lot about: There are different kinds of motivations for players. Many players are motivated by rewards, but the types of rewards that motivate them are different.
For some people, it’s about getting cool looks that let their character stand out. For others, it’s all about power, it has to be a power object, so a lot of adjustment was there too. As May mentioned, because we have the big vault, people who are interested in power have the opportunity to choose that power that way. We could really rely on rewards in the delves themselves as less of a power sort of thing.
Big improvements are coming to WoW with The War Within
Warbands, UI improvements, and more
Warbands is also a game changer, and it’s another way to mix that quality of life improvement with stuff that will actually contribute to gameplay at the same time. Are Warbands something you guys have known you wanted to do for a while in the game?
May Flores-Garcia: I do not know for a while, but one of the things is We’ve been listening a lot to player feedbackAnd one of the things we really want to make sure is that we respect a player’s time. I think Warbands makes sense for us to do right now. I think it was always in our minds as well. We need to do something for those who really, really like playing with multiple characters. It was an exciting picture to work on.
Maria Hamilton: Yes, I would say as we developed content, and we saw that players want to pick up and continue with the next character and the next character, and don’t necessarily want to replay the same things or raise the faction on both characters . They wanted to do it only on one, or have both the factions combine in one thing. We started talking about warbands, we realized, “God, that would not only be a great quality of life, but It helps keep the content fresh.”
In terms of, as you mentioned, it’s the first triad of a really cool trilogy that you put together with this one first. Do you feel a unique pressure when it comes to laying the groundwork for the story you’re looking to tell over the next several years?
Maria Hamilton: I mean, I don’t know that I would call it stress. There’s a certain kind of excitement about getting people interested in some of the things that we keep mysterious, and it’s about providing enough information that people start to guess or start to try to predict what’s going to happen, because it’s A happy community, a community that’s trying to figure things out. When we sat down to talk about the World Soul saga, we had our high level design, our high level beats. We know where we want the story to go, we know what threads we want to draw forward from the past. We know where we want to create some new characters and bring in some old characters.
We had this high level plan, and we needed to pace everything appropriately, but also make sure that each expansion was in and of itself a complete story and interesting. Trying to figure out how this would break down was challenging. I don’t think we’ve done anything like this before in terms of planning something that would take such a long time. Personally, I’m very, very excited to see how it goes and see how people react. We had really good feedback and really good reactions in our beta to this.
People have already speculated and got upset. I think we have a wonderful antagonist in Xal’atath, whose motives are pretty unknown to players, but she’s intriguing. Some of them feel like they have a connection to her because they played a Shadow Priest in Legion, and so they deal with her when she’s in a knife, so it leads to an interesting dynamic between community members – Some who feel she is a friend and some who feel she is not. I would say there is excitement to participate in something that is this big, but also to have the time to do it, really freely.
Obviously, this expansion brings a lot of big changes and improvements and additions to the game, but I’m curious from both of your perspectives if there are any smaller-scale changes that maybe weren’t as hyped to players in promotional materials for the expansion , but that you’re personally like, “I like that little thing that we put in there. I’m really excited for that. I think players will appreciate that”?
May Flores-Garcia: I’d like to say skyriding, but I feel like that’s one of the things that we’ve really talked about, mostly because it’s just great that we can extend the tech now. Because player feedback – people loved Dragon Riding, so Now we want to bring it up in another scale.
But something that’s a little bit minor that I don’t think we’ve ever talked too much about is when it comes to the story, one of the things that my team actually works a lot with is the tool that allows us to create what we call RTCs, Which is real-time cinematic. As Maria’s team really wants to emphasize certain points in the story, sometimes we need to add more to this tool. Recently we started to add more than we can deal with cameras. One of the last cinematics with Malfurian, some people may remember it, actually had that moment where the camera rotates around them, which I think was a really, really good thing. It’s the kind of small improvements we’re making in the tech overall, too.
Maria Hamilton: One of the comments that we’ve heard quite a lot and are really eager to address is that Some players feel terribly intimidated playing with othersEspecially dungeons and raids and things like that. But the players could be deeply engaged in the story and really interested in the story, and our dungeons tell stories too, they are relevant, and so they felt left. The ability to have the follower dungeons that allow players to play solo with followers and get the story of ​​the dungeon and understand it made it possible for us to actually have one of those dungeons in the main campaign.
Because Now I didn’t have to worry that there would be players who felt they couldn’t do the story because they didn’t want to do a dungeon with other people – This was huge for me, I was very excited about it. Similarly, we have players who do not like to or are uncomfortable riding or feel frustrated by riding, and they may wait for many weeks before they can somehow get into a small raid and see the conclusion of the story. We were able to build a story mode, so the story mode will allow the players to go solo again and get the conclusion of the story, which is really important for storytelling.
I’m really happy about it, and I don’t know that it’s been talked about, but for a certain group of players I think it’s a great deal. They’re going to get a chance to experience some of​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​great​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​… We have too Many UI improvements. I know we talked about it in general, but our UI and UX team worked super hard to find ways to standardize, to make it more clear.
We have some amazing new filtering capabilities on our site, so depending on what kind of content you enjoy, you can turn filters on and off. The key is not to forget you have it, because then you’ll be like, “There’s nothing to do.” You have to remember, “Oh yeah, I put that filter to say, ‘Just show me this.'” [Laughs] But there are just some great useful tools for you to find what you would like to do, so I think this is another good one.