Public Alpha testing for The War Within, the tenth World of Warcraft expansion, is about to begin. Ahead of this important development milestone, Wccftech joined a roundtable Q&A session featuring Blizzard’s Michael Bybee (Production Director on all World of Warcraft), Sean McCann (Senior Content Designer), and several colleagues from the press for an hour-long conversation.
You can read the entire transcript below. It’s a big deep dive into practically every aspect of The War Within, from the Hero Talents to Delves, Warbands, the new zones, dungeons, and raids, as well as some tidbits about the studio’s approach for the whole Worldsoul Saga announced at BlizzCon 2023. By the way, we’ve also embedded the new WoWCast in case you really want to overload your sense with The War Within information.
Mike Minotti (GamesBeat): How is the team able to handle the scope of everything that it’s undertaking at the moment? Dragonflight had a lot of content and The War Within is shaping up. You have that long-term plan with the other expansions and you’re even surprising us with things like Mists of Pandaria Remix. It seems like a lot to take on. And yet, people seem generally pretty happy with the quality of the content as well. Was there some kind of organizational shift to make this happen, or has something just clicked into place?
Michael Bybee: I think the best way to answer that question is really a couple of things. One of them is that the team these days is doing a lot more in terms of organization and planning around the kind of work we’re doing. It’s something I’m obviously very passionate about as the production leader on the team, but it’s something I’m really proud to see with the team.
Everybody is engaged in making sure that we’re sustaining good team health. We do a lot of planning to make sure that the work that we do lines up with that. Then in addition to that, yeah, there have been some organizational changes over the years that have meant that we have a little bit of a larger team that’s able to focus on all these initiatives. One of the things I really love about that is we’re able to do things like The War Within, which I think is one of the most exciting expansions we’ve ever worked on, and do that alongside things like the Remix Mists of Pandaria content and the Plunderstorm, which is a totally separate team we call the live team that works on that kind of content. It’s really exciting because it just brings way more content for players, including myself. I’m constantly playing, and I love that there’s so much to do.
Stephanie Watel (Twinfinite): I am very, very intrigued by the addition of the Delves in this upcoming expansion. One question I had about that in particular was on Delves. I did the initial Delve that was part of the main campaign. It’s looking like a new fun and exciting gameplay dynamic to help bring further expansion to campaign gameplay and so on and so forth and giving players another avenue for, tackling unique combat and getting rewards and all that. As far as Delves are concerned, are those going to be exclusive to The War Within for now, or potentially with good feedback from players and everything? Do you anticipate adding that to further expansions, at least through the trilogy?
Sean McCann: I’m in charge of Delves, so I’ll take that. I think right now we’re mainly planning it for The War Within. The plan is that it’s an evergreen future, so we’re going to keep growing it. What you’re seeing here will be what we build upon for the next expansion.
What we do with it in future expansions is still to be decided. I think a lot of it will grow with the player base, right? As players play it, we’re going to see, okay, where do we go next with Delves? It’s probably going to be an ongoing conversation about where the best place to take it is after The War Within.
Richard Abrahamson (But Why Tho?): I was able to finish the story for the Isle of Dorn in my brief playing of this Alpha. That whole story told in this first zone felt briefer than what we might be used to with that first zone experience in past expansions. Were there any changes to the writing team and story teams to make the Isle of Dorn and this initial experience feel more like an introduction rather than one of the first of four self-contained zones that kind of add to a grander story?
Michael Bybee: First of all, when you think about the campaign and the Isle of Dorn being the beginning of the campaign, when we sit down and plan these out, we don’t do it in terms of like, hey, this first zone needs to be exactly this long, and then the next zone needs to be exactly this long, etc.
It’s more about what is the story we’re trying to tell. What you’re seeing in this first zone is the introductory experience to the entirety of the expansion. A lot of what’s going on with this expansion is underneath the surface of the Isle of Dorn. You’re absolutely right in that there’s a lot more to tell you haven’t been seeing, but as players delve into the following zones, there will be a lot more story. It’s also really important to emphasize that the addition of those cinematics, the addition of having the max level full campaign at the end of it, we all feel pretty strongly are going to feel like a very compelling story.
We’re pretty excited about it. As you mentioned, there’s a whole expansion introductory experience that we have intentionally not shared at this time because we’re just trying to make sure that that piece of the story is something that all players get a chance to experience together when the expansion unlocks.
You did ask a question about changes to the story team and whether or not that was the direct result of this. I would just emphasize again that the story that you’re seeing here is the result of what the team wanted to tell and the story that the team felt was the most compelling for this zone. We don’t really talk specifically about when people leave the team or if that was related to changes, et cetera.
WCCFTECH – Speaking of Delves, what kind of loot quality can people expect compared to dungeons? Did you evaluate potentially adding Mythic difficulty in the future to Delves?
Sean McCann: Kind of combining the two together, the plan with Delves is we’re going to have about 11 tiers of difficulty. We were thinking 10, and then someone said, let’s take it to 11 and we said, okay, cool. It’s 11. We’re trying to figure out, okay, how hard do we want the difficulty to be? And then match that with what rewards should be there. You know, it’s kind of a fine line that we’re going to be writing there because we don’t want delves to be so lucrative that you don’t want to run Mythics anymore, but the rewards also need to be good enough that you still want to run them, right?
It’s going to be a thing that we’re going to be tweaking a lot probably through Alpha and Beta on what feels good, so I don’t want to give an exact number now. As a player who can’t do dungeons a ton, I’m excited about the loot that we’re going to get and that it’s better than the outdoor world, but I don’t want to commit to a hard number right now, mainly because that’s probably going to change the minute we hit Alpha and we tweak some things, we get some feedback on stuff. Hopefully that gets you a bit of an answer. It’s going to be good loot. We just have to make sure it doesn’t overrun Mythic and that you don’t run Mythic anymore because of Delves.
Mike Minotti (GamesBeat): Beyond the destruction of Dalaran, there’s some other text kind of early on in the story that seems to imply the death of Khadgar. These are some pretty big moments. In the past, like with the destruction of Darnassus, there was maybe a bit of player dissatisfaction with having some of that big stuff happen. Is there any sort of fear about making these big changes to the world of Warcraft?
Sean McCann: So, I’m not too sure what you’re talking about with the destruction of Dalaran. I mean, we can’t really talk about that too much because that hasn’t really been revealed in the zone. I mean, there’s some weird stuff there, but we don’t necessarily know what that is. Regarding your overall comparison to Teldrassil, I think one of the things that I really like about WoW is the willingness to say, okay, what’s good for the story, like what’s going to move the story forward?
We have the resources to say, let’s do something big. It’s going to be something dramatic that’s going to move the world forward. That’s all I can really say to that.
Richard Abrahamson: Going back to Delves and its initial pitch during BlizzCon, you talked about how you go into a Delve and there might be Kobolds, but then you go back a little later and it would be something different in that same area. Is there a set timeline for how often that would change?
Sean McCann: There’s a few knobs that we want to tune that is every time you run it and then a set amount of time, we’re thinking maybe every day, that is going to be based on what feels good.
We have the world quest rotation of every three days world quest change. That might be too long for this. To answer your question there, if you look at the kind of small things of like, you know, I’m assuming you played like earth crawl mines, right? And so we have kind of small things That will change each time that aren’t really groundbreaking, but some of the kind of like the composition of groups might change and so that you know the one jerk new Ruby and that’s going to fear you if you get near it might not be smart in the same place.
Something that ensures that you’re just not on autopilot and that things are changing moment to moment, as well as just easy things like the treasure’s location, what the treasure gives, and things like that. That’ll change moment to moment every time you go to run it. In terms of when it changes to be the example that we gave of, hey, you’re working with the Arathi now and stuff like that, that’s probably going to be more on every day when you get the max level.
But again, that is the thing that as we’re testing it, if we’re hearing that, hey, we want that to change more often or change, we can work with that. We can say, hey, let’s do it every two minutes.
We wouldn’t do two minutes, but at a faster pace or a slower pace, we want to make sure that you understand what’s happening in the Delve and it doesn’t feel like it’s complete chaos in there. That’s the thing we’re going to be balancing out through the Alpha and Beta of The War Within based on everyone’s feedback.
WCCFTECH – Can you talk about the design goals for Hero Talents and how you’re balancing them compared to the regular ones?
Michael Bybee: I think the big takeaway to answer that question is that we’re actually balancing them in the same way that we balance the regular ones.
We see the Hero Talent system as an extension of our existing talent system. The goal here was, rather than just add another layer of talents, we wanted to do more fantasy. We wanted to make it a little bit more interesting, and we wanted to give players real choices. The way the system is designed is such that every spec has the option of choosing two different Hero Talents setups, and then by the time you max out, you’ll be able to choose all of the talents within that tree.
But the goal is that there isn’t a right answer, that players feel like they can choose the talent setup that speaks to them and the fantasy that they most enjoy. Of course, there are going to be some folks who are min-maxing and doing a lot of modeling out to make sure that, mathematically, they can see exactly which one is best.
But our goal, like with all of our specs and all of our talents, is to try to make them as balanced as we can, and especially with the Hero Talents, to be fun and fulfilling of a fantasy. On that last point, just to explain that a little bit further, I do think the fantasy element of the Hero Talents is one of the most fun. I don’t know if anybody here got a chance to check out the new Shadow Priest Hero Talent tree, the Void Weaver.
I keep wanting to call it Voidrunner, but the thing that I thought was cool about it is that we’ve added this new Void Ghoul that basically sucks up all the enemies around it and slows them down and then gets bigger and bigger as you’re doing things, which I think is a really cool mechanic that we haven’t done before. We’ve done so much Void whatever in the game before. But to make this new, hey, you’re a Shadow Priest, you should feel like you’re really working with the Void, especially in an expansion and in the Worldsoul Saga where the Void is such a main part of the story.
In general, I think that what the team is trying to do is deliver on that class fantasy that everybody has. We’re very interested to see what people think and give us feedback. We’ve already made many changes to the Hero Talents that we’ve posted blogs about and talked about with the community.
Mike Minotti (GamesBeat): On that Hero Talent note, I remember the early days of World of Warcraft where Hero Classes was going to be one of the things that would come to the game. It was on like that first roadmap. Is this, in some ways, a fulfillment of a very old promise, having these Hero Talents with these bespoke names and fulfilling more specific class fantasies?
Michael Bybee: It’s definitely part of the goal, for sure. I think the idea of the Hero Class really butted up against a game that has just been around for as long as World of Warcraft has. We have so much history that when you take something like the Death Knight that was supposed to be a Hero Class and totally different from the other classes. Ten years later, Death Knights are still around in the same competition for dungeons and raids as everybody else, and the reality is that we have to balance all the classes against each other so that they feel fun and that players have the opportunity to play the class they think is fun and not have one class fantasy be better than the others.
With that said, everybody’s got their class fantasy that they love, and you’re right, this is exactly trying to deliver on that. If I always wanted to be a vampire in World of Warcraft, but there really wasn’t that opportunity before, now we have a Hero Talent that starts to speak to that fantasy a little bit and give players some way to express themselves in that way.
Stephanie Watel (Twinfinite): Piggybacking off of the discussion about Hero Talents and classes and whatnot. One smaller question going off of that is it’s pretty much been confirmed that while we’re getting the Earthen allied race and the expansion of Hero Talents and new trees and everything, there isn’t a completely new class for The War Within. But is there any kind of predetermined notion of that coming on maybe later on in the trilogy, possibly the inclusion of a new class, or are you guys going to focus primarily on continuing to expand Hero Talents and existing classes and making gameplay with all the existing classes even more dynamic and diverse and personalized? Is there kind of a set agenda you guys have?
Sean McCann: We’re still figuring out what we want to do in terms of systemic things for future expansions. If you look at something like the Evoker, it made sense when we made it. Each hero class kind of made sense like that. I don’t necessarily think we’d be ready to talk about anything like that for the future. Especially in terms of what we would do with Hero Talents going forward. I think it’s just going to be about seeing how well they do, if people like them a lot, and then how we grow them from there.
I know we’ve been saying that a lot with a bunch of things. Hopefully, it doesn’t feel like a cop-out answer, but you know, it is a thing of, we do want to see how well they do, how well we enjoy them, how well everybody else enjoys them, and then just go from there. I don’t want to necessarily say anything about any new classes or any new plans cause we don’t necessarily have those just yet.
Richard Abrahamson (But Why Tho?): Going to the design of Hero Classes. In the past, whenever there was a class rework, from the community that felt like they were kind of being made in a bubble. With Hero Classes and Hero Talents, how do you involve the community at the base level to create, to make sure that when they do come out, they are fun and what people are hoping to see and not have to go back to the drawing board after they do come out to adapt and change based off of potential community feedback?
Michael Bybee: I think we’ve demonstrated how we’re trying to do that this time, but let me just give you a little bit of background. As we were coming out of BlizzCon and we had just announced so much about The War Within and the Hero Talents and everything else, one of the first things the design team started pushing for was, hey, we need to get the talent trees out to the players so they can give us feedback.
They were very insistent and we’ve published a whole series of blog posts with specific details on most, not quite all, of the Hero Talent trees specifically so we could get feedback. I can tell you for sure that the class designers on this game live to understand how the community is reacting to this. If it feels sometimes like things are being designed in a bubble, that is not intended, and especially with Hero Talents and with The War Within, the class designers really engage with the community. They listen to feedback.
We’ve made changes and pushed those back out to the community as well to say like, hey, we heard what you said; here are some changes we made. What do you think about this? I think that they’re getting better. One of the things that changes now that we’re shifting into an Alpha is that instead of blogging about the Hero Talents, we’re actually just going to push them into the Alpha, where people with access will be able to play with the talents and give us feedback on how they’re feeling. We’ll continue to make changes all the way up until we ship to make sure that what players get in the end really fulfills that fantasy and is built basically from the ground up with community feedback in mind.
WCCFTECH – Warband is obviously one of the big features of The War Within. I understand not all gear will have the Warbound attribute. Can players expect it to be a rare find or not? Is it going to be more commonly dropped at max level?
Sean McCann: We’re still gonna be working out exactly how much we want to give for the Warbound stuff. I know we dipped our toes into this a bit with some of the latest patches where we added account-bound things and stuff like that.
We do want to still have some gear that’s like, hey, this is yours. Also, in Delves, you’ll be able to earn currencies to buy gear for your Warband and things like that. You’ll see that there are areas that we’re experimenting with where it feels best to get something that’s Warbound. We want to make sure we avoid a thing where you get a really good piece of gear, but you can’t use it, but it’s for an alt that you don’t have. We want to make sure we avoid that bad feeling. It will be a thing that we’re experimenting with.
Michael Bybee: Just to jump in there a little. The intent is that at max level, you will be able to do a variety of content and get gear that will be Warbound. The specific quantity of gear is something that we’re still going to tune in all of our testing. I think it’s pretty reasonable to expect that you won’t be able to max gear your character doing the max level content, but may be able to get items that are a little bit lower item level for your alts to help them catch up and make sure that they don’t have to do all of that and run around and race behind. But as Sean points out, we will be figuring all that out alongside you as we’re testing this on the Alpha together.
Mike Minotti (GamesBeat): I’ve always liked playing as Dwarven characters in World of Warcraft. Often, they’d get a zone or a storyline devoted to them. The War Within seems very Dwarf-centric all around. I wonder if that kind of opened up any special opportunities, if that was a specific goal to give the dwarves this big spotlight, or if it just made sense with the overall story you guys are looking to tell over these next expansions.
Sean McCann: It’s important to note that you’ll see lots of differences already between Earthen and Dwarves, but it kind of just made sense. I mean, if we’re going to dive deep into the earth, the Earthen would be there, right? It’s kind of in the name. We have a lot of big characters like Dagran and Moira. They’re coming back. You’ve seen Magni and Brann. What happens with Magni and the Earthen? Is that awkward? What’s going on there? Especially like the cool glow-up for Dagran now that he’s getting bigger and off to college soon. It will be fun to explore a lot of that going forward in The War Within and the future patches.
Richard Abrahamson (But Why Tho?): Looking at the map of the Isle of Dorn and that new city that we have, the monthly trader vendor is making an appearance at this new place. You have been slowly adding more and more of the essential stuff, like the auction house being available in the new city of the Dragon Isles. What feedback do you take to try and move more of these essentials away from some of the older cities into where a lot of the player base is? Do you consider as well that this is slowly cutting out some of that older content more and more and making people just stay in the area of the new content?
Michael Bybee: Absolutely, we consider that. It’s one of the biggest things we talk about when we talk about what services to post in a capital city like Dornigal on the Isle of Dorn. We want to make sure that new capital cities feel vibrant and alive and the place where you want to be, but we want to make sure that when you go back to Orgrimmar or Stormwind, it doesn’t feel like a ghost town.
Some of the decisions we’ve made in the past about when to put things in the capital cities, etc., have been driven exactly by that. We also have to balance that with player feedback that people don’t like having to fly back for just one thing where they feel like being forced, so we try to make it feel natural. Or maybe some events are happening in Stormwind to make it so that it actually feels like you want to be there. You want to participate in the noble garden event that just happened or something like that. We’ve tried different things over the years, and you can continue to expect us to do that and to respond to feedback to try to make it better.
Stephanie Watel (Twinfinite): It’s kind of a broader question about The War Within, particularly about the upcoming beta for it. Pre-purchasing The War Within gives players a chance for beta access. They can get a first-hand look at a few of the systems within the expansion, including dynamic flying and all that. To my knowledge, there hasn’t been a date announced for that potential beta drop. Any hint on when that might be?
Michael Bybee: Nope. The reality is that our beta date will be informed by the progress of our Alpha so far. We’re going to release successive builds of content on the Alpha and, bit by bit, get the entire expansion out there. When we feel like we’ve gotten the feedback that we need and that the game is in a ready state, that’s when we’ll release the beta. We’ll be able to announce that at a future date.
WCCFTECH – Speaking of instanced content, like the dungeons and the raid, what kind of changes will players notice compared to the dungeons and raid from the last expansion? What were the takeaways you applied when designing the new ones?
Michael Bybee: Actually, this is an interesting question for Sean and I because we worked on a feature together way back in the day. Exiles Reach was the new player zone that he and I worked on together, it was super fun. We introduced the concept of having NPC followers in the dungeon that would go around and help new players learn how to play.
I mention that because one of the cool things with this expansion is that we’re going to have those, the AI follower dungeons that then got rolled out in Dragonflight near the end of the expansion, but that’s actually going to be introduced in this expansion right out of the gate. Players who are not interested in doing group content, or maybe would prefer to go through the story in the dungeons will be able to do that solo or in groups of anywhere between one and five players.
So, there’ll be a story mode dungeon for all the dungeons that are in the level up experience. We’re really excited for that to be a part of the experience right out of the gate because it means that we can actually tell compelling stories in the dungeons and not have to worry about whether or not some players may not feel comfortable participating in them because we’ve given them a lot of options.
Personally, I’m excited to see that. Some of the characters Sean worked on during the Exiles Reach get to show up again in these experiences. The other thing to say is that we’re already rolling out a big change to our Mythic Plus pool. That is happening in Season 4 of Dragonflight as a sort of test bed for us to see how players react to it, but the intention is that this becomes the way that dungeons operate in The War Within and so it’s informing that. Just to be really specific, what I’m talking about is, prior to this change, the Mythic Plus system had level one all the way up to 20.
What we’ve done is we’ve actually made what used to be Mythic 10 level into what is now Mythic 0. We are essentially giving players a non-timed challenging piece of what could feel very much like five-man raid content and is a lot more accessible for players who maybe don’t like the timer or feel intimidated by that. And we’ve pushed the rest of the Mythic Plus pool out further so that what is now 1 through 10 is actually more the equivalent of 11 through 21 in the past. The other piece of that is Heroic Dungeons now are more difficult because they’re somewhere close to around what a Mythic 5 difficulty was.
The intention here is to really mix up. We’ve gotten a lot of feedback from players that once you start getting into the Mythic Plus dungeon rotation, those early Mythic Plus levels just don’t matter for a lot of players who are pushing the higher keys. For players struggling with the timer and Mythic Plus in general, it becomes a barrier that prevents them from wanting to participate in the first place.
Mike Minotti (GamesBeat): You have these NPC followers who can help players in dungeons now, and that’s great. It allows you to do things like make dungeons sort of mandatory for the story. Is there ever a concern that World of Warcraft is an online game but now you don’t have to interact with players, or is that really not a problem? Is the philosophy more, hey, if that’s how people want to play, then we don’t really have to nudge them one way or another, that’s fine?
Sean McCann: I think there’s always a risk there of, you’re playing a solo MMO, essentially. We want to make sure we avoid that. For me personally, the follower dungeons feature actually helps me group with people more.
I like to play healer. I like to experiment a bit. I’m not great at Discipline, for example, and it’s nice to have Captain Garrick and her friends get slaughtered when I’m like, I’m sorry, what’s Penance again? Now I get to run those dungeons and go, okay, I’m pretty confident now to go run with a group. I kind of see it in two different ways. I get to see the story, get more involved in the world, and then also feel more confident to go out with a group of people and go, hey, I know the fight, I know how my class works a bit better now. I think that’s the hope, that it is a thing that gets you more involved in the game and gets you more willing to go, I can do this content; I know what’s going on now.
Michael Bybee: I would like to add just that I see this as a big shift in the way the team operates from past expansions. Moving into Dragonflight, the values of the team really focused on, instead of, hey, we have this monolithic idea of how the game should work, hearing more what players were saying and understanding more, how can we make the game more accessible to more players? It doesn’t take away from a lot of players who play in groups, but it gives an option for people who maybe were sitting on the sidelines to try to dip their toes in and make the game overall a more accessible place.
Richard Abrahamson (But Why Tho?): Going to the overall expansion content, in the past two expansions we’ve gotten eight dungeons right away, a mega-dungeon, two to three raids for the entire experience, and a couple of zones later. Is that going to be the standard for now? Can we get another season? Should we expect new Delves to be added each year?
Sean McCann: Yeah, we’re having those discussions right now about the Delves. There are plans to have new Delves going forward. Right now we’re just figuring out what’s gonna feel good. No one really knows. You all play Delves at this point, but it’ll be what feels good to change up in Delves in a patch, and what do we want to make sure it stays the same?
What learnings can we take from how we did things with Mythics? You’ll see how we evolved over the years based on players going, hey, this felt good. This didn’t feel good with that. We’re working closely with the dungeon team on that. But yeah, you can bet on there being more Delves in each patch, just increasing the amount of things that we can do.
Michael Bybee: More broadly on future content. I think I would just say that there is no formula that we think works every time so we can just stamp and do it. The reality is player tastes change. What we try to do is pay attention to what people are giving us feedback on and what we think people want most and then continue to do that. What I can commit to is that we will continue to deliver content.
We liked the content cadence that we had for Dragonflight and we want to keep up something like that, with regular drops of content and regularly telling the community what we’re actually going to release ahead of time so they’re not surprised by it, except in special cases like Plunderstorm and then just generally making sure there’s always something to do right around the corner.
Mike Minotti (GamesBeat): A question about planning and announcing those three expansions at once. I’m not expecting specifics here, but what is planned in terms of this trilogy? Is it just story beats? Is it things like major features? Is it just even as little as this very broad story and then it’s really focusing on one expansion at a time?
Michael Bybee: It is everything. The reality is we’re working on the next two expansions right now. We’re deep in the heart of them, and we have a lot of the content that we have figured out and there’s some other questions that we’re still working through, and a lot of that will be informed by feedback.
In a way, nothing has changed for us because we’ve always planned our expansions multiple years ahead. It takes a while to build a World of Warcraft expansion, so that part of our planning hasn’t changed. The big thing that changed here is that the entirety of the Worldsoul Saga, as a set, seemed compelling enough and interesting enough that we wanted to share it upfront with everybody so that people knew what we were doing.
That is part of what I was talking about earlier, which is that shift in the way that we engage with the community, in the way that we think about the game. We started releasing the milestone calendar where we share, hey, here’s a general roadmap for what we’re going to release this year, prior to the end of 2022, just after Dragonflight launched. We had never done anything like that before. This sharing of the Worldsoul saga is an extension of that and having a pre-planned story arc that we can share with you and say, here’s this cool thing and we’re really excited to share it with you. I think is just part of something that you can expect from the World of Warcraft team going forward.
WCCFTECH – I know it’s not part of the feature set for The War Within, but I was wondering if there were any internal considerations around the opportunity of making an actual UI for gamepad support.
Michael Bybee: The reality is there’s nothing we can share about that today, but I will tell you, the team is really excited to talk about things like that. We discuss gamepad support all the time, and it’s something that we want to make sure that the experience is the right one for World of Warcraft if we were to ever pursue that officially, but for the time being, we don’t have anything to announce.
Mike Minotti (GamesBeat): World of Warcraft is reaching this really big anniversary now. Are you guys bumping into that sort of actual age of the game more than ever, or is it really not a problem that has to be thought about much?
Sean McCann: It is like the ship of Theseus. Is WoW still the same that it was 20 years ago? There’s probably some engine code that says yes, but looking at how much we’ve adapted the game over the years and how powerful the tools that we have are to do a lot of cool things… I would say there are some things that we’re looking to improve.
If you look at the change in the models that we had, for example. We talked about Dagran being a loaf of bread, and now look at him; he’s got polygons and everything. We are looking at how to push the tools further and further and how to expand things and keep up with trends.
Because we’re a live game, there’s always going to be that service of updating things. In terms of feeling like it’s a 20-year-old game, at least developing, it doesn’t feel like that, but it feels like it’s all tools that we can do a lot of cool things with and a lot of support to expand things.
Just to mention Delves a little bit. A lot of the cool things we’re doing there like enemy behaviors, Brann’s behavior, things like that, may be not something that we would have done before Dragonflight. Now that we’ve tested the waters with follower dungeons, this is kind of an evolution of that and the evolution of Islands and things like that. It’d be interesting to see where the game is in another 20 years.
Richard Abrahamson (But Why Tho?): Is there a feature or something small in The War Within that you both are extremely excited about that has not been talked about yet? This could be like a small side quest, a model that you’ve seen in the game somewhere, or even some interaction between NPCs that you are just so beyond excited about that you feel might be missed by the player base that you want people to know about.
Sean McCann: The thing that I’m excited about that maybe we haven’t talked about here is the, and I’m biased because I worked on Delves, is the Delver’s dirigible because I love customization. And it’s just all the kind of cool things that we kind of came up with were when we pitched, we just do X, Y, and Z, and the art team was like, sure, how about A, B, C, D, E, F and G also with that.
I think every now and then I’ll just look at our internal webpage to see all the customizations that we have and I’m like, that is so cool. I can’t wait to have that on live. For me, the thing I’m super excited about is seeing everyone’s reactions to the Delver’s Dirigible, getting all the cool parts for it over the seasons and things like that.
Then just a lot of the little things that we’re going to be doing with Brann. The designer working on Brann’s behavior put a thing that if you go AFK and you come back, if there is a wall near Brann, he will walk over and just kind of lean on it while he’s waiting for you, and so trying to get a lot of those little behaviors in there, that you’re like, I may never see Bran do that, but it’s there, he’ll do it, is something that we’re all really excited about on the dev team.
Michael Bybee: Yeah, that’s awesome. I saw that when I was playing Delves last week, Sean, and I was like, really? Oh my gosh, I can’t believe it. That was really cool um; I actually immediately thought of two things when you asked that question. The first one is a little bit of a bigger thing, and the second one is smaller, but I thought was a really nice touch. So the first is, when we first started talking about the dynamic flight feature, on the surface we’re going to take this awesome method to get around the world that we introduced to Dragonflight and we’re going to make that available on a lot of the flying mounts that you already had.
That sounded great. And frankly, from a production perspective, from a scope perspective, there was a lot of anxiety about how much time is that going to take? We were really worried about that. Initially, it was scoped to be a much smaller set of flying mounts. One of the things I’m really excited about is that it was the artists and animators working on it that were like, we’re going to find a way to make this be as true as possible for as many mounts as possible. Now, it’s almost every flying mount in the game, and that is entirely because the art team said, you know what? We think we can do this. We’re going to try and find a way to make it possible.
They streamlined their pipeline and figured it out. I think that is the best thing for the players because it just feels great to do everything from Mimiron’s head, which I was like, really, we got that working? (it actually feels pretty good) to every single Drake you’ve ever collected across the 20 years of playing this game. Just that little detail of this team pushes so hard to make awesome content for players because they really care.
Another example that I think is cool: I don’t know if you saw the sheep in the Isle of Dorn with the flowers on them. If you get a chance, you should check them out. They’re in the hillsides, spawned around the first small city that you go to after Dornigal.
There are a bunch of these awesome rock sheep. They’re made out of stones, but they’ve got grass growing on them and flowers on the grass and they’re just sheep wandering around the hillside and look incredible and fun. The thing that is cool about those sheep is that they were added to the game in a hackathon project. Every year, we give the teams free reign to build whatever they want, come up with cool ideas, et cetera. Then we review those and talk about maybe what makes sense to put into the game.
That sheep is a hackathon project that somebody on the team thought would be cool. It wasn’t a planned thing. It wasn’t something anybody asked for. It’s just some artists on the team who thought that would be awesome. I love that attention to detail and the passion that the team has.
Richard Abrahamson (But Why Tho?): Speaking of the flying, I tried a unicorn mount that was available in this Alpha just to see how dynamic flying worked, and it was honestly unexpected with how it flew around with dynamic flying. Props to the entire team for, like you said, finding ways to make it all work and streamline it all. Is there a mount with dynamic flying that you think is the funniest to see in action?
Michael Bybee: I mean, it’s got to be the Mechagon flying with the four arms, right? It’s freaking awesome. I really love it. And I, I feel like that they’ve just done a great job across all of them. I haven’t seen all of the mounts to be honest, but those are the ones that caught my eye.
Sean McCann: For me, it’s the Lightforged Warframe, at least as a funny/favorite, cause that’s my go-to all the time.
Mike Minotti (GamesBeat): I was kind of almost happy to see the direction with King Magni. In Battle for Azeroth, he felt almost a little too separated from the character we learned to know from before that, seeing him sort of conflicted with the speaker role, being resentful of that. I wonder how much thought there was in maybe not backtracking, but in kind of bringing back some more original flair of the character or finding ways to make him interesting and seem like his own character, unless a vessel or, you know, literal spokesperson for the planet.
Sean McCann: I think whenever we’re using characters, we look at where they’ve been and where we think they need to go. We look at the story arc and BFA and things like that. It’s much the same with Magni. We mentioned before that it made sense to bring in, we’re going to do less stuff with Earthen, it made sense to bring in Magni.
We just looked at things and went, okay, where do we take his character from here? Where should he go? What things do we need to adjust from the past? Writers will always do that, of, okay, like, where do we want to bring the character? How do we want to improve him? What things do you want to focus on more?
You see that with Alleria; you see that with Anduin. So it’s definitely an expansion of looking at where are some cool places that we can take these characters that people have grown familiar with. What are some ways we can surprise people with what we want to do next?
Richard Abrahamson (But Why Tho?): In that same regard with Thrall, it looked like he was using Warrior abilities this time around. Is that something that might be explored with him taking on more of a Warrior role since he lost a lot of his Shaman abilities back in Warlords of Draenor?
Michael Bybee: We’ll explore more of Thrall and his changes since way back when we last saw him. Definitely, there’s some interesting stuff to explore with Thrall in The War Within. The thing I would caution against is I wouldn’t make judgments today on where his character arc is going based on the abilities that he’s using in the Alpha because a lot of the stuff that is set up there is pretty temporary, and it might change before the end.
I think that it’s always challenging working with characters like Thrall because they take up a lot of the space in the room. It’s a lot like Superman. Anytime Superman’s involved, there’s literally no other hero that can do anything because Superman can do everything. Thrall has been that way in the past. It’s how do we make sure these iconic, awesome characters get a chance to share in the story that the players are having, but at the same time, not taking up all the space in the room?
That’s the balance that we’re trying to strike with characters like Thrall, but I think it’ll be really interesting to see where the story takes him.
Thank you for your time.
