Yesterday, Chris Metzen (who returned to Blizzard only about a month ago) took the stage at BlizzCon 2023 to announce the Worldsoul Saga, which is set to span the next three World of Warcraft expansions.
It’s a brand new approach to storytelling for the fantasy MMORPG that will turn twenty next year with the release of the first chapter of the Worldsoul trilogy: The War Within.
This expansion (already available for pre-order on Battle.net starting at $49.99 with Dragonflight included) will add the continent of Khaz Algar, located off the Western shores of Kalimdor. Here, players will find The Isle of Dorn home to the Earthen race (available for both factions with The War Within), The Ringing Deeps, Hallowfall, and Azj-Kahet. In the latter subterranean region, the Harbinger of the Void Xal’atath has been amassing an army of mutated Nerubians for her nefarious goals.
The War Within will increase the World of Warcraft level cap to 80, add eight new dungeons, and a Nerub’ar Palace raid featuring eight bosses. The expansion is also set to add several new features, such as Warbands, Delves, and Hero Talents.
Wccftech had the chance to discuss all of that on-site at BlizzCon with Lead World Artist Kristy Moret and Associate Design Director Maria Hamilton. The conversation has been edited and cleaned up for clarity.
The big thing that everyone is talking about this time is the announcements of the Worldsoul Saga spanning three expansions. One of the first things that fans have been wondering since the reveal is whether the Worldsoul Saga is meant to conclude all the Azeroth threads and kind of lead into a World of Warcraft 2.0 or something like that.
Kristy Moret: I would say that the goal of the Worldsoul Saga is to really tell a self-contained story that draws from the past 20 years of Warcraft. As Metzen said, it sets up for the next 20 years of Warcraft. As far as a 2.0 or anything like that, I wouldn’t know anything about that. But ultimately, our goal is to create a very satisfying story and for new players to jump in at what feels like the start of the story for them.
Can you talk about if there are any new mechanics or possibly returning mechanics that haven’t been present in more recent expansions?
Kristy Moret: I don’t think I can think of anything on that line. Specifically what we’re trying to do going forward is to have a lot of systems. So, for example, dragon-riding is becoming a dynamic flight. It’s being expanded to a lot of different mounts. It’s going to be available in the old world.
There will be dragon races in the old world, all that fun stuff. Going forward, we are introducing Delves in The War Within, and that is going to be a feature that we’d like to carry on into Midnight and The Last Titan. Our goal is to hopefully create features that will continue going forward.
Maria Hamilton: Philosophically, we’ve made a shift to looking at evergreen systems that we know we want to commit to support, that we know are fun, and that players are gonna really enjoy. And so we’re not really diving into those systems that were only present for a single expansion; we moved away from that. So, anything we put into any of these upcoming expansions will continue forward, they will all be evergreen. As Christine mentioned, we have Delves, we also have Warbands, which I think got the biggest roar that I heard at just the idea that we have Warbands, and then, of course, we have our Hero talents. We’re not changing the talent tree again, we’re adding to it. So again, to keep that commitment that we’ve made.
Can you talk a little bit more about the Hero talents?
Kristy Moret: Hero talents are this idea that there are these iconic classes in World of Warcraft. Maybe you see somebody wielding a hammer in just an epic way and you’re like, I am a warrior, I have a hammer. Why don’t I be like that guy?
The idea is to put together these really cool fantasies and allow each specialization two choices of which of these kind of iconic hero trees they want to go down. The idea is really just to kind of build upon the existing talent tree and just give you even more specialization choices. There is the fact that you can change it on the fly as well. It’s a very low barrier, just switch around to completely experiment with the different builds.
The other cool thing about it is that you are going to get your 10 Hero points while you level from 70 to 80. So you’ll get to fill out the entire tree regardless of which tree you choose, you’ll always get all of the talents.
Do you feel that these Hero talents are going to make certain classes more specialized, or will they kind of veer off and go into hybrid roles or change up how they play?
Maria Hamilton: I don’t think we expect people to go deeply hybrid. I think the intent of the fantasy here is to let players look at the different ways you might portray and be a warrior, for example, based on some important characters that have existed in the past in our world.
So you can choose to fight like and be like those. And if that’s not what you feel like, then you can try a different one. The idea here is to give players a little more choice, making it so that each of the classes is a little different. They have different abilities, but nothing that is going to be, you know, this is the right one, or that is the wrong one. We don’t want there to be the perfect meta. We want people to really get into their fantasy of what the character is.
Can you talk a little bit about how the Delves are different from Scenarios?
Kristy Moret: Yes. Delves are integrated into the open world and you can stumble upon the entrances and find them. And you’re like, cool, I want to go exploring.
They are seamless, so when you enter into one of them, there’s no loading screen, you just pop in and you can start exploring. Delves are also very self-contained and repeatable, so you can jump into one and it takes like 10 or 15 minutes. You can do it solo. You can do it in a group. You run through, you punch dudes, and you get treasure. It explodes into sparkles and fun where you get all your gold and from that.
The idea here is that these aren’t necessarily linear story experiences, which is what Scenarios do; they are much more focused on telling a specific thread of the story. Delves are just like almost mini-dungeons for somebody who doesn’t have the time to go through with Min-Maxing for their next Mythic dungeon run in World of Warcraft.
They can just pop in, get some cool loot that will help them with their outdoor progression, and do that in an amount of time that just feels snappy. Like you’re on your lunch break, you’ve only got a little bit of time to play. I want to make sure you get some cool, fun rewards when you do have that time.
Maria Hamilton: I think also differentiating, you know, these can be played solo. These can be played with a couple of friends. You don’t have to have the perfect party composition. You don’t have to worry about what your spec is necessarily.
The idea is that, as Christine said, they’re quick to get in and get out and play with who you want. It doesn’t require a lot of organization. It doesn’t have to be like, I can only do this solo. If you want to play with a friend, you can. You got Brann Bronzebeard along with you to do it and he is actually fairly helpful most of the time.
The idea is just something for our outdoor players who love doing this. Maybe they don’t have as much time, maybe they’re watching the baby, whatever it might be to give them an opportunity to get in there and have some fun, get some loot, and pop right out again.
I think there’s some flexibility there that we were looking for because a dungeon is a commitment for more time generally and you might end up having to wait because you’re not a tank or a healer. This just makes it easier for people to just get in there and enjoy.
Say you wanted to do a Delve as a healer. Would you have Brann or other supporting characters kind of fill out the missing roles in your party?
Maria Hamilton: Yeah. That’s exactly right. The idea here is that you don’t need to have it. It’s totally agnostic to the classes’ capabilities. We have some stuff coming out that I can’t talk about right now that is going to help make this easier. But it’s coming soon, and yes, the idea is that if you want to go as a healer and do it, you can.
Looking at the newly announced Worldsoul Saga as a whole, did you get your inspiration for this wider overarching saga from things like the Marvel Cinematic Universe?
Kristy Moret: So I think part of what spawned the Worldsoul Saga was the return of Metzen to the team and his desire to really collaborate with us and jam with us on what would be exciting to deliver to players. At the same time, we have been increasing our patch cadence. We want World of Warcraft players to have more content to enjoy more frequently. And so, as a whole, we decided we really wanted to tell these big epic stories.
What if we could tell that over the course of three expansions? He just came in with amazing fun ideas and we all bounced off at one another in tons of great brainstorming sessions. And I think that’s really what spawned this. I think it was just a desire to really wrap up these stories, really get to the core of Azeroth (literally), and explore that and see where that takes us.
And so I think it was really just more born out of the idea that we want to tell these big stories and it can be hard to do when you’re confined to just one expansion. So the idea that we could do more with it, I think really wraps into our desire to bring more content to players as well.
Maria Hamilton: Speaking of Metzen, when we built Dragonflight, we were already toying with Titans. What does it mean to bring a Titan back, and what happens if we bring Tyr back? How does that relate to the dragons? How does all of that relate to the dispute essentially that the Incarnates have with the Dragonflights?
When Chris started working with us, he came in and called Dragonflight a poem that just gave him so many ideas for where to move from Dragonflight. Because we had envisioned this big exploration, asking some big questions like, well, what if the Titans did come back?
He sort of took that and ran with it. I have to say, having the opportunity to work with someone who was here at the beginning of World of Warcraft and who knew what they were thinking early on and just sit in a room and jam with him and bounce ideas back and forth and merge them together, it’s just been really rewarding.
We’ve been working on The War Within and the stories for Midnight and The Last Titan, and it has been fantastic just feeling him take us further along. We’re always keen to tell a big story, a cool story. There’s certain things that I always felt may be a little off-limits.
It’s like, well, what if the Titans came back? That’s a big thing. So we were like, what if we remade Tyr? And he went, no, let’s just bring him back. So, it’s been really cool.
Now, Metzen did talk on stage about the team’s plan to make World of Warcraft expansions faster. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
Maria Hamilton: I think what he meant by that is we have committed to a cadence with our content releases that is pretty quick. We’ve been doing about eight weeks to two months-ish pretty consistently.
And I think what he’s saying there is we’re going to keep this up, there’s not going to be gaps. We’re going to keep a nice pace and we’re going to go from one to the next to the next to the next. I think Holly said that The War Within is coming out next year. We are going to have a cadence that continues telling that story.
We’ve done prologue chapters in some of our smaller content patches to keep the story flowing. We’re going to keep doing that and right into Midnight and then right into The Last Titan. That’s the intent. The exact time frames, I’m not clear yet on that.
We’re well underway with The War Within. The footage that we showed today on the panel is recent. We’re already starting to look at and build out zones for Midnight, so I would say we’re going fast because we know what the future holds by having this longer, broader idea of making. We can just keep going since we know. So, in a lot of ways, I think he meant that when he said faster because I don’t think we can go faster. We’re going pretty fast.
World of Warcraft has had world-changing events before, such as the opening of the gates of Ahn Quiraj. Do you foresee content in World of Warcraft leading into The War Within?
Maria Hamilton: I foresee content leading into The War Within. I can’t talk too much about it, but you know, in what Metzen talked about and also in what Cinematic Narrative Director Terran Gregory covered in the What’s Next panel, we talked about the Radiant Song and these visions that people are seeing all around Azeroth. Thrall and Anduin are talking about the vision that they’re seeing and something crying for help. The sword obviously was placed there for a reason.
And then you’ve got Alleria saying, I’m not having the same visions everyone else is having. So I think it’s a safe bet that that might impact players that those visions are going to be part of it. But I don’t want to go any further than that.
As far as the cadence goes, you have the major patches that bring in the dungeons, the raids. Do you foresee having a similar cadence both leading up to The War Within and going into Midnight?
Maria Hamilton: I mean, we’re committed to that. No gaps. What that cadence is exactly… I’m sure a roadmap will come out. But yeah, we want to make sure that there aren’t any of those lulls, there aren’t any of those gaps. That’s something we committed to last year. We said no, we’re not doing that anymore, we’re gonna make sure. So, we are working on multiple content releases simultaneously in order to make sure that we can hit that cadence. So that will continue.
With World of Warcraft Classic, they’re experimenting with the Season of Discovery with some remix content. Do you feel or have any idea whether those systems, should they be well received by the fans, could make their way into The War Within?
Kristy Moret: I’m sure folks would love to investigate some of that stuff. I think we’re definitely keeping a close eye on how it’s going over on the Classic side. Hardcore has been an amazing success. So we’re taking a look at that, we’re gonna see what, if anything, we can bring into modern. It’s definitely something we will look into.
Maria Hamilton: I think we’re very open to experimenting. We’ve always been willing in these content updates to try something and say, oh, how did that go? Did we like how that felt? What can we change? How do the fans react to it? Is it worth pursuing? And I feel in my heart of hearts there will be some things that we’ll be experimenting with before The War Within comes out.
Should we look forward to a Public Test Realm ahead of The War Within?
Maria Hamilton: Absolutely. We’ve got Guardians of the Dream coming out on Tuesday and a Public Test Realm for the next content update will be imminent right after that.
For World of Warcraft players who might have been gone for years and missed key expansions and might want to get into The War Within, what kind of primer would you recommend or would be within the game to onboard them into the new expansion?
Kristy Moret: I definitely think that the idea of The War Within is to tell this epic story across the three expansions where it really begins with The War Within. So, hopefully, players won’t feel like they are missing too much. There may be some context that they’re like what is a Titan? But that’s going to be kind of part of the adventure and the exploration of the Earthen and their civilization and the way that the Titans’ impact has changed the way that they actually live their lives.
I definitely think that for players that are hoping to come into The War Within, leveling from 60 to 70 will still be Dragonflight, which I think is a great sort of adventure and exploration expansion that’s less heavy on really deep lore topics. It’s got dragons, it’s got Titans, it’s got the big hitters, that’s what we’re carrying over as we continue on into Midnight and The Last Titan. I think playing through that would probably be a fun little primer for them. And then the idea is The War Within will be a self-contained story. So if you start at the beginning, you should feel like you start at the beginning and that there’s not too much that’s behind you that you just don’t know about.
Maria Hamilton: Dragonflight will be the leveling expansion, so when players start out as brand new players, they go to Forbidden Reach, and they get that guided experience of learning about their abilities, how to put items on, and all of that.
Previously, they went to Battle for Azeroth, but we’re going to be changing that so that they will be going to the Dragon Isles and doing Dragonflight, so they will get their dynamic mount very quickly, getting the ability to swoop and fly. That should be a nice introduction and give them some more current history to set them up for that. I tend to think that anyone who just gives it a try is gonna get engaged quickly and realize, oh, ok, I get it. This guy Tyr is back and that’s a Titan.
For players that might not be as social and engage in these games primarily as solo players, would you expand the AI characters into the story dungeons as characters are leveling up from 1 to 60?
Maria Hamilton: You know, it’s funny; I have wanted very much personally to have there be a way for people who like to solo to engage in dungeons.
Delves is part of our solution for that, which is you can have this quick experience. I’m just going to go in, and I’m going to do a thing. Maybe I’m on my lunch break, or maybe I have a few minutes.
But again, we experiment a lot and I would not be surprised if there wasn’t some experimentation along the line there, but nothing I could talk about or announce today.
Kristy Moret: The fact that Delves have Brann Bronzebeard as a companion is kind of one of our initial forays into experimenting and stuff like that. So hopefully, that goes well, and we would love to do fun stuff.
Do you ever consider sunsetting or vaulting content to keep newcomers from feeling overloaded for that new World of Warcraft experience?
Kristy Moret: I don’t know that we’ve ever considered that. I know that we do have things like Chromie Time, where you can go back to the land as it was before certain things happened.
I don’t know that we’re planning on sunsetting any content, but one thing that we do want to do a bit more of, and this is something that Maria brought up with me earlier, is things like the blue Dragonfly questline. That one actually had folks exploring the old world to go find the other blue dragons to bring them back and connect with them.
Since we have this really huge, expansive world to pull from, I think it makes sense for us to go back sometimes to revisit these spaces. Whether that is on a special Heritage questline or through something like trying to dig deeper into the lore of the blue dragons like that questline was, I think there are lots of opportunities for us to reuse the old world and what’s there. I don’t see sunsetting anything like that.
Maria Hamilton: I feel like time walking is an excellent example too of us using certain weeks to explore certain areas and go back and remember what that raid was like and what that felt like.
I think that’s really cool. It’s the kind of thing that our live team is thinking about often, bringing interesting new experiences. They did the Secrets of Azeroth fairly recently and tried that out and got some good info. They just redid the headless horseman fight and added the ability to take on curses on yourself, increasing your chance of getting certain kinds of loot while making the fight harder. They’re looking at ways to spice up some of these existing holiday events and add new ones in and kind of do time events that determine, oh, this will be on for this period of time, and then it’s off again.
We now have a dedicated live team that’s looking very carefully at what things players are really enjoying. So it might be a case less so of us sort of sunsetting something and more of us saying, ok, now we’re going to pull this thing that not very many people have looked at in a while and putting it in the forefront.
Then it’s going to go back and we’re going to pull another thing out. That’s what we’re thinking, to keep it fresh while they’re waiting for those next content updates.
Are you talking about any sort of collaboration content between other Blizzard franchises?
Maria Hamilton: I mean, we frequently do promotional content. We have Warcraft Rumble machines and coin tokens and little models in World of Warcraft right now as part of that, and when Diablo IV launched, we had loot goblins showing up and we fought them.
So, that is something we do frequently. It’s just looking for the opportunities to make it mesh well with our world and our fantasy, to make those adjustments.
Okay. How soon do you think we’ll see the new heroes make their way into Hearthstone?
Maria Hamilton: I don’t know. Those guys are so creative. I mean, they come up with things, and we’re just like, oh, wow, that’s amazing. When can we steal some of their stuff?
No, they do come up with a lot of interesting stuff. I don’t know what their schedule looks like. I don’t know much about Hearthstone’s content releases and pacing.
I just know that we inevitably have a team meeting. We get to see their cool new trailer and then we all go, oh, I’m gonna go play Hearthstone.
Any plans to work on the graphics engine to improve the fidelity so World of Warcraft players can see more details on their shiny new armor?
Kristy Moret: We are working on upgrading the visual fidelity of our zones, our characters, and everything. We have a lot of new tech that we are working on internally.
It is a proprietary engine where we’re just trying to find new ways to really build these incredible lush spaces and make them feel alive while still using the same engine that we’ve been using for the past 20 years.
So there’s still a lot of life in the engine. There is a lot of stuff that I’ve seen folks at Blizzard doing recently that I’m very excited about in terms of increasing visual fidelity. So I think that’s absolutely something that we’re going to be seeing. I don’t expect a whole overhaul or anything like that, but there are just so many untapped little veins through that code you can find to just make amazing things.
Maria Hamilton: If you were interviewing an engineer or one of the tech guys, I’m sure they could give you some very specific because they’re making updates all the time to the engine and to different capabilities.
I do know that in Hollowfall, which is one of our new zones in The War Within, that one that’s under the giant crystal, the state of the light is very important. When the zone is dark, things are quite different than when there is light. We have a gameplay feature in the zone that involves trying to spread the light to areas that are dark. That has allowed us to do some additional work on lights, which doesn’t sound very exciting, but it actually is very exciting because the ability to do certain things with lights and not take the performance of the game is huge.
That was something we were just talking about like two weeks ago, getting that capability. Now, for example, designers can actually turn it on and off, which again doesn’t sound like a big deal, but we don’t normally turn on lots of lights because that’s very bad performance-wise. It’s looking amazing. All of our work on it so far is just amazing.
Kristy Moret: Even something as simple as fog makes really good use of a newer tech that we have added to the game, which really adds a lot, making environments feel more mysterious and just adding that extra mood to it.
One of the big centerpieces in Square Enix’s conversation with Final Fantasy XIV was showing off how they were improving the character models but also allowing players to switch between the newer character models or, if they had legacy hardware, still being able to play with the older character models. Is World of Warcraft still going to support the legacy hardware, or will there be a push the boundaries toward newer machines or newer technologies like AMD FSR or NVIDIA DLSS?
Maria Hamilton: I can’t imagine that we would in any way want to exclude people who don’t have fast machines. That’s never been our policy or philosophy. We have the ability to turn your details way down and it’s something designers actually test to make sure they can find the thing in the world that they’re supposed to find if the graphics is tanked all the way down to the bottom.
I mean, you just get the little sparkles as opposed to the glow and things. So that’s something that we’re always careful about. We want to make sure that we’re including everyone and you don’t have to have the fanciest PC. That said, when someone has fancy stuff, they get prettier visuals. We try to keep it comfortable for all of our World of Warcraft players.
Thank you for your time.
