World of Warcraft’s next expansion, The War Within, is right around the corner, and it’s looking to build on the success of Blizzard’s back-to-basics approach for 2022’s Dragonflight. That means a focus on evergreen features that will persist for years to come in The War Within, the first chapter in a three-expansion trilogy Blizzard has dubbed The Worldsoul Saga.
Two of The War Within’s biggest additions, Warbands and Hero Talents, are great examples of Blizzard’s current approach. Rather than entirely new features, each system is instead building on what came before. Warbands is the full realization of all the alt-character-friendly changes and account-wide unlocks that have slowly made their way into the game over the past few years and that became even more of a focus in Dragonflight. Hero Talents, meanwhile, are an expansion of the well-received class Talent tree revamp introduced in Dragonflight, which itself was a throwback to the Talent trees from the game’s earliest days.
On paper, iterations on existing WoW features don’t quite sound like game-changing, back-of-the-box additions that sell expansions, much less the expansion that will kick off a storyline that is intended to serve as the culmination of WoW’s first two decades. But any WoW player with multiple characters will tell you how exciting, and transformative, a feature like Warbands will be to the long-running MMORPG. That enthusiasm applies to Hero Talents as well, as the feature will finally allow players to live out class fantasies like becoming a Dark Ranger as a Hunter or engaging in mounted combat as a Rider of the Apocalypse Death Knight.
With the arrival of Warbands alongside the game’s The War Within pre-patch (which goes live today), gone will be farming reputation or renown on multiple characters. Currencies will be able to be moved freely between characters. Players will finally be able to add various weapon and armor appearances to their account regardless of whether the class they are using at the time is able to use those items. Warbands will display characters across realms on the game’s login screen. It will also allow for the transferring of items between characters on the same account regardless of realm, thanks to additions like the Warband bank. Even on just a visual level, having characters on a player’s account displayed all together, as opposed to being separated by which server they housed on, is a welcome change.
WoW is finally becoming a simpler and more-seamless experience for those who have multiple characters spread across multiple realms and factions. It’s a big change–one that started to come together in earnest as Dragonflight shipped–said WoW principal software engineer Peter Hodge in a recent interview with GameSpot.
“I think there really was a genuine desire to keep pushing,” Hodge said. “Dragonflight had a lot of really great improvements to evergreen systems and a lot of quality-of-life things…We wanted to continue that philosophy. What else is there in World of Warcraft that is due for a fresh look? We certainly get feedback all the time that those quality-of-life things around making playing alts easier or access to account-wide features, [so they were] definitely very high on the list… It feels about the right time to bring a lot of those ideas under one umbrella of a feature.”
Such an undertaking wasn’t exactly simple, however. WoW is a 20-year-old game, and even if many elements of its underlying code are newer, it’s still a massive and complex undertaking to make fundamental changes to how characters, items, and accounts have always worked.
“The reality is, especially when you’re dealing with something like the inventory, you’re dealing with bits and pieces of that or features of that which have a very long history,” Hodge said. “None of it was written with the idea of ‘Hey, what if this was account-wide?’ No one thought about that when they were laying down the foundations of the inventory code 20 years ago or longer. That certainly becomes one of the biggest challenges from an engineering perspective.”
For Hero Talents, which aren’t coming with The War Within’s pre-patch but will be part of the expansion proper, it was a different sort of challenge: how to expand the well-received the Talent tree system from Dragonflight without overwhelming players with choices or complexity. It’s for that reason Blizzard decided on the idea of 10 additional Talent points able to be invested in a single separate tree, with each specialization able to choose between two of each class’s three new Hero Talent trees. At max level, players will have the entirety of their chosen Hero Talent tree unlocked, as opposed to the normal class Talent trees, where players are forced to make some choices about their build and don’t have enough Talent points for everything. George Velev, a producer on WoW, said the team liked having a “definitive package” for each Hero Talent tree.
“We find that the current Talent tree offers a lot of options for players entirely, adding 10 more options; 10 more points you had to pick between probably felt like it was skirting a little bit too much towards too complex,” Velev said.
Though each Hero Talent tree does feature some choice nodes where players pick between two abilities, the fact that each Talent tree is largely the same across all players of that spec makes each easier to fine-tune and balance, Velev said.
“Every Sunfury Fire Mage is going to have these 10, give or take a few choice nodes, for their kit,” Velev said. “So we fundamentally know we can balance that against Spellslinger or that against Frostfire. That gives us a lot of tools in our arsenal for making sure when you do come to a decision of ‘should I play X or Y,’ it’s more of a focus on the thematics and fantasy and what appeals to you instead of just picking between what’s stronger and what’s weaker.”
That “class fantasy” of each Hero Talent tree is a big part of the appeal. Some of the new Talents draw on existing archetypes for many of the Hero Talent specializations. Hunters will be able to follow in the footsteps of Sylvanas as a Dark Ranger, while Monks will have the option of embracing the teachings of Pandaria’s Shado-Pan. Other Talents put an emphasis on less-explored aspects of a particular class, like exploring the prophecy side of Priests or the ancestral-spirit ideas present in Shaman lore.
Many of the Hero Talent specs that pull from existing lore are also rooted in a particular faction or group. Warrior’s Mountain Thane Hero Talent tree, for example, is a dwarven archetype, but one that will be usable by all Fury and Protection Warriors, not just dwarves. It was a design challenge that took a lot of time and brainstorming to get right, Velev said.
“For the most part, we went with what felt most appropriate for the class,” Velev said. “Yes, there are a lot that are sort of faction-specific, but we tried to avoid a lot of faction connotations. We know a lot of players don’t want to play something that’s very Horde or very Alliance, in which case we tried to make sure that’s not the only option for them. But we also didn’t completely remove stuff that felt too faction-specific from the table entirely because at the end of the day, Dark Ranger Hunter is super cool. Yes, it’s a little bit Horde-oriented but just because it’s Horde-oriented doesn’t mean we should give up on that approach or that direction.”
Hero Talents have drawn some criticism from players over the fact that the idea of playing as a Dark Ranger might be the best option for their class specialization, but might not fit their particular class fantasy. The opposite is also true; a player may have always really loved the idea of being a Dark Ranger and all that entails, but the spec in theory might not be optimal for specific types of endgame content, discouraging them from playing the spec. Velev said the team wants players to feel like they can swap Hero specs should one tree perform better than another at a specific type of content. He also said that Hero Talents are an evergreen feature and that balance changes and iteration will continue into The War Within and beyond.
“What we want to avoid is every single time you play your Hunter you feel like you can’t play Dark Ranger at all,” Velev said. “There are trees that are optimized for specific scenarios and that’s sweet. That’s awesome. But feeling like you can never play what you want to play… That’s something we’re trying to avoid. And that’s why we have things like you get every single Talent point, so we can have more opportunities to make sure they are as tightly balanced as possible.”
While every expansion is a major turning point for WoW, The War Within in particular feels like a fundamental change for the MMO. One prominent WoW content creator has gone as far to call the expansion’s upcoming pre-patch “the most important Warcraft patch ever.” That might be a little clickbaity, but there is truth in the fact that once the account-wide systems that make up Warbands are unleashed, there’s no going back. WoW will fundamentally be played differently come The War Within. The changes have been a long time coming (one might even call them overdue), but it seems as if Blizzard is finally keeping pace with how its players consume WoW in the modern age, doubling down on the idea that players want to play more characters, not fewer.
“A lot more players play a lot more characters than they did in the dawn of World of Warcraft,” Hodge said. “That’s been a gradual change over time. That was definitely a big part of the reason why we thought ‘Hey, we need to be looking more at making this easier for players.’ Certainly, as an outcome, as a goal, if we get more players trying more classes in World of Warcraft…if we can provide more options and excitement for players to jump into more alts, for me that will be a win.”
WoW: The War Within launches on August 26. Those who purchase the game’s $90 Epic or 20th Anniversary Collector’s Edition will be able to play three days earlier on August 23. The War Within pre-patch, which adds Warbands and Skyriding for most flying mounts (another feature iterated on from Dragonflight), is live today.
