Cox: Artifacts -- What’s the process of creating them and developing them for the class order and the RPG experience?
IH: We wanted a weapon of incredible power with lore and history that you can progress and customize. We worked with the art team and the core fantasy i.e. Ashbringer. A big challenge was not having everyone feel identical. From the outset, we wanted radical customization options to make them distinct but still feel like the foundation weapon.
Some appearances are easy to unlock but others will take a lot of dedication to unlock, even some secret and very rare appearances that can be discovered and unlocked.
Cox: Let’s talk Mythic Plus. What’s going on there?
IH: This is tied to Suramar and I’m excited about it. We’ve done dungeon game play a disservice over the years. They’re fun for a few months and then they become less relevant when raids open. That’s been the story for many years.
Mythic dungeons are designed to stay relevant over the course of the expansion. If you beat them at Mythic and get a keystone to challenge, difficulty and rewards scaling up. There are parallels to Diablo 3 but there are key differences. We knew if we’re asking players to run dungeons for a longer period of time, we needed to vary up the experience. Mythic dungeons in Legion introduce affixes (up to 10) that can massively alter the gameplay experience. Bolstering, for instance, means that when a monster dies, it strengthens all of the monsters in the area. These begin at level 4 and above. Every dungeon is approached differently from week to week. It will change the team composition too. It keeps dungeons relevant throughout the entire expansion and sets dungeons up as an alternative to raiding or even as a complement to it on non-raid nights.
There is no limit to keystone levels. Keystones level through dungeon completion within a certain time limit. Each level has better rewards and more challenge. For the highest tier you complete in one week, you’ll receive a big reward chest the next week that will be waiting for you in the order hall.
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Cox: Can we dig deeper into world questing?
IH: In Mists we had lots of dailies that had a lot of positives. But the two big negatives were the reward structure and the limitations of the structure itself. By definition, if you missed a single day, you were behind everyone else. But it was not ideal. We wanted to vary the experience.
World quests improve on that structure. We have hundreds of world quests with different types, locations, etc. You shouldn’t see the same ones over and over. The emissary system lets you stack them up three at a time and pulls you out of that sense of being behind if you miss a day.
There’s a ton of content to get out in the world and have a different experience from day to day. When the game feels like a chore, that’s not a good place to be.
Cox: But people like to do the same thing day-to-day. What about them?
IH: You can see the objective, add them to the quest tracker and choose what you want to do. Over time, you’ll develop that sense of mastery and know what you want to do and you will strike a balance. You’ll come to recognize quests and quest types that are reliable mainstays.
All of our world quests have story to them. As soon as you enter an area, you’ll have lore delivered to you to explain what to do and why. Context is important and we won’t rely on pure mechanics. Story is essential. We lost sight of that.
What do you think of some of the revelations from the interview? Leveling upgrades? Garrisons? A return to story? Leave us your thoughts!
