Later this week, World of Warcraft’s first-ever Classic Hardcore servers will open up for players to test how far they can go without dying. Leading into this week’s launch, I had the opportunity to participate in an interview with Senior Technical Designer Tim Jones and Game Producer Linny Cooke. We talked about everything ranging from what players can expect when they hop onto a Hardcore server to what they think the future might hold for this type of gameplay, and everything in between.
The Hardcore Experience
The entire existence of the current Hardcore experience in World of Warcraft revolves around using an addon that imposes various restrictions on players to keep with the idea of a hardcore character. The way Blizzard is implementing things, there are a number of ways they are making things a bit easier. For instance, players will be able to trade things with other players on the AH rather than only relying on what they themselves obtain. With that in mind, it would make sense for players to be allowed to use the hardcore-related addon on these servers.
However, most add-ons have a tendency to make things a bit easier. Since this is the most common case for WoW addons, I was curious if the team was looking to restrict the use of addons in any way in an effort to preserve the hardcoreness of the game mode. Cooke laid out their approach to addons in Hardcore: "We don’t want to be too directive or prescriptive of ‘this is how you Hardcore’; Hardcore is your journey.” I really appreciate their take on this, and in the long run, it will likely help this game mode to be more successful over the long term. I do have concerns about some segments of the community getting into arguments over “what is a real hardcore playthrough and what isn’t,” but this would likely be way worse if Blizzard were determining this more specifically.
In a further conversation regarding how the hardcore mode functions now vs. what players will experience on these Hardcore servers, Jones threw in that “We do recognize that there is a desire to play the self-found mode; we don’t necessarily want to have it be completely solo. [There are] lots of nuances with whether someone is doing solo, or duos, or trios, and we don’t want to restrict that type of gameplay. But, at a later date, we do plan on adding the ability for people to opt into a self-found mode.” The idea of having this be a toggleable option is fantastic, and I hadn’t realized they were even considering it. Hopefully, players will have to choose to do or not do this in character creation. It’d really water down the entire point of it if we could turn it on and off willy-nilly.
Regarding future plans for Classic Hardcore, a question regarding what they have planned for this game mode and if we might see seasons of mastery for it, Jones responded to that with a bit more of an explanation of their overall philosophy for Classic Hardcore. He said, “Hardcore is meant to be an evergreen feature. You might have a great experience, you might die, and have a lot of fun in the process, but Hardcore is meant to be something that you can set down, you can go play Dragonflight, you can go play other games. Hardcore will be back there forever… We do plan on continuing to do seasonal content that will not change what players experience on the Hardcore era servers. If there is or is not the desire for Hardcore gameplay in future seasons, we’ll leave that up to the community. If that’s something they desire, then that’s something we’ll consider to add onto future seasonal content.”
I’m sure there will be players for whom Hardcore becomes their primary gameplay experience, but those will likely be the minority. For everyone else, having this commitment to the content always being there for players to return to is a great choice. It is also a big reason why they decided to make all of the content in Classic available from the beginning; it removes the perception of severs being “done” after a certain point.
The single biggest change between how Classic Hardmode will function and most other hardmode gameplay types out there is the fact that dying isn’t the end of that character’s journey. Yes, they won’t be able to continue on in Classic Hardmode, but they can be transferred to a regular server and continue their journey. I was curious if they’d limit which servers players could choose from, as it could be a way to try and bolster populations on various servers. Cooke quickly clarified that the free character transfer would be available to any Classic Era server with no restrictions. Jones also explained that players don’t have to die to transfer off. If you’re playing a character and decide that hardcore isn’t for you or for any other reason, you can transfer to any other Classic Era server. Of course, transferring is one way only.
PTR Feedback Experiences
One of the most fascinating times for any game is when players at large get their hands on it and start playing. No matter how much time and effort game developers put into trying to anticipate what players will do, as soon as thousands of people start playing, surprising things will happen. As such, I was quite curious about if what they saw during the PTR period surprised them at all or if there were any unexpected issues that arose and needed solutions before Classic Hardcore officially launched.
Cooke jumped right on this, saying, “On the systems side, there were a couple of things which caused resurrections that we kind of didn’t expect. So, PTR was really cool, not just for finding out when players died when they shouldn’t have, but when they came back when they really shouldn’t have. That ended up being really really valuable.” This honestly cracked me up, and I wish I could have gotten some more detail on what exactly was causing that issue. Obviously, having players return to life in a game mode where that shouldn’t be possible is a huge issue.
Jones also chimed in with, “that brings up the Duel to the Death mechanic that we added, and we’re super hyped about. We got awesome new art assets for the dueling flag” Cooke added “and audio so that people know what’s happening,” and then Jones continued, “It’s just such an awesome high-stakes environment that exists in no other version of World of Warcraft. Seeing the community give themselves a couple of days to farm the best gear that they can, and get the most amazing consumables they can, get really bizarre quest auras from turning in the totem of air questline so you get this crazy movement and haste buff for one hour then bringing that to the duel tournament. The creativity of players when it comes to a high stakes, you can potentially lose everything in a single duel, and to see how they pull out all the stops is just super amazing.”
I must say the duel to the death thing is something I can’t wait to see out in the wild. I don’t really want to participate in any, but it’ll be fun to see out there. I have really fond memories of sitting outside the entrance of Ironforge watching people duel one after the other. Well, until two Holy Pallies decided to duel, and that got boring really quickly. It’ll be interesting to see how playing on Classic Hardcore affects those kinds of interactions. Cooke continued, "That was something else that was really cool that we got from the PTR. Learning players are possibly going to run away from duels to the death. So, how do you also go ahead and make sure it’s meaningful? We have added a cowardice buff, so now, if you run away, you’re going to have a bad time for the next couple of days.” Which is amazing. Word to the wise, make sure you are actually willing to risk death if you accept a duel to the death.
When it comes to protecting players from deaths they have no control over, Jones had an interesting story about how that system changed a bit due to things that happened on the PTR:
“One of the things that I helped build was the disconnect protection if you’re on a flight path, or we call them taxis. There’s a system in place that tracks whenever someone gets on a flight path, the system remembers per player what flight master did you originate from, and then if you’re ever disconnected, if the system ever detects that you are no longer on a flight path, but you are up in the air, and you were on a flight path, the system will do a couple of different things. It’ll try to teleport you back to the flight master. If it can’t do that, then it’ll try to teleport you to the nearest safe location, which is usually a graveyard. If it can’t do that, then it’ll try to teleport you to the ground.
"One thing that we learned was that there are some spawns near graveyards that there shouldn’t be. I think someone posted on Reddit that they were unlucky enough to disconnect in. I believe it was Searing Gorge, and they were transported to Thorium Point graveyard. Of all things, there was a rare spider that was level 50, that out of the nine spots where this rare can spawn it spawned at the one really close to this graveyard. I’m totally ok with changing those types of things to make sure that creatures in general, it’s a universal design philosophy that we don’t want creatures near graveyards. So thank you to the person who posted that on Reddit.”
Getting Ready for Launch
We’ll finally be able to get the full World of Warcraft Classic Hardcore experience starting on August 24th. I’m definitely going to be hopping in and seeing how well I can do. I’m extremely hesitant about doing any dungeons, let alone raids, so I’m not sure how far I’ll get or how much I’ll do, but it’s a fresh new take on an old world I love. I’m also really looking forward to seeing the people who have been playing the community version of hardcore so far and how everything will go on that front. I’m sure there will be a ton of fun death montages in our future.
