As part of the 20th anniversary of World of Warcraft direct, Blizzard took a moment to pay tribute to the community and paid homage to all of the best aspects of WoW. In addition, Game Director Ion Hazzikostas also took a few minutes to preview where the current expansion, The War Within, is going in the near future and into the next expansion Midnight. There were quite a few interesting reveals, and thankfully, I had the opportunity to interview both Hazzikostas and Assistant Lead Quest Designer Mark Kelada. We covered a lot of ground, so without further ado, let's dive in.
Player Housing
The first thing I had to ask about was player housing. A significant portion of the community has been asking for it —well, for as long as World of Warcraft has been out and probably before then as well. Hazzikostas confirmed that player housing is a core feature of the Midnight expansion. However, since we are probably about a year out from the launch of that expansion, Hazzikostas couldn’t share more details than we saw in the brief tease. When I pressed on perhaps just sharing some core pillars or goals for player housing, he responded that they wanted to “spark some conversation amongst the community, so we can start to double check our own internal thoughts and see what people are most excited about and what they are hoping to see out of this system as we continue to work on it.”
To some, this might come off as Blizzard not knowing what they want to do or not having any concrete plans yet. However, revealing that they are committed to having player housing in Midnight but not releasing any details is a good plan regardless of how far they are in the design process. Before this announcement, the only people talking about player housing were the people who wanted it the most, and that’s great. The thoughts of those players definitely should be taken into account. After this announcement, even people who aren’t generally super interested in player housing are talking about it as well. All of this allows Blizzard to gather more information to hopefully design a system that will be enjoyable for the majority of players.
Undermine
Although I have enjoyed a few individual goblins in World of Warcraft, I’ve never enjoyed goblins in general. I made a one in Cataclysm, but I disliked nearly everything about their starting zone, so that didn’t last long. As a result, I’m not looking forward to the next patch a whole lot, but I’ll get through it as best I can. That said, I am very interested in the cartels fighting against each other.
At first, I imagined this to be similar to some old reps where earning rep with one faction would make other factions dislike you more. The Scryers and Aldor are the best-known example of this, but are by no means the only example. However, I also remembered the issues that those kinds of systems caused in the past. Mainly where there are power-related rewards and players feel they have to pick a faction they don’t like to be appropriately geared.
When I inquired about this Kelada said that the cartels would function somewhat similarly to how the pacts function with the severed threads. He continued, “the presentation is similar to that, but the spin is that it is like your core reputation but brought up more to be in front of the player. What that means is, through the different cartels, depending on which one you want to ally with, you’ll have different world quests available, you’ll have different characters that’ll be speaking to you to do those activities, you can earn different rewards in terms of cosmetics or in parts for your car that can customize it.” He also later mentioned that when you are allied with one faction you can pick up “side gigs” from the other cartels which will allow players to do tasks for some of the other cartels as well.
From the sounds of it, the rewards won’t be power-related, which relieving considerable pressure on players to make certain choices. If it does work like the pacts, where we can change who we support each week, that will also give us a lot more freedom than we have had with similar systems in the past. The idea of which cartel changing what world quests I have available and what NPCs I am working with also sounds like a great change. One of my main complaints with the Pacts is that the only difference between who I support is what extra action ability I get.
During the Undermined content patch, players will also gain access to a new ground mount in the form of a car. Similar to dragonriding in Dragonflight, this car will allow players to travel much faster than any previous ground mount and move in a very different way than we are used to. Additionally, there’s a host of customizations to be collected; some will be purely cosmetic, while others will allow players to change how their car handles. Kelada also mentioned there will be races for the car mounts, including challenge and reverse courses.
With all this focus on the new car mount, I was concerned there would be no flying in the new zone. Hazzikostas confirmed that there is no flying in the Undermine because the city's design isn’t conducive to it. However, Kelada also clarified, “In 11.1, it’s not just Undermine. We do have other locations in the world that you are going to, you’ll see it feed into the story and the narrative of it. In those locations, we aren’t restricting skyriding.”
I’m thankful for that clarification, though now I’m curious about other areas we’ll be visiting and why. Considering the new dungeon has to do with trying to prevent the Ringing Deeps from being flooded, I’d have to guess some of our time will be spent there. However, there is a potential we could find ourselves in some of the older zones as well.
Delves
The addition of delves has been a great boon overall for WoW. Even for players like me who do a lot of group content, I have still enjoyed running them now that their tuning has stabilized. With the 11.1 Undermined patch, we will be getting not only two new delves in the new zone, but our existing delves will also get a new goblin-themed path as well. Hazzikostas also confirmed that there will be new curios to collect for Brann, and he will also gain a tanking spec. He explained that the tanking spec for Brann is “particularly for healer mains out there; if they want to feel like they can still play their core role a bit more in the delve while they are solo, that should be a great opportunity for them.”
I was disappointed about Brann continuing to be the companion in Season 2 - there are so many other characters that it would have been fun to wander around in the dark with. Hazzikostas explained the decision to stick with Brann this way:
“Full transparency here, I think that when we first announced this system, and I think the slide said something along the lines of ‘your first season companion will be Brann,’ we did imagine we might introduce new ones in later seasons. As we began really working on undermine we started to think through the logistics of what that would look like and replacing your Brann progression with a new one, asking people to reset and start over. Is like, well, if you have a new level 1 companion, is that just going to feel like you lost something in a bad borrowed power sort of way? In just trying to navigate that there were no elegant solutions that presented themselves. And Brann still feels iconic and in the spirit of exploration. I think we can say we are going to change your companion on an expansion-over-expansion basis, but Brann will be your buddy for the remainder of The War Within, but with new rewards and upgrades to earn for him and new content to explore with him.”
As much as I am disappointed not to get a new companion, this line of thought does make sense. I hadn’t thought about needing to level up a new companion and how that might make delves feel frustrating again. Along those lines, I also wondered if this means there won’t be any new levels for Brann in Season 2, and Hazzikostas confirmed we won’t need to level Brann beyond the current cap.
Mythic+ in Season 2
The first season of any new expansion always feels rougher than the following seasons. So far, TWW has been no exception, and I’d even say it feels a bit rougher overall than I remember the first season in Dragonflight. The reasoning for this is obvious: In addition to all of the class, spec, and addition of hero talents, M+ also had a massive overhaul in terms of difficulty levels and how affixes work heading into this season. Most of these changes have been good, but there are still some significant pain points that are difficult to address during a season. With all that in mind, I wanted to check where Blizzard’s thoughts are heading into Season 2. Hazzikostas had a good bit to say about it:
“Several changes[were good] here. Blowing up the traditional affix system we had in place for a long time, I think overall, we’re happy with how that’s played out. The kiss/curse affixes that have upsides to them, but then give way to a static difficulty level for people who are just trying to push for the top rating, the leaderboards, the titles, who aren’t really looking for variety in their week to week gameplay, in a way that can kind of undermine the level competitive playing field that those folks are looking for. At the same time, I think, particularly with a new dungeon pool, and the start of a new expansion the challenge level for the dungeons was definitely high. We’ve made tweaks over the first month and a half or so to reduce some specific pain points in dungeons, as well as bump up the reward levels by making some of the higher tier crests more accessible.
“As we go into Season 2, we are definitely looking at ways to make the on ramp into Mythic+ a bit smoother. I think a lot of folks who spent the first couple of weeks of War Within gearing up in delves, and then made a transition to Mythic+, looked at the Mythic+ system and found that rewards wise that the natural starting point for them was actually pretty far along the progression track. Which honestly if you are not experienced with the dungeons at all, and you don’t really know the mechanics, starting at a Mythic 6 or 7 level, is not going to be the smoothest experience. That’s a lot of the feedback we’ve been seeing and hearing from folks, that the levels of dungeons that would give them rewards didn’t feel accessible. We’ll have more details on adjustments to how the way rewards rollout as we get closer to the Undermined PTR, we’ll want a lot of feedback and testing at that time. One of our main goals really is to smooth out that onramp into the system. I think we’re pretty happy with how it’s playing out at the Mythic 8/Mythic 10 and beyond high end, but there are definitely players who feel like they are getting stuck before that point.”
From what I’ve seen, the tension between the level of gear I can get by doing delves and how high of a key I need to get upgrades has a real disconnect. In the past, my main way of gear was through M+, so I would learn the dungeons through them and step up in what felt like a natural progression. I quickly realized I could not rely on my gear to carry me through a +7 or +8 for upgrades. However, when we do a +2 or +3, getting a three star upgrade isn’t generally difficult at all, even without the specific dungeon knowledge. So, I agree that the transition there needs some work, which may mean reducing the level of gear obtained from delves. Regardless, I’ll be interested to see what solution they come up with.
Story Mode Raiding
One of the more experimental features in The War Within is that for the first time, the final boss of the raid was available for solo players to tackle without needing to enter LFR or find a group to do other raid difficulties with. This has caused some issues with an expansion’s storytelling in the past because huge story moments often happen in raid, and watching a cutscene out of context with the raid doesn’t capture things very well. Seeing how this is such a great addition for solo players, I wondered if the team plans to continue with the story mode for the last bosses in raids.
Hazzikostas confirmed that we will continue seeing this as an option because there are so many players who just want to experience all of the story without grouping or having to deal with the mechanics we see in raids. Kelada further explained that, “with story mode in Undermined and Gallywix it also allows us as designers to give people a story that can end in a raid boss, because now we don’t have to have the expectation that you are doing this through a group.” While this doesn’t change for me, I’m excited that they are going to continue this for players who don’t raid at all.
All in all, the Warcraft Direct was well worth tuning in for, and the extra insights provided by Hazzikostas and Kelada helped clarify a lot of what we have to look for. Through Dragonflight and now The War Within the team has shown that they are watching and always looking for ways to improve things. I wasn’t expecting a new mount with different traversal mechanics in patch 11.1, but it sounds amazing. What are you looking forward to?
