World of Warcraft, Blizzard’s long-running MMO, is nearing its twentieth anniversary. As part of its celebration, Blizzard Entertainment is launching the game’s tenth expansion, The War Within. As we inch ever closer to the expansion’s launch, Blizzard held a press event to check out the alpha version of the expansion early to test drive Delves, Warbands, and get a look at Khaz Algar’s first zone, The Isle of Dorn. We got to sit down in a group interview with World of Warcraft‘s Production Director, Michael Bybee, and Senior Content Designer II, Sean McCann, to talk about our first steps on Khaz Algar and into the Worldsoul Saga itself.
When first introduced, Delves, the new pillar of PvE content, was pitched as mysterious. Players would encounter something new whenever they enter one. However, while playing the alpha, I noticed that very little changed whenever I re-entered the delves. I asked the developers how Delve updates would be approached and the anticipated frequency of updates. Sean McCann confirmed, “We’re thinking maybe every day, and that is going to be based on what feels good. Like, we have the world quest rotation of every three days. That might be too long for this, we have to see. We have kind of small things that will change each time that aren’t really groundbreaking, but some of it, like the composition of groups, might change, as well as easy things like locations and the treasures, what the treasures give, and things like that. That’ll change moment to moment, every time you go to run it (Delves).”
“In terms of when it changes to be the example that we gave of like, ‘Hey, you’re working with the Arathi now’. that’s probably going to be more on every day when you get to max level. But again, that is the thing that as we’re testing it,” he added.
McCann continued to reiterate that the frequency will be based on player feedback. “If we’re hearing that, ‘Hey, I want it to change more often or doesn’t change soon enough,’ we can work with that. We just want to make sure it doesn’t feel we want to make sure that you understand what’s happened in the Delves, and it doesn’t feel like it’s complete chaos in there. [We will] be balancing out through alpha and better based on everyone’s feedback.”
As for the immediate, I asked about what players can expect in The War Within in terms of new content. Particularly if we should expect new Delves to be a part of major patch releases. In recent expansions, we got new content like clockwork with major patches consisting of a new zone, new raid, and new world content, followed by minor patches full of extra world events and interesting minigame-like content. In other words, I asked the team how Delves fit into the patch cadence that players have come to expect.
McCann confirmed that Delves will be coming in future patches, but their forms may differ based on player feedback, “We’re having those discussions right now about the Delves. There are plans to have new Delves going forward. You’ll see how we evolved over the years based on players going, ‘Hey, this felt good. [Or] that didn’t feel good with that.’ And so we’re working closely with the dungeon team on that. But you can bet there will be more Delves in each patch.”
Speaking on general content cadence and what players can expect, Bybee added some additional information. “More broadly, on future content, I think I would just say that there is no formula that we think works because the reality is player tastes change. What other games people are playing, what’s happening in World of Warcraft changes. And so what we try to do is pay attention to what people are giving us feedback on and what we think people want most, and then continue to do that.
What I can commit to is that we will continue to deliver content. We liked the content cadence that we had for Dragonflight. And we want to keep up something like that, with regular drops of content with regularly telling the community what we’re actually going to release ahead of time, they’re not surprised by it, except in special cases like Plunderstorm. And then just generally like making sure there’s always something to do right around the corner.”
As for the other new expansion feature, hero talents, I asked how they were developed and how class design philosophy changed in this process. Whenever reworks of classes or specializations were announced, feedback was quite polarizing with fans either loving the updates or hating a specialization that already felt forgotten. The biggest fear with hero talents from my perspective was how they were created, particularly with some pieces of hero talents refusing to be let go until it’s too late like some past expansion features.
Bybee confirmed hero talents are a team effort with the community, “I think we’ve demonstrated how we’re trying to do that this time. But let me just give you a little bit of background. As we were coming out of Blizzcon, and we just announced so much about The War Within and the hero talents and everything else, one of the first things the design team started pushing for is, ‘Hey, we need to get the talent trees out to the players so they can give us feedback.’ They were very insistent. And we’ve published a whole series of blog posts with specific details on most, not quite all, of the hero talent trees specifically. So we get your feedback.”
Elaborating further on how the current design philosophy of class design is being approached, Bybee talked about how community feedback is being approached to ensure class fantasy and fun are achieved. “I can tell you 100 percent, for sure that the class designers on this game, they live to understand how the community is reacting to this. If it feels sometimes like things are being designed in a bubble, that is not intended. The class designers have been not just publishing those blogs about what the hero talents are.
But they really engage with the community. They listen to feedback. We’ve made changes and push those back out to the community as well to say, ‘Hey, we heard what you said, here are some changes we made. ‘What do you think about this?’ I think that they’re getting better. One of the things that changes now that we’re shifting into an alpha model is that instead of blogging about the hero talents, we’re actually just going to push them into the alpha where people will have access to be able to play with the talents and give us feedback on how they’re feeling. And we’ll continue to make changes all the way up until ship to make sure that what players get in the end really fulfills that fantasy and is built basically from the ground up with community feedback in mind.”
An interesting thing I noticed in the new capital city was the presence of the Trading Post vendor. Since their release, the Trading Post (World of Warcraft‘s form of a free monthly battle pass) can be found in either Orgrimmar or Stormwind. I asked the team about their move to put a Trading Post in the new city as well as moving other critical items like the auction house to the new expansion’s hub. We also discussed making sure older cities don’t become forgotten. Bybee told me that this is something they watch and balance very carefully,
“We consider that it’s one of the biggest things we talk about when we talk about what services to put in a capital city like Dornagal on the Isle of Dorn. We want to make sure that new capital cities feel vibrant and alive and like the place where you want to be. But we want to make sure that when you go back to Orgrimmar or Stormwind, it doesn’t feel like a ghost town. Some of the decisions we’ve made in the past about when to put things in the capital cities have been driven exactly by that.
We also have to balance that with player feedback, that people don’t like having to fly back for just one thing where they feel like they’re being forced. And we try to make it feel like it’s natural. Maybe there are events that are happening in Stormwind to make it so that it actually feels like you want to be there you want to participate in the Noblegarden event that just happened or something like that. So, yeah, definitely a balance. And, you know, we’ve tried different things over the years, and you can continue to expect us to do that and and to respond to feedback to try to make it better.”
When asked the team about that and if there have been any changes to the storytelling ethos leading into The War Within and The Worldsoul Saga, Bybee explained that a story length does not restrain them. “First of all, when you think about the campaign and the Isle of Dorn being the beginning of the campaign, when we sit down and plan these out, we don’t do it in terms of like, ‘Hey, this first zone needs to be exactly this long. Then the next one needs to be exactly this long, etc.’ It’s more about what is the story we’re trying to tell. What you’re seeing in this first zone is the introductory experience to the entirety of the expansion, which, a lot of what’s going on with this expansion is underneath the surface, underneath the Isle of Dorn.”
Bybee continued, “There’s a lot more to tell that you haven’t been seeing. But as players delve into the following zones, there will be a lot more story, and then it’s really important to be able to emphasize the addition of those cinematics, the addition of having the max level full campaign at the end of it, we feel pretty strongly like a very compelling story. We’re pretty excited about it. And as you mentioned, there’s a whole expansion, introductory experience that we have intentionally not shared at this time, because we’re just trying to make sure that that piece of the story is something that all players get a chance to experience together when the expansion unlocks.”
Finally, I asked Bybee and McCann what they are both most excited about for The War Within, which they both think hasn’t been talked about enough yet. Many developers may have a favorite thing that they love after working on a game for years that can be overlooked by the “back of the box” feature list. And for me, it’s always fun to hear exactly what they are most proud of or love most of their new release, no matter how small of a feature or inclusion it is.
McCann talked about the dirigible, the customizable mount reward from Delves, and a special interaction with Brann many players may never see, “It’s the Delvers dirigible because I love customization on things. And just all the cool things that we kind of came up with were when we pitched. Can we just do XY and Z? The art team was like, sure, how about ABCDE F and G also with that? I think every now and then, I’ll just look at our webpage and see all the customizations that we have on our internal page, and I’m like, That is so cool. I can’t wait to have that on live. For me, that’s what I’m super excited about. And then I think just a lot of the little things that we’re going to be doing with Brann. The designer working on Brann’s behavior put a thing that if you go afk, and you come back, Brann, if there is a wall near, will walk over and just kind of lean on it while he’s waiting for you. Trying to get a lot of those like little behaviors in there, that you’re like, I may never see Brann do that. But it’s there he’ll do it is something that we’re all really excited about on the dev team.”
As for Bybee, he is most excited about all the work the team has done in converting most flying mounts to work with dynamic flying as well as a rock sheep players will find in The Isle of Dorn, “The first one is a little bit of a bigger thing. The second one is smaller, but I thought it was a really nice touch. The first is when we first started talking about the dynamic flight feature, you think of that on the surface, we’re going to take this awesome method to get around the world that we introduced in Dragonflight. We’re going to make that available on a lot of the Flying mounts that you already had. That sounded great. Frankly, from a production perspective and scope perspective, there was a lot of anxiety about how much time that was going to take.
“Initially, it was scoped to be a much smaller set of flying mounts. And one of the things we’re really excited about is that it was the artists and animators working on it, they were like, ‘We’re gonna find a way to make this be as true as possible for as many mounts as possible.’ It’s almost every flying mount in the game now will have dynamic flight. And that is entirely because our team said, You know what, we think we can do this, we’re going to try and find a way to make it possible. And they streamlined their pipeline, and they figured it out. And I think that is the best thing for the players. Because it just feels great to do everything from Mimiron’s Head to every single drake that you’ve ever collected across the 20 years of playing this game. Just that little detail of this team pushes hard to make awesome content for players because they really care. And that’s just one example.”
Bybee continued with an adorable story about a creature that I never considered during my playthrough of the Isle of Dorn, rock goats. “Another example that I think is really cool. Fid you all see the sheep in the Isle of Dorn with the flowers on them. I don’t know, maybe you maybe you miss them, if you get a chance to check them out in the hillsides. Wander around, I think the first small city that you go to after Donagal, there are a bunch of these just really awesome rock sheep. They basically are a little bit like earthen. They’re made out of stones, but they’ve got grass growing on them and flowers on the grass. And they’re just sheep wandering around the hillside, and they just look incredible and fun.
The thing that is cool about those sheep is that they were added to the game by something. We do a hackathon project as a team every year where we give the team free rein to build whatever they want, come up with cool ideas, etc. Then, we review those and talk about what makes sense to put into the game. That sheep is a hackathon project that somebody on the team thought, ‘This would be cool’, wasn’t a planned thing. It wasn’t something anybody asked for. It’s just some artists on the team said, you know, what I think would be awesome is I’m gonna make the sheep, and they made that, and that got into the game, and it’s incredible. And I love again that attention to detail and the team’s passion.”
What is clear from our conversation is just how much more community-driven the team has become. Every new mechanic being introduced in The War Within is approached from a community-focused standpoint and made to be adapted with community feedback. Plus, the team’s passion is palpable in what I’ve been able to experience so far on the alpha Isle of Dorn. As mentioned in the preview, The War Within feels like the beginning of a new era for World of Warcraft.
World of Warcraft: The War Within will release later in 2024 on PC and Mac.
