It’s easy to forget, when reflecting on World of Warcraft’s mark on the gaming industry and pop culture, just how different the game has felt over its various iterations. With its consistent bi-yearly expansions over two decades pushing it to stay relevant in a dramatically different gaming scene to the one it launched to 20 years ago, WoW has been defined and redefined by several different eras of gameplay.
Whether it’s the ‘vanilla’ experience of pre-Cataclysm; the ‘new world’ experience of Cataclysm through to Legion, where Blizzard wrestled with updating WoW for a more modern audience; or the ‘borrowed power’ experience of Legion to Shadowlands, in which players needed to grind out content to stay relevant – each era had its highlights and pitfalls that have each sculpted and changed players’ perception of the WoW experience.
Within reach
Now, beginning with The War Within – WoW’s 10th expansion – Blizzard has for the first time tried to lay the groundwork for its next ‘era’ ahead of time, by announcing three expansions all at once in ‘The Worldsoul Saga.’ Blizzard has promised to iterate on WoW’s 20 year heritage, while building on the bold new development direction it undertook since Dragonflight launched two years ago.
While the game itself is certainly still recognizable today as WoW, the efforts of the team over the last expansion cycle to rapidly release fresh content, and respond to player feedback at breakneck (by WoW standards) pace, has breathed new life into what many believed could well have been WoW’s swansong following Shadowlands.
With The War Within, Blizzard is trying to harness this new energy and signal to the gaming landscape that WoW is still as relevant today as it ever was. And more than anything, that WoW has the staying power to celebrate many more anniversaries to come. Whether the team will succeed remains to be seen, but to find out more about WoW’s more immediate future, I sat down with World of Warcraft assistant design director Maria Hamilton at a pre-alpha preview for The War Within.
A new Warcraft saga
While Blizzard has long been clear that it plans WoW’s story at least two expansions in advance, this is the first time they’ve let players into that process by announcing a three-expansion saga. I was keen to find out more about that decision, and whether Hamilton felt it could potentially shackle the team to an idea, rather than being free to iterate on it away from prying player eyes and expectations.
“When we looked at the story we wanted to tell, we realized it wasn’t a single expansion story, it was three. Rather than just leaving little snippets of future stories, we wanted to be able to build up to this amazing epic thing. It just made sense to us. But while we might know the start, the path in the middle and the end of the story, we might still want to change some of the other middle bits,” she explains.
“We have our story figured out, but there’s some leeway there. Right now we’re working on concept art for the third expansion The Last Titan, for example, trying to figure out how it will look. For the second expansion, Midnight, we’re currently working on world building and figuring out how to map different areas. There's a lot of time for us to make changes as we go, really up to when we voice record – that’s really the only point in which we’re locked in.”
As many players can attest, WoW has never been the quickest to implement new content, or adjust to player feedback, which in recent years has seen it unfavorably compared to its more contemporary rivals in the MMO space, such as Final Fantasy 14. The first step in creating a more modernized WoW experience, then, was working out how to rethink the update cycle.
“With Dragonflight we wanted to try and find the right cadence for how rapidly we could deploy content,” Hamilton explains. “There’s reasons why we can’t just rush things out: there’s localization and voice recording, and plenty of things that simply take a chunk of time that we can’t really adjust for. But we figured out that our ideal cadence for updates was around eight weeks, which was still far faster than we’ve ever managed before. A lot of us also felt like we really wanted to communicate with the community more, so that’s something we’ve tried to embed.
“The other core change was not focusing on systems that went away at the end of an expansion, but rather focusing on evergreen ones and areas we can overhaul.” These ‘evergreen’ systems include Dragonflight’s ‘dynamic flight’, which in The War Within is being expanded to all flying mounts that players have collected over the years, as well as ‘warbands’ which allow players to make account-wide progress on reputations and collect transmogs using any of their characters.
There’s also been a deepening focus on Dragonflight’s redefined talent trees, and new to The War Within we will see ‘delves,’ a novel and fresh kind of content that showcases Blizzard’s desire to build new systems that will stand the test of time, while offering players a broader and more bespoke experience. Delves are 1-to-5 player, 10-15 minute mini dungeons with scaling difficulty, designed to cater to those players who dip into WoW for an hour or two, but who don’t want to commit to weekly raids or hardcore Mythic+ progression, and who aren’t interested in PvP.
Hamilton describes them as: “answering the issue of ‘hey, we have people that don’t have a lot of time to play, let’s give them something meaningful to do.’” She goes on to explain that while this is technically a The War Within box feature, it’s not purely a hook to sell the new expansion, but rather caters to their evolving playerbase. “They’re very much agnostic to the expansion, it was a problem we knew we wanted to solve. It didn’t actually matter what the expansion was, other than for how we were going to theme how we implemented them.”
Expanding on Azeroth’s offering
Catering for so many different playstyles is a tricky balance, though. WoW has a solid community of raiders, Mythic+ dungeon runners and PvPers, not to mention the thousands who simply log in to do outdoor world content, farm mounts or level alts through old content. All these players want to feel accommodated and catered to, and I was keen to hear how Blizzard walked that tightrope, especially around the release of a new expansion.
“Yeah, I mean we have always had to consider everyone’s needs with WoW, because the game has always catered to lots of different interests. For example, with the PvP contingent in the very early days - I’m talking Burning Crusade - we knew alongside the PvE content we wanted to introduce a capture the flag style gameplay mode that was unique for them.”
Hamilton says: “We’ve always tried to do things like that, but I think it has gotten easier over the years as we’ve gotten better at identifying who those people are, what that community is and how to better interact with them. So when we say ‘okay, we’re going to build a new PvP battleground’ we know how to reach them. The same can be said for Mythic+, or battle pets or anything else.”
The recent surprise addition of new battle royale-inspired game mode Plunderstorm, plus the announcement of WoW Remix, which will allow players to level confined to a specific past expansion (Mists of Pandaria is coming first, aptly named ‘Pandamonium’) with updated features and loot mechanics that evoke an experience more akin to a Diablo season than a WoW event, mean players will have more ways than ever before to experience Azeroth. And that’s not even mentioning WoW Classic Cataclysm and all of its intricacies.
“Now we have the back-end tech built, we have the ability to build separate modes into the WoW menu, like we did for Plunderstorm and like we will with Remix. It gives us the opportunity to experiment a bit and get a sense of reception among players. That’s one of the biggest benefits of an online game in my opinion,” comments Hamilton. Events like these would’ve once been selling points of a new expansion, rather than mid-expansion cycle surprise announcements – perhaps indicative of Blizzard’s new ethos to WoW content.
Blizzard certainly have a tricky task ahead of them with The War Within, trying to convince players that they’ve learned from their past mistakes and that WoW’s development has turned a corner, with fast-paced response to player concerns and feedback, while at the same time attempting to demonstrate that WoW has a place in today’s gaming marketplace. Whether The War Within will herald the start of a new Warcraft generation that will last yet another 20 years, though, remains to be seen.
