This year marks the 20th anniversary ofWorld of Warcraft, as well as the arrival of theWar Withinexpansion. First revealed last fall, the new release will add a host of features to the game, from expansive new zones for players to explore to a myriad of quality of life improvements. It’s the first of three expansions set to come out as a part of theWorldsoul Saga, atrilogy planned for theWoWfranchise.
There are many innovative ways developers have added more depth to the long-running game. A new race, the Earthen, has been introduced, Delves now allow fans to engage in shorter-form gameplay, Warbands give the option for account-wide progression between characters, Hero Talents offer more ways than ever before to progress and improve, and many more excitingfeatures have arrived withThe War Within. If this first expansion is any indication of what’s to follow, fans have a lot to look forward to in the future from the franchise as well.
BlizzCon 2023 World of Warcraft Interview: Maria Hamilton & Kristy Moret
Two formative leads on World of Warcraft’s worldbuilding discuss their design principles, in advance of The War Within’s release sometime next year.
Screen RantinterviewedWorld of WarcraftAssociate Design Director Maria Hamilton and Lead Software Engineer May Flores-Garcia at Gamescom to discuss the process behind designing new areas, fitting the Earthen into the existing lineup of races, and the biggest ways fans can expect thegame to change withThe War Within.
Crafting A New WoW: Trilogy
Beginning An Epic Three-Part Sage With The War Within
Screen Rant:When you have such a large new area, an undertaking that big with something like this expansion, how do you even begin knowing where you want that new area to go artistically and in terms of the experiences that it’s offering players?
Maria Hamilton: When we’re planning out a new expansion, we are thinking a lot about what our story is and where we want to take the players. In the case of The War Within,this is the first chapter of an epic saga trilogy, so we knew that we wanted to first go underground. It was very important. This is resolving a thread from a while ago where a sword was plunged into the planet, and we wanted to delve down there.
When we thought about that, we thought, “Well, we better develop the technology that we need to make it so that we can make underground areas feel good and feel right.” We contacted May’s engineering team for assistance with that, and I’m sure she’ll have some things to say in a moment about that, but we were aware that underground spaces can make people feel claustrophobic.
We wanted to explore ways to make sure that that descent was fantastic - it didn’t feel like being underground. It didn’t feel tight and constrained.We also heard players' feedback about an underground area we tried in Dragonflight called Zaralek Cavern, and wanted to consider all the things that they had to tell us about that experience. That’s where we started.
May Flores-Garcia: As Maria said, once design knows what they want, the direction they want to go, we start thinking about what it is that we need on the technical side to actually get that feeling that they’re looking for. In this case, for the underground zones, there were a couple of new techs that we had to look into and implement. One that we’re calling airlock, which is actually something that allows us to have this kind of seamless transition between zones without a loading screen.
It is one of the things that we wanted, when you go from the outside to the underground, that it just looks like you are just going there, no loading a screen -very, very seamless. It really helped with the feeling of, “This is an actual world that’s cohesive together.” Another one, we have this crystal in the middle that actually brings the light into the zone. That is another aspect where we have to be like, “Okay, do we have the tech to do that?” We kind of do, but not for this kind of setup, so that is when engineering is looking into what you need to create for the expansion.
Similarly, in that vein, there’s obviously the brand-new race as well of the Earthen. When you’re introducing a new race into this existing group of races that are in the world, how are you managing making them feel unique and special with the new things that they’re letting players do, but also feeling like they’re cohesive and not too overpowered or too different from everything that exists?
Maria Hamilton: There’s so many different groups that are involved in making a new race, from the artists that are conceiving the look and getting the scale right and all the possible customizations, so players can feel unique and different, to the animators that are giving us cool moves that fit that kind of new race. In the case of the Earthen, they’re heavy, blocky, stone and mineral-encrusted, gem-encrusted creatures, so making those animations look and feel right.
Part of that effort, narratively, is to set up some backstory and help us understand their place in the world. In this case, it was all about having been created by the Titans, given specific edicts, specific things that they were to do in the world, and then left to their own devices for far too long. The Titans haven’t come back, andnow they’re starting to question whether they should really be doing these things. They’ve lost a lot of expertise and memory of what they used to do long ago. It’s just building that culture up from scratch and thinking about: what makes this an appealing and interesting race of people? How do they fit with our story?
The Titans are key to the story of Azeroth, so we go into a lot of depth, a lot of detail. Then, when the art teams go out there, they start thinking about: what are the appropriate props, and what are the appropriate types of objects that they would use in their everyday life? For example, the Earthen are stone, they like warmth, that’s appealing to them, they bathe in hot springs. You’ll see them sitting in bubbling hot springs, it’s kind of healing for them, and entertainingly, the beds that they rest on look like barbecues to us.
I don’t think we’ve done anything like this before in terms of planning something to span such a long time. Personally, I’m very, very excited to see how this goes and see how people react. - May Flores-Garcia
Another exciting concept to this is Delves, which is a fun way for players who are busier to still be able to get bursts of playingWorld of Warcraft. Can you talk a little bit about where that idea first came from and where you’re hoping to see it go once it becomes available to players?
May Flores-Garcia: I think for us, one of the things thatwe’re trying to focus on a lot is to make the game accessible for any kind of player, to give something to do for everyone. For a long time, I think we have been focusing a lot on a player that really loves raiding, people that really likes PvP, but not really a whole ton on people who, as you say, may not have a lot of time, may just have 15 minutes to do something particularly quick, and maybe solo players as well. For us, I think Delves was a way to give something that players that like to be more solo players, a little bit more casual, could do on their own or a group of people in their own time.
Maria Hamilton: Yeah, I’d say alsowe keep an eye on what players are doing and what players enjoy, and we have pretty good data on who’s engaged and who’s less engaged, and there was a real opportunity here recognizing that a lot of folks just don’t have as much time. That’s part of what made us think, “Oh, we should do something for those folks.”
When you first had that thought of wanting to make a sort of shorter form experience, did it always look like Delves do now, or did it go through a lot of iterations in that regard?
Maria Hamilton: I mean, we always iterate. Design is all about iteration, where we’ll try something and change it, try something, and we’ll change it, until we get it feeling where we really want it. After we get some feedback on it, we might change it again. That’s normal. What we wanted from Delves, the goals for Delves were really, again, that shorter experience, that experience where someone could play solo, or they could play with their friends; if they chose to go solo, that was fine, they could do that.
We want it to be progressive, so you could unlock things that make it easier for you to do this as your gear gets better, you’re able to make it harder, you can choose a difficulty rating and add more challenge. It was sort of your ability to control it yourself. Then, of course, on the rewards front, we talked a lot about:there’s different kinds of motivations for players. Many players are motivated by rewards, but the types of rewards that motivate them are different.
For some folks, it’s about getting cool looks that let their character stand out. For others, it’s all about power, it has to be a power object, so a lot of adjusting happened there as well. As May mentioned, because we have the Great Vault, folks that are interested in power have the opportunity to pick up that power that way. We could really rely on rewards in the Delves themselves being less of a power sort of thing.
Big Improvements Coming To WoW With The War Within
Warbands, UI Improvements, & More
Warbands is also a game changer, and it’s another way you’re sort of blending this quality of life improvement with stuff that will really contribute to gameplay at the same time. Are Warbands something you guys have known you wanted to do for a while in the game?
May Flores-Garcia: I don’t know for a while, but one of the things iswe’ve been listening a lot to player feedback, and one of the things we really want to make sure of is that we’re respecting a player’s time. I think Warbands makes sense for us to do right now. I think it has kind of always been in our minds too. We need to do something for those who really, really like playing with multiple characters. It has been an exciting picture to work on.
Maria Hamilton: Yeah, I would say as we developed content, and we saw that players kind of wanted to pick up and continue with the next character and the next character, and didn’t necessarily want to replay the same things or raise the faction on both characters. They wanted to do it just on one, or have both of the factions combine into one thing. We started talking about Warbands, we realized,“Gosh, this would be not only a great quality of life, butit helps keep the content fresh.”
In terms of, as you mentioned, it’s the first triad of a really cool trilogy that you’re setting up with this first one. Does you feel any unique pressure when this is laying the foundation for this story that you’re looking to tell over these next several years?
Maria Hamilton: I mean, I don’t know that I’d call it pressure. There’s a certain sort of excitement about getting people interested in some of the things we’re keeping mysterious, and it’s about providing enough information that people start to guess or start to try to predict what will happen, because that’s a happy community, a community that’s trying to figure things out. When we sat down to talk about the Worldsoul Saga, we had our high level plan, our high level beats. We know where we want the story to go, we know what threads we want to pull forward from the past. We know where we want to create some new characters and bring in some old characters.
We had that high level plan, and we needed to pace everything appropriately, but also make sure each expansion was in and of itself a complete story and interesting. Trying to figure out how that would break down, that was challenging.I don’t think we’ve done anything like this before in terms of planning something to span such a long time. Personally, I’m very, very excited to see how this goes and see how people react. We’ve had really good feedback and really good reactions in our beta to this.
People were already speculating and getting excited. I think we’ve got a wonderful antagonist in Xal’atath, whose motives are pretty unknown to players, but she’s intriguing. Some of them feel like they have a connection to her because they happened to play a Shadow Priest in Legion, and so they dealt with her when she was in a knife, so it’s led to an interesting dynamic amongst community members -some who feel she’s a friend and some who feel that she’s not. I would say that there’s excitement about engaging in something that’s this large, but also in having the time to do it, freeing really.
Obviously, this expansion is bringing a lot of big changes and improvements and additions to the game, but I’m curious from both of your perspectives, if there are any smaller-scale changes that maybe haven’t been as hyped up to players in promotional materials for the expansion, but that you personally are like, “I like that little thing that we put in there. I’m really excited for that. I think players will appreciate that”?
May Flores-Garcia: I kind of want to say Skyriding, but I feel like maybe that this is one of the things that we have actually been talking about, mostly because it is just great that we’re able to extend the tech now. Because player feedback - people have loved dragon riding, sonow we want to bring it up in another scale.
But something that is a little bit minor that I don’t think we ever really talked too much about is when it comes to the story, one of the things that my team actually works a lot with is with the tool that allows us to create what we call RTCs, which is real-time cinematics. As Maria’s team actually wants to emphasize certain points in the story, sometimes we need to add more into that tool. Recently we started adding more with how we can deal with cameras. One of the latest cinematics with Malfurian, some people may remember it, actually had this moment where the camera rotates around them, which I think was a really, really good thing. It’s the kind of small improvements that we are also doing in the tech overall.
Maria Hamilton: One of the pieces of feedback we’ve heard quite a lot and were really eager to approach is thatsome players feel terribly intimidated playing with others, especially dungeons and raids and things like that. But those players might be deeply engaged in the lore and really interested in the story, and our dungeons tell stories too, they’re pertinent, and so they were feeling left out. The ability to have the follower dungeons that let players play solo with followers and get the story of the dungeon and understand it made it possible for us to actually have one of the dungeons in the main campaign.
Becausenow I didn’t have to worry that there’d be players who felt they couldn’t do the story because they didn’t want to do a dungeon with other people- that was huge for me, I was very excited about that. Similarly, we have players who don’t like to or are uncomfortable raiding or feel frustrated by raiding, and they might wait for many weeks before they’re able to somehow get into a small raid and see the conclusion of the story. We were able to build out story mode, so story mode will allow those players again to go in solo and get that conclusion of the story, which is really important for storytelling.
I’m really happy about that, and I don’t know that that’s been talked up very much, but for a certain group of players I think it’s a big deal. They’re going to get a chance to experience some of these things in a more comfortable way, and I think that’s great. We also have hada lot of UI improvements. I know we’ve talked about it generally, but our UI and UX team have been working super hard on finding ways to standardize, to make it more clear.
We’ve got some amazing new filtering capabilities on our map, so depending on what kind of content you enjoy, you can turn on and off filters. The key is not to forget that you did that, because then you’ll be like, “There’s nothing to do.” You have to remember, “Oh yeah, I set that filter to say, ‘only show me this.'” [Laughs] But there’s just some great useful tools for you to find what you’d like to do, so I think that’s another good one.
