During today's big Warcraft 30th anniversary celebration, Blizzard outlined the immediate future of World of Warcraft, and a variety of other projects. The major announcements revolved around Warcraft 1, 2, and 3: Reforged getting remastered versions, on top of major updates for Warcraft Rumble and Hearthstone.
For World of Warcraft: The War Within players, Blizzard offered a glimpse into the future of the game. We're getting a huge new patch dubbed Undermine(d), set in the goblin city of the same name. Undermine is a vast new subterranean city, complete with a new 8-boss raid experience with Gallywix as its ultimate villain. The patch will continue the story of Xal'atath and her efforts to subvert Azeroth itself, while also giving players new gear to hunt down and accolades to achieve.
For long time players, perhaps the biggest reveal / tease for World of Warcraft is the addition of Player Housing. In the next expansion, dubbed Midnight, players will finally be able to decorate their very own homes, complete with trophies acquired for various in-game feats. The tease has been a long time coming, since the feature was originally planned for the game over two decades ago, but has never materialized until now.
During the festivities, we spoke to game director Ion Hazzikostas as well as Assistant Lead Quest Designer Mark Kelada to learn a bit more about the future of World of Warcraft.
On Mythic+ progression, Hero Talents, and Delve rewards
Jez Corden, Exec Editor, Windows Central: At a high level, are you guys happy with how World of Warcraft: The War Within has been going so far? Particularly with regards to endgame progression, Mythic+ difficulty curve, and so on.
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Ion Hazzikostas, World of Warcraft Game Director, Blizzard: I think high level, I'm very happy and satisfied with how The War Within has been going. The narrative journey, the world building, the beginning of the epic Worldsoul saga — I think it's been great seeing people just embrace that, while beginning to speculate about what's going to come next.
Delves and Warbands so far has played out the way we've hoped. On Mythic+, I think that this was a season of experiments. We changed the way affixes work, the way progression is structured, and we have been iterating based on feedback. A big focus for the team right now is to smooth out some particular pain points in specific dungeons, while also looking at class balance. We also don't feel like we have a proper on-ramp into the system.
For a lot of players hitting level 8 Delves, you're getting very powerful rewards at that point. When you look across from there to Mythic+, it can feel like there's no point doing anything below a Mythic+7, and 7 and up is actually quite hard. If you're someone without experience of dungeons to begin with, +7 is not the best point of entry, and it certainly wasn't designed to be a point of entry, so we think some players are hitting a cliff wall. So we see a lot of people bouncing off that would have previously had a home in early Mythic+ tiers. So, for Season 2, that's one of the big things we're going to address there. It just wasn't something we could change in the middle of Season 1.
Jez: On that point, do you think the Mythic+ Crest system is working out how you'd like? Sometimes I feel like it's a bit opaque and confusing, even for me as a vet. For new players, I've found it hard to explain at times, haha.
Ion: The Mythic+ Crest gearing system meets almost all of our design goals, save for that clarity and intuitiveness. That is one area we want to focus on in terms of naming them, tutorialization, and so on. We want to make it more logical about what you shuold be doing with Crests. The idea is to give players of all play styles goals to work towards, with ongoing power advancements, beyond specific item drops. Crests are an important part of the tiered structure of World of Warcraft, helping sure that the best way to get stronger is to push into harder content, rather than just grind basic content massively, as we saw previously with Artifact Power and things like that. You should want to complete higher tier dungeons, but making it clearer on how to get there is something we want to address.
Jez: I noticed you have been addressing some things mid-season such as racial bonuses, which were recently updated. I wondered how you guys are feeling about the overall balance of the game right now, not only for racial bonuses, but also Hero Talents. Are there more passes to come in the near term? Should we expect that Hero Talent trees end up simply being a case of "one tree for AoE, one for single target" and so on, as is the case for some of them?
Ion: On racials, I think we are taking more passes at increasing the power of particularly underpowered races, such as the Draenei Light of the Naaru, for example. Things that just don't feel worth even clicking in the current meta. At the same time, we want to keep racial power levels to be low. Just above "pure flavor" is the goal. The race you play should be an expression of your identity and preference in that regard, then I think it's meaningful to have some mechanical flavor associated with different races based on their heritage or physical quirks. We don't want to be at a place where players feel forced to play a specific race. There are a couple of race/class combinations where, at least when it comes to min-maxing, are higher than we'd prefer them to be. Those aren't changes we'd make mid-season, though.
On Hero Talents, overall we're happy with how they're playing out. Of course there are many trees, many specs, many ability interactions. There are some where there isn't enough diversity in terms of choices, and others have some finicky aspects that we're going to iterate. It overall accomplished our goals, though.
The situation you describe is a big challenge for our combat team, regarding picking specific trees for specific situations like AoE and single target. On the one hand, some players enjoy changing their load outs to solve specific problems. Others may dislike it, though, because they feel a certain tree is an expression of their preference or aesthetic identity. "This is what I think is the coolest, and I want this to work everywhere." That's true for hero talents, and maybe even specs as a whole. We try to strike a balance between strengths and weaknesses. That's why we made Hero Talents and talents in general heavily flexible, moving from single target, to something more AoE-oriented for dungeons, and then more utility-focused for PvP. I think that's the direction class design will likely continue in.
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On story delivery, Undermine, and player housing
Jez: I feel like World of Warcraft's story delivery took a huge leap forward in terms of quality and delivery with The War Within, but my concern would be that it was probably also very expensive to deliver too ... should players continue to have increased expectations for World of Warcraft's story as we move into 11.1 Undermine(d) patch and more?
Mark Kelada, Assistant Lead Quest Designer, World of Warcraft: The goal is never to see a degradation in our story quality, certainly. In making 11.0, we wanted to make sure that our villains are on par with our heroes. Heroes are only as good as the villains, right? That's why we want to give Xal'atath a strong path through the story. What are the conflicts and successes that we can have? She grew from being trapped in a knife, and is now a focal point of the main story.
On Undermine, it's perhaps not what you might expect from a typical Goblin story, but it does connect to the main arc. We're not giving anything away today, but you will see how big characters from 11.0 feature into 11.1 in Undermine, and how the war between Gallywix and Gazlowe has begun playing out. I will say that we do want to take time to tell lighter stories too, in that vein, because you can create fatigue if we bludgeon you with heavy stories constantly.
Jez: It's music to my ears about the emphasis on villains, and I do feel like Xal'atath is one of the strongest World of Warcraft has had in years. You mentioned about the balance between heroes and villains, but many felt 11.0 with The War Within's launch was quite heavily Alliance-centric. How important is the Horde vs. Alliance narrative to the future of WoW?
Ion: I think narratively, there's no question that the Alliance vs. Horde conflict is not the primary theme of WoW at this stage. We dived very deeply into that for Battle for Azeroth, and there is a history of conflict and tensions. But the story has always been about the factions ultimately working together to battle a shared enemy to save Azeroth itself. We found increasingly that trying to shoehorn conflict into those stories, it felt dissonant for players. It's almost not realistic, and almost frustrating to watch the Horde and Alliance snipe at each other while Azeroth is potentially facing apocalyptic destruction. I think that matches how players think. We're making the game more cross-faction so that players can play with their friends regardless of server of faction. We still want the faction anchors, the thematic identity of playing Horde or Alliance, which is why we often hear feedback like "this story is too Alliance focused" or "too Horde focused." We don't swing the pendulum based on the need to tell faction-specific stories, and we think it's important to note that an elvish story doesn't necessarily need to be Alliance-associated, and Undermine in 11.1 doesn't necessarily need to be Horde-associated too. Goblins were a neutral faction long before the Bilgewater Cartel joined the Horde. Obviously Alliance characters like Anduin have been front and center right now, but other characters with other affiliations will come to the fore over the course of the story.
Mark: We are cognizant of the feedback of course, but the discussion often revolves around what cultures or characters are best conduits to tell aspects of the story as it develops. Gazlowe is a character players might recognize from Battle for Azeroth with a bit of Heroes of the Storm too, and now we have an opportunity to build him up beyond that legacy experience.
Ion: We can say pretty confidently that we didn't just do Undermine because we felt like "it was time to give goblins their spotlight," but rather really because we're already underground. What are some known locations from beneath the surface of Azeroth? Obviously, one of the big ones was the Nerubian Empire, which we'd barely seen. The second big one was, of course, Undermine. Figuring out how to lead the story arc to Undermine was an early challenge, but it would've been a horrible injustice to make an expansion underground and miss out on Undermine. It was a labor of love for everyone to pull together and figure it out. The humor, the intrigue, the "fun" that comes with goblin culture, and it's a really deep exploration. We're going well beyond the surface.
Mark: Undermine was a weird sort of turn, but the team was hyped to make it work. We wanted to follow the "rule of cool" while also making sure the story develops in a way that doesn't make people go "huh?" It's a cultural story, but we're pulling different Azerothian races in too, we want to serve players and the characters they're playing too. We're excited to go deeper on a culture when the story allows us to make sure we're doing it justice, and not just try to shoe-horn things into a position.
Jez: Just a quick one before we run out of time... I'm not going crazy right, you guys did just confirm World of Warcraft Player Housing, right?
Ion: Yes, it is a tease. I hope we weren't too subtle there. Player housing is coming in World of Warcraft: Midnight. We'll have a lot more to say on Midnight and housing in the year to come. We wanted to end our Warcraft Direct on player housing to start conversations and discussions, and listen to what people want to see most from it. We don't want to say much more about it for now, since our focus is on The War Within, but we can't wait to share more in 2025.
World of Warcraft's roadmap is looking bright
A mountain of fresh content is heading to World of Warcraft in the coming months. WoW: Classic has a new Season of Discovery to look forward to, in addition to totally fresh realms based on the vanilla experience. World of Warcraft retail is getting the big Undermine patch at the start of next year, with an expansion on the horizon with Player Housing as a headlining feature in 2025. Warcraft 1, 2, and 3 have been refreshed and updated on Battle.net, celebrating Blizzard's heritage. Warcraft Rumble is also coming to PC, and Hearthstone is getting new StarCraft-themed content as well.
As someone who has been playing for 20 years, it has been a long time since World of Warcraft truly felt like it was firing on all cylinders. Microsoft's acquisition of Activision-Blizzard has removed much of the old guard from the organizational equation, which has been felt as a change of direction for one of the world's most celebrated franchises. Long may it live! Thanks a ton for reading, and thanks to Blizzard for taking the time to answer some of our questions.
