World of Warcraft: The War Within is here, and so far, it has been incredibly promising.
Microsoft's Xbox division acquired World of Warcraft along with its purchase of Activision-Blizzard last year, and it coincided with a bit of a boom time for the game. Thanks to back-to-back solid expansion launches, I haven't been this hopelessly addicted to World of Warcraft in quite a long time. The volume of pro-player design choices Blizzard has baked into its maturing MMORPG has also seen legions of lapsed players return.
In my World of Warcraft: The War Within review, I praised the game's focus on improved story telling and reduced grind, allowing players to band their alternate characters together to share reputation, currencies, and even equipment. The game also now has soloable mini dungeons for those of us who don't have the time nor inclination to get into organized group World of Warcraft content. Blizzard has also extended the class fantasy, allowing players to further specialize their characters with "Hero Talents" inspired by classic Warcraft archetypes. However, some aspects of these features still need a bit of polish.
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World of Warcraft enters its 20th year in November, and Blizzard is celebrating WoW's 20th with a range of new content, including revamped equipment sets and a remastered old school dungeon. But between now and then, Blizzard is working hard to improve some of the new features it added to The War Within, and we caught up with Associate Game Director Morgan Day to learn a little bit more about what the immediate future may hold.
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On Delves, Hero Talents, and more upcoming changes
Jez Corden, Managing Editor at Windows Central: With Delves having been out for a few weeks now, what are the biggest takeaways and changes you're exploring for the near or long term? One big discrepancy I've seen in my own experiences is that my warlock has a very easy time solo'ing tier 8, but my disc priest has a very miserable time solo'ing tier 8, for example.
Morgan Day, Associate Game Director at Blizzard: It’s been amazing seeing everyone’s excitement for Delves, and the positivity around how flexible they are. We really want to continue to prioritize achieving our goal of making Delves a bite-sized piece of content that you can do in a quick 10 or 15 minutes, and a lot of our biggest takeaways have been focused on achieving those goals. We’ve learned a lot about tuning of the Delves at higher difficulty and the impact of solo vs. group play, as well as Brann’s impact on your experience depending on your role.
As you mentioned, the team is really focused right now on dialling in the tuning of delves across different roles and we’re actively discussing ways that we can help get the experience more aligned for your Disc Priest.
With Hero Talents, you've previewed a big rework of Dark Ranger, which has been well received by the community. Are there any other talent trees you're looking into for perhaps another pass? I feel both thematically and mechanically some trees are a lot stronger than others even now.
Dark Ranger is the big one for 11.0.5 and the 20th Anniversary update; we’re super excited for the update and the new visuals there! Keep an eye out in future updates for additional Hero Talent changes as well as visual updates, but for the immediate future outside of Dark Ranger we’re looking at making some adjustments to Rogue, Resto and Balance Druids as well as Enhance and Elemental Shaman. Additionally based on player feedback we’re also looking to make some further adjustments to the Shaman Ascendancy form that we had previously announced and updated that will be in the Anniversary update. Some of those updates to the Shaman forms are now visible in the latest PTR build.
On Warbands, story delivery, and updating old school assets
I've personally adored the Warband system, and it has made me feel like playing my alts is also beneficial for my main. How are you guys feeling about the way Warbands have landed? Could we see more features added there?
Great to hear you’ve been enjoying the Warband System! We view Warbands as an evergreen feature that will make WoW better forever. We feel it has transformed the way we build all of our features moving forward to ensure we’re considering whether we should “Warbandify” (I just made that word up) where it’s appropriate. While we’re excited with what we had to offer at the launch of The War Within, we want to continue to improve upon and add to the already strong foundations of Warbands.
We’ve been listening to player feedback to help drive the short-term additions and improvements we make to the system and are looking at things like adding filters to the character select screen so people with a bunch of alts can more quickly find their characters. We’ve also heard feedback about not being able to easily transfer currency if you have zero of that currency on the character you’re currently logged into, so we’re working to get a solution for that into the near future.
Longer term we still love the idea of adding more options for your camp screen and being able to change where your Warband is located on that screen. I’ve really loved seeing the community reaction as well as the fan art and community created camp screens that feel so thematic!
The Warcraft 20th anniversary coming up, as someone who has played since the beginning, I love what you're doing with the Tier 2 sets and I think most others do as well. Updating classic assets seems like an ongoing process. How do you approach updating classic assets, and how do you pick which ones to look at next? Since transmog, people seem more invested in their character's visuals than ever, I would say.
We spend a lot of time discussing this topic, and in terms of what we update it’s a delicate balance. We often are guided by the content we’re building, and the story we’re currently telling to make sure that it keeps the original intent. For the Tier two sets we felt like that was a great way to update something that is beloved by the community, but also retained the original design of those iconic sets.
Regarding future updates, it’s hard to say but we are always looking for opportunities, reading community feedback, and looking for ways to make WoW always feel fresh and revisiting exciting content from the past that still holds up today.
I want to really give you guys a shoutout for the delivery of The War Within's story. The cinematic treatment, abundance of voice acting, and "stay a while and listen" moments really added a ton of intrigue and depth this time around. How are you guys feeling about how that aspect of TWW landed? I think it has been a long time since I've been so intrigued by the mysteries Blizzard is weaving.
For the specific “stay a while and listen” moments, that really was inspired by wanting to tell these deep stories but also wanting to make sure people were able to play they wanted to. We have such a broad audience in WoW; some people are really geeked out by the narrative, where others just want to get to max level so they can do the super challenging content as quickly as possible.
In the past we might have built those quests to make you “Hear the story of X, Y, and Z thing” and we have gotten feedback that it could break the pacing of gameplay for some of our audiences. So, with The War Within we looked at this as an opportunity to continue that world building and developing the rich stories of the cultures and characters, but in a way that felt more like an opt-in experience.
We’re excited that it paid off, those were very much an intentional choice, and we were quite worried that people would miss out on that story, but that hasn’t turned out to be the case, which is awesome!
World of Warcraft is on a big upward trajectory
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A big thanks to Morgan Day for fielding our questions here!
World of Warcraft is experiencing a soft renaissance in my view, and while there are still plenty of issues to address, the game feels like it has been in a better place than it has been in years. Blizzard has begun focusing on permanent, evergreen additions to the game, rather than expansion-only features that get thrown away at the end. We've seen a greater alignment with how different cohorts of players play, offering potent challenges for high-end Mythic raiders, and accessible challenges for mid-core players in Heroic raids and Mythic+. For solo players, we've seen a bigger emphasis on story development and character delivery, as well as the first tier of solo-able Delve dungeons that offer truly powerful rewards.
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Of course, there's still some polish passes to address. I think healers have had it particularly rough this season for example, and some specs and hero talent trees have fallen quite far behind the pack, limiting player choice. There's still the on-going issue of the new player experience being a bit muddled and lacking compared to previous iterations of World of Warcraft. Also, the lack of playable ogres remains a big issue. Right? No? Just me? Anyway ...
In any case, World of Warcraft continues to be an example to be followed for the service video game industry, as it enters its next two decades. Long may it live, and may we get playable ogres sooner rather than later, ahem.
