Six years have passed since I last set foot on the virtual soil of Azeroth. Three additional expansions have further broadened the world, and piled more lore on the never-ending battle between The Alliance and The Horde. With the seventh expansion, Battle for Azeroth, slated for release this upcoming August, I had the opportunity to sit down for a short interview with two of the current World of Warcraft developers and find out what’s new in the world of Azeroth.
Marooners’ Rock: “So in general, what’s new in WoW? It’s been about six years since I last played, why is this a good time to come back?
Blizzard: Specific to what we’re showing here, and with the new expansion, Island Expeditions is a new feature that’s meant to highlight the core of this new expansion: Horde versus Alliance. You have these two factions that everyone who has ever played World of Warcraft understands are opposed to each other. It’s built in right at character creation. But then once you get into the game, those two factions butting heads has almost always been stuck in PvP. But what if we built a feature where you could go to an uncharted island with a treasure map, and arrive with a couple of your buddy heroes, and now you’re facing off against a new type of creature in World of Warcraft. Something that isn’t like the spiders and the wolves that just run up and bite you, but these are thinking, strategic personalities, really, of the other faction. There’s six different teams on each side, and they each represent sort of different types of races and ideas in World of Warcraft. So Island Expeditions really is that feature that exists to help sell that story again. Why are we fighting? Oh, right we’re fighting over Azerite, this new substance.
Lady Sylvanas is as tough as ever.
Now if you haven’t following the story up to this point, a giant sword was plunged into Silithus, and Azeroth herself has been wounded, some would say mortally. And in doing so, this power source (Azerite, ed.) has started bubbling up all over the planet. We’re not quite sure what it can do yet, but both sides start gathering it and inspecting it to figure it out. In Battle for Azeroth, Island Expeditions is one way that you’re going to find this Azerite, but you’re also going to use it to power up your armor and your gear through this amulet that’s been given to you.
And that’s just one life-sized chunk of what’s in store with Battle for Azeroth, and that’s why we’re showing Island Expeditions here. Mainly to show that this is conflict without it being something that you’ve seen before. It’s not like cueing for a battleground (or getting ganked on a PvP server while mining ore, Ed.).
Azerite has kind of become the catalyst that has re-invigorated the conflict between the Horde and the Alliance. The conflict has always been there, and we’ve always been at each other’s throats, but every time it starts to come to a head in the past, some new Big Bad will emerge like the rise of the Burning Crusade, or the Burning Legion again. But as we’ve seen with the cinematic and the events leading up to the Battle for Azeroth, there’s events that are going to take place which will further fracture the two factions. Like we saw with the battle for Lordaeron and Teldrassil , the Eastern Kingdom has been painted blue for the Alliance, and Kalimdor has been painted red for the Horde. And now we have this giant body of water between us.
What does that mean? Obviously we need big fleets. We need a new naval presence to be able to wage this war and win. So where do we turn? Obviously we turn to the greatest fleets that have ever existed on Azeroth, the Zandalari and their armada. So the Horde travel to Zandalar to learn about them and try to bring them into the fold as an ally. Meanwhile, the Alliance turns to Kul Tiras, which is where we’ve heard of Jaina’s mother and the Proudmoore clan there. So we have to go there. And not only do we have to go there, but we have to find Jaina. Because she took off for a while, and everyone’s wondering where she went. We have to follow those threads that have maybe been put to the side for a while and really get back to that conflict that’s at the core of World of Warcraft, and continue to drive it forward.
Also, this is really exciting, because this is the first time that I can remember where we’ve done a new expansion and there are mirrored continents for each side to level up through. So with the Horde, you’ll level up through Zandalar, and learn about the different conflicts taking place throughout this continent. But there’s also the continent of Kul Tiras, where the Alliance will level through. And those are exclusive. So the Horde will level through one, and the Alliance will level through the other and it gets back to that feeling that we’ve had before. Like back when I was leveling my Forsaken Warlock and going out into the Wetlands for the first time. Where you go out there as a Forsaken and it’s like “I’m not supposed to be here. Maybe I should turn back.”
So with Legion we had this idea of the Class Order campaign, where each class learned more about their class as they leveled up, and it brought them together. Now in Battle for Azeroth we have what we call the War campaign. This is the story that we’re telling as we go through the different zones as you’re leveling. But it’s also about going into the other side’s zones, making incursions, setting up base camps, so that later on, when you hit max level, you have these base camps that are a jump off point now. So there’s a lot going on, obviously, as you’ve heard.
Marooners’ Rock: For a returning player, would you suggest that they make a new character to experience everything, or should they go back and play one of their favorite older characters and bring them up to speed?
Blizzard: So leading up to Battle for Azeroth, we’re coming out of this point with Legion where characters have become emissaries to these new cultures. And in doing so, we’ve been able to take our identity as “For the Horde” or “For the Alliance” and help other people kind of see where they might align. So when you ask that question of what should I do, how do I get back in, you don’t have to wait for Battle for Azeroth to do that. You can jump right in now, because we have opened up the ability to play more allied races. And you get to sort of experience the story from their perspective of “Hey, I want to be a Dark Iron Dwarf”, or “Hey, I want to play a Blade Elf for the first time.” So they themselves have their own unique perspective on the situation and they are having to make that. So you get to play through that decision of “Are we Horde or are we Alliance” from new perspectives.
Allied races is actually a pre-order feature of Battle for Azeroth, so once you’ve unlocked that, then you can try out all these Allied races. You get the chance to learn who are the Nightborne, or who are the High Mountain Tauren, and how do I bring them into my faction? They’ll have some things that you have to do to prove your worth to them. You’ll have to play through some of the questing so that you can earn the ability to bring them into the fold so that they trust you.
On top of that, there’s some other really cool things, like Boost. Returning players who pre-order Battle for Azeroth have the ability to boost an existing character up to level 110, so that when the expansion comes out, they can immediately experience the new content. Or if you want to keep playing your old character as is, or even start a new one, we recently introduced something during Legion that we call a scaling world. So as you level through Legion, you can pick whatever zone you want to go through. So where it used to be that you’d go to this zone first, and this zone after that, now those zones have a sense of scaling. So you can level through a zone, and go from start all the way through to the end if you want and progress at a reasonable rate, whereas in the past quests would start to turn green and then grey as you leveled past them, so you’d be going “I guess I should be leaving, but I’m pretty interested in what’s going on.” So that’s a big change we’ve made recently that’s great for returning players.
Another thing that we did is that with scaling, it’s a lot easier to pick and choose how to go through stuff. You don’t have to do everything. You can say “I want to replay Burning Crusade, but I really don’t want to do Wrath of the Lich King.” (or skip playing through the Badlands again! Ed.) You can have a unique experience that lets you tailor for your character what makes sense. As you get to the end of the new experience, if you don’t boost, you’ll be ready with the context and the understanding of how this battle came about so you’ll be ready when August 14th comes around and we unlock the Battle for Lordaeron, you don’t have to wait. You’ll be ready to go and can dive right in to the epic story.
One of the other cool things with the zones now is that they scale to the team. Playing with family or friends now, you don’t have to worry about getting too far apart, dragging a group down. There’s still level ranges for each continent, but they’re very broad. You don’t have to feel bad about sleeping any more.
Marooners’ Rock: If you do choose to boost, will it be an intuitive return to the front lines for a player who hasn’t been in the game for a while?
Blizzard: One of the things we added in Legion was a class trial, where we can show you “Okay, this is how your class works, this is what you do” and you can go through that if you don’t remember. Additionally when you use boost, there are still implements of the story that you will have to go through, so that you don’t miss the big story beats.
Marooners’ Rock: So respeccing is a lot more forgiving there?
Blizzard: Absolutely. And I really want to emphasize, those Class Trials are really there for “I want to jump into the front lines, but I haven’t played this character in a while, what do these buttons do again?” So I think we’ve really made it easier to jump in and have the opportunity to do some tutorials and really get a feel for how your class works now.
Another thing now are World Quests and scaling dungeons. For hardcore or casual players, there a chance to get back in.
It sounds like this is a really good point to head back to Azeroth. In Part Three of this series, I’ll be doing just that!
(Portions of this transcribed interview were edited and summarized for clarity.) Here’s Part One.
