Dragonflight Alpha Group Interview with Ion Hazzikostas - Release Date, Power Infusion, Raid and Party Buffs

巨龙时代由 Anshlun 发表于 2022/07/14，12:43

Dragonflight TalentsWe’ve seen with the Dracthyr and other talent trees a resurgence of party and raid synergy skills – for example Mark of the Wild returning, and the Dracthyr Bronze buff. And even Rogue has the party wide cooldown reduction buff. What is the goal for party and raid synergy in Dragonflight?So I think this is definitely a space that we’re interested in exploring. And not everything that is in these first iterations of talent trees is necessarily going to make it to live, but we want to get the stuff out there to begin that conversation and feedback around what the individual trees end up being. I think for the space of party and raid buffs, at the end of the day, it’s an MMO, we have tons of cooperative gameplay in all of our modes, whether it’s dungeon, raid, group PvP - and the ability to make choices that are augmenting the capabilities of the people around you is an interesting RPG space to explore.

At the same time, we also want to be mindful that we want to dip our toes in the water without going too far to the extreme of 15 years ago in Burning Crusade. Making a raid group as a raid leader was a matrix of 15 different buffs - your Rogues need Battle Shout from a warrior, but the Warrior needs Windfury from the Shaman, and all that interconnection. We know we can go too far. But I think we want to test out individual ideas, see which are most compelling, and also take a look at the sum total of it and make sure it’s not too much in terms of that complexity space that ‘s going to lead to micromanagement. But the general design space of “I can make choices that make my buddies stronger in a cooperative game" feels like a natural one we want to explore.In terms of community feedback, one of the hot topics recently has been the return of the controversial ability, Power Infusion, on the priest talent tree. Are there any changes being planned to address some of the issues the community has with the ability, such how it impacts class balance?I understand it’s controversial, but at the same time, some of this gets back to the earlier discussion of party and raid buffs, and our philosophy there with adding new ones. It is a cooperative MMO, where in the design space of “I can make my comrades, my allies stronger!” it seems like a viable support type role that should exist in an RPG setting. Internally, it’s interesting, the team has coined this problem. There are two games being played in a raid group. There is game 1, which is the game that we built, which is beat the raid boss, clear the dungeon in the time limit. Then there’s game 2, which players have largely created for themselves, which is win DPS meters, beat my performance from last week, get a purple parse, get a gold parse, whatever else. We don’t create that game. But many people are playing it, and it is almost the primary motivation for them. A question is, how sensitive should we be to that? How much should we be designing around that?

Because yes, certainly, if we were making a game, and the point of the game was maximize your score, maximize this number, it would be problematic to introduce elements into the game that are very random or skew outcomes one way or another. But that’s also not the game that we have made. We have created a cooperative game that presents these challenges to be overcome. And so something in that environment like Power Infusion is a really interesting decision in a range of raid settings. Maybe on farm you sell it to the person with the best burst window, but when you’re learning an encounter for the first time, it’s more “what are the moments in the fight that are most challenging for us? Do we need to burst down this wave of adds before this next thing happens and who should we PI? Should we PI a healer because we need a throughput burst to make it through this thing? DPS isn’t an issue, we’re just trying to survive but we don’t want to add a healer?” It’s those sorts of decisions that are interesting group dynamics that we would hate to take away.

And game 2, so to speak, is also one where the rules in other places are shaped by the community. Like everyone at this point thinks nothing of the fact that log sites completely ignore padding. You can maximize your number by just damaging a bunch of extraneous adds in a fight that don’t really serve the interest of the group. And doing that will make you have the biggest number and win meters, and the community has collectively decided this is unhealthy, we’re not going to count or reward that behavior, just because you’re multi-dotting all these adds that will die on their own…we’re not going to count this damage at all. And that shapes player behavior there. To some extent, we want to focus on designing for the so-called game 1, and making that the best experience possible, and leave to the community and log sites and others to figure out the rules for how they want to determine who the best hunter is, who the best mage is etc. on this fight.Dragonflight Testing Time-frameYou are targeting the Dragonflight release date for end of 2022. How comfortable are you feeling with that target window right now? Do you think that’s going to give you enough time to do all the testing and iteration needed?I think we’re feeling comfortable. We wouldn’t have announced that if that wasn’t the case, especially after the delay of Shadowlands a couple years ago. I've definitely heard and seen concerns in the community of “oh is it too soon, is it going to be rough?” and I understand, solely looking Alpha and Beta timelines, how that might seem to be the case. But I think if you take a step back and think “is 2 years after the last expansion too soon for the next?” Well no, that’s in line with historical precedence. I think certainly our players are ready to move on by later this year from Shadowlands to the next thing.

Dragonflight has been in development since before Shadowlands shipped, and has had the full development cycle that any WoW expansion had in the past. A difference this time around is we have consciously decided to have a more-focused public test period. Whereas in the past I think we’d start our Alpha with the game in less of a state of readiness, and then slowly trickle content online over the course of multiple months. I forget the exact date, but for Shadowlands it was like mid-April when Alpha started and it wasn’t until sometime in the middle of June where even the last leveling zone was available. BFA was again a three month gap between Alpha launching and Stormsong being available for testing.

This time around, all of our zones are ready for testing, and we’re going to be rolling them out over the course of successive alpha builds in the coming weeks, in rapid succession with focused feedback. After this week our plan is to shut down Azure Span, and point people at the next thing. And then we’ll shut that down and point people at the next thing. We want a focused experience that concentrates feedback, that’s better and a more-accurate testing experience for the people playing an Alpha, where the zone is actually full of other players because that’s where everyone’s attention is currently focused. And so we’re going to have a lot of excitement over the next month and a half as we roll out our zones, the rest of the talent trees, dungeons, everything else. And then as soon as it’s all there, we’ll move onto Beta.This is kind of a change of pace from how you’ve developed the game in the past – what was the thought process in making that change? Why did you feel like you needed to change the way that you went about the Alpha and Beta?The way we’ve developed a game hasn’t changed meaningfully. In terms of our testing I think we were often asking ourselves “what we’re getting out of it?” like in terms of how we’re getting the feedback. At the end of the day, in an ideal world, we wouldn’t test this at all. I’d love to get to that place one day. Frankly, I’d love to get to a place where it’s like “hey, the expansion is coming out, I can’t wait for everyone to play it and experience the story, and see what it has to offer!" But given the complexity and multiplayer scale of a lot of our systems and content, we’re not yet at a point where we feel confident to bring a quality experience without at least throwing a few thousand of testers alongside each other. So we want to avoid, to some extent over, exposure.

We also want to focus the feedback that we get, rather than having an Alpha that’s out there sparsely populated, sparsely attended. Over the course of the Alpha, we’ll have weeks/weekends where this zone is the focus, this dungeon is the focus etc. We think that we can get more feedback, offer better experience for our testers, and have more structure in terms of what they’re asked to do and new stuff to check out. In contrast, in the past, often we’d have a couple of weeks at a time where there wasn't anything going on. We’d see concurrency drop, and content creators and folks struggling to find new things to do. We think this can just be a more focused and constructive experience all around and still get all of what we need out of it and more.Will you be announcing different areas progressively throughout the Alpha? Will there be a release schedule that people can see on that? Or is it just going to be announced sparsely and sporadically?Somewhere in between. This is still an Alpha process, and so sometimes builds fail. Sometimes we can’t necessarily hit the exact date that we wanted. I think we’re going to be making, when Alpha goes up, a forum post laying out the structure for the first five weeks or five alpha builds. Off the top of my head, Azure Span this week, next week Forbidden Reach and the Dracthyr starting experience. After that Waking Shore, the first zone, and then I forget the order on Ohn'ahran Plains and Thaldraszus. I think it’s Thaldraszus and then Ohn'ahran Plains last. But that’s what the next five builds will look like. Along the way we’ll have more talent trees coming online, more professions, and so forth. And beyond that, we don’t want to put firm stakes in the ground just yet. We want to give people a sense and rough roadmap of what they can expect in the weeks to come.EvokerI was impressed by how modern the Evoker feels and there are similarities in terms of design philosophy to the Demon Hunter, such as in terms of mobility. Can you expand on some of the design principles of modernity in combat, especially as WoW has classes developed in an older MMO combat style? That’s a great question. I think when we add a new class to a game that has 12 classes and 36 specs, an important question is “what is the thing that will immediately make this feel fresh and different?” And so stuff like more actiony-traversals, animation integration, or new mechanics like empower spells so you can charge up to unleash with variable effects, end up being some of those answers.

For someone that’s played WoW for a decade, and is sitting down to try a new class, if it feels like just a reskin of something they’re familiar with, we feel like we’re falling short of a promise there. At the same time, there are plenty of people who tried out a Demon Hunter and decided it wasn’t for them. There are also plenty of people who tried out Demon Hunter and enjoy it, but still main a Warrior or Hunter or Warlock. We expect the same to be the case with the Evoker as with the Demon Hunter; nearly everyone will make the new class, check out its starting experience, get a feel for it. Most people will go back to what their traditional main was. Many will play the new thing as a main or primary character. And that’s great.

But really, what we want to offer is as many options as possible that can co-exist in this space. That’s a conscious part of our class design. Everything from melee vs ranged, rotational vs proc reactive, builder vs spenders…these are all different flavors of engaging with combat in the world. Hopefully now that we have 38 options to choose among…everyone can find the one that feels like the best fit for them, since your class and your spec are a relatable lens through which you view and experience everything else that’s going on in Azeroth. We want to make sure everyone has a home there.Every time you add a class, it’s not just the work of creating a class. It’s the commitment to a class you need to iterate on and balance for the rest of the life of the game. Does that perhaps make the team a little anxious or hesitant to add new classes considering how it’s going to add to the permanent workload and delicate balance of balancing all these different classes and specs that you already have?Yes, there’s a reason why this is the fourth time we’re doing it in 18 years. It’s something we know is a huge, impactful change, as well as an impactful exciting addition. But we need to really feel convinced that there’s a compelling fantasy here, there's a unique opportunity here that will be different from the options that are already out there. And we feel strongly enough about it that it’s worth that ongoing investment.

And that’s not just “yes, it means we have to make more class sets, and do more stuff forever,” but it’s also carrying costs and a complexity burden for players. For anyone getting into the game, well there’s two more specs to learn now. When you’re going into PvP, there’s two more sets of abilities you need to understand and know how to counter. When you’re going into raids and dungeons, more stuff you have to be aware of with what your group-mates bring to a situation. That bar just got higher to master the game. And none of that is something that we do lightly.

As we were coming up with the feature set for Dragonflight, pretty early on the idea of giving players a chance to realize the fantasy of being a dragon led to the idea that we could make a race and class that can fight like no one else in WoW. And once we started spinning up and brainstorming ideas, the team pretty quickly solidified behind it and was galvanized by it. This was the first stake we had in the ground for what Dragonflight features would be. And so, two years later, we are really excited to pull back the curtain and share it with the world.Evokers in draconic form don’t display all of their armor; how does the Evoker specifically interact with visual gear and transmog?Certain key pieces show in your draconic form: shoulders, large geometric pieces like belt buckles. When we make things like tier sets, we know that this armor is custom-made for the Evoker, and so we can do more things than we could do elsewhere. The big challenge is with such a unique body shape and horns and wings, fitting regular armor was a mix of logistically impossible but also undermining a bit of the core fantasy of being a scaled draconic being with wings. And if you cover it all up, that undermines a piece of it. But yes, in your visage form, it’s all visible all the time. We want to make sure people are seeing their visage form more than say a Worgen sees their humanoid form, depending on personal preference.Customization OptionsIn Shadowlands, you guys added a bunch of new character customization options and overhauled the whole character creation screen. The scope and breadth of Dracthyr customization is that taken to the extreme, with millions of options. It really seems like you guys are trying to push customization to the limit with the Dracthyr. Are you using that as a way to test out future changes for other races? Will this work as a template for future customization options for other races?I mean, I think yes. We say ‘the extreme" or "push it to the limit," and we want to keep raising that bar over time. Every new class, new race, everything we do we want to set a new standard for fidelity. And then where possible, we want to expand that and go back and bring others up to that bar. In a sense, going way back, 10 years ago in Mists of Pandaria, the Pandaren would just have smoother animations, crisper, higher level of fidelity than any other player races. Then we strove to make updated player models for everyone else down the line.

It was really exciting to see the lessons the artists have learned and the tech we’ve gotten to enable Dracthyr character customization. Bringing some of that to all of the existing player races is obviously a monumental project but I think it’s a direction we clearly want to move in. I think that giving people more ability to express and customize their avatars in our world is fundamental to what an MMO is all about. The fact that we’ve seen, even internally, people’s first experience sitting down and checking out Dracthyr, people spending 20 minutes in character creation, tinkering and finding the perfect one for them; who wouldn’t want that for every one of our player races? That should be the connection that everyone feels to their character, that truly feels like it’s theirs. Potentially, your character will literally not look like any other you’re going to meet no matter how much WoW you play.Mythic+ DungeonsCan you explain your intentions with the new expansion as far as the Mythic+ pool is concerned? You guys are obviously experimenting with bringing back keys from previous expansions now. I just wanted to know if you guys plan on continuing that or is this something that you guys are waiting to hear feedback on in this last season?For sure that’s the path we’re going to take for Dragonflight Season 1. We’re already well underway on updating old dungeons. The plan is a pool of eight dungeons for the first Mythic+ season: four new Dragonflight dungeons, as well as some old fan favorites from across the years – a couple of examples are Temple of the Jade Serpent from Mists of Pandaria and Court of Stars from Legion, so everyone can go back and play “Guess Who?” again. And I think we’re really excited both to revisit some old dungeons but also to have a structure where really, a new Mythic+ season can mean as much variety as a new raid tier. There will be new challenges, new rewards, and a whole new set of problems to solve, which also frankly serves as a little bit of a community knowledge reset and makes for a smoother point of entry for players getting into the scene.

Even though we have new seasonal affixes, we’ve observed over the course of an expansion that it’s challenging for people, when you’re 12-15 months in, to do the same dungeons, to reach the level of sophistication and refinement and community expectations for what you’re supposed to know. It’s so stratospherically high that it can be a rough experience for someone trying to get into it later, if you don’t have a patient group of friends to help you. We’re really hopeful and excited about the structure. Obviously whether we stick with it, whether it becomes the future of Mythic+, that’s going depend on how it plays out, what we hear from the community. And as always, we’ll be listening and trying to refine and evolve it based on that feedback.Tanks have a lot of responsibility, especially in Mythic+. The tank pool is sometimes really small, a lot of groups in LFG looking to wait for a tank. Is there anything you think could be coming in Dragonflight to encourage tanking, especially when Evoker doesn’t have a tank spec?This is something we talk about a lot. Evoker not having a tank spec, I think, is more a reflection on the fantasy of what being a draconic being is and how you would expect it to act. A breath weapon and wings and mobility and all that felt like it lent itself more to a ranged-based class, a caster. And caster abilities don’t always work well with tanking, so we didn’t go in that direction with that fantasy. Future classes may have tank specs.

Even looking back historically, I don’t know that we saw a massive increase in the number of tanks due to Demon Hunters existing. A lot of tanks may have switched specs or classes because they liked the mobility or toolkit as compared to other tanks. But it’s more of a mindset, wanting to be responsible for survival, for positioning, for leading a group through a dungeon, and yeah, that can be a very high barrier. To some extent, I think rotating the dungeon pool may help with that. For some of the reasons I was saying earlier, part of the challenge is, as the tank, you are expected to know the route, the pulls, where to clump mobs, etc., and if you’re learning, unless you have a patient group of friends, you’re learning at the expense of a group. While other roles have the ability to hang back and kind of follow along and pick up the knowledge that way. And so I think, by lowering that barrier a little bit, hopefully we can make it more accessible.

We’re also being mindful of tank gameplay itself and what we ask tanks to do in terms of our encounter design, especially in dungeons, with how much you’re using active mitigation, how much positioning matters, how many other things you can do wrong as a tank. We’re already expecting a ton of you. While in raid encounters you might not be moving a lot as a tank, and you’re focused on active mitigation and managing the boss and your own health in that regard, we’re probably not throwing as much at you there.

The game and community as a whole, benefits the more people there are to tank, the more groups can form. That’s something we’re definitely trying to increase interest in.In Wrath we had the little LFG bag - could that kind of incentive be possible?Yeah, that’s an interesting question. I think there are challenges in thinking through how that would apply to pre-made content where the limit is most-keenly felt, like forming Mythic+ groups or who is going to tank for a raid pug, but, where possible, we want to make sure that the people who are interested in being the tank and being responsible for their survival and leading the group, are feeling appreciated and rewarded for it.A common criticism among some players is having to do content that they don’t like in order to do content that they do like, such as Mythic+ and raiding interactions. Is that a problem to solve? And if it is, how are you doing it in Dragonflight?I think it’s certainly a problem to solve as stated by those players. At the end of the day, one of the shifts that we made over the course of Shadowlands, I think, was re-examining some of our philosophies, assumptions on interconnectedness of rewards, and how important it was for all players to need to do certain systems or certain pieces of the game vs taking a step back and just letting people focus on what they prefer to focus on, while encouraging them and giving them optional rewards for branching out. So I think what we saw in Eternity’s End, the final major patch for Shadowlands, was some of those philosophies in action after 9.1.5. If you look at the endgame of Shadowlands today, there’s plenty of content in the outdoor world and Zereth Mortis that is there for those who want to engage deeply with it. We have an entire Cypher system that you can unlock to improve your ability to interact with and traverse the environment, to make you more effective in combat, but none of that is making you better in raids and dungeons. We wanted to get away from the sense of a checklist of weekly or daily chores, of alright, I have to do this thing, or I’m going to fall behind or let my raid group down. We’ve seen and heard good feedback, and seen success, and you know what, there are plenty of people running around Zereth Mortis, and there are enough people who enjoy that content on its own right that it can stand on its own.

One of our pillars is really, as much as possible, let people play the game the way they want to play it. Don’t require them to do things they don’t enjoy in order to compete or have access to the things they do. This remains a guiding principle. Will we have a 100% success rate there? Not necessarily, and there are some things like, if you don’t want to level, sorry you have to level. We want everyone to a baseline understanding of the shared world, the story, the stakes, the characters from going through the world. But if you want to hit max level and then spend most of your time pushing Mythic+ keys and not worry about getting your Renown levels up in the different zone factions, ok. You’ll miss out on some cool cosmetics and rewards and items, but you’ll have better or equal items from Mythic dungeons, and that’s fine. Choose your path.Similarities to Mists of PandariaWhen you were designing Dragonflight, what do you think the biggest inspirations were? And what do you think are the biggest things you learned from some of the places in WoW’s history that got criticism in the past?Great question, a couple things to unpack there. We’ve at times thought, as we’ve built WoW expansions over the years, there’s some rough alternation between cosmic scale stuff and more grounded terrestrial stories. Legion, for as core as demons and the Burning Legion feel to World of Warcraft, we were going on spaceships and through wormholes to other worlds and seeing celestial forges. That was a super high-concept, almost sci-fi at times, expansion. BFA was deliberately a return to Azeroth, to Alliance and Horde, to traditional Warcraft 3 themes. Then Shadowlands of course was high-concept… and so even before Shadowlands was out, we knew Dragonflight was where we were headed next, returning to Azeroth, returning to that space. Obviously we got a lot of feedback over the course of Shadowlands about some fatigue, just with the ever-increasing stakes and spiraling cosmic scale of storytelling, which fortunately reaffirmed the decision we already made, that we’re going to head back to this part and to Azeroth.

But for something that’s different…I think a direct inspiration for this expansion is actually probably Mists of Pandaria. If I had to pick an expansion in the past that’s closest in feel and overall vibes. It’s this massive verdant land with ancient secrets and mysteries, and we’re arriving on its shores as explorers. There’s a lot to discuss, a lot to learn. This isn’t an expansion where the kickoff is like “there’s an existential threat that’s going to destroy Azeroth and we need to stop it and drop everything!” There‘s trouble brewing, there’s mysteries, there’s secrets, there’s concerning things, let’s explore and adventure. And I think that’s Warcraft at its best.

Speaking frankly about community feedback we’ve received, I think Mists of Pandaria failed to connect with some people who just passed on it on the outset looking at the theme: “Aw Pandas, that doesn’t seem Warcraft, too kiddie for me.” But the people who engaged with that expansion cite it fondly as one of their favorites. And some of that is just the universal joy in that journey and exploration and connecting on a human scale with new cultures, allies, making the enemies as you go. And so that’s the type of story we set out to tell in building the Dragon Isles. And hopefully Dragons are a slightly more universally resonant theme than Pandas.Group LootIn a previous interview, you mentioned that master loot was something you wanted to do but were looking for the right implementation, which kind of was a change from ‘no’ previously. Any update to that?Yeah! I think I would describe it more as group loot rather than master loot. That’s the specific process of a single loot master allocating the drops, that’s actually in some ways some of the stuff we were looking to move away from back in the day. But moving away from personal to shared pool of loot, where you kill a raid boss, you work together with 15 or 20 or 30 people to do it, there’s 5 items on the corpse you can roll for those items, you can pass on them, you can trade them to your friends; that’s a world we think we want to be in again.

We’re still hammering out the details, but our current plan is to have raid bosses in Dragonflight work that way. This is a raid boss specific system. Dungeon loot is fine. We haven’t really heard people clamoring for the return of group loot in dungeons, and getting a bow from a chest at the end of a dungeon when a group has no hunter. I think raids are uniquely a cooperative experience, they lend themselves to a cooperative loot allocation mechanism. And that’s the current plan.Profession BagWhen I was on the Alpha, there was something I noticed in the bottom right hand corner of the screen, it looked like we had an extra bag slot! When I was messing around with it, it said that it was called a reagent bag slot. Can you explain what it is and why you guys gave it to players?It’s a giant universal profession stuff bag. And it will contain all your profession stuff. Think of what the Reagent Bank tab is back in your personal bank in town. We realized, as we expanded professions, that we have materials with different quality levels and different inputs. One of the first questions that came up in feedback from people on the team was "I don’t have any bag space as it is…this sucks. Please don’t give me more junk to put in my bags." But at the same time, the whole point of crafting is that you’re taking junk and combining it into better junk. And so the idea was, let’s just separate this space out entirely.

Years back, in the past, we used to have profession-specific bags ie. larger skinning bags; that was ultimately a bit too fiddly for our purposes here so we’re just going with expanding the inventory, pulling all of that stuff out of your current bag space, and you don’t have to worry about professions competing with the space you want to use for your gear sets, quest items, all the rest.
Are those bags going to have a specific number of slots, or is it like an endless space?Somewhere in between. Not literally endless, but the intent is Big. It’s not meant to be a meaningful constraint on picking stuff up, or herbing, or gathering. DragonridingI had the chance to play in the Alpha over the last day or two, and the first thing I want to say is how much fun the Dragonriding system is. One thing I’m curious about is that while we had many Dragonriding things unlocked on Alpha, what is the progression system like when the game goes live?What you’re experiencing in Azure Span is basically the starting point; it’s the third level-up zone. You’d be getting to this point a few hours into your first day of playing Dragonflight and progress by unlocking increased vigor, faster generation of it, some extra active abilities to use, that’s kind of the course that we’d laid out there. And that progression of those unlocks are all account-wide.

We quickly realized, when talking about the philosophy of what should be character-specific progression vs what should be progression the human behind the keyboard makes across your account, convenience of traversal felt like one of those things that’s only fun to go in one direction. Having to re-unlock it on subsequent characters would not be terribly compelling.Are all of the flying mounts that you can earn in Dragonflight going to tie into the Dragonriding system, or just certain ones?It’s just certain ones. Right now, the presentation UI they’re using is not necessarily final. It’s just "hey you’ve got this mount in your journal, but this is going to be framed as more of a bit of a separate system." It’s a set of different models of dragon that you can meet, you can choose among, and customize so that the button you’re picking to fly around with is the one that is coolest, that it complements your transmog, or whatever else. And there are still separate traditional mounts that are earned through the normal range of activities that you use throughout the game.It’s probably too early to say, but if the Dragonriding system is well received and people really like it, what do you think that’s going to look like in the future? If people really like it, do you think you would consider continuing on with this system or go back to traditional flying?That’s certainly a possibility and I would say even a hope. We’ve definitely framed it as an expansion-specific system. There’s no necessary path forward, but when we introduce any new system, whether it’s expansion-specific or otherwise, if the feedback that we get is “hey this is awesome, we want to keep having it and versions going forward,” we will happily go along with that. I think we’re really curious and excited to hear a wider range of impressions, and see how the community is feeling about the system, unfold over the course of the expansion and progressing through the unlocks.How much did Dragonriding have an impact on quest/world design in Dragonflight?I think certainly knowing from the outset that we were going to build this system, and even before it was fully up and running internally, that definitely informed our level and world design. Azure Span is, I believe the largest single zone, in terms of sheer landmass, in WoW’s history. And the rest of Dragon Isles is not too far behind it. We were able to add a lot more negative space in between areas of interest and create more of an open-world feel knowing that from the outset, we didn’t have to worry about how a player was going to get back to turn in their quest after they completed it because they could just walk to an edge of a cliff, hop on a drake, and zip back to where they want to be. And so I think we are really excited for the sheer scale and inviting a sense of exploration.How will Dragonriding develop over time? How will it build out to be something that regards players who spend their time, without trivializing the mechanic from the beginning?Certainly there are more restrictions on this then there are on traditional Burning Crusade type flying, but recently, for the last 8+ years, that type of flying hasn't existed until you’re well into an expansion. Dragonriding is available day 1. And so, some of our concerns about shrinking the world, effortless traversal, bypassing obstacles and challenges without any kind of restriction, remain, but at the same time, convenient transportation to point B is important and clearly desired by players. The fantasy of a dragon-themed expansion where you have no access to flying early on felt ultimately wrong. For all those reasons, it felt like the right time and place to explore this.

There’s a lot of friction, but there’s also mastery to flying around on your drake companion. We’re getting feedback, even with the basic starting level of 3 vigor and those constraints, people are able to sustain flight for incredibly long periods of time with practice, which is something that is pretty cool. You can work and learn to overcome some of those restrictions just through practice and experience. And we also have the meta progression that is account wide, that will remove, increasingly, those barriers, make it easier and easier to sustain being able to effortlessly get from point A to point B. That will come in line with your increasing familiarity with the world, explore these spaces as a player, knowing what’s between point A and point B such that you’re not really losing as much in terms of your sense of the world if you can get there with fewer restrictions.

What this means for the future, I think, is an open question. We want to be guided by what players prefer. There’s certainly a world where months from now, with Dragonriding fully upgraded, no one is asking for the return of Burning Crusade style flying, and they’re just like "this is awesome! It’s faster! It’s way more fun!" Cool, we’ll happily run with that. If people feel otherwise, then we’re open to that too. But we’ll see.So the ideal then, for the mid-point of the expansion, when flying normally comes in, is to provide something ideally more invigorating than the past but just as convenient?I think that’s the goal. Past that tipping point, for people that are comfortable with the system, it should just be all-around better once you are fully upgraded. Potentially higher-max speeds that can be attained, other perks compared to traditional flying, that I think will make this a really exciting progression for everyone.ProletariatBlizzard announced that they are acquiring Proletariat and they’ll be helping the WoW team. I was curious what specifically does that mean? Are they helping with Dragonflight right now? Or the content coming there? Or something more specific or something even further to the future?The answer is basically all of it. This is certainly a long-term investment. Dragonflight was on track and well underway before any of this came onto our collective radar. We’ve been working with Proletariat for a couple of months even though the acquisition was just finalized really recently. This is an investment in trying to give our players what they want and deserve: more content, fewer gaps in between, while maintaining a high level of quality and also making sure that we’re able to attend to the health of our team and give people breaks and downtime.

And so it’s really exciting to have all the folks from Proletariat coming on board, including a lot of real MMO veterans, folks who worked on games that predated World of Warcraft, in some cases, I was playing 20 years ago. It’s super exciting to have this infusion of talent and really there’s a lot of integration to do. Adding 100 people and merging studios and all of that is not something that happens without friction or happens overnight, but it’s been great so far. They are awesome humans and we all couldn’t be more excited to have them with us, and can’t be more excited what that’s going to mean for players of WoW in the future.Dragonflight GeneralTo get the best experience out of Dragonflight, what would you consider the required reading list? Which expansions or books or parts of Warcraft would be the best for people to focus on if they wanted to get the most out of Dragonflight?There’s not a requirement to understand and appreciate it; if you’re brand new to World of Warcraft this is as good a time as any to get into the game and play through a level-up experience. Go from the BFA content into the Dragon Isles, and it should flow naturally from there. For some themes in particular, as well as familiar characters, I would say a mix of Wrath and Cataclysm. In Wrath we went to Dragonblight, we saw the remains of Galakrond and learned about the origins of the Dragon Aspects, and we worked closely with the Aspects. Some of them fell into madness, we fought Malygos, and we saw the replacement and ascension of a new blue aspect. And then of course Cataclysm itself, was the story of the fall of the Aspects. At the end, as Deathwing was defeated, the Dragon Aspects gave their power to seal his fate and that has left the world without this fully-empowered tier of protectors ever since.

And so I think the Dragon Isles are awakening, we’re going to find that we need Dragon Aspects again. We need protectors for Azeroth and we, as champions, are going to work alongside the Dragons in that pursuit. And of course, there are some familiar characters along the way: Khadgar is joining us in our journeys, and if you played Legion, you’ll know a lot more about him and his fondness for dad jokes and the rest. But all of that is just complimenting the core experience that was designed to be accessible for everyone from new players to veterans.What are the biggest challenges for retaining players and secondly, how do you balance that with implementing new things for returning players and new players?The biggest challenge in a lot of ways for retaining players is just content. It’s stuff to do, it’s goals to pursue, to reward, it’s part of why we’re continuing to grow the World of Warcraft team and invest in our potential to do that. Because at the end of the day, even if you have fun, when you run out of stuff to do, you’re going to find something else to do. In a social game like World of Warcraft, that can be rough. If you’re still having fun but all your guild-mates or people you used to run dungeons with decided to move on to something else, now you don’t have a dungeon group anymore. We always want to make sure there’s something around the corner to look forward to in WoW.

At the same time, we want to keep it welcoming to new players. And so all of our implementation and our vision is a balance between creating fresh experiences like Dragonriding or the Dracthyr Evoker that can show someone whose played WoW for 15 years a new look at what’s possible in this game, while also making sure that we’re continuing to pay attention to our new player experience. I’m happy we did in that Shadowlands, by getting rid of the need to play through seven different expansions at a breakneck pace before you could get into what the game is today.

It’s about listening to our veterans, it’s listening to new players coming into the game about what’s confusing them, what’s frustrating them, or what’s causing them to lose interest. All of that said, WoW is a game that often asks a lot of you, and it’s totally fine that some people are going to take breaks - play other games, there’s a lot of awesome stuff out there. We’re going to be there for you when you’re ready to return, and we also want to make sure that our patches and certainly our expansions feel like an open door that’s inviting people back that haven't had a relationship with the game for a while but miss it. So I think Dragonflight we’re trying to position as a perfect time for anyone to jump into World of Warcraft.The antagonists in the Azure Span weren’t just characterized as mindless villains, which I appreciated. Even one tuskarr says they’re not evil, they’re just another group. How has designing monster races (for lack of a better term) changed in the modern world vs maybe 20 years ago?That’s a really good question. Going to speculate a little here, because I’m not the person to answer that question, that would be the person who made the quest themselves and are writing the dialogue and the stories. I think we want to be nuanced in our storytelling where possible. We’ve seen a wide range of media from core properties like D&D across the board move away from the sense of “alright, there’s just mindless monster races, and they exist, they were born evil, and all they want to do is destroy things and pillage, and you gotta kill them, that’s that.”

When going to a new place, without necessarily the baggage of lots of past stories and history, we have a blank slate that we can build upon. It’s just naturally more interesting to tell stories that have more shades of grey and time-honored principles and narratives or conflict over resources and space and misunderstandings and the clashes that arise from that. It will lead to combat and conflict, because ultimately that remains a core engine of our game: you punch things, you cast fireballs, so that shapes the storytelling to a certain extent. But yeah, I think where possible we try to find ways to also let you understand the perspectives and motivations of those who are your antagonists, and have some depth to them.Final thoughts on Dragonflight, the Alpha, the Beta, and the release, and just on World of Warcraft in general?It’s going to be an exciting summer, exciting rest of the year for WoW players! We of course also have Wrath Classic coming up as well. But really, the team has been so hard at work on Dragonflight the past couple of years. So excited this week to finally formally pull back the curtain. I can’t wait for the frenzy of datamining that’s going to begin tomorrow as everyone picks apart what’s there and what it all means and how it all fits together. But we have an exciting testing plan ahead with zones coming online, the rest of our dungeons, the rest of our systems, and more than ever before, we’ve baked a ton of time into our testing development plan to just respond to feedback and iterate and refine things like individual talent trees and all the rest to get them to a place where our players expect them to be when we launch the game later this year.

And so, also with the recent Proletariat news, our focus as a team is as WoW “terrifyingly” moves into our third decade in the near future, the future remains as bright as ever. We are humble and so appreciative of the players who have chosen to spend their time with us. We want to make sure we’re doing everything to make that a wise choice in the years to come.

Dragonflight Alpha News

Features & Updates

Models & Customization

Evoker & Class Changes

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