Early access for World of Warcraft: The War Within is live now for those who purchased the Epic Edition. As part of the launch push, Blizzard invited Wccftech and a couple of colleagues from other publications to a roundtable Q&A with Associate Art Director Tina Wang and Lead Encounter Designer Michael Nuthals, who answered a great many questions on art, raids, dungeons, and more pertaining to the tenth expansion pack for the acclaimed MMORPG (which is also about to celebrate its 20th anniversary). You can find the full transcript below.
Heather Newman (PC Gamer/Forbes): I’ll pitch a question to Tina. In terms of the art direction for The War Within, I think folks have talked a lot about Hallowfall and some of the cool things that are happening there. I would love to hear from you about Ringing Deeps and the efforts that you specifically made to make that zone feel perhaps a little bit less oppressive and cavern-like than recent underground zones that we’ve had.
Tina Wang: Absolutely. The Ringing Deeps is a fun one because it is the first zone where we go underground, right? You start at the top and then go to the Ringing Deeps. We did want to meet that subterranean fantasy to some degree where you’re creating the sense of caverns, but again, not create something that’s super oppressive or claustrophobic to the player. We initially described it as a bit of a mix of Black Rock Depths plus Maraudon. These are some traditional places that maybe some vanilla World of Warcraft players would have recognized.
But there’s this idea that there’s tons of Earthen industry embedded in this space, and we’re constantly looking for ways to create atmosphere and light sources. So in those spaces, we added tons of lava falls, there’s these giant buildings, and also in a lot of the places of the Ringing Deeps, if you look up, you’ll see that there’s these layers of rock that lead to a brightness above. It’s this idea that because you’re in the first layer, you are close to the surface.
We also created these locations that feel like cenotes. There are incredible pictures of massive underground caves with greenery, mists, and moss, and we really wanted to put that out there for players to experience. So you get the lava, the nature aspect of things, and we really love how we mesh that together.
Kazuma Hashimoto (Siliconera): This is actually an encounter-specific question. I’m a very new adopter of World of Warcraft; I started playing last year. I did a lot of Savage raiding in Final Fantasy XIV 14. I’ve noticed that going into the Mythic tier for World of Warcraft, things can be hard to understand without addons or some sort of visual indicator.
I’m wondering if the team has considered or designed these new raids and encounters with the consideration that you might have an overlap of new players coming in from other MMOs. What’s being done to accommodate those new players, whether it be making things more accessible without addons (I don’t play with addons) or better legibility in terms of raid mechanics?
Michael Nuthals: Yeah, this is something that we on the encounter team take really seriously. We really want our players to be able to understand the mechanics that are happening. We have some conventions, right? There’s a swirl on the ground. That means, maybe, don’t stand here. It might be bad real soon. Or, there’s this visual that looks almost there’s like a fire coming out of the middle of it, but it’s pulsing away from it. That means clump up because it’s going to split the damage. So we’re trying to create consistent language to communicate with the players.
One piece of feedback we consistently hear is that they should be able to read those visuals against the background of the art itself and make sure they pop. For Nerub-ar Palace and all of the dungeons, we’ve actually worked with our visual effects team and our dungeon art team to identify what our color palette is going to be for this boss.
Is this boss going to use a lot of fire and lightning attacks? We probably shouldn’t use like really matching floor textures, right? So, really, letting those things stand out and pop against it. We also talk a lot about communicating over a lot of different channels. We want to have a cool audio effect along with maybe a raid warning along with the visual so that players can see what’s happening and learn that language and then be able to react to that language.
One of the things I love is being able to learn how a fight plays out. Understand how to pull the boss, wiping because we didn’t know we ran into something we couldn’t overcome, learning how to overcome that, working with my team and then progressing past that the next time. So making failure clear is really important to us.
ALESSIO PALUMBO (WCCFTECH): Is there any brand new graphics effect that you have introduced with The War Within or perhaps improved specifically for this expansion that you are proud of?
Tina Wang: With World of Warcraft, with every expansion we’re trying to add new improvements. I know people like to comment that it’s an older engine, but it’s always being evolved. For The War Within specifically, one of the things that we did in Hallowfall was something that we had never done before. Hallowfall has this giant glowing crystal placed on one side of the zone, and there’s a falloff to it because it’s not like sunlight, right?
With sunlight, you get this very direct light. Everything that it hits casts a shadow. So something that we had to do here was make it so that it was only getting the direct light in a certain falloff around it so that we were still able to create the depth of the caverns, feeling like there’s that darkness to it, creating that sense of being near the light is what is so important to the Arathi and where it’s safe.
We also added some improvements that helped us achieve that glow from the crystal. I think that’s one of those things that maybe if you aren’t looking for it, you don’t know that notice it’s like a graphic improvement, but it really helps make Hallowfall feel as unique as it is.
Heather Newman (PC Gamer/Forbes): Michael, as we’re looking at the new 18-month timeline that was sketched out for us for the expansions that will make up the three-part Worldsoul Saga, one of the questions that I hear all the time is from raiders wondering, okay, does this mean that we’re still getting what has become the traditional three tiers of raiding plus some kind of end of expansion kind of cycle, or does this mean that we’re talking about the possibility maybe of cutting back to two or some other combination? Can you settle that for us?
Michael Nuthals: I can’t do that today. I don’t want to talk too much about the future, but I can say we have a very exciting Nerub-ar raid coming up here. Players will be able to take the fight directly to Queen Ansurek, a surrogate of Xal’atath. I don’t know if you had a chance to see the 2D animation that was recently released featuring Xal’atath behind me here.
Being able to go and delve deep into the Nerubian kind of culture and seeing how they fight and being able to square off against the queen of their people is a very cool opportunity. I’m very excited to hear how players the reception that we’re going to get from that. We’re also adding an opportunity for players who aren’t as comfortable venturing in with a group.
We’re giving players the option to see the end boss through what we’re calling story mode, and this is a chance for players to be able to play along with a couple of NPC buddies and really encounter Ansurek and be able to play the story and experience this end that they may have only been able to see maybe through third party websites in the past. Now, they can get in there and really play the story and be able to defeat Ansurek themselves. Maybe it gives them the courage to jump in on LFR Normal and see it with a group of friends. That’s what I’m most excited about. We’ve got some cool stuff coming in raiding.
Kazuma Hashimoto (Siliconera): This is an art question, actually. In that fantastic CGI trailer for The War Within, we see the Harronir and the dwarves and everything. I want to talk a little bit about what the team does to portray these cultures and really add a sense of depth to them. For example, the trolls were doing a tribal dance that you would typically see associated with tribes in South Africa. What real life inspirations has the art team taken and injected into World of Warcraft for this expansion?
Tina Wang: When we work on expansions, when we work on new cultures, we have this really cool group, BlizzU, and so we get researchers or experts in their specific fields to come and chat with us about their area of expertise. For instance, for The War Within, we initially had one about exploring caves, and we recently had another about crystals. When it comes to different cultures, those are also cases where we consult experts in various spaces to hear from them as well.
Kazuma Hashimoto(Siliconera): How deep does that go in relation to what Blizzard does to really nail the potential cultural sensitivity within portraying specific cultures? For example, how involved are these consultants? Do they look at art assets? Do they look at narrative things to help add and provide feedback?
Tina Wang: Depending on what it is, there’s a variety there. Certainly across Blizzard, especially in games like Overwatch, where it’s very specific to a culture that they choose to represent of the real world, it gets very deep. Whereas on World of Warcraft, oftentimes we’re taking bits of inspiration from places. We’re never trying to represent a culture very directly, right? But we do want to make sure that when we take inspiration, we are doing that from an informed place.
Heather Newman (PC Gamer/Forbes): I’ll jump in on the crystals thing. Do you have a specific example, something you heard during the consultation, and you were like, oh, this is great. We can build this in here.
Tina Wang: Oh, I think that happens all the time. For instance, another one that we did during The War Within was a virtual forge tour because there were a lot of forges in Earthen culture. With arachnophobia, this was another one where we consulted an arachnophobia expert, so we added this accessibility mode in World of Warcraft that changes spider-like beasts. We received a lot of information that informed some testing that we did, such as the angle of the legs, the number of legs, the presence of fangs, and things like that.
One of the examples was that the crabs, when it comes to testing the phobia, even though they seem spider-like to the casual observer, when it comes to phobias, it makes a huge difference. Then we also reinforced that message through user testing as well.
Heather Newman (PC Gamer/Forbes): Who was it, or how was it, that the idea of replacing with crabs specifically came up and not some other creature?
Tina Wang: It was because of that initial consultation with the arachnophobia expert of crabs specifically. Their shape, the angle of their legs, and the way they move don’t trigger it. We did some testing, and also, anecdotally, people were saying, oh, crabs would be less scary. We had so many of those models, right? We already have crabs. We already have spiders. It was very easy for us to do those tests.
ALESSIO PALUMBO (WCCFTECH): I wanted to ask about dungeons, specifically follower dungeons. I understand there are four in The War Within, correct? Do you have plans to add more post-launch, and also, do you have any plans to expand the possibility of using NPC followers to regular dungeons at some point if the community asks for it?
Michael Nuthals: First of all, I am very excited about follower dungeons. This is a really cool opportunity that we introduced in season four of Dragonflight of being able to do a dungeon solo and then having NPC buddies help you make your way through the dungeon. Similar to story mode, this is an opportunity for players who don’t feel comfortable maybe going into a group as a way of being able to engage with all the cool storytelling we’re doing in dungeons.
Tina’s team makes awesome stuff, and we want every player to be able to see all that cool stuff, while our team makes really cool, engaging gameplay. We want players to interact with that in a fun and engaging way. I’m just really excited about being able to open that up to a broader audience.
As for future plans, I’m really curious to see how players engage with it. I’m excited to hear what players want, and then we can make choices based on what we hear from our players.
Heather Newman (PC Gamer/Forbes): Quick question for you, Michael, that almost plays off of that previous question. As we look at the new structure for Mythic Plus and the idea that above level 10 folks are no longer going to be seeing those cool visual and gameplay-related affixes, are you feeling any angst there about the fact that the folks who play Mythic Plus dungeons the most are, at some point, relatively quickly, one would assume, not going to be seeing your work in those specific spaces at all?
Michael Nuthals: Yeah, great question. We’re really targeting and reacting to player feedback. As we hit keystone level 12, Xal’atath removes the affixes, and you’re left with a combination of tyrannical and fortified. The feedback we’ve been hearing is that players who are engaging with content at that level want that repeatability. There’s a desire to be able to master the dungeon, whereas the players who are engaging between keystone levels 2 and 10 are players who we’re injecting that variety for because that’s what we have shown so far.
Those players are interested in getting that different experience week over week, and we think most players are going to be living in that world where they’re getting that variety every week. As we designed the Mythic Plus system, we’re catering to two different segments of the audience.
Tina Wang: In terms of thinking about the affixes, I see them more as just a layer on top, right? They’re a layer on top of what I, maybe with bias, see as the star of World of Warcraft, which is really the world, these bespoke places that we built. Then, as Mike mentioned previously, by creating follower dungeons and story modes, it allows so many different players to experience the time we invest into crafting these locations and allows us to invest more time into them, too, as we know more players are able to see them.
Kazuma Hashimoto (Siliconera): This is more like a generalist question. You mentioned that World of Warcraft is adding the follower aspect to dungeons where you can run through with NPCs and everything, like a story mode. This is a hot topic in MMO communities about MMOs becoming more focused on single player experiences. Do you think that this will potentially impact the community in a negative way and prevent players from more or less cultivating the communities that they’ve had in MMOs by implementing this feature into dungeons?
Tina Wang: With the follower dungeons, it’s really more of a way to experience a story. For instance, in terms of the rewards that you can get, if you’re a reward-focused player, that’s not going to resolve that avenue for you. You mentioned Delves in terms of a new track of content that we’ve added to our reward track, where, yes, we are trying to look at all the different ways that different players like to play the game and create segments of content that work well for them.
With raids, we have a very large-scale, organized multi-hour content. With dungeons, it’s more like a 30-minute experience, but it’s an organized five-person set group, whereas Delves is much more open-ended and flexible because we already see players who play the game that way. We want to give those players a way to continue to feel like they can be part of that endgame reward track. Something I’m excited about is when it comes to heroic raiding some players do choose other avenues of gearing up for it. A lot of times, what we’ve heard is that players felt forced to do Mythic Plus dungeons, even though that wasn’t for them. They’re like, I like these 20 friends that I hang out with weekly, but I don’t want to find five people and do this stressful experience. So we think Delves will benefit group content in that way as well.
ALESSIO PALUMBO (WCCFTECH): Let me ask about raids specifically. Is there anything specific that you’re excited for raiders to, to find out about the world within and that you were able to introduce or improve or previous raids from earlier expansions?
Michael Nuthals: I’m incredibly excited to see players reach and defeat Queen Ansurek. That’s an encounter that is, I think, really cool and different and something the players haven’t seen yet because we’ve played our cards close to the chest. We’re not showing that on any of our public playtests. Our internal QA team is tuning it right now. They’re working on polishing it up. It’s really exciting to me because that encounter is layered. There’s kind of like different platforms and how players are going to traverse through the space is different than we’ve ever done before in World of Warcraft. It’s a different way of progressing an encounter through this verticality, really inspired by the spiders that the Nerubians are based on. They can climb up walls and they can get around in ways that maybe we, as the players, can’t. So it’s interesting to see how we’re going to be able to get around that space to keep up with Queen Ansurek. That’s one encounter I’m super excited about.
Another encounter I’m really excited about is in one of our dungeons, the Dawnbreaker. The final boss of that is this kind of Nerubian beast, like a mutated dragonfly thing. It’s really cool. Players, as they’re doing that dungeon, chase it down and are able to defeat it. But they don’t slay it, so the thing retreats. As players make their way through the Nerub-ar palace, as they make their way deep into the Queen’s lair, they come across this unassuming bridge. Could be anything under there. That’s when the flyer appears and it’s back with a vengeance, ready to take out the players. So that’s a really cool space for fighting on long bridge and you’re traversing across the platform as the boss moves around the space. It’s a really cool, engaging way, and it lets players flex their movement abilities and get around the space in interesting ways.
ALESSIO PALUMBO (WCCFTECH): Do you believe these raids will be tougher to beat? Will hardcore players take longer to beat them, or do you expect a similar amount of time to do the World First kill?
Michael Nuthals: We have our own internal tuning targets that we’re hoping to shoot for. We really want a satisfying experience for the players who are doing the race to World First. The folks who are doing Mythic should have a satisfying experience. The race to cutting-edge Heroic-level guilds, right? They should have a fun experience, right? And feel like they have a chance to get their toe into the raid and then meet challenges and overcome those challenges. We’re hoping for a really well-paced, executed experience there.
Kazuma Hashimoto (Siliconera): I saw that half-elf customization was datamined for The War Within. If that is a real thing, will we actually see more character customizations across the board for biracial characters? Given that we do have a pretty healthy amount of biracial characters in the story now, and one being featured prominently within The War Within.
Tina Wang: I’m not gonna call it half-elf because we think of it more as just a touch of elven heritage. They’re not half-elves, necessarily. But that is something that we’ve discussed, whether that’s something that we do give to the player. Nothing to share today, though, about additional customizations. I do want to real quick, though, shout out one of my favorite parts of the Arathi, which is that they have lynxes, which is also that fallback to the touch of mixing and hanging out with elves in the past.
Heather Newman (PC Gamer/Forbes): As we discuss the differences between Delves and follower dungeons, what is the dividing line between those two things? You could see a follower dungeon as this flexible solo type of content and one could easily see how you could bring in multiple friends or no friends at all and have your little NPC buddies or Bran in the case of Delves for this season that will move along with you. But talk to them about whether there is a deep philosophical difference in where you see these two avenues of content heading, or is it kind of two sides of the same coin?
Michael Nuthals: When I think of follower dungeons, I think of them as a chance for players to experience the story of The War Within, right? The rookery dungeon has particular story beats we want to tell players that will lead them to discover some things about the Earthen and lead them to the story of the Ringing Deeps.
Delves are an adventure. We’re gonna go on an adventure, set like the tier levels, so there’s difficulty levels, and then once we enter into that space, there might be kobolds in it, there might be goblins in it, there might be rats with really big fangs. It’s that type of thing where we’re gonna have a different experience each time with maybe different environmental effects, and different events, and different bosses. That variety is the goal of Delves.
Tina Wang: One of the key pieces here is having a progression track. Delve-focused players are catered towards players who want to play either solo or in a flexible-size group, and they’ll be able to earn better rewards than those types of players have ever been able to. When I talk progression path, it’s really about that weekly endgame where every week, you look forward to opening a Great Vault.
Michael Nuthals: One of the features I like about it is that players can really push it. We have this Delve, which is similar to our end bosses. We don’t test that on our beta or PTR. That’s going to be the experience that players are going to be able to do once the game goes live. We’ve been inspired by previous solo challenges like the Mage Tower when imagining what this could be, a solo progression where you can crank the tier level up so high that you can end up doing this really cool boss encounter.
Heather Newman (PC Gamer/Forbes): One of the things about Delve specifically that strikes a lot of people is this feels a little bit like Torghast 2.0. There was some disappointment, I think, in the amount of effort that went into designing Torghast, only to find that players went through it once or as required and then maybe didn’t return in the numbers that folks were hoping they would return to, because it feels like there’s some real similarities there, certainly some of the gameplay mechanics in terms of powers and traps, at least similarly structured as they did the first time through. But the reward level, Tina, as you say, has been tuned up quite a bit compared to Torghast, which was primarily cosmetics.
Tina Wang: I think the key here is with Torghast, our very power progression-focused players felt like they needed to do it, whereas for Delves… We have a group of players who loved doing Torghast and that’s the type of people who we want to make sure we’re allowing them an avenue for that endgame progression system. At the same, we do not say, hey, everyone, you have to do a Delve.
Michael Nuthals: We really want folks to be able to find the pieces of World of Warcraft that engage them and let them explore the world in a way that they’re comfortable with. We want to have an opportunity for everyone to find their place in World of Warcraft.
Tina Wang: It’s a big piece of really listening to our players, seeing what they’re doing, and meeting them where they’re at. That’s also another piece of why we chose to make this really major technological investment into Warbands, changing the infrastructure of how we’ve structured the game really, because we see that nowadays players play multiple characters. It’s very common.
Kazuma Hashimoto: I wanted to ask about the collaborative nature between the art team and the encounter team. You mentioned how those bespoke, beautiful environments for each dungeon are created and what goes into the environmental storytelling of each dungeon because that’s something that I really love about World of Warcraft so far. I’m going through Wrath, I’m going through Shadowlands, and I’m just like, all of this stuff is actually story-relevant to everything I’m playing and actually has some sort of nod to something that goes as far back as Warcraft 1 or Warcraft 3.
Michael Nuthals: Ultimately, the world of Azeroth is the star of World of Warcraft. It’s in the name. So making the world shine and feel like a place that makes sense and belongs and has history is really important. As we go through the process of building a dungeon, we want to pick the spaces that have significance. We want to go to the cool places of the world and delve in there and defeat the challenges within. We find those cool opportunities to tell a story through not just narrative or visuals, but through combat mechanics. What you’re seeing, who’s there, all these things are important to us as we ideate where we want to take the players. Where are our adventures going to lead us?
Tina Wang: Yeah, when we kick off Dungeons and Raids, we start, for the most part, with the story. There’s a narrative reason why we’re going to this place, who we might encounter there, and we try to factor all that in, even to the degree of foreshadowing future things. You mentioned Shadowlands, for instance. In the Sanctum of Domination, there’s a piece of one of those bosses in that raid. If you actually look out the window, you see that he’s pulled a piece of a continent from a different location of Shadowlands and that location was actually a piece of Zereth Mortis, which is in our next patch. We’re constantly adding these details to inject more of that storytelling.
Kazuma Hashimoto (Siliconera): I have another follow-up question. One of the talent trees for, I believe it’s the priest, almost pays homage to Xal’atath in the way that it’s like a void priest, right? As someone who plays a Frost Death Knight, it’s really cool that I get to cast Remorseless Winter and do all the animations Arthas does because I’m still stuck in Warcraft 3. Are we going to see potentially any of her skills make it into that specific talent tree? Are we going to be able to cast some of her skills or have things that pay homage to this really interesting boss?
Michael Nuthals: Who’s to say as we go deeper into this, right? But what I can say is that the Shadow Priest already has hints of the Void coming in from the edges.
Xal’atath here started as a Shadow Priest artifact in Legion. I believe it was the Blade of the Black Empire and through the Shadow Priest and the Whispers, and through the events of Battle for Azeroth, we released Xal’atath from that blade. So there’s a lot of connection there between the kind of that priest order hall that’s led us to the story that now is Xal’atath as we’re starting to see it unfold in World of Warcraft: The War Within.
Tina Wang: There’s a bit of that element that the flavor of Void that she uses, cosmic Void, is reflected in some of the abilities. So in that degree, yeah, artistically, visually.
ALESSIO PALUMBO (WCCFTECH): I wanted to ask Tina about something art related, specifically whether the team has looked into potentially adding some additional cutting edge technologies. For example, with the Shadowlands expansion, you added ray traced shadows to World of Warcraft, but that was a while ago. Is that something you are still looking into? Something else on that note is also support for HDR displays. Is that something you might be interested in adding in the future?
Tina Wang: So, there is nothing to announce today, but we are continuously looking at ways to improve the engine and the way that we do it. We’re continuing to look into those things over time for sure. Sorry for no specific details.
Heather Newman (PC Gamer/Forbes): This is a question again about Mythic Plus and specifically about representation. If you look at the very highest levels, clearly, there is a defined meta that settles in as the season progresses, and folks tend to lean towards playing that meta. But even considering that, there are certain specs and, in some cases, certain classes that don’t show up. Which seems to indicate, at least to me, that probably classes are not perfectly balanced when it comes to play in Mythic Plus even setting aside that pack mentality.
How important is it to you as you think about the mechanics you design, as you think about the difficulty attributed to each of those mechanics that there is some kind of representation that is inclusive across all classes, and how much of it is, you know what, if they’re playing at the title level, they’ve got to be able to play whatever fits the current suite of dungeons and that’s just part of the gameplay?
Michael Nuthals: We really want to see good representation. We wanna give players opportunities. When we think about building mechanics, we’re thinking about giving players a reason to hit all the cool buttons on their keyboard that the class designers have given them as an encounter designer building an encounter. That means that we should be offering challenges for everyone. The goal is that maybe one class is better at this mechanic or boss, right? Or maybe this affix encourages certain players or certain classes or specs to be better there. And that texture is what’s important. It’s making sure that no one class or spec is the quintessential best. But that you want to assemble a team of people who can be successful. That’s ultimately the goal.
Heather Newman (PC Gamer/Forbes): How successful do you feel like you’ve been?
Michael Nuthals: I think we’ve been pretty successful in tuning the bars where the damage meters lie. I think there’s always room for improvement, and this is where we lean on our players. The Season 1 affix changes are a reaction to listening to player feedback and wanting to change something to help address some of the community’s concerns. I think the most important thing is that we are listening and we’re going to be tuning as we go in.
I’m just really excited for players to get in there so I can start listening. I always think of this first couple of weeks post-expansion as a chance to really listen to the players and start getting that feedback to help inform what kind of changes we want to make as we start to build the next cool stuff for our players. It’s always that opportunity to just be informed and try and meet the players where they are.
Tina Wang: Like you mentioned, the most important thing is that it’s balanced for the vast majority of players. Then maybe there’s outliers and that’s something that should be discussed further, but as long as the bulk of the way that players play the game, as long as we get good representation in that front, I feel like that’s most important.
ALESSIO PALUMBO (WCCFTECH): Michael talked about community feedback. Since the pre-patch update for World of Warcraft: The War Within went live a few weeks ago, I wanted to ask what kind of feedback you got from the community about those features released as part of the pre-patch update.
Tina Wang: Yeah, there was a good amount of feedback on the pre-patch event, and we’re really glad that we were able to respond as quickly as we did. It can sometimes be difficult for us to balance it in our internal testing and estimations of how quickly a huge horde of players is going to eliminate every mob in the area. It’s an example of us paying very close attention to when stuff like that gets put out.
ALESSIO PALUMBO (WCCFTECH): How did the community react to Warbands and dynamic flight so far?
Tina Wang: I think very positive on the Warbands. It’s a huge quality of life improvement.
Michael Nuthals: I was gonna say I love seeing folks riding around on their Ashes of Alar because we’ve been able to expand the set of mounts that are able to be used with skyriding. I saw an Ashes fly by me the other day. I was like, that’s awesome. I better go kill Kael’thas again for the 30th time. It’s really cool to soar through the old world, too and just like zip around on my – I tend to use a Griffin myself, as I play a lot of Dwarf. So, soaring on a Griffin, I’m channeling my inner Wildhammer dwarf. It’s really cool. I love skyriding.
Kazuma Hashimoto (Siliconera): I’ve been looking at a lot of community reception to previous expansions, specifically with Shadowlands, and all the gear that was available then, and all the transmogs, and in general player reception to what has been available. For The War Within, will players have access to more class-specific transmogs that actually represent that class? For example, Hunters having access to things that look more Hunter-like instead of just more generic plate armor and Priests having things that look closer to Priest roes and everything, especially with the inclusion of the Arathi.
Tina Wang: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Something that we did in World of Warcraft: The War Within with our tier sets is that they’re all geared toward class fantasy instead of a specific raid theme. We’re very excited because there are some really awesome themes out there. Like the Hunter, the tier set that we did for them, the theme of it is like a trophy hunter. They’ve got these awesome skulls and just like relics on the armor. Plus there’s a hint of this green poison, which is a call to how Hunters have the serpent sting ability. We also have a Mage set that’s like a Kirin Tor Mage. We want to lean into specific themes about the Mage.
Heather Newman (PC Gamer/Forbes): I’ll ask a follow-up question to something that you mentioned pretty early on, Michael, which is the design of visual and audio cues to help people understand what’s happening in specifically raid encounters, I think. So, one of the things that has been a hot discussion topic over the past couple of tiers has been the use of private auras.
We just had a major shakeup in the API approach that’s affecting both dungeons and rage just in the most recent patch push, which may be some oddity from transitioning between beta and launch, but it certainly got folks in a tizzy this morning. Talk to me about the philosophy in terms of how much you want people to have to rely on addons and is the encouragement at this point to say, hey, we want you guys to try things without them.
Because it seems like the player-based response has been, we’ll do that funky macro plus addon thing where people just push the button when they see stuff happen, and then it’ll just be as if the addon could read it to begin with.
Michael Nuthals: What a great topic. When we think about private auras, I think the ultimate goal is to encourage players to look at the world around them, take in the information, and make decisions based on what’s happening in real time and when adding a private aura encourages enough consternation that players feel like they need to work around it, that’s where we might re- evaluate the need for a private aura. For example Sometimes private or work really well.
For example, Blaze on for Rock is a great example of a private aura, but everybody understood that this giant line coming off of me is probably bad, and I don’t want to stand in it. You know where folks needed to go to the macros to problem-solve, right? That’s maybe an instance where we could reevaluate whether or not we’re getting what we want out of it.
We want players to really be focused and have a good time playing the encounters and looking at the world and being in the world. Ideally, we would have players focused on just what kind of information they have in the game, but in a world of addons and weak auras and communication, we should, where it is egregious, meet the players where they are.
Alessio Palumbo (WCCFTECH): An easy last question from me. I wanted to ask you which World of Warcraft: The War Within dungeon is your favorite and why.
Tina Wang: This is a very hard question! Probably the Dawnbreaker. I really think that I love the Arathi culture that we built, and then the airships themselves are just so cool. The fight itself is really unique too, where you get to fight out that new flyer creature, right? Where, so there’s fun new animations for that as well. So yeah, again, I’m going to go with the Dawnbreaker.
Michael Nuthals: I love all the dungeons. But if I have to pick one, I’m gonna go with Cinderbrew Meadery. It’s probably the one I am gonna pick here. This is an Earthen kind of meadery that was taken over by goblins. We have the fun whimsy of goblins meeting the seriousness of the Earthen and there’s there’s Goblin bee cowboys, like riding fire bees that they’re trying to turn into mead. There’s like an ale elemental. It’s just a ton of fun and that, to me, really leans into the humor that our wow.
Heather Newman (PC Gamer/Forbes): One more quick yes or no question. Michael, are we going to see the return of Mythic-only phases for end bosses and raids anytime soon?
Michael Nuthals: I can’t say right now. There’s like to do them where it makes sense, right? Where we think that there’s a cool story that we want to tell and there’s a cool hook that we can use. Where they make sense is the goal there.
Thank you for your time.