The Future of Warcraft - Growth and Future Plans Interview with But Why Tho?

WoW Posted 4 days ago by Jezartroz

interview with But Why Tho?Worldsoul SagaThe Birth of Warcraft Rumble
“Well, the way we approach it is, we look at any genre, and we’re like, ‘hey, is there a game that we can create there that could really either define or redefine that genre?’ We start with the player. In this case, Tom loved action strategy games. He felt like he could have a different voice there, have a different new twist on it.”

Hight continued, “Not many strategy games and mobile have a very robust PvE experience, for instance. That’s how we will distinguish, hopefully, and that’s how we’ll add more depth to this genre. And so it’s the same thing when we look at targets, and we are looking at new projects all the time. That for the fun part of my job is people pitched to me. It’s like they have ideas for things they want to do. But I always look for, ‘Okay, is this literally going to be genre-defining? Is it one of our pillars? What’s the gameplay? What’s going to make this something people really want to do?”
The Classic Conundrumrecent announcement of the Season of Discovery Season-specific Runes
“We want to support . We do wrestle with the question of we start an alternate history or put new content in classic. We’re still kind of confining ourselves. We want to create a lot of cool gameplay and moments, and we’re willing to explore some variants, as you’ll see in raids that we’re doing. But we’re going to stick to the storyline that played out. That doesn’t mean that that’s completely off the table. The classic community has guided us in many ways. We thought we were just gonna do classic, and that was gonna be it. But they clearly love it, and we want to make them happy. So we’re continuing to support them. But we’ll continue to try and think of cool things, new things for them to do”.
Cosmic Threats and Player Safeguards
On the topic of future expansions and World of Warcraft‘s story returning to a more cosmic threat in the void, Hight talked about what safeguard are implemented to make sure that the player character and the overall story doesn’t go off the rails. Describing the team’s guidelines, “It’s not only Chris, we have a creative director for World of Warcraft itself. That’s Chris Robinson, was Senior Art Director for a long time. He actually works very closely with Chris, and he’s looking at literally every zone, every character, every quest line and reviewing it with that lens. It’s like, ‘Is this being consistent’ with who we believe this place or these individuals are?’ ‘Are we empowering the heroes in the players in a natural way, not in a way that feels wrong?'”

Hight gave a little more details on how these new zones are being implemented while also preserving their past usage in the game, “We’re giving our world builders some free rein to expand. Those areas may be geographically larger than they were. That’ll give them more opportunities to introduce some of the smaller points of interest where you’ll have a culture or a local tribe and give them the ability to have storylines that center on that. We don’t want people to feel like, oh, wait a minute, it’s that same place I know. It’s gonna feel like the same place; it’s just that it is literally going to be a little bit larger than what you’ve experienced. Flight being much more accessible, we need to have a larger landmass for people to be able to explore.”

Comment by ItacolomiGlad to hear they're boosting the sizes of the zones.

Scaling in WoW has always been a bit inconsistent. In terms of lore, the Broken Isles and Dragon Isles (not to mention Kul'Tiras and Zandalar) are much smaller than, say, Pandaria, but in gameplay terms they're the same size or bigger, because that leads to a better gameplay experience. It's like how Stormwind is meant to house tens of thousands of humans, but there are like 50 houses.

So when they said Quel'thalas was going to be a 'focus' for an expansion, it makes sense for them to revamp Eversong, Ghostlands and Silvermoon, maybe even Zul'aman, and turn them into four full-sized, Dragon Isles big zones. It wouldn't really be retconning anything, it'd just be scaling them more accurately to how the lore portrays them - where it can take a day to traverse, instead of minutes.

I'm eager to see what they add to the zones. When they do Northrend for TLT, I wonder if they'll finally have 'outdoor' Ulduar?Comment by hobbidaggyQuel'thalas is on the BC map currently. I would love to get rid of the loading screen and just merge it into the old world but triple the size. :D

Everything in wow is smooshed anyways. You think Orgrimmar could house millions of people with the way it looks in-game? Of course not. In lore it would be much MUCH larger. As would every zone, technically.

So just imagine of Quel'thalas was the size of the Dragon Isles....

Hoo boy, dream come true.

And then Northrend after!

I'm here for it all.Comment by merex760I'm starting to think we need to put Steve Danuser on the side of a milk cartonComment by SoeroahQuel'thalas is on the BC map currently. I would love to get rid of the loading screen and just merge it into the old world but triple the size. :D

Everything in wow is smooshed anyways. You think Orgrimmar could house millions of people with the way it looks in-game? Of course not. In lore it would be much MUCH larger. As would every zone, technically.

So just imagine of Quel'thalas was the size of the Dragon Isles....

Hoo boy, dream come true.

And then Northrend after!

I'm here for it all.Comment by SoeroahGlad to hear they're boosting the sizes of the zones.

Scaling in WoW has always been a bit inconsistent. In terms of lore, the Broken Isles and Dragon Isles (not to mention Kul'Tiras and Zandalar) are much smaller than, say, Pandaria, but in gameplay terms they're the same size or bigger, because that leads to a better gameplay experience. It's like how Stormwind is meant to house tens of thousands of humans, but there are like 50 houses.

So when they said Quel'thalas was going to be a 'focus' for an expansion, it makes sense for them to revamp Eversong, Ghostlands and Silvermoon, maybe even Zul'aman, and turn them into four full-sized, Dragon Isles big zones. It wouldn't really be retconning anything, it'd just be scaling them more accurately to how the lore portrays them - where it can take a day to traverse, instead of minutes.

I'm eager to see what they add to the zones. When they do Northrend for TLT, I wonder if they'll finally have 'outdoor' Ulduar?Comment by adscott We do wrestle with the question of we start an alternate history or put new content in classic. We’re still kind of confining ourselves.Comment by Strungeng
This is hilarious given it's a Clash of Clans ripoff and the motivation was Comment by gruloch We do wrestle with the question of we start an alternate history or put new content in classic. We’re still kind of confining ourselves.Comment by BillcarsonI guess I thought players had the sense to realize some things are inherently smaller for gameplay. Like Mulgore itself ingame is smaller than some of the bigger raids, and for decades I have known that it is not literally supposed to be understood that way by the players.

Sort of like how Generic Small Town #3294 in Daggerfall is larger than every major city in all Bethesda games made after Daggerfall. Of course we aren’t supposed to think that one hick town was in fact bigger than the Imperial City, Solitude, and Vivec City combined.Comment by SilverizedWith The War Within being their first major use of underground zones it really makes me wonder if they'll dip their feet into making an actual version of azjol-nerub this time. Just think about it, The Last Titan is a standalone expansion that comes out in a few years. They already said they'll update the old Northend zones. If WW can have an entire underground area then Northrend can too if they want.

I don't think it will necessarily be about nerubians as we have that in WW. But they could create the area based on lore still

And azjol-nerub has been mentioned so many times in recent lore where they mention other things living there now. They could easily make it a zone based on new creaturesComment by GhoulsDisappointed they're not going to try the alternate history angle. Feel like this would be a great way to go back with 20/20 hindsight and undo some of the more universally unpopular writing decisions, like making Kael'thas ally with the Burning Legion for no &*!@ing reason.Comment by tyresias11This really has to end. To real WOW players, we see time and money spent on something that already exists in live WOW. Only vanilla content is inaccessible to us. And now we see that every xpac will be released as classic on its own separate servers. So players that actually enjoyed vanilla content on live servers cant even revisit that content, yet people who start new characters on classic can. So thats a big FU to all veteran players.

I also can't comprehend how they deleted the TBC realms. The whole point is having each xpac separate right? But they removed TBC saying "well players can access TBC on the WOTLK realms" - which is ridiculous, since players can experience both the TBC content and WOTLK content in real WOW anyways (live WOW, that is).

Any new content added to a classic realm is a slap in the face for veteran players who play on live WOW. Good thing is when Cata classic comes, many will come back to retail/live WOW.

I will never understand why listening to 10,000 vocal players is more important than doing what millions of players want. Lets all hope classic realms get shut down, vanilla content is accessible in live WOW again and then players can enjoy every bit of content on one realm type, as it always should have been.Comment by PleegWatI expect physical resizing mostly applies to Quel'Thalas, since the 3 existing zones combined are barely as large as 1 DF zone. However, that would probably involve rebuilding those zones from scratch. Northrend is already larger, causing me to think they wouldn't bother there.

The WoW map is shrunk to an enormous degree - the in-wow distance from silvermoon to booty bay is about 25k yards, while the true distance should be 5000 kilometers minimum. And it's also hugely contorted – look up some maps from the warcraft 2 era, which I'd consider to be closer to canon than current wow reality. Or consider all the wc1/2/3 campaign maps which aren't represented in wow.Comment by PerlusoIs it Quel' Thalas and Northrend of old or are they of the current (yet to come) time line? I'm a it confused cause at blizzcon Metzen said we are going to the old world (Quel' Thalas in Midnight) and that at some point we mess up and have to go back even further to Northrend in The Last Titan. I've heard from some, yes time travel and others no time travel.Comment by PleegWatIs it Quel' Thalas and Northrend of old or are they of the current (yet to come) time line? I'm a it confused cause at blizzcon Metzen said we are going to the old world (Quel' Thalas in Midnight) and that at some point we mess up and have to go back even further to Northrend in The Last Titan. I've heard from some, yes time travel and others no time travel.Comment by YummkaI don't mind cosmic conflict, I want the story to make sense, forshadowing to pay off, and feel what WoW used to be.

That being said, I don't understand how Kurog Grimtotem releasing Raszageth for being mad that he wasn't invited to Lor'themar's and Thalyssra's wedding, but inviting Wrathion and Kalec, makes sense. What about Magatha? I don't get how people think this is a good storytelling. This is not even mentioning the recent winx club raid cinematic, this is about a chain of events that lead to whole xpac.Comment by BlackDragonAJ89I don't mind cosmic conflict, I want the story to make sense, forshadowing to pay off, and feel what WoW used to be.

That being said, I don't understand how Kurog Grimtotem releasing Raszageth for being mad that he wasn't invited to Lor'themar's and Thalyssra's wedding, but inviting Wrathion and Kalec, makes sense. What about Magatha? I don't get how people think this is a good storytelling. This is not even mentioning the recent winx club raid cinematic, this is about a chain of events that lead to whole xpac.Comment by mrtievI don't mind cosmic conflict, I want the story to make sense, forshadowing to pay off, and feel what WoW used to be.

That being said, I don't understand how Kurog Grimtotem releasing Raszageth for being mad that he wasn't invited to Lor'themar's and Thalyssra's wedding, but inviting Wrathion and Kalec, makes sense. What about Magatha? I don't get how people think this is a good storytelling. This is not even mentioning the recent winx club raid cinematic, this is about a chain of events that lead to whole xpac.Comment by tupolew519interesting.