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Wowhead's Exclusive Blizzcon 2023 Interview with Anne Stickney & Tina Wang
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This year at BlizzCon 2023, Wowhead was lucky to sit down for an exclusive interview with Senior Narrative Designer Anne Stickley and Associate Art Director Tina Wang, discussing The War Within, open world endgame Delve content, and Heroic Talent philosophies! Read our full transcript below.
Blizzcon 2023 Interview with Anne Stickney & Tina Wang
We haven't heard of the Arathi humans in so long. Why now?
Anne Stickney:
These guys are a splintered tribe of the original Arathi Empire from back in the day, before they split into the seven kingdoms that we know of. It was a massive - all of humanity came together in this Empire. And there was a group of them who left and they spawned their own kingdom across the sea. These guys are a splintered group from that kingdom that received a vision about a falling star, and it took them to Harrowfall. And when they found it - you guys saw the key art for it, it's huge, gigantic - these guys are super devoted to the Light. They're like uber Paladins, and it just made sense that if we were going to bring in a group devoted to the Light, to that degree, why not bring in those ancient tribes of humanity that maybe we haven't seen in a hot minute, or heard of in forever? The Arathi have a very interesting history because, like I said, they're kinda like the first Empire of humanity, and it splintered itself in different directions. This is a direction that we're not familiar with.
Tina Wang:
On the art side, in World of Warcraft we're always trying to create variety in terms of what we encounter, and we haven't really done a very human-focused one in a while. We were really excited to touch up on their culture and history over the eons, that we're excited for players to check out as well - in terms of their animal companions, things like that.
Anne Stickney:
Just how they are a branch of humanity that kind of evolved and grew and built a culture outside of the kingdoms we're familiar with. So it's like, who are these guys, what are they all about? We're going to find out.
If I'm not mistaken though, the Arathi use the Holy Flame pretty intensively, right? They would use it to power something fun?
Anne Stickney:
Yes. The airships that they have actually are run on Holy Flame.
Tina Wang:
They're fighting the darkness, clashing with the Nerubians, so that story is part of it. One of my favourite dungeons is the Priory of the Secret Flame - It looks Cathedral-like.
The sword reveal was fantastic.
Anne Stickney:
What sword?
How big a role will the sword play in the expansion? Is it a central, kind of a side plot, or part of the main story?
Anne Stickney:
It's a part of the Saga. The World Soul is calling to people, and calling for a reason. And a lot of people have been hearing these words and these visions. And we pointed out in the cinematic, the sword's gotta be pointed at something, right? Understatement of the century Thrall, so thank you. As far as that goes, I can't really speak too much as to how much it will be addressed in The War Within. It is a part of the Worldsoul Saga. So three expansions worth of stuff.
It's the beginning?
Tina Wang:
Yeah. Something that I've seen online is that some people think the crystal and the crystalline ceiling is the sword - and it's not. I just want to clarify that.
Anne Stickney:
Different thing.
That seems like a light source, at first glance?
Anne Stickney:
...It's mysterious, at first glance. That's all we'll say.
You mentioned Azeroth is calling to people - it doesn't seem like they know what it is in the trailer?
Anne Stickney:
No.
Will they figure out what that is quickly, or?
Anne Stickney:
Well, we did mention Magni, and Magni is kind of the direct line to the World Soul. He's going to have a role in this. We're going to be talking to him, and more will be revealed over time. But Thrall - he's been kind of removed for awhile, so he's not in on all this stuff, and then Anduin has also been going through his own thing, and maybe not paying attention to all of that overarching, oh here's this world-changing... I mean he almost went full Arthas, right? He's got a lot on his plate, as you saw. He needs a bath, he needs some chapstick, he needs a therapist. So they don't necessarily know what's going on, but they know who they can talk to. Another tidbit: Magni obviously has a vested interest in this. Moira hasn't been seen for quite a while... and she is actually - you know - interested in the Earthen. Also, I mean her son has just come of age... So we get to go on adventures with Dagran. He's not a weird baby in a crib with heavy eyebrows anymore, he's actually grown up.
So you obviously mentioned Anduin and Arthas as well. There are some obvious similarities - the sword and stuff like that,
Anne Stickney:
The pose there...
Yeah. Is there still going to be some Arthas in there?
Anne Stickney:
I don't think there was ever any Arthas in him, necessarily, but because it was the power of Domination that was the same thing that worked with the Lich King and all of that so there was like the last vestiges, and we saw that last vestige in that cinematic in the Shadowlands - it was like, the last whisper of what was left. Does Anduin have any Arthas in him? No, I think he's at a point where he's... When you devote yourself to something, like he has devoted himself to the Light, and to the idea of peace and compassion and diplomacy, and everything that he's been since he was that little shrimp in the throne room, right? To have that robbed of you so completely just at a moment's notice, it changes you, right? It shakes you up. Maybe there was a part of him that almost was starting to like it? We don't know. But he doesn't feel like he is worthy of the Light anymore. He has flashbacks to the things that he did. Like I said, he almost went full Arthas, and that's scary. I mean we call it
The War Within
, because we're going into Azeroth, but it's also kinda that war within yourself - and with Anduin he's very much battling this idea of - "Am I worthy of these things that I aspire to? Or am I just as easily swayed as anybody else? Am I really part of this darkness?" He has to struggle with that as well. So we're going to see a lot of him and his story going through.
I guess instead of "is Arthas in him", "Was all the Domination magic completely removed" I guess would be the main question. Or are there maybe some more remnants in there that cause him to...?
Anne Stickney:
I don't really want to get too far into that, cause beats are still being laid out for him. But I feel like that chapter of his story was kind of closed at the end of Shadowlands, and now it's what comes after you've gone through something horrific like that.
The Arathi will probably help him?
Anne Stickney:
Oh yeah. He's going to be hanging out in Hallowfall.
You guys kinda surprised us with three expansions at the same time. How often are you expecting these expansions to come out? Is there any planned change? Or is this just kind of looking ahead for the story?
Tina Wang:
We are planning on increasing the cadence of our release. But we want to keep it at a responsible pace, both for on the development side as well as for our player base. We're really happy with the overall engagement with Dragonflight.
So you're looking to speed it up a bit?
Anne Stickney:
We're basically working hard to deliver stuff at a pace that keeps people entertained and keeps people with something new to do. I think a lot of the stuff that we're trying to avoid is sort of like what happened with
Mists of Pandaria
to
Warlords
, where we had that year worth of Siege of Orgrimmar before Warlords came out. We want to avoid that. We want to avoid those long periods of nothing. We want to make sure that we're continually giving people something to do.
That typical end of an expansion, everyone expects that last tier to take eight months to a year.
Anne Stickney:
Yeah, speaking of which, 10.2 is not the last patch of Dragonflight. We have so much more story to tell and you guys don't even know. Oh my god, I can't wait for you to see it.
I know in another interview though someone said no 10.3, so is it just going to be story and the smaller patches basically?
Tina Wang:
The final raid is 10.2.
Anne Stickney:
Yeah, Amirdrassil.
The three expansions - is it the end of the saga, or is it the end of Wow?
Tina Wang:
No, you heard the hype. Just opening the chapter for another twenty. This is just one story that is too much to do in one expansion at a time, and then it's kind of awkward for people... we want to let them know we have an epic story planned that's too much for a single expansion.
And I think that works really well.
Anne Stickney:
How do you pay off twenty years of people logging in to play with their friends and be the big heroes? And we addressed that and went back and forth on that, and Chris came up with so many ideas, because he's just like a fountain... I love jamming with him. But like, there was too much there to try and cram into one, because if you cram too much into one, then the story has no room to breathe. You just go too fast. So why not make it three? Sure - let's do it.
Can we expect this first one to be a little more of a set-up - kind of like a typical story set-up - climax, and then post-mortem text stuff?
Anne Stickney:
I can't really talk about that because spoilers, but I will say it's sort of like three chapters, or three arcs, and each one leads into the next. It's sort of like what happened between Warlords and Legion, where the end of Warlords played directly into what happened at the beginning of Legion. It's sort of like that, except that thematically the story beat's gonna carry through a lot harder.
Why change the character screen?
Anne Stickney:
Ok because it's like you're a little mini overlord and this little army of dudes that you've been playing with, all these alts and everything. Why not let them sit down and hang out with each other around the campfire? That's just cool. Why not talk to each other? That's great. So setting it up so it has that visual is cool because it reinforces the idea of what a warband is.
Many players have been talking about a world revamp. Last one I saw was the Cataclysm. Is there a chance of looking into updating some of those old old zones from way back in Cataclysm?
Tina Wang:
That's something we continuously talk about. I think we've found moments when we've done that with things like the Warfronts in BFA with Darkshore, and you might have heard from Metzen - we're going back to Quel'Thalas. So Silvermoon... right? So, you know.
Anne Stickney:
It's been a hot minute since those guys have done anything.
Tina Wang:
I know that our players love Silvermoon, so...
We still can't fly there, but maybe we can dragonride?
Anne Stickney:
I can't speak to that.
Tina Wang:
We are excited to look at those spaces that Metzen hinted at during the opening ceremony.
You mentioned Quel'thalas, so that's obviously a zone that obviously started in BC. It's been there for a while. I assume it will be expanded on in the second expansion - Midnight - then?
Tina Wang:
I don't really want to go too much into that, for this moment we really want to focus on the War Within.
Anne Stickney:
But as Metzen said, the Sunwell is of great interest to certain parties, because it's not just that magical font anymore - when we fixed it back in Burning Crusade they dumped the heart of a Naaru in it and imbued it with the Light, and then there was that whole scene with Liadrin where she was super impressed with everything at the end of the raid. It has become something other than it was originally, so it's arcane yeah, but it's also "the Light". And that's kind of intriguing to people who want to snuff that out...
Back to Warbands, this has been a lot of quality of life that players have been asking for for a long time. How hard was it to get this underway?
Tina Wang:
You heard what Ion said - it's not just a design feature of "we want it to work this way!" This is like engineering... foundational, changing the way the architecture of how the game was built. I would say it's a significant effort, but it's worth it. This is how players play the game and that's what we want to continue to do. Support the variety of playstyles that people embrace. That's also one of the reasons we made Delves.
Anne Stickney:
One of the bullet points that they had at the initial "What's Next" panel was respecting the player's time. And it's the player's time - not the character's time - how much time has the player put into all this stuff that they've done? They shouldn't feel bad starting with so many alts because of putting this time into somebody else... they're all interconnected. And I think that's kind of a lot of we're focussing on with stuff like Delves and with Warbands and that kind of thing, just respecting the player's time to the point that... like with Delves, it's kind of like, do you just have 15-20 minutes to go do something? Ok well, you go do that thing in 15-20 minutes and then we'll give you a track on the great vault and give you some good loot out of it. A lot of it is very much a flexibility in play. Because not everybody's got 16 hours a week to raid.
So Delves will be very shortform content then?
Tina Wang:
I think it's more like 15 minutes.
Similar to Islands?
Tina Wang:
Time phase-wise. It's one of those things where it actually has its own progression. So one of the things you get with outdoor world is like, ok it's cool that I'm increasing my item level, but do I really need to increase my item level to accomplish these things? And with a Delvess it gives you a way to still engage with that mastery aspect of World of Warcraft, but also in a way where it's not like - with Mythic+ it's timed content, Torghast you even have a timer, in a raid there's like 20 other people waiting for you. This you can afk in the middle of it if you want to. You can play with a varied number of people. The friction of getting in and engaging in something that makes you feel like you're progressing your character is much more minimized.
Tina Wang:
Yeah I think the fact that no timer is definitely something that people are asking for in terms of content.
Anne Stickney:
You said Islands. The way that I kind of equate it in my head when they were showing it to us is scenarios from
Mists of Pandaria
. Scenarios are great because, as a rogue, when I jumped into the raid finder queue, I had a long wait, because nobody wanted DPS. So in between, I would queue up for scenarios, and do some quickly. And that was always fun and quick, but it never felt like you got anything really substantial out of it. So Delves are kind of a combination of that, and maybe the treasure room, and maybe a little bit of withered training... combat, puzzle, there's all kinds of stuff that you do in there.
Tina Wang:
But the thing that's really interesting about this one that we haven't done before is the companion. Because you can spec that. You know when you do Torghast you're like, I kinda should bring a tank, I kind of should bring a healer, but you can spec Brann to supplement, so it's even better.
Anne Stickney:
Yeah what I love about it is it's all those things I loved from back then, but we're getting progression out of it. We're getting decent loot out of it. It feels like we've accomplished something really good at the end of it. And I'm like, yeah that's my jam.
What kind of progression other than Brann is there?
Tina Wang:
Difficulty levels.
Anne Stickney:
Difficulty levels and then like I said, it's got its own track on the great vault now, so you can get loot from that every week.
Is there more plans for public events to be added to the Great Vault as well? Because I think those were new to Dragonflight.
Tina Wang:
I think we're leaving that area still more ambiguous, in figuring out what rewards might be great vault relevant. Not too many details to share yet on that. But definitely Delves will be in that section.
Are they always up, or are they timed like the public events?
Tina Wang:
They're always available. But there's a variety so they can change in theme over a timeline.
So if it's I want to play now, I can choose any number of them, but if I want to play a specific one, you may need to wait a little?
Tina Wang:
Yeah, it's possible.
Anne Stickney:
When you're exploring out in the world, you'll find them here, there, and everywhere, Just like little hidey-holes that you can go into. It's really fun. And the other thing I love is we've done the outdoor content, stuff like that, but pvp has been taken off that track. So it can be its own thing, people can do their own thing with that, they don't have to choose between "do I want the PVE reward or the PVP reward". And we went to our outdoor players and said, "Hi, can we do something for you?"
So a little bit on hero talents - just kind of scratching the surface with those. What really caused you to add this new talent tree, in the middle of keep doing revamps to the old stuff?
Tina Wang:
Well this is something that Ion touched on in the deep dive as well - when you add to the tree, you're continuously adding to the weight of the tree. I might really like this specific choice, but as a result you have to rearrange the whole tree. There's a lot of specs right now that are working really well, and we didn't want to break the way that people were allocating things too much. So this is an alternative solution that really helps you lean into a specific fantasy that you might be into. So the fact that it's separate gives us much more freedom to add those cool things where you don't feel like, well which branch do we put that ability, right? Everyone should be able to access it.
And it's completely customizable - you can change as much as you want?
Anne Stickney:
You can go back and forth and flip in and out of it. Each spec gets two choices, where they can choose their little hero talent trees. It's very flexible, you aren't locked into anything. It's sort of like having an artifact talent tree except on a weapon, it's on you. I love that.
And you don't need to grind for it?
Anne Stickney:
No
To touch on that, if you're one of the hero specs or whatever, does your character get a visualization change of any form?
Tina Wang:
There are certain abilities where we'll make them more themed towards that specific thing. So you saw there's a video that we showed where the Mountain Thane did like his thunderclap and then his storm bolt - just a little more epic.
Anne Stickney:
The visual cues will be there and tell the other players around you "they just pushed the big button".
Despite hero talents existing and focus being on those, we can still probably see revamps of the old talent trees as needed I assume, as needed? These aren't locked in or anything like that?
Tina Wang:
Yeah the classes are definitely an area with continuous player feedback.
Anne Stickney:
I don't think they ever lock anything down in stone with those things, they're always kind of like - what's working, what's not working?
Quick question about professions... Are the stats sticking around? We haven't heard too much about professions, and that was a big focus of Dragonflight.
Anne Stickney:
I don't think we have too much on professions just yet to talk about. Obviously, it's one of those things where we want to keep it fascinating, we want to keep it interesting for players, and we also want to make sure that when you're doing stuff with your profession you're getting something good out of it. So still a work in progress, but when we have more information we will be sure to share that with the community.
Backing up just a little bit to Delves. It was mentioned that you learned stuff from Island Expeditions, Torghast, what did you learn from those that you put into Delves to make sure it's the best it can be?
Tina Wang:
I think the biggest thing is the fact that, this idea that there's this progression in terms of increasing your item level and being able to master harder and harder difficulties of it. A lot of those were timed...
Anne Stickney:
The timer's not always fun.
Tina Wang:
Then also the fact that sometimes even though you can go in with any class, it's really better if you're a tank, or one type of class. So adding Brann. I think those are some of the key facets.
Anne Stickney:
Yeah. Not having to switch a spec just to go into a thing makes me happy. It's again it's about respecting the player's time and also letting them play the way they want to play. Delves are kind of designed around that idea of you can pop in, doesn't matter what you are, and get things done.
A final statement on mounts:
Tina Wang:
I did want to share that on the art side, we are planning that most if not all of the mounts that currently fly should be able to have dynamic flying by launch. That's our intent.
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