Game director Ion Hazzikostas faces a tough challenge for this fall’s World of Warcraft: Shadowlands expansion. Blizzard Entertainment must make an (sometimes badly) aged game feel relevant and new again, while remaining true to what people love.
World of Warcraft occupies a unique place in the world of games. After 15 years, he still dominates massively multiplayer online role-playing games in western games, and people are still playing.
Blizzard Entertainment never released a World of Warcraft II; it just kept iterating on the original. In recent years, that philosophy has created a WoW world where game tropes from a decade coexist alongside missions with current sensibilities. Modern gaming systems collide with clearly low-fidelity graphics, and the game’s primary user interface shows none of the finesse of modern user experience research.
World of Warcraft: Shadowlands is a chance for redemption
The Shadowlands can do more to fix that dichotomy than most of the previous seven expansions.
The revamped leveling experience features a new start and progression zone through 60 levels instead of 120-130. Designers had their first real chance to silently tweak and upgrade missions and leveling since the 2010 Cataclysm expansion literally tore apart parts of the game world. For new players, the experience will completely skip large chunks of franchise history that are low on age.
“We can have a fine and elaborate experience that truly reflects the best of what WoW has to offer in 2020, that reflects modern gaming.” So a new player is not playing 2010 content, and then graduating to 2012 content or 2014 content, ”said Hazzikostas.
Blizzard made some modest adjustments to the game’s user interface for Shadowlands, including new character design screens and updated button appearance and behavior. But the look doesn’t stray too far from the classic look players have become familiar with. Shadowlands’ new Afterlands environment means artists can take new directions on how to create areas. His designs go back to familiar elements, but they also create new ones.
“Yes, there is content in the game that is 15 years old, and we revisited it at WoW Classic last year,” said Hazzikostas. “But each new expansion marks an evolution in our storytelling and our engine, our visual fidelity and only our overall design that builds on the lessons learned along the way.
“So Shadowlands is a 2020 game. It’s a modern MMO in many ways, built on the foundation of this famous franchise.”
Above: Warcraft: Shadowlands game director Ion Hazzikostas.
Image credit: Blizzard Entertainment
Invent for decades of old code
Sometimes those bases feel like shackles rather than a beak to stand on, he admitted. Hazzikostas has been working on the game since 2008, when he joined as a game designer and became a director in 2016.
“Of course there is technological debt. That is a double-edged sword, where we are in some areas in debt with decisions made 10, 15 years ago by people who could not imagine the situation we are in now, or the ways in which we want to apply that technology to new systems. “He said.” But that is why each expansion, we are constantly going back and renewing and updating part of our previous infrastructure. “
An example that Warcraft: Shadowlands brings is the new character customization system. An avalanche of new options will greet players, thanks to updates on how new customizations can be designed. Those features also retroactively give a stripe of personality and color to the legion of similar NPCs.
“I think the character customization project is one of my favorite new features in Shadowlands,” said Hazzikostas. “It is as much an achievement and a product of the artwork that our character artists have made, as it is [by] our engineers. “
In the previous system, when designers added customizations, they added exponential manual labor. The new systems are more modular, allowing for almost infinite creativity that fits well.
“There are those kinds of examples, in which we realized that we are meeting the limits of the old technological choices we made in the past. We can redo it, “he said. “We can break those limits and clear the way forward for further progress.”
Above: Players fight on the island of Warcraft Havenswood.
Image credit: Blizzard Entertainment
Balancing new technology with a familiar look
Hazzikostas said a saving grace has been WoW’s brightly colored and pictorial art style. Because the game never aspired to be photorealistic, it held up better against its competitors than it otherwise could have. As a bonus, players can still use basic PCs.
Shadowlands will take advantage of new graphics technology. Engineers added support for ray tracing and ultra-wide resolutions. But many work-style PC potatoes will also play the next expansion as well.
The team tried and rejected some other advanced technology for Shadowlands. In designing Torghast’s endless new dungeon, Hazzikostas sat down with Diablo’s hack -‘-n-slash adventure team to explore new ways to create infinite content. Should they use procedurally generated maps? Artificial intelligence?
New dungeons won’t feel like Islands or AI battlefield
“The closest thing to AI we’ve really had is the enemy teams in [Island] Expeditions They have a true type of AI rather than priorities that drive them, ”he said. “You also see them when you fight those agents on the battlefields, when we have that [Arathi Basin Comp Stomp] fight continuing. What we have learned from Island Expeditions, and how we actually build Torghast from scratch, is more modular than procedural. You are building content in a way that allows for the interconnection and combination of many different craft possibilities. “
The areas and features and monsters they spawn on the fly run the risk of feeling chaotic in a game focused on tailor-made experiences and interactions, he said.
“To be clear, I love Diablo, but that exact approach didn’t seem right for World of Warcraft,” he said. “Essentially, we wanted to create spaces and targets that, if they squinted a bit, felt like they could have been a purely handmade WoW dungeon. Maybe at some point we will all be out of work and have artificial intelligence that can do this for us, but in the meantime we have found much better success and results when it is primarily a craft process. “
Above: Whirlwind becomes a basic skill for all warriors in Shadowlands.
Image credit: Heather Newman
Choose from 15 years of player skills
New and old fight each other in Shadowlands player skills as well. One of the design decisions Warcraft developers made was to “not prune” the spells and abilities of the classes, returning iconic spells that had been removed over time. That increased the amount of button options players can press.
For one, the “lack of pruning” returned fun flavor spells and some in-game images that I haven’t seen in-game in a while. (Hunter marks are popping up on targets everywhere!) On the other hand, the changes make some classes with action bars that are already overflowing extend beyond their limits. Choices about what skills to use and maintain can complicate the game.
“There certainly are some skills that are there to add flavor. We don’t expect them to be used regularly, “said Hazzikostas. “A shaman is probably not going to worry about [key] binding Far Sight and where exactly should your bar go. But it is something great and tasty. The game is no worse if someone goes a whole year without casting that ability, and they forget it’s in their spellbook. There will be some people who will really love it. “
‘What do you want us to get out?’
The team started by listening to what the players said they wanted to recover, he said. Upon moving to the Shadowlands, they will ask, what do you wish was gone? Blizzard typically monitors player feedback to tell them when they removed something that people loved, not when they added too much stuff.
“Unlike past expansions, where we started the discussion by asking people what skills they missed because we had taken a lot of things from them. This time we ask, is there anything here that you really feel is free? Hazzikostas said. He often plays a shaman, and gave an example of that kind.
“We put back Burning Totem, and [we] I received a lot of comments. I didn’t miss this one. This is like a super maintenance button. It’s not very exciting to push, but I feel like I have to push it regularly. Please no.’ We pruned it again. It could be that yes, the buttons he recovered were exciting, but there are a couple of others that now feel completely unnecessary. “
Like the game itself, skill changes will continue to evolve in the Shadowlands class, Hazzikostas said.
“That is part of the ongoing iterative process. The book is already closed on that.
