We’ve had the opportunity to attend a one-hour group interview with the Warcraft development team who answered various questions about the Midnight expansion.
The session ran for one hour with two sets of devs joining in 30 minute intervals. The first set included Senior Game Director Ion Hazzikostas and Lead UX Designer Crash Reed. In the second set, we talked with Associate Game Director Paul Kubit and Design Director Maria Hamilton.
Interview Highlights
- With Apex Talents, Blizzard wants to give classes some growth without increasing complexity, so they’re aggregating power into a single node (the Apex Talent).
- Adding new specializations to existing classes is still on the table for the future.
- The team wants variety while ensuring “support” doesn’t feel forced on players who don’t want it.
- Skyriding has been simplified and the Vigor bar is no more! Abilities now work without it and have their own cooldowns.
- The Arcantina is a new tavern filled with life which will have daily visitors. It serves as a narrative hub and isn’t a replacement for the main hub. The goal with it was to create a peaceful venue for new stories and interactions with important lore characters.
- With healers, the team wants every spec to have a unique identity while being viable across all content. The talent system lets players pivot their focus per content. Overlaps between healing specs will happen by necessity.
- The team’s focusing on reducing redundant buttons and move away from “DPS-like” planned cooldown rotations so healers can react more to the situation. We will have a follow-up on this in upcoming blog posts about class design.
- There are no plans currently to implement story mode on week 1 when the raid opens.
- The new player experience has been rerouted into the Dragonflight campaign, so characters are not tossed into capitals to figure things out any more.
- Returning players have a new tutorial option called “Siege of the Arathi Highlands” with Skyriding tutorials and even ones for interrupting.
- There are no plans to bring back Brawler’s Guild at Midnight launch.
- Nameplates will be more robust and customizable in Midnight.
- Midnight class tuning revolves mostly around spec-specific issues and there are no plans to add or remove raid buffs.
- Domelius in Legion Remix is a housing vendor who doesn’t sell anything because the housing preview won’t be available until Patch 11.2.7. We’ll have to wait until then to find out if Legion Remix will award player housing decor.
- Members of either faction can settle in Alliance/Horde-style neighborhoods.
- There are no plans for Pet Battle Dungeons at Midnight launch.
- We can’t display old Archaeology artifacts as trophies in our houses. Many of them don’t have the proper 3D models for that, but that doesn’t mean a similar feature may not be available in the future. Keep in mind this is just the launch of player housing and many things that the community wants will be implemented down the road.
- The team is overall happy with the abandon system in Mythic+. Toxic cases make up under 1% of runs. Reporting categories have been improved.
- They don’t want complex addons to solve Roll the Bones math for you.
- Mythic+ rewards beyond 3K rating aren’t planned at this time.
- The new Training Grounds feature for battlegrounds should lower the entry point barrier for battlegrounds.
- We will have more Horde characters appear during the Worldsoul Saga.
- There are no plans to localize the game for more languages right now.
- Orweyna’s decision to act is a big deal to the Haranir, they’ve mostly been all about not interfering with anything and their stance is explicit in the story.
- The team’s discussing how to extend Warband functionality to past reputations. They see Warbands as a long-term accessibility benefit for altoholics.
- There’s currently no redesign planned for the character creation screen. The current layout will still accommodate the Haranir on both sides’ second rows.
- Blizzard is changing some API rules to block certain combat info for addons. That said, tuning will change so the groups are compensated.
- You choose your Haranir faction at the beginning when you create the character. They don’t work like the Pandaren.
