Midnight Dev Interviews

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Midnight Dev Interviews
We're waiting to update our full recap until when/if the gamescom Fireside Chat VoDs come out.

AlterTime talked to Maria Hamilton and Gabriel Gonzalez. They also talked to Frank Koowalkowski (Senior Technical Director) and Ely Cannon (Senior Art Director) in a second interview. We've recapped some of the points below, but be sure to listen to the full interview if you want more in-depth information.


Development Timeline
  • The team is in production for content releases and Midnight, and pre-production for The Last Titan.

Silvermoon
  • One of the biggest challenges with Silvermoon was making sure they captured the identity of Silvermoon. They had to be sure it didn't change with the upresing and modern fidelity.
  • They wanted to be sure Silvermoon kept all of the iconic elements while they are adding more to it.
  • There will be some friction between the Horde and Alliance in Silvermoon. It is still a Horde city, they are allowing the Alliance to set up in a part of it to help with the Void and protecting the Sunwell.
  • When you start the expansion, the first thing you'll do is step out of the light and join the battle we saw in the cinematic. We only saw the first set of people that arrive.

Void
  • We don't know how to get to the Voidstorm, so that is one challenge players will face. The Void Elves will be important to this.
  • When Void Elves are in Voidstorm, they are going to have a little extra something because they are in their element.

Misc
  • Arator will hear from friends of his father about what his father was like when he was younger.



Housing
  • The team started working on housing well before The War Within. It's one of the longest features the team has developed for World of Warcraft.
  • During Dragonflight the team started to explore the idea a little more. They had to solidify the design, figure out how to store the player data, how the zones would work, how the UI would work (copying some things from internal tools into the game).

Blood Elves
  • Isle of Quel'Danas has been reworked
  • Nothing to announce for additional Blood Elf customizations, but the team is interested in and committed to doing more, but it won't be in the initial release.

Void
  • Players will go into the Voidstorm and feel what the Void is about. You'll feel the predation of them, the very aggressive almost cannibalistic nature of the Void, and see it evidenced everywhere. You'll see this both with the environment and the creatures. We'll see large creatures that have been cannibalized by smaller creatures, aggressive terrain, and amazing and aggressive sky, and more.

Development
  • Early in expansion development, there are art and narrative leaders all in the same room working together to define the direction they want to go.
  • A level designer might come up with a cool idea for a location and zone, and all of a sudden there will be a story sprouting up around it.
  • We'll likely see more zones reworked in the future. There are a lot of classic zones that the team wants to tell stories in.
  • Watching Housing develop from a PowerPoint years ago, going through all of the steps and challenges along the way, and seeing the progress of the biggest feature in WoW take shape was very exciting.


WindowsCentral Interview
WindowsCentral talked to Ion Hazzikostas and Holly Longdale.

Housing
  • Every time the team looked at what it would take to make housing happen, it didn't fit in the development cycle of an expansion.
  • This time the team committed to a longer development cycle that would span multiple expansions.
  • To get housing done for Midnight, the team had to start back before Shadowlands.
  • Other systems built over the years also helped make housing possible, such as seamless instancing of Delves and the modularity of things like Torghast.
  • There should be something meaningful to do all of the time when a player is in Azeroth and Housing was a perfect fit for that idea.

Faction Conflict
  • The team leaned heavily into faction conflict in Battle for Azeroth, but some players felt it was implausible after the factions working together so many times against bigger threats.
  • Going forward, the goal is to balance room for faction conflict with broader storytelling that represents both cooperation and lingering rivalries.

Evoker
  • The team heard player concerns about Evoker transmog restrictions and noted that the model’s design makes armor display difficult, but they hope to improve it and use it as a lesson for future classes.
  • Augmentation Evoker continues to be tough to balance. At the high end, when you have a co-ordinated group making the absolute most of all them, Augmentation can seem mandatory. If you pull away from that, then, they feel unwelcome entirely at the high end.
  • The team loves the Bard vibe in other MMORPGs. They also appreciated a Shadow Priest or Enhancement Shaman was back in the early days, where people didn't bring you for DPS, but things like the old Windfury.

World Content
  • The team would love to offer challenging outdoor world content. Delves give solo players some progression, so bringing progression to outdoor world content would be great.
  • The Prey system might bring some of that difficulty to players. If the feedback is positive and the system is successful, it'll be something they carry forward into the future.

Consoles
  • The team is still learning how to adapt WoW to a controller well, but it is important to them. There are people that play on a Steam Deck and other handhelds.
  • Bringing WoW to consoles or controllers presents major UX challenges after 20 years of PC-focused design.
  • Any new platform would need to meet Blizzard quality standards and feel fully tailored, which would be a long-term effort.

Misc
  • Remix and other experimental modes let the team test ideas in a contained environment, learn from them, and apply them to other versions of the game.


Bronze and Silver Profession Crafts Removed
Taliesin & Evitel posted a long video about what went wrong at Gamescom, revealing a profession change.

  • Bronze and Silver quality items are being removed from the profession crafting system.

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