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While The War Within expansion of World of Warcraft is still a couple of months away, we already had the opportunity to play the 10th expansion.
During an event in London, where Associate Design Director Mario Hamilton and Vice President for World of Warcraft Holly Longdale, we learned a lot about the vision and future of World of Warcraft. The current state of the game seems the perfect set-up for the next iteration of World of Warcraft, which starts after the World Soul saga.
Ever since BlizzCon 2023 Blizzard has said a couple things, but mainly, that we are getting ready for the next 20 years of the Warcraft franchise, which will start in a couple of years. This means that Blizzard has a lot of time to ask their players what they like and don’t like about the game. Listening to the community has been the most important phrase that is constantly repeated by the developers and during the event in London, we learned more about what that means.
Holly explained to us in a group interview, that Blizzard does a lot of analyzing, focus testing and surveys, to be sure that every corner of the community has content to enjoy. The example she gives is the addition of Delves. Blizzard learned that while players got older, they got more busy, got children and want more bite-sized content to fulfill their WoW needs. The Delves should fill that gap in the game. Playing the Delves for a couple hours, I can definitely say that they seem a very good addition to the game. Although they were a bit too easy at this point and I would like to see some more challenging Delves in the future. But most importantly, the goal of making fun bite-sized content, seems to be achieved.
While we were at the event, we also got the opportunity to talk with Maria. We talked a bit about the current state of World of Warcraft and how Season of Discovery and Remix are an experiment that let Blizzard test features in real-time. “Although the features that we want to implement in the World Soul saga are pretty set in stone, we are definitely testing what players like with Remix and Season of Discovery,” she explained.
Warbands and Hero Talents
If we add up all these statements, we can only come to one conclusion: all the changes and features that are being tested now, are being tested for the next iteration of World of Warcraft. Warbands are here to stay, as are Delves and other new content coming to the next three expansions. Blizzard is carefully adding new features, that are staying in the next expansion and I do believe that the learnings they take from Season of Discovery and Remix, will play a big part in the future of World of Warcraft. The developers could of course not talk about that now, but the writings are on the wall.
During our playtime with the Delves we also had the opportunity to try out the Hero Talents, which seemed amazing at first glance. I got the chance to play as a Dark Ranger Hunter and a Frostfire Mage, which both felt amazing. Holly tells us that these were made to get back that special feeling for your class and that effect was definitely felt. Playing as a Dark Ranger felt like you are a decendent of Sylvanas, which was really cool. The Frostfire Mage brought me back to the days of Classic where I had to use Frostfire bolt to save some mana.
The War Within is shaping up to be a cool expansion, with amazing new features and a great new story to unfold with our favorite dwarfs to play a huge part.
