On Monday, November 8, 2021, our colleagues from France had the opportunity and honor to interview ion hazzikostas, director of the game, and Sara Won s Chief level designer of World of Warcraft, on the patch 9.2: End of the MEADOWLANDS expansion eternity!
ion HazzikOSTas: Is the last great content update of Shadow lands in terms of implementation of new Raids, new areas, etc. There are still many stories to tell and systems to improve, but as Steve mentioned in the video, this It is a story told in the form of a trilogy that consists of three main acts: this chapter is the last in the history of Shadow lands. There will follow many more, but end of eternity contains the word final for a good reason.
Sara Won s: con Earth Morris, we really wanted to explore the origins of the creators of the universe, we know, we know things about the Titans, many things, but we do not know who created them. It is the opportunity to explore an invisible part of the universe, and it turns out that this is the playground of the first. Earth Morris exists with the sole purpose of creating the beyond. Shadow lands was created along with many things from the force of death that we still have to discover. So Both, the sepulcher of the founders is a place within Earth Morris that contains many secrets on how the universe works.
ion hazzikostas: In a way, perhaps! Earth Morris is our first in-depth look at the founders, cosmos and cosmology, of that balance of power that governs the entire universe: this is where the Jailer must surrender, it is in this area that he has looked for a long time to remodel all creation to his image; in the image of death. As you enter Earth Morris and discover her secrets, you will make you new questions about nature From the universe of Warcraft as we know him and, who knows, can change your way of thinking about what you know when you return to Zeroth and could help you understand how all these elements.
ion HazzikOSTas: Narrentatively, as players explore, they will know the automizes, their culture and their mysteries. You will decipher your language and begin to understand things that were previously incomprehensible and had the shape of runes. This is a New way of addressing the topics of exploration and discovery. We are replacing everything that has ever been seen with something literally strange (extraterrestrial) in many ways, much more than creatures, also the very heart of communication between these species. Sara Won s: Si, and as Ion mentioned, we really make sure to take that look to the fullest. You know, the somber lands were already a fantasy area, and we wanted to increase that feeling on the land of the parents. Beyond the fact of doing it less earthly, Earth Morris, for example, does not have a day / night cycle, since it is neither a star nor a planet, but an area located in the heart of the ether of the universe itself. We really try to make this place look very strange and distant, and the encoded language system was an excellent way to think about it. To reinforce this idea.
ion hazzikostas: as always, you must know that the recent comments we have had and that allowed the introduction of the 9.1.5 patch not only allowed the creation of patch 9.1.5 but also all updates. So while you are In Earth Morris there are new stories and missions, as well as a new way of progress (even narrative) and gain power, we have learned a lot from Parthia and when creating these loops. Some of these revelations had to do with forced power. That happened to improve the intermediates and add hunts that finally frustrated the players. But it was not like that, since there have been other discoveries about secondary characters in particular. You are obliged to perform these tasks in each of your characters.
Narrative, we gave a lighter touch to Earth Morris than to Parthia. We want players to explore and unlock access to content fragments in a more free way, unlike the very linear road that had to be taken to progress in Parthia.
Of course, during the RPP test phases, we will collect comments from the players as they try all this and take the time to further improve these characteristics so that they feel as if they were combining all those who are already in Shadow lands. — and not only narrative, but also in the systems offered and in the way the content is presented.
ion HazzikOSTas: May, very soon, I would say that it will happen in the coming weeks. As always, there are technical challenges that may occur and make the implementation of an update fails at the last minute. Therefore, no. I have a specific date. However, we want to share all this very quickly with our community and receive your comments very, very soon.
Sara Won s: I think that one of the biggest challenges for us was to create something without a real track to follow. When we created an Zeroth area, it has a story. But with the somber lands, it s as if everything had emerged Suddenly from the water and, however, we have to go even further with the first. We have to create a culture and one own world and, at the same time, keep what makes the spirit of wow.
But that s not all, since we also had to think about how all this would look like, what could this place be? We were genuinely interested in what could be called the building blocks of the universe. So you will discover a sacred geometry embedded within the structure of the universe: hexagons, orbs, etc. And even the inhabitants and creatures that inhabit this area reflect this and sacred geometry that we found very interesting. This was undoubtedly our biggest challenge.
ion hazzikostas: End general, I do not believe it, I think that greater consistency is our real goal. One of the challenges of creating some meetings, Key tuned in mythical mode, for example, is that the players Been a strategy that the developer the team did not foresee: I remember the first group that defeated Key tuned, they were not far away to try to cure the damage they were receiving and approve each of the mechanics that composed the meeting, but when some others Group arrived at the same stage and realized that stop the DPS for a while, that I was going to go beyond just trying to use the brute force to pass a certain stage, then one of the hearts of the difficulty of the meeting vanished instantly.
They are things that we try to be aware of. I think it would be prudent to say that what may seem too easy or little tuned for the best guilds in the world remains a real challenge for all other players. For Key Thread and the scribe of destiny, the two suffered successive nerfs to allow intermediate guilds, as are commonly known, defeat these bosses in the following weeks and months.
But there is no debate about it: the difficulty in the sepulcher of the founders will increase with some peaks here and there, especially during the meeting with Indoor that will be a very, very complex boss, that is our absolute goal. However, if it was simpler than other bosses before he, that would not be a failure.
I would also like to mention an important element for the guilds that practice mythical mode and want to try to obtain the first world: the raid will not be deployed in its entirety during the first week of normal and heroic mode. The first eight bosses, to Indoor, will be available from the opening week of the normal and heroic modes. The second part of the incursion, after Indoor and during which you will face the jailer in particular, will be accessible in all modes of difficulty only from the second week. Therefore, there will be no way to train before mythical mode in normal and heroic mode in the last three bosses. This system is also partly configured for narrative reasons: I do not want to spoil anything, but when the players arrive at Indoor, an intense battle is carried out and should discover new things after it, so they can continue their search for the jailer until the Last part of the sepulcher.
Probably it will be a very interesting career to follow. Everything is practiced and anticipated with so much enthusiasm, even before the raid is officially starting, which should be interesting to see how the best guilds adapt to this new rule
ion hazzikostas: he lets s try to be increasingly attentive to this topic in recent years. I think of a time, after Warcraft III to Cataclysm in particular, when a main character like Cairn could die without being killed. We see this event on the screen and the players are not aware of him directly; If you did not read the books, then you never knew what happened. We understand interest in our history. Game, both through the game itself and when watching videos or reading auxiliary resources like chronicles, but we really want to bring everything we can directly to the game, and that can take the shape of a book that you can find here and there exploring the Motivations from a given character or teaching us more about his past to better understand who he is. However, these elements are not crucial to understand the events that are developed in the game. If you ever needed to read a book out of the game to understand a mission or important plot in the game that is World of Warcraft, that would mean that we would have caused a significant narrative interruption.
ion HazzikOSTas: Much Mysteries will be resolved in Earth Morris with the deployment of Eternity s End, and some of them can be resolved at a later date. There are many crucial questions that can arise in the minds of fans. World of Warcraft For a long time, but it is not necessarily a maximum priority unlike stopping the advance of the jailer. This is where we focus on, but as I said before, the things that we learn in Earth Morris allow us to get a broader view of all Zeroth and the Warcraft, and that involves solving some of these mysteries.
ion HazzikOSTas: We ll see! We ll see... You know, I d really like to answer your question, but I want to avoid giving the story of patch to players, so they can discover it by themselves.
ion HazzikOSTas: C OMO said Steve in the video, and how all the team thinks, our systems designers and artists loved the idea of working on the return of these sets of armor. A pause in creation of new sets for several years at the end of Legion had several reasons: some dealt on the interaction between the bonuses granted by those sets and the armor of America, others were more focused on the purely artistic aspect and the idea of offering 20 different versions of The Fantasy Class of the Paladin, for example, therefore, we decided to focus on global decorated dedicated to each incursion, as the very narrow aspect of Under or very aquatic of the Eternal Palace, etc. But I think our artists have made an Amazing work when instilling these new decorated with what makes the founders what they are and never forget every class fantasy.
A funny anecdote about it is that one of our artist teams was working on the design of these decorated and went to offer the design team a complete concept of the decorated that they had devised without specifying which was dedicated. Such or what kind depends on them guess! Some of them were more obvious and easy to guess, while others were less. The team then told himself is fine, that means we have to work these concepts with more depth so that we can guess that this set is dedicated to the shaman, another is dedicated to the paladin, etc.. It has to be a perfect combination between Class Fantasy and Raid Fantasy and we are anxious to share this with the players! ion HazzikOSTas: I think we can say it s pretty big!
Sara Won s: Is a lot big, I do not want to be wrong, it s been a long time since I compared the size of Earth Morris with any other area. I would say it s wider than you think.
ion HazzikOSTas: Since it is much larger than Parthia! It is more comparable to Narrator or other very large areas deployed in the past.
ion HazzikOSTas: This is really a challenge that you share with us, nowadays, most players have access to a phone or have had the option of obtaining a physical authenticator. But, the restrictions we have applied To the Group Finder tool aim to improve the quality of the game for most users.
We know that some players enter and flood this tool with ads, and although advertising in the group search engine goes against our terms of service, we have ruled that players can report them. The promotion of these ads had no impact, since they were fraudulent accounts in many cases and therefore, in essence, they did not fear being forbidden.
The authenticator is an attempt to purge this, but one of the things we did recently at patch 9.1.5 is to improve this tool: you get a password, enter the information of that key. In the group search engine, you can specify if you expect to finish it before the time or not, etc. Then, even if you can not customize the text you write in this tool, you can still list your group regardless of what. And, of course, anyone can join any group! Therefore, we hope that the beneficial contribution that this system contributes to most players much greater than the inconvenience caused to players who can not obtain an authenticator. However, it is something that we continue to work: How can we make this technology and these protections become universally accessible for all accounts? ion HazzikOSTas: Yes! This is the philosophy proposed by patch 9.1.5: We want to offer a really fun, interesting and profound progression system during the first weeks after the patch is implemented, while Players who arrive late or change character can not we have the feeling of becoming late, precisely, to prevent this from being a source of frustration, so we ask ourselves every time a system of this type is deployed How can you expect this? In a few months? How can we add updating mechanics? How do you help the secondary characters? And there are different answers depending on the nature of the proposed system, but ideally we should not have to fix this, we have to know what the players want, and we have to anticipate ourselves.
ion hazzikostas: SA is a great question, and also something that we are still actively discussing here. I do not know the perfect answer to make our expansions or patches last necessarily longer or not, but we know that we have to get to Most frequent updates. We want to move towards a world in which, whether arrangements, balances or important patches, players always have something to put their hands, we know that one of the challenges of the live kingdoms offered by World of Warcraft is the constant balance without sacrificing the quality of the content and allowing the players to access the content at the right time. No matter how fun it is Zeroth or World of Warcraft, if you have nothing to do at some point, then we know That means that we have abandoned our players, that is the goal we have.
ion hazzikostas: really we are not in favor of the idea of letting an arch of this story remain inactive in tribes in Eternity s End. Its history is indissolubly linked to the jailer and Indoor, and we are anxious to share it with the players. All he could add would be a spoiler, but she knows crucial things about the designs of the jailer, and we will need it in some way if our goal is to stop the jailer.
ion HazzikOSTas: As you have seen briefly in the video of Eternity s End, there is a Lord of Terror in the incursion of the grave of the founders. Perhaps we learn more about them in the course. As I mentioned earlier, this is one of them. The secrets and mysteries of the Warcraft universe on which we will discover clues while traveling.
ion HazzikOSTas: Code is possible! We ll see. The players who have completely completed this story may have discovered that a part of it remains, while the other was completely destroyed during the final meeting of the Natalia castle. Denaturing He is a very interesting conspiracy character and may have a role to play, we ll see.
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