World of Warcraft: Midnight is creeping closer, with an alpha test rolling out to select players over the last week, press previews now in the wild, and plenty of interviews, Q&As, and discussions revealing loads of new details about the upcoming expansion. As a part of that cycle, I was able to speak to four of the expansion’s lead developers about…well, everything!

My interview with the team took place in two parts. In the first half, I spoke with design director Maria Hamilton and associate game director Paul Kubit. In the second half, I chatted with lead UX designer Crash Reed and senior game director Ion Hazzikostas. I had a lot of questions that could have been answered by either pair, so I ended up dividing them into topics and working through them as quickly and efficiently as possible across the two interviews.

For ease of reading and searching, I’ve mashed the two interviews together in this write-up, and sub-divided them by topic. The questions are mostly listed in the order I asked them so as to avoid removing context from the exchanges, but there are a few places where I reordered them just a bit so that questions along the same themes are placed together.

If you’re looking for something more succinct to read, you can check out the breakout stories from this interview of what’s going on with the Sword of Sargeras, and our discussion of the controversial add-on changes in Midnight. Otherwise, buckle up, because here’s our Q&A printed in full:

Locations

IGN: Let’s start by talking about some of the new places. I was curious with the revamp of Silvermoon City, if there are any plans to revamp the Draenei Zones, Azuremyst Isle, Bloodmyst Isle, the Exodar.

Maria Hamilton: Right now, no, not for Midnight. We have the old versions of all of those places, including the original Silvermoon still, so that if you’re doing questing in those areas, those all still exist, but no plans specifically for Midnight to do a reimagining of those areas.

Maybe sometime in the future?

Hamilton: Never say never. We’d love to. This went very well. We weren’t totally sure how a reimagining of a zone with this much nostalgia would go and so far so good. Seems like people are enjoying it and of course we’re going to Northrend in The Last Titans, so that was important for us to learn.

I’ve seen concerns from Alliance players about areas of Silvermoon being no-go zones for them and making them feel like they’re maybe getting a lesser capital for this expansion. How do you respond to that?

Hamilton: Two-thirds of Silvermoon is set aside as the neutral area where they’re able to go. There’s lots of space there and room for all of the services that we would normally expect.

It’s more that there are sections of what is a Horde city that ought to be for the Horde only and wanting to make sure that that’s very clear. You get a warning, “Hey, you’re not allowed in here,” and then if you don’t head back into the areas that are agreed upon, that’s when the guards will come after you. And as soon as you enter the area, you’re allowed to be back in again. They will drop threat and not chase you.

So I would say the area is actually very, very large. There’s lots of space there. All of the needed things are there for a hub. And it felt like it does play very well into our story because increasingly, and you won’t have seen this yet, as time goes by, through the course of the campaign, that relationship becomes increasingly tense and friction increases and increases and increases as the Army of Light, which was brought into to help against the onslaught is making its present felt and the Blood Elves are not responding well to that presence in their city.

So it was also important to the story that we build it in this way.

It feels like an ongoing challenge for you all. I mean it’s not just storytelling, trying to balance Alliance and Horde, but also trying to make sure that the gameplay itself has that balance intact.

Paul Kubit: It’s a challenge that it also has comes with its own benefits too. One of the great parts about World of Warcraft is the cultures that are within it, and the Horde and Alliance are a huge part of it and despite the fact that the Horde and Alliance aren’t actively warring against one another right now as they have been in the not-too-distant past, there’s still those tensions. There’s still those reasons to hop into PvP modes. There’s still those reasons to ask questions about, can the Alliance even enter this space, and also gives us some really cool texture to build our housing places in the form of Razorwind Shores and Founder’s Point.

Delves

It was really cool to see delves come back for this expansion. What worked about delves in The War Within that led you to keep them around, as opposed to some other smaller group content that we’ve seen in the past? I’m thinking specifically of scenarios and island expeditions.

Hamilton: I think that with Delves we were looking at a way to provide content that was relatively predictable in terms of how long it would take, and what the challenges would be. We were looking at sort of that, slightly more casual folks who want to not be worried about a timer or worried about people waiting on them. They need to go walk the dog real fast. They got to deal with a baby or a kid or something. And they should be able to stand up and walk away and go do that and not leave their group upset or wondering what happened.

And a lot of players really responded to having that different pace and that different feel for content. It just provided us a sort of a different experience, and folks that that’s their thing. They really enjoyed it and we wanted to make sure that we expanded more in those areas to make sure those players are having a good time.

Kubit: Yeah, I’ll add on to that. I think a lot of the reason that we were able to see success with Delves is, no feature in World of Warcraft stands on its own. We’re all standing on the shoulders of previous features which have come before them. And so we’ve learned all sorts of lessons about dynamic spawning and having creatures spawn in interesting in different ways each time from features like Torghast. The ability for creatures, the enemies to scale not just by the size of your group, but also the composition of your group because a group of five DPS plays very differently than a group with three DPS, a healer and a tank.

But if you want to have those groups have similar challenges without having to worry about, we have to have a tank, or we have to not have a tank, they’re all just going to have a similar difficulty. Previous things like the Horrific Visions gave us that tech. We got tech from Islands in terms of additional procedural spawning techniques and so on. And so, this is one of the reasons that Delves were able to take off.

And I think the other was just planning ahead to say that this is going to be an evergreen feature. This is not intended to be a War Within feature where it’s just going to be narrowly focused on a particular fantasy, but it’s a little bit more like, no, these are just a dungeon-like experience with scalable difficulty, scalable group size, and a companion who follows along and powers up along the way. That was a broad enough structure that it allowed us to not just have it stick in The War Within, but carry it forward to Midnight and beyond.

I’ve seen the overview of how Valeera works as a Delve companion. It seems like she obviously has some different abilities than Brann, but it seems like broadly speaking she’s not like a drastic change-up from Brann. Does that feel accurate to say?

Kubit: I think so. Yeah. So the differences you’ll see are she takes things a little bit more seriously, she’s more stabby, and also she’s going to start with all three specs. So with Brann we started with healer and DPS and then only added in tank along the way. We think that was a good addition and one that a lot of folks choose to take advantage of depending on what class or spec they play and bring into delves, and so she’ll be able to take from the get go as well.

Hamilton: We also added a storyline for her that she will unlock as you play through Delves and you’ll learn a bit more about her over time, which we think will add to your ability to get to know your companion. You may not ever end up being best buds like you might feel you could be with Brann, but at least you’ll better understand her and her motivations.

Have there been any improvements made to the companion AI for Valera? Is she going to run through packs of unpulled monsters to try and get me killed?

Kubit: This is something we’re looking at for sure. We always want to continue to build up the AI of the creatures that you’re playing the game alongside. And so yeah, this is something we’re looking at.

She’ll have the benefit of being a rogue too, so she may be a little less detectable than Brann was. And, “Don’t stand there!” She’ll be a little bit more subtle in her interactions, and so I think that will natively help.

I think on a broader spectrum, so I know this isn’t exactly what you asked, but we’re working on making the game-controlled companions a lot smarter and easier to build in our game. And this is right now taking form in the training grounds, which is our PvP training feature where the bots or game controlled opponents that you have there are built in an entirely new way.

They’re actually players underneath the hood as opposed to being monsters, and what that means is that it’s easier for our designers to update them as we get new spells for paladins or rogues, et cetera, and easier for them to show what gear they’re wearing. They don’t have to require as much update, and so those types of updates, and making our bots a little bit smarter and easier to make are going to continue to bleed through into things like your companions and Delves, or your companions and follower dungeons or story mode raids and things like that.

Hamilton: Yeah. I want to add, I’m sorry, I have to add a Brann quote. I’m sorry. Just my personal favorite has to be after pulling those four packs into you, then after we’ve died, letting us know that we should probably use harder-hitting moves. So I think we’re going to have slightly different kinds of feedback from her, so it should feel different.

Demon Hunters and Other Classes

So you’re adding Void Elves to the races that can play Demon Hunters. Again, talking about faction balance, is there any chance of seeing another Horde race join Demon Hunters at some point in the future?

Kubit: So we have sort of winkingly said that the World Soul Saga is only just now entering its second chapter of three. There’s plenty of opportunities for the story to go in different and interesting directions. The story just now took us into a place where the Void Elves were given access to the ability to be a Demon Hunter. Who knows where the story will take us in the future? It might not necessarily be a Demon Hunter, but we do want to at least make sure that we even out the Horde-Alliance balance.

Why give a new spec to Demon Hunters specifically? Why not another DPS class, or why notexpand on support classes after Augmentation Evoker, or anything else?

Kubit: A big reason here is this is where the story took us, as we’re working to fight against the Void and getting really close to the Void powers in particular. That’s an interesting cosmic power to work with when it comes to class design. We don’t have a whole lot of classes which use the Void. Shadow Priest is pretty much it right now in terms of using that force. And also Demon Hunters just happened to have two specs and were our only class who had two specs coming up to this point, and so there’s always been a feeling that there’s an opportunity for growth there.

And so there was a really cool confluence of story opportunity as well as class design opportunity for the Demon Hunters to do what they do, which is sacrifice everything and take the enemy’s own power and use it against them in ways that they wouldn’t expect. In this case, it just doesn’t happen to be Fel, it happens to be sparkly, purple, cosmic Void energy.

Is that normally how it flows, like story first, to decide what new classes or races or whatever else is joining, or does it go the other way where it’s like, okay, well we need this to balance out everything that we have, how can we fit it into the story?

Hamilton: I mean I think it is both, but we do lean to the when, not the what as much as when. If it doesn’t make sense with the story that we’re telling, it’s very hard to just jam something in there. And so, we also have to look at, as Ian talked about, we have to look at carrying costs going forward as well. So, as much fun as it would be to add lots of new races and lots of new class animations and things, we have to think about what does that mean for the future? Ideally, there is a good strong story support for those choices, but there is also balance considerations, and Demon Hunters only having two specs was also something. Right?

So you’re saying if I wait long enough for a Maelstrom-focused expansion, I can get Shaman Tanks.

Hamilton: That’s possible. I don’t see why not.

Housing

Okay. Housing. So my understanding is, if I earn a cosmetic from an achievement, I’ll get that for the house, a cup or whatever. I can then purchase more of those cups for currency from some vendor because I got it through an achievement. But there are other ones where I have to repeat content over and over again if I want a second cup, a third cup, a fourth cup. Is that correct? Am I understanding that right?

Kubit: That’s by and large, accurate. Yeah, I think and it’s going to be defined by the type of unlock that you have. If it’s an achievement, then by definition, you can’t earn achievements more than once on an account, and so you’ll get your first cup, using cups as an example from that achievement, and then others will be backfilled from a vendor. Whereas if something is, say, crafted by a profession, then there would not be a vendor for backfills after you’ve purchased your first one or crafted your first one, you would just craft more of them or have a guildmate or a friend acquaintance craft more of them for you.

What about stuff that’s not tied to achievements? Say it’s killing a boss in a dungeon. If I want four cups to sit on my table, do I have to go kill that boss four times? Am I locked out every week from loot? How does that work?

Kubit: I actually don’t know the specifics on dungeons. But we do want to make sure that that act of, if it happens to be something which drops from a dungeon boss, is not something that’s going to be a frustrating experience. By and large, a lot of these drops that drop from bosses are just going to be guaranteed a hundred percent drop. So you defeat them and then you get the item, and so that’ll make it much more so that you don’t have to hope for that 1% drop. Especially if this is dropping from a boss that you might’ve been grinding for a mount for several months, if not years prior, and just got that mount now have to go back and start grinding that same boss for a chair or a cup or whatnot. That would be a frustrating experience.

So we’re putting these in such a way that we want to avoid those feels bad moments of I want the thing, but I can’t get it.

When I log in for the first time on December 2nd when housing drops, am I just going to suddenly find myself with a bunch of stuff from all the different achievements that I’ve unlocked in the past?

Kubit: Based on my understanding of how much World of Warcraft you’ve played? I think the answer is yes.

Wow. Called out! Okay, awesome. So I love the dye system. I was messing around with that in the alpha. Any chance we’re ever going to get armor dyes since the housing dyes work?

Hamilton: I think you’re my twin, because these are all things I have said. Ooh, could I dye my armor? Oh my God, this is great. What’s this technology limitation? Can we do this? Obviously we are looking into what we can do with the dye system and what’s possible and what’s involved. It was one of my first ideas to, it’s not something for Midnight. We won’t have that at launch and I can’t promise it’s going to happen, because we need our engineers who are brilliant to come up with brilliant engineer answers, but yeah, same thing I thought too.

The Arcantina

Tell me about the Arcontina. How do you get to it? Where is it?

Hamilton: You will unlock it after journeying with Arator and you will learn about it and that it’s existed for some time and who has had access to it previously. It is an extra-dimensional, arcane space that is wherever that is, and you will access it through going to that arcane place using, I believe it’s an item right now. We’ll see if it remains an item, but essentially you can go to it once you’ve unlocked it.

And yeah, it’s a place for folks that need to kick back and relax and get a little bit of respite from the day to day. It’s an arcane cantina so that it’s not in the world where it can be bothered. You’ll find lots of lesser-known characters visiting there. Most of them are war-weary folks, both Horde and Alliance. Often having a drink and a chat with somebody who might’ve been their enemy in the past.

It was important to us that we talk to our veterans who work on the team and get their feedback on this and get their feedback on what kinds of conversations and language are appropriate and reasonable and really used that to help inform what you get to overhear, what kind of stories you get to hear, and what it is that these folks are asking you to do for them in questing. What is important to them, what would they like you to go do? So it’s a space that should be fun for people. It’s intended to be social. There’s room for role players, multiple rooms in the place, so yeah.

I saw Gamon in the trailer and everything, but it feels like a really good opportunity for cameos of characters we haven’t seen in a long time or I saw you can get quests there, opportunities to go back and explore old content, is that kind of what you’re thinking?

Hamilton: Yep, exactly.

Kubit: Gamon is a great example. The type of character you might see in there as well, someone who is known and interesting, but also just has the vibe of being an old soldier who needs to come back to the Arcantina every once in a while and grab a cup of brew and talk to some other old soldiers.

You mentioned it’s really good for role players. How difficult is it going to be to encounter other players in the Arcantina?

Hamilton: Yeah, I think we’re looking at the sharding numbers to determine when we instance shard, but the intent is that there’s enough room and space there that we do allow groups of people to get in there. I don’t know what we’re going to set the maximum at yet. It’ll be something it’d be good to see over the course of the alpha.

Kubit: Yeah, think on the order of order halls. There were shared spaces. They’re not crowded crowded, but you’re going to run into other folks when you’re in there.

Did I see correctly that the Brawler’s Guild is coming back? Is that real?

Kubit: We don’t talk about the Brawler’s Guild very often. As you look through the game files that are datamineable within Midnight, you may see some changes to the Brawler’s Guild, where season names are changing and things like that and interesting items and monsters are appearing in the database. We suggest you don’t pay too much attention to what’s going on there. Wink, wink.

Dungeons

I know you guys have talked about what dungeons to expect, what ones are going to be in the mythic rotation. As far as Timewalking goes, are we eventually going to see Shadowlands Timewalking during the rotation in Midnight?

Kubit: Yeah, we’re going to continue building Timewalking up to catch up over time, not at the launch of Midnight. This is typically the type of thing that happens in those smaller intermediate patches as you’ll see Timewalking updates. But our plan is to continue to support Timewalking. There’s a lot of folks who really like the gameplay and efficient rewards that come from Timewalking, as well as just cool opportunities to get old reps that you might’ve missed out on and so on.

Are you also thinking about potentially adding other Timewalking raids to the pool as well?

Kubit: Maybe. Yeah. Yeah. This is something that we continue to look at. We had a lot of folks who really enjoyed engaging with the Blackrock raid that was a part of the 20-year celebration, and so that wasn’t necessarily a Timewalking raid, but that was one that we saw a lot of folks playing with. So as we look to build Timewalking raids in the future, we’re going to look at what folks had the most fun playing with, and then go from there.

What are your plans around raid buffs, especially in Mythic+? I know there’s some concerns that you have to have certain classes to bring to Mythic+ or whatever, or your group’s not going to be complete. Are you removing buffs, nerfing them, adding more? What are you doing?

Hazzikostas: Hunters have noticed that Hunter’s Mark now increases damage taken by all forces.

Yeah, Hunters got a raid buff!

Hazzikostas: At long last. Yeah, I think raid buffs serve the purpose of, in raids, ensuring that the best raid composition is a balanced one. Ultimately, I think players play all classes. You want everyone to feel like they have a home in the raid groups that get formed. If you’re a leader of a pickup group, forming a group, ideally if you don’t have a Warlock or you don’t have a Hunter or you don’t have a Death Knight, you should be looking for one of those classes, and accordingly providing a home to a player in search of a group, rather than just trying to stack whatever you perceive the flavor of the month best damage dealer to be.

But conversely though, in dungeons, of course, you can’t have all of those present, so our approach there is to make sure that there aren’t specific ones that feel like they have an outsized impact, where they’re going to overshadow the others and limit composition diversity.

I think we’re in a pretty good place there, honestly. It is natural that if you have a couple of classes that are buffing magical damage, let’s say, that may push you towards wanting a caster or magic damage dealer as your third, and vice versa for physical damage. But those sorts of synergies are fine as long as there’s room for both magic heavy and physical heavy players in groups, broadly speaking.

Ultimately, we’re looking at representation and want to make sure that no matter what class you play, you have a home in the groups that are being formed, and if we’re seeing stats starting to skew away from that, we’re going to make some changes.

What about helping motivate more people, not just to queue as tank and healer, but just to play tank and healer in the first place?

Hazzikostas: Yeah, that is absolutely a goal. There’s different factors that come into play there. I think as we’ve seen in the past when we add, let’s say a new healer spec or a new tank specialization, that doesn’t necessarily increase the total number of people playing those roles. It just often has people switch from one healer spec to a new one to try it out. Because a lot of it is, it’s not a unique phenomenon to World of Warcraft, as you are no doubt aware from a wide range of games. Turns out that damage is a more popular role than tank or support, whether you are playing Overwatch, whether you’re playing whatever. And that is something we’re trying to work around.

But one approach for us is to also look at the things that can make those roles intimidating and see how we can lower some of those barriers. For healers, a lot of the combat approachability changes that we’re doing and some of the UI improvements are hopefully aimed at making the pace of healing a bit more manageable and the number of tools that healers have to manage against something that is less reliant on add-ons to build yourself a dashboard, to give you all the real-time information that you need to make all these split-second decisions, and maybe something that can be a bit more manageable where you’re responding to the situations that are unfolding in front of you.

With tanks, I think we have more work to do. I mean, part of the reality is in Dungeons in particular socially and community-wise, the Tanks are seen as the leaders of the group and there’s an expectation that the routes, you know exactly where to move, and that’s not necessarily something that we designed that way, but it is what the community expectation has come to be, and what people will ask of their tank. And so still thinking through how we can improve just the tools there that we offer players, to maybe reduce that barrier to entry, but we know we have more work to do.

Yeah, I’ve seen some interesting suggestions for that around UI, like suggested routing for tanks that could be turned on and off.

Hazzikostas: I mean, I think we’re always hesitant to prescribe our suggested route, because inevitably the community will figure out a different one than ours and then we’re just adding confusion. It’s like, “Oh, no, no, you’re following the Blizzard line. That’s the wrong way to do it. You’re supposed to do this other thing.”

You’d also be essentially admitting that parts of your dungeon are not part of the intended way or whatever.

Hazzikostas: Exactly, and we’re often designing dungeons that are deliberately meant to be approached by any one of four or five different paths depending on whether you have stealth in your group, depending on just what you’re more comfortable with. We’re hesitant to, we know that players always want to distill challenges down to a single solution, but ultimately if we do that for them, we are robbing players of a key part of the gameplay. So it’s a complicated problem space, but it’s definitely one that we haven’t abandoned, one that we continue to talk about a lot.

Raids and Gearing

I’m seeing some frustration in the community from the announcement that we won’t have the ability to unlock armor appearances from different tiers of content via upgrades. So for instance, right now, if I clear a raid, if I get a tier set on heroic with my guild, if I upgrade it high enough, I also unlock the mythic appearance and my understanding is that’s going away in Midnight. Why?

Kubit: We saw this feedback too, so this is something that we’re just continuing to talk with the team about. This is why we go to alpha and share information early as opposed to our alpha being the victory lap. Take a look at the game before it’s out. Like, no, we’re still actively working on the game and will be for the next several weeks and months, and so I would say this is the type of feedback we’re looking forward for and we’re going to talk about it internally.

Will all three Midnight Raids at launch open at the same time and drop the same item level loot, or is there sort of an intended progression?

Hazzikostas: They will not open all at the same time. The Void Spire and Dream Rift Raids will both be open when the season starts, and then the March on Quel’Danas raid will probably open a couple of weeks later or so, and kind of pick up where Void Spire left off. I think the contents of that raid narratively follow from the events at Void Spire, and so if you want to view it as the conclusion of the tier after giving players a chance to experience the first seven bosses, first six bosses elsewhere, then that’s one way of looking at it.

In the past, this has not been true for every expansion, but there has been generally a cadence of three major patches, one raid per patch, with occasional anomalies here and there. Is this another anomaly or is there maybe an expectation that we might start seeing you guys playing with different raid instances, different numbers of bosses in the future, per patch?

Hazzikostas: Yeah, I think it is a signal that we are looking to deviate from being formulaic a little bit, and play around with structure. We’d like to get back to these one boss and Onyxia-style raids to give people flexibility in their schedules. But as always, we’re going to see how the community responds to it, what the pros and cons are, and that’s going to shape our plans going forward.

But I think when it comes to most things in WoW, we try to avoid being too formulaic and too repetitive. A couple of exceptions, we’re probably going to keep having eight dungeons in a Mythic plus season. That’s a good number.

What about like patch X.5 mini raids, like Trial of Valor or Crucible of Storms? Is that also just sort of on the table in the air somewhere, maybe?

Hazzikostas: Things like that I think are definitely on the table, just as we’ve experimented with introducing mega-dungeons in those intermediate patches. I think a small raid could also serve the same general purpose. Yeah, we want to stay flexible.

Are there any plans for changing how tier sets work or thoughts on feedback around them? Any plans to balance the tokens, ahem, pallypriestshaman?

Hazzikostas: No current major plans. That’s not to say that nothing will change between now and Midnight launch. I think that when it comes to the structure of our seasons, that’s something that we really work on very iteratively and almost in real time. I think if there were things that we wanted to change about how Mythic Plus works, or how sets work or whatever, we honestly would’ve just done those in War Within season three, which has been in development in parallel to Midnight.

We’ve been focused on the content in a lot of ways on Midnight, but when it comes to some of the systems, how the season’s going to play out, we’re looking at learning lessons from how season three of War Within is unfolding on the live servers, how people are feeling about that. And that will inform changes that we make during beta, let’s say, as we prepare to launch Midnight.

How are you feeling about the place that loot is at right now, especially in raids? Any chance we’re ever going to go back to personal loot in LFR?

Hazzikostas: I think that’s possible. The current structure, there are some technical and general clarity advantages to having loot work in a single way across all raid difficulties, as opposed to differently in one of them from the others. But the feedback is not lost on us.

I think a hope that we have is that the change to transmog rules will change how LFR Loot acquisition plays out. Broadly speaking, right now a ton of people are in LFR who have better gear who don’t need the items, but they have to do it and have to roll on it if they want to collect the appearances. As of Midnight, if you have a higher level appearance, you’ll automatically learn the appearances from the lower tiers.

And so ideally people are all in Raid Finder because they want the gear from raid finder, and that should be a more equitable situation where people are competing for loot.

Add-ons

How are you addressing button bloat? How are you working to reduce the number of buttons that need to be on-screen at a time?

Kubit: Yeah. I’ll actually say that there are not any specific efforts in Midnight which are aimed directly at button bloat. We are taking a pretty big stab at combat approachability, and in some cases that may end up meaning fewer buttons, but we are taking a pretty holistic view of all of the 40 specs in the game and identifying places where to play that spec either at a baseline level, or in cases at a competitive level, requires you to understand a lot of information, requires you to manage a lot of information. There are certain rotations which make you feel like you need to have an add-on in order to play that class effectively. We identify Outlaw Rogue as one of these with the roll the bones mechanic as being something which is very mathematically difficult to hold that information in your head while you’re trying to dodge the fire, and things like that.

There are a lot of classes which had a large number of buffs, either on themselves or debuffs their enemies, that required management and maintenance and over time and a lot of buttons, which maybe just were used to power up other buttons and so on.

So we’re looking at classes from that point of view and trying to make them more approachable, and in some cases that may end up being meaning that you have fewer buttons at the end of the day, but reducing button count isn’t necessarily a goal. We also do have, this is not a new feature to Midnight, but there’s a one button rotation which was added in 11.1.7, which is a fantastic accessibility feature in and of itself, separate from the approachability efforts that we have now. This is a way to play the game, just to focus a little less on maximizing your throughput by playing your class perfectly, and just playing your class at an acceptable level. And spending more time enjoying the scenery, enjoying the gameplay, relaxing, focusing on a second screen, doing whatever, maybe learning a new class or learning a new spec, playing your alts during a cosmetic weekend when mounts drop at a higher rate and things like that.

This is a way to solve some of those problems that you might be hitting on when you’re saying button load is an issue. If managing that level of dexterity is something that isn’t your cup of tea, then that might be an option to explore as well.

So, add-ons. I don’t want to totally rehash the reasons why you’re making the changes you are making. But why announce the deactivation of combat data add-on APA… Whatever technical words, without allowing time for players to mess around with the actual in-house Blizzard updates first? Because I feel like a lot of people are mad, but they haven’t seen what you’re offering yet.

Hazzikostas: I mean, I would argue that the next few months are that opportunity to mess around with all of these things. We are in week one of our alpha test, with several weeks of alpha to follow and then beta. I mean this is a cut over that I think needs to happen with an expansion rollout. It’s not something we could ever do mid-expansion. I think it’s important that we are able to build an entire tier of dungeons and raids, all of that in this world. That we’re able to design our classes for this world rather than changing expectations out from under people while they’re in the, accustomed to doing existing content.

I think we’ve tried to be as transparent as possible about what some of the upcoming UI improvements were. We’ve had many of them rolled out during War Within to begin getting feedback that we could already incorporate as players are seeing in the Midnight alpha today. And we’re going to be paying very close attention in the weeks and months to come to make sure that we land this in a way that’s really satisfying to players.

We also have invited a bunch of our add-on authors to alpha alongside everyone else so that they can start giving us feedback on collateral damage that’s unintended, things that we can change in our implementation to make their lives easier, to make players’ lives easier, and just make sure that we’re getting all the feedback that we need ASAP.

Crash Reed: Because to add to that, honestly, we want to keep this an open dialogue. This is something that we want to have players continue to keep giving that information. We’re already getting a flood of it now. I mean you’re seeing the changes we’re making to the cooldown manager based on that feedback. That was the whole reason to launch it early so that we could, this is what we think it should be. Obviously it didn’t have everything attached to it, but we had enough there just to get the dialogue going.

We want to change the way that we’re engaging with this so that it’s very, very open and players are getting their hands on things very, very early so that we can react to that feedback and this gives us that time.

For people who maybe don’t have access to the alpha or won’t have access to the beta, who are seeing all this pop up on Wowhead or whatever and are kind of freaking out, what do you tell them? Like, I am obviously in the alpha, but I like having DBM air horn at me when I’m standing in poop. I use Weak Auras as kind of a midway point between the one-button rotation and nothing, to tell me what’s going on with my procs and Maelstrom So for someone who’s in that vicinity who’s really freaked out that this is going to lock them out of raiding, what do you say to them to reassure them?

Reed: So you’re in luck, the cooldown manager very soon will have sound alerts. We’re looking at them right now, so just going over the very large list of them sound alerts are going into the cooldown manager. You will be able to assign sounds to the various things like on cooldown when it’s available, a various subset of things that you’ll be able to assign that to. The list is quite a robust list of sounds that you’ll be able to use.

And going into talking about the boss warnings, that also will have a robust set of sounds as things are moving through. Our sound team will be putting things on something that’s like deadly versus something that’s normal, so you’ll be able to hear the distinction between these as they’re moving down that list.

Currently, right now the sounds aren’t there so it doesn’t have them, but that is just for the alpha. The sounds will be there.

Hazzikostas: Philosophically, and just to be clear, I know there are many, many players who share your exact perspective and use add-ons in the same way and have the same concerns. Ultimately, if you are standing in something that is lethal and is going to kill your character, and the only way that you are aware of that fact is because you have an air horn that’s playing from an add-on, we have dropped the ball as developers. And that should be on us to fix.

Ideally, we should have been getting feedback loud and clear of like, “I just keep dying. This is super frustrating. I don’t know what to do about it, and I’m going to stop playing if you don’t fix this.”

Purple fire on purple ground.

Hazzikostas: Yeah, well, yes, and we should stop doing red on red and purple on purple, and that feedback has been very well noted. I mean we’ve also continued to make visual effects improvements as we rolled out during War Within, with much crisper edges on things like this isn’t just a UI effort, it’s not just an encounter design effort, it’s combat design. It’s our artists, it’s our sound team, it’s everyone.

To ultimately take away this crutch that we have been leaning on to some extent we’re players who haven’t been using these tools, have honestly been playing a game, a version of the game that was in some ways unfair. We want to level the playing field, and ensure that everyone has the information at their disposal as part of the base experience that they need to succeed. And from a philosophical perspective as we approach difficulty tuning, our goal is for difficulty to be the same as it used to be. If your guild is accustomed to taking, I don’t know, X weeks to get ahead of the curve, or to clear normal, or Mythic or whatever tier you’re doing, it should be roughly that same amount of time. You should spend the same number of hours or wipes to learn a boss.

Just, ideally the things that are being tested are going to be more a product of coordinating, collaborating with your teammates and understanding, solving the puzzle of the encounter in a way that is this unique MMO PvE gameplay, as opposed to forcing us to test Twitch reaction times because there are a few other things that we can do that add-ons won’t solve. Or forcing, or players, as many people grumble about spending a bunch of time configuring WeakAuras or figuring out who has theirs improperly set up so that the raid assignment thing works correctly.

That’s not what raiding should be about. Ideally it’s about the gameplay playing the mechanics, but at the end of the day, again, as I said, part of why we’re rolling this out with the new expansion, part of why we have our first raid encounter available for testing in the first week of alpha, is to make sure that we’re getting all the data we need to tune the experience appropriately.

If maybe people need a couple more seconds to react to something and get into position, or there shouldn’t be quite as many of this debuff or this mechanic going out at the same time for it to be reasonable from a cognitive load perspective for a group of humans who aren’t using assistance to help manage that load. But at the end of the day, our goal is just to create fun encounters that are challenging people the way they’re accustomed to being challenged that still feel really satisfying to overcome, and I think we’re confident that we have a path to get there.

Everything Else

So it looks like hero talents are back. Obviously there are many changes to all the classes, but I guess in shape, roughly the same as they have been in War Within. What do you feel worked and didn’t work with that system, in a manner that allowed you to bring it back in the same way?

Hazzikostas: I think overall, I think we’re happy with how the system has played out. I think that some of the original goals of the system were to give players meaningful power progressions, some new fantasies to access without having too much complexity. And I think that was the value in ultimately making sure that you get all of your hero talent tree and you’re just making one binary swap between them.

Our specs and classes have a bunch of combinatorial complexity already. We don’t feel like we need to add too much more of that, even for our pretty advanced players. That same sort of philosophy is actually what motivated our approach to Apex talents and how we are treating talents in Midnight as well. We’re not looking to just give you 10 new points to spend anywhere and have exponential complexity.

In many cases, the trees have strong class fantasies. Things like Dark Ranger or the like, that players were excited to be able to access. I think some of the more challenging aspects were four specializations that have very different play styles. Coming up with a single cohesive tree that felt like it could serve both of them well, could be a challenge at times. Some worked better than others.

In evaluating the health of the system, we look at basically diversity. If there are cases where there’s pretty much a one-to-one mapping of everyone who plays this spec picks this option out of their two available hero talent trees, we see that as unhealthy. And so those are the ones that tended to see much more change going into Midnight full redesigns in a couple of cases. Ideally, everyone feels like both are viable for at least some of the content they prefer doing. But yeah, all in all, I think we’re happy with how the system has played out in War Within, and that’s why we’re continuing it on into Midnight and beyond.

So we’ve had the Delve Belt, we’ve had the Reshii Wraps, we’ve had the special boots that only drop from, I think it’s Soul Hunters in 11.2. And so now we’ve got three slots basically that are taken up by one thing that you have to get, and then every other boot drop or belt drop you get is useless. Are you going to do this again?

Hazzikostas: Not in that form and not with that amount of density over the same couple of successive patches. We are aware that that is far from ideal. I think, taking a step back, part of why the belt exists, for example, is we understand players partways into a season, we’re often pretty well saturated on gear rewards, and so it’s hard to, if we have new content, we have some new system that we’re dropping in a dot seven, we’re trying to find a reward that’s going to be interesting and motivating to a wide range of players. And just saying, “Okay, here’s a standard piece of myth gear or whatever” isn’t going to do it for a lot of folks.

And so, making one of these alternate types of items, whether it’s, you know, Cyrce’s Circlet or the belt most recently, is a way of cutting across all play styles, all tiers of difficulty of content people are engaging in, and making something that can be interesting. Now, when we do that too often we’re basically killing gear slots and that clashes with the rest of our itemization going into the next season. We’re discussing taking a different approach to solving those sorts of problems in Midnight. It’s a bit early to talk about it just yet. It’s not really going to come into play until we get later on into the patches in Midnight, but I can promise that we’re not going to see multiple slots monopolized by those sorts of items going forward.

You’re clearly trying to reduce add-on use in-game, to make the game more playable across the board for everybody out of the box. Does that lead or does anything lead to plans eventually for a console launch in the future, mobile? Would you ever put the game on Steam? Is there any thought about branching out?

Hazzikostas: Nothing to announce in that direction. This is mostly just around getting the years of feedback. All the things that we talked about in the past of making sure that everyone has a even playing field coming in. But it’s also just taking in the slew of accessibility requests that have come in over the years, and just making sure that high information players who are playing mythics, dungeons and everything have what they need. But also players who want to go out in the world or reduce things or move things around to customize for their needs, that we have a slew of all of that available just like we did with edit mode.

This is just the next implementation of that and we plan to continue evolving the UI beyond this once the set is done.

I know you don’t share subscriber numbers anymore, but can you offer any idea of how World of Warcraft is doing now in terms of players when compared to past expansions, like Wrath or Dragonflight?

Hazzikostas: Yeah, we don’t share subscriber numbers. I can say, I think the game is in a very, very healthy place. I think that we’ve seen stronger retention over the course of Dragonflight and War Within previous expansions. And I think our content cadence and frequent updates have really resonated well with players.

The wide range of content that we’re offering, especially things like delves for solo players, really holding onto and capturing the interest of players who often ran out of things to do pretty quickly once they hit max level and then realized they didn’t want to do dungeons or raids. So I think we’re really happy with where the game is overall and incredibly excited for this next chapter.

At what point does WoW become too top-heavy? I know I ask you this every couple of years. When do you move on to WoW 2? Is the Worldsoul Saga something that might serve like a good bridge? Is this ever something that could happen?

Hazzikostas: I’d argue we’re about to release WoW 11 or WoW 12, I guess. It’s the 11th expansion. Yeah. I think it’s hard to imagine, right? I think we constantly are reinventing and updating core pieces of the game. It’s a little bit of a Ship of Theseus approach to how the game is built at this point. And if you look at the differences between the classic anniversary realms and War Within today, oh my gosh, they are very, very, very, very different games. And in many cases appeal to different audiences. And that’s awesome because they’re all part of this greater Azeroth.

And yeah, I think we’re also not just touching endgame, we are doing things like updating our new player experience, updating our new UI, updating our returning player experience, to make sure the people who didn’t play War Within or who’ve been away for a while can quickly get caught up both mechanically and story-wise.

So we know that it’s equally important to keep drawing in new players as well as just serving the core that we have.

I think I’m out of time so I’m going to sneak in this last one. When are we going to deal with the big sword?

Hazzikostas and Reed, in unison: What sword?

Yeah. Okay.

Hazzikostas: Before the Worldsoul Saga is over. Metzen promised and Metzen doesn’t lie.

For our impressions of Midnight so far, check out our preview of the new expansion.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.