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Taliesin & Evitel Zone Story and Art Interview with Maria Hamilton and Jordan Powers
The War Within
Pubblicato
16/07/2024 alle 18:00
da
Archimtiros
In a deep dive interview into the zones of The War Within, Associate Design Director Maria Hamilton and Lead Prop Artist Jordan Powers discuss story and art design with
Taliesin & Evitel
!
Shorter Campaign, More Side Stories
The main campaign itself is a little bit shorter than the past. The team invested more time into local zone stories with the expectation that players would do at least some of them along their leveling journey.
They want players to understand the area and its characters more fully, but recognize that not everyone is as interested in the story or wants to quest the whole way to level 80, so the campaign covers the important beats, while the side stories can be skipped by players who aren't as interested in them.
They're still tuning the experience rates, and there's a whole introduction players haven't experienced yet, alongside some additional parts at the end of the campaign either.
Making a Spider City
Azj-Kahet was a fun challenge, building upon an already familiar race with new features. Putting themselves in the "shoes" of its inhabitants make them ask questions like how and why they live there, what they eat, where they sleep, and how they construct their environments.
Being a race of arachnids, they wanted the city to feel like it was built for a race with multiple appendages. It feels somewhat alien and different from what we're used to; even tables and chairs should feel a little bit... off.
It was fun to work on, but they have an arachnophobia mode for people who aren't as into the spiders too!
The city is very Suramar-esque, but more otherworldly. Internally, they like to say there's "dark elegance" throughout the zone.
Cultural Storytelling and Seeding Stories
The team made a conscious effort to focus more on the background of Mereldar and the Arathi, their founding, legends, and prophecies. This is a group of people who are at war
all the time
, and in Hallowfall, the team wanted to let players see what they're like at rest. It's important to them to keep this type of storytelling optional though, since they know not all of their players are interested in reading a bunch of background text.
They're very interested to see how the lore community responds to these stories though, how they feel, how they react, and what questions they ask, because (spoilers), some of that information will very be important later on.
They're thrilled that players have already cracked the Arathi's calligraphy code, allowing them to read all the little hidden messages throughout the zone. From their perspective, Arathi culture was a blast to work on, from their militaristic nature, to symbolism of the flame, and obviously airships are a big part of their culture. They try to weave subtle storytelling tidbits into the props they create, such as all their furniture featuring brackets to bolt them to the floor of an airship.
Prop artists make all of the doodads, goobers, and fuzzles seen throughout the game. Some of these things will forever be easter eggs, but it's really fun to work with the art and storytelling team to come up with fun little pieces of worldbuilding to inject into the game. Leaving that little trail of breadcrumbs for players is something they love to do and can add a lot of flavor.
The developers won't spoil anything, but they're glad players have noticed that not all the Arathi are necessarily friendly.
They want to create cultures that feel reasonably fleshed out. Even if they just have a brief appearance, a whole culture kit is built to create a unique and detailed group of people. They might not use it all right now, but the team is trying to tell a new story over the course of three expansions, and they want to seeding early, introduce ideas and build a runway that can be built out further later on. Of course they want each to be a complete and interesting story in their own right, but ultimately cohesive with each individual part.
The Harronir are a good example of that, a
very detailed race
which players don't interact with very much at the launch of The War Within, but the developers are certain we'll encounter more in the future.
Both players are developers have commented on the half-elf ears of some Arathi characters, and there's nothing to announce yet, but it seems likely that players will get that option eventually.
Lessons Learned from Dragonflight
Early in Dragonflight they had a bunch of little individual events that were ultimately fairly similar, while the Forbidden Reach encouraged a "murderball" of players bouncing between rare mob spawns, and developers realized that their events had started to lack variety.
In The War Within, they're tried to make each event a little more distinct and offer more variety. The Theater is similar to the Soup or Timerift activities, with a bunch of players doing a lot of little tasks to collaboratively complete the event. Awakening the Machine is a more individual activity, defending the machine against waves of enemies. The light mechanics of Hallowfall is a larger and deeper mechanic like Zskarn Vaults. They learned a lot from Dragonflight, collecting a lot of metrics on which and how much of the activities players engaged with, when spikes of activity occurred, all of which informed their new designs. Ultimately, the goal is to offer activities that engage different types of players.
They learned a lot from Dragonflight, collecting a lot of metrics on which and how much of the activities players engaged with, when spikes of activity occurred, all of which informed their new designs. Ultimately, the goal is to offer activities that engage different types of players.
Various teams are already working on *all* of The War Within patches simultaneously, which is a benefit so that they can plan out and coordinate not to over-do any one type of content.
Warband Customization
The developers love the idea of letting players customize aspects of their Warband character select screen, such a changing the background, though there's nothing specific to share at this point.
Delves were created to help give solo outdoor world players more activities to engage with, without a group or time commitment. You can't really get up and walk away in the middle of a Mythic+ dungeon without inconveniencing the rest of your team.
They also really wanted to make sure that players go into Delves during the campaign, not necessarily as a required tutorial, but just sending them through that space, letting players see and decide to engage with it, letting them experience the activity early on. There's one in the level up campaign and one in the max level campaign to remind players that Delves are out there and can be customized to fit your level of challenge and reward.
Similarly, they want players to remember that Follower Dungeons are a thing that they can do, absent any pressure from other players. This allows the team to work dungeons into the story without worrying about alienating some of their players.
Assuming players like Delves, which seems to be the case based on beta feedback, it's something they expect to use more going forward.
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