Dragons are returning to Azeroth and carrying a lot of amazing content with them in the World of Warcraft: Dragonflight expansion releasing later this month. This massive expansion brings with it new abilities such as Dragonriding, new areas to explore in the Dragon Isles, a huge chunk of new lore and story, as well as many technical changes to things such as the profession system, HUD and UI, and talent trees. With so much content being added to the game, this expansion is already set to be one of the most monumental that World of Warcraft has experienced.
The official launch date of WoW: Dragonflight is coming up fast on November 28 and players are already able to enjoy many new features in the pre-patch content that has been released. Screen Rant recently had a chance to chat with two of the lead developers associated with the game: Associate Game Director Jeremy Feasel and Lead Software Engineer May Flores Garcia. The pair were eager to share their excitement for the new expansion and expressed their desire for feedback from the players.
Screen Rant: There is so much new content being released with Dragonflight, including everything from the Dragonriding skill, the Dracthyr, and Dragon Isles but also the HUD and UI updates and changes to the talent trees and professions system. What would you say is your favorite change or addition to the game among all of this?
May Flores Garcia: For me, I think definitely Dragonriding. That's the thing I have personally been working with. I think it is a better movement system, something that at least in World of Warcraft we hadn't done so far. We had really not explored this kind of movement before. So, from the moment that we started talking about it and during the whole development process, just seeing how we started to say like, "okay, let's try and explore a little bit, how would it be to have a little bit of momentum," to then actually having a completely fleshed out feature that players are really liking and are loving, and changing the way people interact with the world. To me, it has really been one of my favorite things with this expansion.
Jeremy Feasel: I think there are a couple things I am really excited about. I tend to be a little bit of an alt-aholic. And I think we started evolving a lot of our alt philosophies around the 9.1.5 timeframe, and we carried that all the way through the end of Season 4 in Shadowlands, and then into our philosophies as we are thinking about how progression occurs in Dragonflight. So, we really tried to lean into - as you're unlocking different elements on your account, as you're unlocking different Dragonriding upgrades, as you are going down some of the different renown trees and unlocking things to do in the world - it's also unlocking them for your alts. So if you're that kind of player that wants to come through and have a whole bunch of stuff all ready to do for your alts, that's going to be the alt experience for you. We really have a focus towards making sure that as you get higher levels of renown, it unlocks a speed-up for your alts renown gain, so you feel like you can make progression a little bit faster. We have really taken an eye toward the alt experience here which just happens to work really well with how I like to play the game.
I also tend to be a very exploratory-type player and there are a lot of fun little side quests to find in Dragonflight. They are scattered everywhere. I think it's the highest number of side quests we have ever done, and there are just a ton of fun little things to find out there. We really went crazy with the different subtypes of gameplay, so if you like hanging out and doing Tuskarr feasts or climbing walls or cataloging little creatures, the team really had a lot of fun building up the sandbox out there. I tend to be an in-game sandbox player myself, so I'm very excited to get out there and engage in a lot of fun and oftentimes social outdoor activities.
With the actual Dragonriding skill, how is it going to be different from a regular mount? How would you describe using the Dragonriding skill vs using a mount?
May Flores Garcia: So with Dragonriding, we have a new movement system which is physics-based. This means that your velocity is now going to be changing, and you are going to be in control of it. You will be using gravity, essentially, to control your momentum and your velocity. So, if you are pitching down in a dive, your velocity will be increasing, and you'll be gaining that momentum, so when you start leveling up, that velocity will still be with you so you can actually use that to continue moving within the world. Something that with normal flying that we have had so far, typically it is just a constant velocity, so with this new system, you as a player will be much more engaged because you will have to be paying a little bit more attention and like, "okay, if I'm at point A and I want to get to point B, how am I going to manage that? How fast do I need to be moving to actually reach this point? How should I be using my abilities?"
Dragonriding has an energy system which we are calling Vigor, which will empower some of your abilities. For example, Surge Forward allows you to get a little bit of boost of velocity or go a little bit higher, so it makes you feel like basically, you need to really plan what you're going to be doing to reach from one point to another. We hope that this is going to be a very engaging experience and make you feel a little bit more like part of the world itself and the zones.
The Dracthyr Evoker is such an amazing new race and class combo. What was the thinking behind keeping it locked to that combo rather than having the Dracthyr be able to be a rogue or some other race be able to be an evoker?
Jeremy Feasel: It's one of those decisions that kind of starts to gel as you are going through the creative process. Where does this particular subgroup draw their power? Well, part of that is their narrative story: where do they come from, who are they? The demon hunters, for example, draw their power from fel energy - that was a fairly well-told story. Illidan had already become one. This isn't really treading new ground. In terms of the creatures that Neltharion had created, had started to delve into some different type of magic that wasn't really formally represented on the cosmology chart. It's a little bit of melding of different subtypes of magic, and that gets really exciting and interesting, and that's sort of where a lot of the creative discussion ends up going: "what is a really exciting idea?" What's really, for lack of a less punny term, what's evocative for the evoker right?
For us, it was "let's really get into dragon magic" and, at the same time, we are delving into dragon lore, and we are getting into every single one of the dragon flights as represented in multiple locations out here. They all have their oaths, they all have their home base, but they also all have a seat up in Valdrakken. We wanted to get into their different subtypes of magic in all of the different zones. You should get into the nuance of red dragon life binding magic a little bit in zone one. You should get into the nuance of earth warding a little bit in zone one. You should get into the nuance of leylines and taming magical powers in the Azure Span. As we were discussing all these things, it became pretty apparent that this magic that dragons wield is something that you want to double down in. It's so cool and it's so unique, it's a little bit different. Life binding is different than fire, dream magic is different than mistweaving, time magic is different than sand blasting. Because they all have nuance, they all have something a little different to them. It's time plus rocks rather than just what shaman do which is just "I'm going to throw rocks at you," and that results in interesting abilities as well as interesting visuals.
You are going to see there are elements of all five of the dragon flights at the beginning of a lot of their casts, and then as they cast, you see it coalesce into a specific subtype of magic before it lands, showing their mastery - or underlying mastery - of all these different elements that they don't quite understand. Then you try to get across that story in the Dracthyr introduction, of really having quite a bit of this power but having lost your memories and not really knowing how to contain and control it. Everything ends up sort of coming together to make this really unique experience, with a unique power source and background. That made it the right decision to give us the first unique race/class in World of Warcraft.
And then, when you have a unique race/class [combination], it opens up a ton of doors for you. You have a model that you can add really crazy, bespoke animations to. You can have conversations with a designer where they say "I'm going to make you take off and fly over the battlefield and all of your abilities can be done while you're flying around", and the answer can be "Yes!" and that's awesome because that becomes a workable problem within that contained problem space. We ended up being able to make some really awesome decisions because of that, and coming out of the gate with some crazy never-before-seen abilities.
With all the different dragonflights having different styles of how they interact, how will this work for people who like to play World of Warcraft mostly solo? Other than dungeons and raids obviously, is Dragonflight's questing within the world and sandbox going to have a lot for solo players to be able to do?
Jeremy Feasel: Compared with Shadowlands, you'll find similar to Zereth Mortis that there is more in varied ways for the solo player, especially the outdoor sandbox player, to increase their item level to become competitive if they want to stretch into any of those multiplayer activities. We also just have a ton for you to do out in the world, with four different renown tracks that you can progress at your own pace. If you want to get a weekly reward, you just need to get a certain amount of renown. You can choose how you want to spend your time and what you want to end up doing, and really what you want to specialize in. Us focusing pretty heavily on alt-friendliness I think really helps out the solo player [also], especially the type that prefers to jump around between a couple of different characters and gear them up. I think that's all been a major focus of our end-game activities crew. But, if you are that type of player type, we are still really looking forward to what your feedback is about what we can do better. What additional things would you like to see in World of Warcraft that help provide additional stuff there that's missing that we can also look into? It's always great to hear so hit up the forums and let us know.
In the Dragonflight expansion, there is a lot more focus on cross-faction play with the Alliance and Horde being able to have shared mob tags. Does this mean that Horde and Alliance will be able to group up and quest together in the world? Will the mob tags still work when they are not grouped?
Jeremy Feasel: So, the basis behind the idea is that the animosities between the Horde and Alliance are really starting to wane right now in the overworld. Except in War Mode of course - still want to murder the other person in War Mode. Now, we have some fun PvP world quests and activities for you to engage in. But, in a non-War Mode shard, more and more the Alliance and Horde are finding their ability to work together. You saw that in the cool Dragonflight cinematic where you have the dwarf and the troll who nod at each other, and they're all riding specific dragons. We have greater foes to fight, and I think that's also the underlying direction behind the cross-faction improvements that we have been working on with cross-faction instances. We are continuing to look for improvements there, and we know there are a lot of major requests from the player base, like cross-faction guilds as one of the top ones. So, thank you to everyone who has requested that. We don't have any announcements about anything in particular other than what's existing in Dragonflight right now, but that's an area of the game we have only started scratching the surface of, and we will continue going down that rabbit hole during the content update cycle. As you can imagine, as you progress into the phased outdoor overworld, it has its own technical hurdles that can get more or less complicated depending on which crazy intro phase of what you're working on. We will be looking for more ideas from the player base on how you want to see cross-faction continue to evolve in the future.
Great, that's wonderful!
Jeremy Feasel: Oh, sorry, I kind of answered your question but didn't really answer your question. So, the tagging improvements are basically a fallout of that, "hey, it's not feeling like I really have this animosity towards this other character anymore, now it's feeling more like they are just stealing this thing from me, and it's making things a bit awkward, and it's making it hard for me to quest." The tapping rules that we changed up in Shadowlands and made another change in Dragonflight just basically mean that it's open to five tappers of either faction now, so you don't have to compete with the other faction for taps anymore or be really upset if there is one Horde character in your area that is turning everything gray to you. That won't happen anymore.
Thank you. Going back a little to the Dragonriding ability, there is a whole separate talent tree now for Dragonriding. How is that going to work compared to the other talent trees in the game?
May Flores Garcia: It's actually very similar, but the specifics will be [unique] to Dragonriding. It really will take effect when you are Dragonriding. From the engineering side its underlying tech is very much the same that we are using for traits. So, it is also something that is going to be specifically for Dragonriding...You're going to be finding some glyphs around the world, so it's like something you will have to collect, so you can get talents, or rather points, that you can then use to select what traits you actually want for Dragonriding. This is going to be something that will just be improving how well you can Dragonride in the world.
Is the Dragonriding skill something that will be continuing to improve in future expansions as well, or is it mostly going to be used within the Dragon Isles?
Jeremy Feasel: We are really looking forward to seeing how players enjoy the system. It's going to hit the majority of everybody in a couple weeks, and we will get a ton of opinions. Interestingly, we've got a couple of different use cases here, because we have Dragonriding at full blast at 800+ speed in the Dragon Isles where it's meant to be, where we have these giant, wide open, expansive spaces. Then we also have the slightly more constrained Soar which is useable everywhere, so it's going to be awesome to be able to see how players are using these things, how they change up how traversal works in World of Warcraft. It's a really fundamental system. It's a huge change if we are going to carry this forward in an evergreen way, but we are looking forward to seeing what players think about that. We have this awesome locomotion system now, and I think we would like to keep it around and see what else we can apply it to and what else we can do with it. We are looking forward to all of your ideas for that too, and we will see how it evolves. But so far, I think we are really happy with Dragonriding and I think it's got a bright future.
I think so too, I love it. Okay, switching gears a little here. The heads-up display and user interface changes. You all did a lot of behind-the-scenes work with all of that. What prompted those changes after all of these years?
Jeremy Feasel: I think when we were looking at the overall package for "what all different elements do we want to ship in Dragonflight," one of the things that was a slight pivot from Shadowlands is that we want to make sure we are at least taking a handful of evergreen systems and elements in World of Warcraft and continuing to constantly upgrade them, and we had a special eye towards that in Dragonflight. In particular, with the UI improvements, we have ongoing ideas that we want to continue involving there. I think that was one of those cases very similar to the talent trees, where it's been a long time since we've really taken a fundamental look at it, and it's been high on players' requested lists of "hey, can you take another look at this, we want to see something fresh and new. I have all of these different UI things that I have to carry through in every single expansion, can you please bake some of them into the existing game, or can I please at least move everything, that would be awesome."
I think that when we are thinking in that problem space of "hey, let's make sure that there is this specific sub chunk of the game that is evergreen ongoing improvements," those are the two things that really bubbled up to the top there. This is another one of those interesting cases where I think we are really going to be looking for player feedback too. As long as we are constantly looking for evergreen improvements to World of Warcraft, what are your top things? Beyond talent improvements and UI improvements, what are the next things that you'd want hit for evergreen WoW improvements? What else can we make just better in the game? We are always looking to make WoW a better and fresher experience while also, at the same time, feeling like a home on Azeroth.
The profession system also got a major update with this expansion. Was there anything specific about the Dragonflight expansion that prompted the profession system to get an upgrade or anything in the Dragon Isles that prompted that? Or was it just timing?
Jeremy Feasel: I think it worked out well with a lot of our cooperative goals for Dragonflight. One of them is we went absolutely crazy with Dracthyr customization, it's the most customizable race that we've ever done, and we get two different forms. This continues the desire to increase player customization - we wanted to just spread that out to professions this time. We wanted to make sure that when you are doing profession activities, you are in a specific outfit associated with the profession, with your own specific mining pick and mining hat and mining outfit. We wanted to make sure that coming together to do profession orders is a social activity that you're all coming together to Valdrakken to do stuff together. It was another one of those cases where it fit really well with a lot of the different overarching goals of the expansion.
Along the same lines, we want to give players an additional way to not only engage with the world and engage with each other, but also to increase the item level of their character. This is an opportunity for the outdoor solo player or the player that likes to really specialize in a particular thing. You can also compete with Mythic raid and Mythic dungeon item levels. We can even create some awesome, specifically crafted things that have effects on them that make them BiS for certain slots, so there is some extra awesome competition in there for those particular characters. That works nicely when you're fitting together the puzzle piece of all the different elements of the expansion, with elements like reconfiguring Mythic dungeons to have a slightly different rotation so that feels fresh.
We've reconfigured our sandbox, so players can really play their way and get reputation how they want on a weekly basis. They can get slightly higher item levels through world activities and a weekly jackpot box, or item increase on their weekly quests. I think all of these things end up coming together and fitting together nicely, because we want ways for players to increase their item level that are customization oriented and also happens to work really well with "hey, we are revamping the UI, let's do a really cool new customization professions UI." It definitely felt like the right time to fit that in with all these other things.
Is that also why the talent tree got changed back to where it's a little more customizable as well?
Jeremy Feasel: I think that is one of those interesting things - there are a number of different ways to increase player customization, and the grand hope is that the talent tree gives players the opportunity to really go deep in particular elements if they want to, to make and swap different talent specs that they like. That's so that they feel like they get a little bit of that classic customization of their character back again, where there is a differentiation between us, and we have fundamentally different abilities and I can kind of hybridize my character [when compared to someone else's talent build].
Can you give us any extra info about any future updates or anything that will be added to Dragonflight later?
Jeremy Feasel: This time around I think we are just going to leave that for the first time there are end game chapter quests, because players have been able to tease out some of the data because they are renown rewards, but they are all encrypted, so all of our endgame story is invisible up until it gets played for the first time on PTR. We are really looking forward to players seeing that, seeing all the encrypted cinematics and all these little lore bombs that are going to go off in the future that nobody has seen anything of yet, and there is no data mining. It is very exciting for us!
Well, can you at least give us any hints as to if Anduin will return anytime soon?
Jeremy Feasel: (laughing) I think giving any hints now would make all the poor people that worked on encryption be so sad.
Alright. Is there anything else that either of you would like to talk about or put out there, something that is really cool and special to you that you'd like to be able to discuss some more?
Jeremy Feasel: I think this expansion just has a ton of great little flavor, little heart elements in it. From finding your first duck down in a cavern and leading it to safety during your first five minutes of doing a quest, there's so many little elements of the world. It's such a huge and expansive world, and the team just had a great time going through and sprinkling all these fun little flavor elements into it. My favorite thing on the first week is people finding all those, the little hidden things and the little hidden pet or that particular toy or this thing that's down at the end of this cave that someone added. I'm going to be there with six or eight different streams up all at the same time watching everybody stumble into these things and explore a new and fantastic landscape for the first time. That's always the most fun.
May Flores Garcia: We are very, very excited to see how people react to this expansion. Especially through Dragonriding as a system. So far, we have been super happy, and it has been very heartwarming to see people's reaction and people's feedback. It's really motivating for us to definitely want to continue improving the system. So, any kind of feedback that players want to give, feel free to do so and we will be listening to all of that.
World of Warcraft: Dragonflight releases on November 28. This interview has been lightly edited to provide further clarification and context to some answers.