World of Warcraft: The War Within Game Director Answers All Our Burning Questions

17.04.2024 - 17:53 / ign.com / Ion Hazzikostas

Blizzard has just given the wider public its first proper look at The War Within, the next expansion to World of Warcraft coming later this year and the start of its three-part, MCU-like Worldsoul Saga.

Over the last few days, I've been playing an alpha build of the game featuring its first zone and some early questlines, and I got the chance to sit down with game director Ion Hazzikostas to talk about what I experienced. We started off our conversation by talking about the expansion's VERY spoilery, very dramatic opening, so if you don't mind spoilers and want to hear more, check out my separate piece on that subject.

For the rest of the interview, which is free of story spoilers, here's a transcript of my conversation with Hazzikotas that's been lightly edited for clarity:

Let's start with Hero Talents. What work is being done to make sure Hero Talents feel really impactful? I feel like there's a sense that there are a lot of tacked-on, passive buffs as opposed to real, active gameplay changes, and I was admittedly a little underwhelmed by what I played around with.

Hazzikostas: The way we approached the Hero Talent Trees, each one begins with what we call internally a keystone talent. Something that is often an active ability or something that is transforming one of your abilities or just a signature thing that represents the flavor of that entire Hero Talent Tree that you're opting into. Then there's also a capstone at the very end as you hit 80 that will either further augment it or flesh out your capabilities. But along the way, yeah, there are definitely a number of passive talents, but that's not really different than talent trees in general. I think that if we set out to add 10 active or gameplay-changing nuanced things for everyone, that would be pretty overwhelming in aggregate. So our goal here is just focused flavor, fantasy, power, some new utility or throughput depending on what kind of spec you are.

At the end of the day, once you have them fully unlocked at max level, you'll be able to have these as part of your overall loadout. So do I want to go with this spec, or that spec to complement my fire build or my frost build or whatever else?

So, they're not intended to be really class-shattering abilities?

Hazzikostas: They're not, honestly. They're class augmenting. They are nudging your fantasy and your class's fantasy in one direction or another. But at the end of the day, part of the challenge is managing complexity within all of this space. We already have dozens of talent nodes. Many people prefer to use the default or starter builds that we offer rather than microing on it, but with 39 specializations across 13 classes, we're not looking to massively add more combinatorics to that.