Stevivor recently sat down with Blizzard’s Chadd Nervig and Genevieve St-Michel to discuss the company’s strategy to both win over new players and entice lapsed ones to return with tomorrow’s “Legion” expansion.
“We do a lot to try to improve the accessibility of World of Warcraft; to open it up to a broader audience,” said Nervig, Technical Game Designer. “There’s many different types of players, be it lapsed or existing players or people who have never played before — and all of those are important to us.”
Blizzard has built ways in which all players can get through old content as fast or as slow as they’d like.
“We’ve built systems like boost, for example,” Nervig said. “Boost lets you build your character up to 100, so if you’re a lapsed player, you buy ‘Legion’ and you get a boost free in the box. If you used to play before and now you’ve come back, you can play with your friends right away. That system’s really smooth and teaches you how to play again and gets you right into it.
“Same thing if you’re a new player, you can go that route as well. We’ve also got a whole lot of improvements to the levelling flow, so if you are a new player and want to do the full levelling process, that’s a more improved situation and we’ve got plans further to keep improving that as well.”
Characters are treated in much the same manner.
“Another avenue that we look at is trying to provide gameplay and systems that accommodate a wide variety of players,” Nervig continued. “For example, looking at our talents. We let you opt in to as much complexity as you want through your combat rotation by choosing, ‘Oh, I want to some passive talents here,’ or, ‘I want all these tons of active talents and I get really complex gameplay.’
“Outside of your core combat stuff, we have all sorts of systems like transmog, like professions. Professions are another one where we’ve put in a whole lot of effort in recently. That’s another type of player that is looking for different things out of the game. With professions, we’ve added a whole bunch of questlines specific to each. We’ve added these quests that are specific to the profession and learning higher and higher levels of the same recipes so you can become a better crafter than someone else who’s not really into it. You can distinguish yourself that way and have something to continue to progressing on in your leatherworking or blacksmithing or whatever.”
It really is all about finding that balance between making a game casual enough to play leisurely, yet complex enough for those who want to sink hours and hours into it.
“We keep adding a lot of quality of life things,” added 3D Artist Genevieve St-Michel. “We keep polishing systems. In general, we keep adding depth but also adding ease to it, so the game can be as deep as you would like, but also as casual as you would like.
“It really is for everyone to play.”
“Legion” unlocks tomorrow afternoon on PC.
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