The Worldsoul Saga: Blizzard on the future of World of Warcraft

Strap yourselves in.

It was with raucous applause that Chris Metzen, Warcraft’s heroic designer and the voice of Thrall himself, stepped out onto the BlizzCon stage in Anaheim Arena and announced not just the next one but the next three expansions coming to World of Warcraft.

Dubbed the Worldsoul Saga, this three-act structure is an entirely new approach to the neverending march of WoW expansion packs. It brings with it a promise of something new, something grander in scale than the previous expansions.

Jade Martin and May Florez-Garcia sat down with Stevivor at Blizzcon to talk about all of the changes coming in The War Within and how the Worldsoul Saga has reshaped the future of World of Warcraft.

Hamish Lindsay, Stevivor: A three-part saga, hey? That’s pretty cool. Tell me about that.

Jade Martin, World of Warcraft Lead Combat Designer: Absolutely so you know the Worldsoul Saga is really a culmination of the last 20 years of World of Warcraft, and gives us the ability to Loop back and kind of put some closure on some unfinished storylines. The really interesting thing about it is we’re doing it over three expansions, right? I don’t think we’ve ever released the name of the next three expansions at once. Normally, when we try and tie up a lot of storylines, we do it in one expansion and it can maybe feel a little rushed or that maybe we didn’t get to finish everything. Which leaves us with the Worldsoul Saga, where it gives us the opportunity to go back and wrap up a lot of those unfinished storylines, starting with The War Within going to Midnight and finishing up with The Last Titan. It’s a really exciting time.

May Florez-Garcia, World of Warcraft Lead Gameplay Engineer: Yeah, it’s been 20 years of World of Warcraft and its stories. For us this is a very exciting opportunity to just kind of wrap everything up, but also kind of a start building the foundations of what’s to come in the next 20 years.

Stevivor: It represents a very different approach, right? Most WoW expansions have historically just been little bubbles, but this is like an overarching thing instead. How is that kind of complicated the way you guys approach the Saga?

Martin: Yeah, it’s a lot different on the combat side of things. We generally take things one expansion at a time because it’s really difficult to be working on say, rogue talents in one expansion and have someone working on the Midnight expansion and its rogue talents because there’s a lot of conflict there. It does require us to do a quite a bit more thinking ahead for sure. That’s the biggest challenge, knowing what we’re doing with The War Within, which is Hero Talents, but then also trying to get in early enough to know what we’re going to be working on for Midnight and The Last Titan as well. So that’s where a lot of the complication on our end comes from, I think.

Florez-Garcia: It’s definitely similar in the gameplay engineering side because typically where we’re working in what’s next, like for example the next expansion and the next features. In this case though we already have like a good idea of what’s coming in the next maybe one year, year and a half. We’re already starting having engineers working on different expansions, some of the patches for example. I’m working very closely with design to make sure that they have all the engineering support that they need.

Martin: And not to speak too much for story and narrative, but I think one of the great things about having it the Worldsoul Saga across three expansions is that you have a good idea of where you’re going. You’re starting with The War Within, you know where you want to take that and then it gives you the opportunity to look at Midnight and The Last Titan and consider that all at the same time. It’s not like you’re trying to come up with what the next expansion is. No, you get to tell the story across three expansions and wrap up a lot of story lines within that. I think that’s a really cool opportunity for story and narrative. I’m looking forward to it as a fan and someone who works on the game.

Stevivor: Do you kind of perceive it differently too? Because like historically, it would be “okay, this is the artifact weapon (from the Legion expansion). We’re moving on from that now, this is what it looks like we’re done.” But now you’re like building across multiple expansions instead. Is that like a different approach for your teams as well?

Martin: Absolutely. We’ve been calling it evergreen content, which are things that are meant to persist across expansions. You look back at a lot of our older expansions like Legion, you called out artifacts, Shadowlands with Legendaries. Those were kind of what were deemed in the past borrowed power, players deemed them that in the past. We’ve seen with Dragonflight we’ve actually shifted away from that philosophy quite a bit. We reworked the talent system and brought in a lot of other bonuses and incorporated those in some capacity into the talents for a lot of classes. That was always intended to be evergreen. We haven’t seen a lot of those borrowed power systems in Dragonflight and it’s honestly been really well received.

So, I think our goal is to continue that going into The War Within and throughout the Worldsoul Saga. With The War Within we have Hero Talents and those are kind of a compartmentalised, little, smaller talent trees for the players to interact with. Maybe akin to the covenants that we’ve seen in Shadowlands. The difference being is like these are being built to be evergreen. We know that they’re going to be sticking around for a long time, so our goal is to make sure that they’re well incorporated into the classes and the specs so that they feel like a part of the class and allow you to embrace a little bit more class and spec fantasy.

Some of my favourites are like Keeper of the Grove, which we saw in the deep dive panel. Being able to raise an army of Treants that are casting moon fires is really cool. My personal Favorite is the San’layn Death Knight, which is going to be a blood and unholy mixture. It’s great for us because we can approach things knowing that they’re going to be evergreen that we can build around it and feel confident that we can bring it for multiple expansions as a power system.

Florez-Garcia: Which actually helps us as engineers as well. Because for example, I know the Hero Talents is using exactly the same tech that we’re used for like traits in Dragonflight. Knowing that, we can actually make sure that we’re creating systems that are more generic, and that we know is going to be staying for a while. Rather than knowing that okay, maybe in two years this code won’t be used as much or we’ll have to refactor it again, which can be like a big undertaking. For example, Warbands.

Now with Warbands you’re actually going to share a lot of things between all your different characters on the same Battle.net account. That means that we’re introducing something called the Warband bank, which allows all of your characters to access what’s in your bank. But that has taken us in the tech side a few weeks to actually be able to complete as a project because when we first created the tech for your bank and your Guild’s bank it was never actually considered that something else outside of your own specific character was going to be able to access that. Knowing before, and so early, how we intend to use all of these systems in the future helps a lot for us to get ahead a of it as well.

Stevivor: You mentioned like having to refactor code like almost every other expansion, right? Now you’re thinking of building more open systems that are easier for you to… to do this building on that we’ve been talking about. Do you see yourself being able to like build even grander things going forward? Because now you’ve got this like, really great and far broader base level of stuff that you are approaching this three-part saga with. Are you going to be able to build up much more because you’ve really solidified that baseline?

Florez-Garcia: I think so, I think one of the things we’re really trying to push in the engineering side is trying to go for better generic systems or trying to think a little bit more outside what’s just happening in the next one or two months. We kind of just go from there, basically we just tried to build systems with as much of the information as we can, and the more information we have then the more generic and stable and flexible we can make the systems.

Stevivor: What kind of a change do you think Warband’s going to mean players whether it’s your hardcore raiders, or like your casual enjoyers

Martin: The premise of Warbands is really just respect the player and how they want to play, as well as respecting their time. We understand there are a ton of games out there to play and it’s hard to spread yourself out and devote yourself to doing Dragonflight, doing all the renown grinds and things like that on multiple characters. I think, in terms of how this will help your hardcore raiders is that it’ll be much easier for them. They’re not going to have to do the same renown grind on multiple Mages.

For example, if you look at world first raiders, they’re going to have four to six, maybe sometimes more mages and now they don’t have to worry about doing all those renown grinds. Now they can just do that on one character and it will be unlocked for all and that’s going to save them a lot of time so they can do the activities that they’re want to do. Probably farming more Mythic+ vault keys and whatnot. Perhaps doing delves if that’s something they want to do. For your more collectionist types or your more casual types of players, this is great for them.

Say you’re playing a Priest and you’re in Molten Core and as you’re going through a Breastplate of Might drops. In the past, you’re not on your Warrior so that means nothing to you. Now it does mean something to you because you can learn that as a transmog. Then when you switch over to your Warrior character who’s in your war band, you now have that Breastplate of Might transmog. It just saves their time; I think that’s really fundamentally super awesome.

Stevivor: You mentioned Delves in there too, a new end game pillar activity, tell me about those.

Florez-Garcia: Delves are like bite site pieces of content that you’ll find kind of scattered around the world. You can think a little bit kind of like how the scenarios in Pandaria used to work, you can go and maybe you have a boss to kill or some treasure to find or some puzzles to do. They’re meant to just be 15 to 20 minutes of your time, and they’re completely role agnostic. You can go with like all DPS or all healers, you can go alone or you can go with a group of up to five people. There’s a lot of flexibility there. You also get to pick your difficulty, and you get an AI companion, which is going to be Brann Bronzebeard this season, that you get the customize in a way that will fit your needs. For example, if you go with all the DPS, you may want him to Tank for you, or someone who can heal.

Martin: Just to play back on that, these are seasonal too, which is really cool. So, Brann is actually the first seasonal character, so as we go on it’s going to create a little bit more replayability in that each season will be a little bit different with new characters to play.  I think that’s a really fun approach to it.

Stevivor: I guess dungeons obviously take longer than 10 to 15 minutes in most cases. Are Delves kind of like a more casual dungeon experience?

Florez-Garcia: Yes, it is definitely aimed for people who are like, well, I’m not going to say they’re like dungeons specifically.

Martin: Right, yeah, so they they’re not one for one with a dungeon. In dungeons you’re often encountering multiple types of monsters, bosses with very unique abilities, and there will be some of that in Delves, but to unlock the treasure in a Delve it’s not always going to be that. Maybe actually as you’re going along with Brann it’s actually about figuring out a puzzle to open up this Vault that’s back here. It’s more like an exploratory area that’s that will have some challenging bytes of content such as bosses but there’s also like going to be puzzles and things like that to create a more enjoyable experience for a wider range of audience.

Stevivor: Do you see that as like diversifying the way people interact with World of Warcraft? It’s like moving away from that traditional…

Martin: A little bit, right? Because the thing is World of Warcraft is massive, and there are so many different types of players. What we’re really trying to do here is engage the outdoor world player and give them the opportunity to get some of those end game rewards. Now, they’re not going to be getting Mythic level raid loot. They’re going to be getting, let’s say the last two bosses drop Heroic ilevel loot. That’s still fantastic for the vast majority of people, it’s not the tippy-top of the ilevel loot band, but it is still really good and it’s going to give them something to strive for. I mean we’re really embracing multiple types of people, multiple types of players and giving them a way to access content that maybe they wouldn’t have otherwise had.

Stevivor: And it can be run solo, right? That gives these people who are solo players…

Martin: Yeah, absolutely, and it’s as mentioned earlier, it’s role agnostics. If you’re a Priest and you want to heal, you’re going to be able to do that. That probably means you’re going to tailor Brann Bronzebeard to be more of a DPS type character, but if it’s a puzzle challenge then you’re probably not going to bring DPS. There are multiple ways to play which is great.

Stevivor: It seems like there’s a lot of quality-of-life changes coming down the pipeline too, in The War Within specifically, why is that? Why is that a focus in this first part of the saga?

Martin: I wouldn’t say it was necessarily a focus, but I think we’ve had the opportunity here and we have been able to identify things that have long since been lacking. It’s a perfect opportunity for us to get a lot of these quality-of-life features in. We’re revamping the spell book UI, which is great. We’re putting everything into one spell book and if you open up your spell book, you’ll also be able to tab over to your talents. They’re not two different hotkeys this time. I don’t want to call it low hanging fruit because I’m sure May would just slap me across the face, but in player’s eyes it probably feels like low hanging fruit. Things that should be easy enough to do.

But WoW is an old game and the engine is equally as old and there’s a lot of things to consider when making these changes. Luckily, we’re in a space where we’re able to do that. The War Within being the culmination of the 20 years as we’ve said, it feels like there’s no better time than now to try and get these in and get people who are interested in WoW but haven’t picked it up or are looking to return the opportunity to come back to a fresh experience with these quality of life changes.

Stevivor: What’s the pitch then? To get some of those players back like the lapsed players or to bring in, you know, the hearthstone player or people who just haven’t played.

Martin: I mean I think really the overarching pitch is like come celebrate WoW with us, come celebrate the Warcraft franchise. We’re looking to wrap up these the story lines. For the older players, we’re going to be The Last Titan expansion we’re going to go back to Northrend, we’re gonna explore, see what the Titans are. Come back and look at the features, look at dynamic flying.

Unlocking TBC flying very early on now as well. We’re removing a lot of these gaps that often felt pretty tough. The great thing is new players are going to come in and actually be able to start in Dragonflight, which is one of our best expansions in recent times. You get to join in and see the Worldsoul saga come to an epic conclusion.

Florez-Garcia: Yeah, definitely. We really just are super excited to see all of this, I’m hoping that new players will actually come and returning players will come and celebrate this with us.

Thanks to both Martin and Florez-Garcia for their time, and stay tuned for more for BlizzCon 2023.