World of Warcraft: The War Within is the 10th expansion for the game, and it launches just a few months before the MMO’s 20th anniversary. But The war within is more than just a milestone for long-term World of Warcraft players feel old. It is also the beginning of the end for the first saga of the franchise.
After The war withinBlizzard will release a follow-up expansion called Midnightfollowed by another, The Last TitanThis trilogy forms the Worldsoul Saga, which is not the end of Wowbut wants to usher in a new era, similar to Bungie’s “Light and Darkness” saga in Lot 2which just ended with The final shape earlier this summer.
With the trilogy nearly underway, I sat down with Assistant Design Director Maria Hamilton and Lead Prop Artist Jordan Powers to discuss this first chapter in the Worldsoul Saga, from The war within‘S Initially, the Alliance focused on the pressure cooker nature of caves.
With the beta for The war within already well underway, some players have pointed out that the story seems to be focused heavily on Alliance characters. With the lines between the Horde and Alliance blurring in recent expansions, and a world-destroying threat looming, I was curious to see how the story team thought about balancing representation between the two factions after the fourth war in Battle for Azeroth.
“I do not think that Battle for Azeroth changed something there,” Hamilton said. “I think we wanted to get away from, except where it made perfect sense, telling different stories. Sometimes we want you to understand a slightly different nuance, and then we might have a separate Horde-only or Alliance-only story. But generally, for our main story, we really wanted to make sure that everyone was understanding the same story.
“We’ve thought a lot about where we have Horde and Alliance representation. And obviously, we know what we’re going to do going forward. And so we just try to make sure that no one feels like their particular interest isn’t represented as much as possible, because it’s a saga. Right? We have room to spread things out over a longer period of time. And people might respond to that. They see this first chapter — not even the whole chapter, really. But they see this first part and say, ‘Wow, that seems like a lot of Alliance characters.’ But there are Horde characters that are there. And there will be more later.”
Patience is a virtue that is easy to lose sight of when playing a live game like this. Wow. But this longer saga gives developers the tools to tell a story that not only flows better, but also has meaningful foreshadowing that could play out in the next expansion or two, rather than six or seven years later as some teasers in 2016 suggested. Legion.
“To use an art analogy, we have the broad strokes already laid out,” Powers said. “We can see where we’re going, what cultures and races and characters we’re going to be interacting with throughout this whole saga. And as Maria said, it allows us to make adjustments — you know, make sure we’re hitting all the right flavor notes along the way.”
When we talk about the perceived focus of the Alliance in the beginning War within content, it’s hard not to mention Anduin Wrynn. Anduin is the rightful king of the Alliance capital of Stormwind, but he’s spent the last expansion out of the spotlight after being mind-controlled into service Shadowlands‘ big bad guy. In Hallowfall, one of The war withinIn the zones, Anduin is given the space to truly examine what happened to him and figure out if he is worthy of living a life of service to the Light.
“We wanted to do justice to Anduin’s story here,” Hamilton said. “We wanted to make sure that he didn’t just suddenly feel better and become happier. That would have really taken away from the story for everyone. We wanted to make the depth of his self-doubt and his kind of fear more apparent at times. And we wanted to contrast him with Faerin [Lothar] who has no doubts and wields the Light. [Anduin]doubts himself and his worthiness. And putting him in a situation, like we have in Hallowfall, where he sees these people who are constantly under siege by endless waves of Nerubians attacking all the time, and then giving him time with Faerin, and giving him time in their city to reflect and to talk about some of the things that he’s been through – a very deliberate setting for that. […] The choices he makes later are largely based on the conversations he had in [Hallowfall].”
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Image: Blizzard Entertainment
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Image: Blizzard Entertainment
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Image: Blizzard Entertainment
The war within takes place in, seemingly, a very large set of caves. The opening zone, the Isle of Dorn, is the only outdoor area in the expansion. The Ringing Deeps, Hallowfall, and then Azj-Kahet are all massive cave zones stacked on top of each other. It’s a very different world layout than what players and Blizzard are used to, so I asked Hamilton and Powers how the natural limitations of caves affected development.
“Well, in terms of the story, having things in a bag, like you say, it’s a little tighter, it’s a little closer,” Hamilton said. “But at the same time, we can tell more personal stories about that place, and about some of those people. Sometimes you come across a place that doesn’t look like it’s been used much, there’s not a lot going on. And sometimes that’s really intentional, because we want those environmental stories to do the work for us. You come across the place and you wonder, ‘Well, what happened here?’ So sometimes you don’t have to build things in those tight spaces to tell the story. Sometimes you just have to step back and say, ‘Okay, they’re going to imagine what happened here, this is cool.'”
Small spaces are great for deep story explorations like Anduin’s, but convincing players to spend hundreds of hours in caves over the next two years is a tough task. When approaching the underground zones in The war withinand learn about the underground zone that Blizzard just added to Dragon FlightPowers and the art team had to make sure the spaces were distinct from each other.
“I think there were, you know, artistically, some challenges in creating only four unique zones, three of which were underground,” Powers said. “One of the big things that we were careful about from an artistic perspective was making sure that all of these spaces that we’re creating aren’t too claustrophobic, too dark, too oppressive, because no one really wants to spend an extended period of time in that environment. So what we did was try to strike a delicate balance between still capturing the fantasy of venturing deeper underground, but also giving players some new, unexpected things that they’re going to encounter along the way. And I think a great example of that is when you come out of The Ringing Deeps in Hallowfall, you see, you know, the shot of the giant crystal coming out of the ceiling of the cave, you see the endless ocean. It’s not something that players would really expect to see in an underground area.”
The underground of Azeroth feels like an unexplored corner of the world. But it’s still an unexpected choice to start an entire new trilogy by throwing players into a hole. After all, holes and caves often feel like end points — the place where the dragon in your D&D campaign makes its final stand. Some of World of Warcraft‘s oldest raids and dungeons end in caves. When asked about this, Hamilton nodded and answered cautiously, careful not to give away any upcoming, unannounced content.
“Yes, a hole goes down, or to the sides. But sometimes it gets blocked,” Hamilton said. “And then you have to try different ways of doing things, and it’s not always a hole. There’s more to it than going down.”
World of Warcraft: The War Within will be released on PC on August 26.
Disclosure: This article is based on a preview event held on July 11 at Blizzard Entertainment Studios in Irvine, California. Blizzard provided Polygon with travel and accommodations for the event. You can additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.