WoW: Midnight's open world zones make Azeroth feel like a character again
World of Warcraft developers talk about the game's endgame loops and open world zones, including the new Prey system.
World of Warcraft: Midnight is the second expansion in the three-part Worldsoul Saga, and now that the alpha is live, a select number of players are able to explore Silvermoon City, test player housing, and venture out into the revamped Eversong Woods. While Midnight is changing some things up from The War Within — goodbye, Valorstones, hello new class talents — the strongest parts of the last expansion are being combined with some new, experimental systems.
Rogue spoke with Dylan Barker, lead encounter designer, and Noah Smith, quest designer during the Midnight alpha summit, and we learned more about what players can expect from the new open world zones and their associated endgame activities.
Predator and Prey
Prey is a new, opt-in system that players can activate by chatting with Alastor in Silvermoon City’s Murder Row. The player is then assigned a target: perhaps a Lightforged Zealot purging heresy from the Ghostlands, a power-crazed Magister chafing against the blood elf leadership, or one of Xal’atath’s key generals. As the player goes about their business in the world, they’ll eventually run into a series of encounters against their Prey.
“A lot of the inspiration for the system came internally from us, as players, who really loved the outdoor world,” says Noah Smith, a quest designer on the Midnight team. “Delves did a lot of work to introduce a more structured loop into the outdoor world and we felt with Midnight, it felt like a great time to take this outdoor world that we really love and feel really passionate about mechanically and narratively and give it a little bit more bite.”
Prey is designed to only show up in Midnight zones, so hanging out in the old world will remain safe. There are three levels of difficulty, allowing the players to prevent an overly stressful ambush, while still providing a challenge. “You don’t have to do Prey,” Smith says. “There’s no strict, hard player power associated with it; we tried to build it in compliment with other systems.”
“We had some self-imposed limits,” explains Smith. “What makes a compelling prey target is establishing a relationship with the thing you’re hunting. We found internally that if you’re hunting a beast and all they really do is growl at you, you get a lot less mileage as opposed to a quippy blood elf where you’re like, ‘I want to kill that guy. He’s a jerk who keeps making fun of me.’”
Edgy elves
Prey targets are not great people, but Alastor — perhaps best known as the guy who drained a Naaru [ed note: basically a space angel in WoW terms] of its light energy — is clearly giving us his dirty work. Considering there are elves knife-fighting like, ten feet away from him, we may not want to trust this guy too much.
“This is a dark expansion, and there’s an element of uncertainty in all of your interactions with Astalor,” says Smith. “The Burning Crusade was my onboarding point and I’ve always had nostalgia for that moment in the trailer when there’s the blood elf with the Mana Wyrm and she siphons all the mana out of it and you’re like, ‘oh crap.’ Blood elves have an element of darkness to them, and that’s what we tried to frame Prey around – these targets are bad people, but you’re also doing someone’s dirty work.”
The system is designed to keep the end game feeling spicy, even after the player has gone through their first round of world quests and dungeons. It’s definitely one of the more interesting elements of Midnight, and since housing cosmetics will be a Prey reward, I’ll definitely be opting-in to get into some mid-questing fights with scallywags' and saboteurs.
Delving deeper
Delves, introduced in The War Within, are fifteen to twenty minute mini-dungeons that players can tackle solo, alongside a friendly NPC. Our old companion, Brann, is hanging up his hat, and we’ll be accompanied in Midnight by Valeera Sanguinar. Delves and dungeons are two of the core endgame experiences, and Blizzard has learned a lot from how the players interacted with these features so far.“Delves are very popular and very fun,” says Dylan Barker, lead encounter designer at Blizzard.
“The biggest lesson I’ve taken away from them is the need to refine some of the formula. I think about what dungeons do really well: we throw the holy trinity [DPS, Tank, and Healer] into a space and we can design really strongly around that. With Delves, the overwhelming majority of players are going into Delves alone, which means aside from the companion you have with you, you’ve kicked out one or two legs of the trinity and it makes it a little more difficult for some specs in the Delve ecosystem. I want to see us account better for that discrepancy.”
Barker gives an example of the priest class. A Shadow priest has no problems, a Disc priest is unkillable but a little slow, but a Holy priest will struggle. “We also have the experience of having made several [delves] now, we have the ability to go through and say, ‘Yeah, this didn’t work. We didn’t love doing that for the fifth time.’ We can unlock some of the creativity on the team.”
Valeera’s presence should also make Delves feel a little fresh. “Touching back on the holy trinity in a dungeon versus a delve, we’re looking to have her bridge that gap certain specs might feel,” says Barker. “It’s a playstyle that opens up because of who Valeera is. In addition to that, the characterization is going to be fun. We’ve been playing with Brann for a while, and he always makes us laugh. I hope Valeera makes us laugh, but it’ll be a completely different vibe as she helps us get in there and knock out some bad guys.”
City streets and open zones
There are eight dungeons and three raids that will roll out with Midnight — some raid content will roll out post-launch — and some of them will take us through familiar territory. The Burning Crusade dungeon of Magister’s Keep is back on the menu, but players are also going to be able to go through a dungeon version of Murder Row. “It’s an infamous place with players and especially role-players,” says Barker. “In the dungeon we get to pay off a lot of the feeling about, what does the underbelly of this city look like?”
While the reworked Silvermoon gives the blood elves a little bit more of the edge that players have been craving, Midnight’s open world zones should build on past expansions’ efforts and become more dynamic than ever.
“We have so much gameplay for the open world player at every intersection in Midnight,” says Smith. “Personally as both a player and a developer, World of Warcraft has never felt bigger, which is weird. In terms of the offering of what you can do moment-to-moment, in addition to the well-established loop of Mythic+ and delves and raids, is just so cool. The world has never felt more alive and immersive to me as a player than in Midnight, so that’s something that really excites me and I want to yell from the rooftops.”
