The Future of World of Warcraft

Blizzard's ever-popular MMO has been in the news for a few reasons recently. First, because subscriptions have beendropping ever so slightly, though still staying above the 11 million mark. Second, because at Gamescom 2011 Blizzard talked about upcoming changes to World of Warcraft, including the Deathwing raid encounter, armor transmogrification and the void bank. The goal for this content patch to give players new things to do after churning through what 4.2 had to offer, presumably lasting up to the release of the next expansion pack, which hasn't actually been announced yet. Game director Tom Chilton and art director Chris Robinson explain more.

The Deathwing encounter sounds as though it'll be especially time intensive. Chilton said that, if you were to take into account the encounter's multiple stages, it would be longer than any other in the game. "The fight takes place in multiple different environments, you'll actually potentially get loot at different points in the encounter so it's broken up into larger scale overall. Players will start at Wyrmrest Temple and then eventually it progresses to players fighting on [Deathwing's] back flying towards the Maelstrom, trying to wrestle him to the ground, basically."

Building up to this encounter will be a series of new five man instances meant to build up to the Deathwing fight. "They tie in from story standpoint," said Chilton. "Really the five man instances are all about building up to the Deathwing fight in a lot the same way that the five-man instances in Icecrown were building up to the king, so all of them are very tied together story-wise."

You'll soon be able to swap around armor styles...

Though there'll be lots of cool loot to grab from Deathwing, Blizzard realizes that eventually high level players all wind up acquiring similar gear. For those that want to stand out in a crowd, the transmogrification feature is being added in. This lets you swap around the appearance of armor sets without altering the statistic. For a certain fee of gold you can keep all the bonuses associated with your best stuff, but swap the new design with that of an old favorite. Though there are a lot of different ways Blizzard could have gone with this feature, including allowing players to edit the designs of armor pieces down to fine levels of detail, the system had to be kept reasonably basic.

"Like if we go down the road allowing players to really modify the texture to any fine degree then you probably talk about ballooning the scope of the feature massively to the point where realistically it'd be very difficult for us to do in 4.3," said Chilton. "You always hear people say "Oh, Judgment, that was so cool," and every now and then they'll throw it on and stand there, but that's about as much as they get out of it. It seems like a really good way for players to be able to differentiate themselves."

Robinson provided more detail about the feature and said it would likely be the leading edge of broader armor customization changes. "I wouldn't look at this as like our final you know end game for what we're going with our armor sets. We've been prototyping different ways that we can improve the functionality of armor sets, the complexity of them and certainly the variety and how characters can differentiate themselves from one another. [Transmogrification] was a solution in the meantime. We've got to prototype it, roll it out and test the waters. We don't want to end up with a whole Burning Crusade clown suit problem again." Robinson hopes the transmogrification feature will still give players a lot of power over their appearance. "Previously, you work for this piece of armor and if it turned out to be teal or whatever and it didn't match your red chest, you kind of had no choice. [Transmogrification] is more player-driven where hopefully people will take the art that they appreciate and find something that works well aesthetically." Blizzard will be watching how the system plays out once it's in players' hands and use that date for future changes beyond 4.3.

...and there was much rejoicing.

Considering how important cool items are to keeping players invested in World of Warcraft, Blizzard devotes plenty of resources to producing new ones. Teams are dedicated specifically to producing new armors and items, and there's even a sub-lead who tracks everything in the game so far and guides the teams toward new styles not yet seen in the game. "One of the things that's really important with our armor sets and has been after you get through an area and do a certain amount of content you come out looking like you have trophies from that area. Like you know, I beat the Lich King so I have black death looking armor going on."

To Blizzard, designing the next most powerful armor set isn't about one-upping the design of the previous one, it's about new styles, always with the consideration of maintaining a certain look for each class. "We do have to be careful about iconic class looks bleeding into other classes. That's one reason we have that restriction with transmogrification that you wouldn't be able to take a class-specific item and apply it to something for an item with a different class. I think that's important to protect [class] integrity. When you see those demon wings you know 'Okay that's a warlock,' you know you can apply that to his tier twenty-one armor but it's still a warlock."

To transmogrify an armor design you'll need to have it in your inventory, which is part of the reason Blizzard is drastically expanding storage space with the addition of Void Storage. "Not surprisingly we have packrats in our game," said Chilton. "There are a lot players out there that really like to hold onto every last thing they ever get. We know that introducing this transmogrify feature is going to make pack rats out of everybody because any time you get a piece of armor if it's cool, or even if right now you don't think it's all that cool but maybe three years from now you'll think it looks cool, you're going to want to hang onto it. We definitely feel like well, we better prepare in advance for that or all of a sudden we're going to have a crisis."

More storage for item hoarders.

Blizzard sees 4.3 as one of the final content patches leading up to the next expansion. "There's very likely to be a content patch from the perspective of world events that build up to the next expansion but this will definitely be the last content patch for Cataclysm content," said Chilton.

Moving forward beyond 4.3, Chilton explained the focus of the development team. "I would say that the majority of our mindshare as a team goes toward our existing player base. How do we keep them entertained and how do we keep them enjoying World of Warcraft? I don't know if that's necessarily the right approach as time keeps going on. If you look at, if you look at the way the population breaks down, we're at a point in our history where there are more people that played World of Warcraft but no longer play World of Warcraft than currently play World of Warcraft. That was totally not true four or five years ago, and so in a way the demographic of the potential returning player becomes more and more important over time."

"I don't think we'll ever be able to stop feeding the beast," said Chilton. "It's kind of what we call trying to keep the players entertained, you know the guys bored right now and you know what are they going to do next month? But I think that for us to continue to be successful we have to think more and more about the new players that are coming into the game now and the potential returning players. What are we doing to the game that lowers those barriers to entry?"

Might that include a full-scale free-to-play model at some point? "It's definitely a possibility. I don't see it right over the horizon because I think we would almost have to feel like our current business model doesn't really work all that well anymore before we go to something like that. There would be a huge amount of business model risk in making a dramatic change like that for us so right now it definitely doesn't make sense but maybe it will."

Speculation swirled recently regarding Blizzard's decision to trademark 'Mists of Pandaria', as many thought it may indicate the name of the next World of Warcraft expansion. Pandaria, in Warcraft lore, refers to the home of the Pandaren, basically humanoid war pandas you may remember making an appearance as neutral heroes in in Warcraft III. Chilton said the speculation was, "wildly overhyped." He added, "if you look at traditionally how we've handled that race it's been in those secondary products because we haven't realized it in the world. Most of the time when we do anything panda-related it's going to be a comic book or a figurine or something like that."

Look for patch to be hitting World of Warcraft sometime soon. And just in case Blizzard is holding back an expansion pack announcement for this year's BlizzCon, we'll be there to report any announcements when the event starts up on October 21.