Shadowlands Press Event Recap
Blizzard recently held a Press Event for Shadowlands. We'll be updating the post below today with interview recaps, so keep checking back!
Shadowlands - Auto Battle Mission Table
Preach shared a video of the Auto Battle system we started to see data added for.
Shadowlands - Legendary Crafting UI
Towelliee shared a video of the legendary crafting UI.
Developer Interview - Ion Hazzikostas
Windowscentral shared a interview with Blizzard.
Character Customization
- There was a large engineering undertaking to rebuild how characters are put together under the hood, allowing for the new customization.
- More character customization will be added even after Shadowlands release.
Starting Experience and Leveling
- There is a lot the team would do differently with Island Expeditions. They took lessons from Islands and applied them to Torghast, which should feel more replayable.
- The team wanted to create a better starting experience, as the current game starts you with content that was made 10 years ago and doesn't reflect how the game is built today. That content wasn't created with a new player in mind in some cases.
- The new intro experience reflects the World of Warcraft as of 2020. There are treasures, other players around, optional rares, a mini-dungeon, and more.
- The more linear leveling experience in Shadowlands is an experiment. It's easier to tell a broader progressive narrative when you'll visit zones in a specific order.
- The sense of danger and struggle was lost when you could level through zones in any order, as a new zone didn't feel difficult due to the scaling.
- After you level your main character, then you can experience the zones in any order on alts.
- Keeping EU and US separate systems isn't great experience or design choice that the team would make. It would be great if one day people could play across both regions.
Legendary Items
- The ability to make multiple legendaries over the course of a raid tier with the limit of only one that you can equip at any given time, create interesting decisions, but players have control over these decisions.
- You'll probably acquire legendaries faster than you did in Legion, but the final rate hasn't been determined yet.
Covenants, Soulbinds, and Conduits
- The team wants players to be able to pick the Covenant that they think is cool and enjoy playing more rather than having to pick one for power reasons.
- Making Covenant swapping easy would be a last resort. Choices in an RPG are what define your character and let you carve out an identity that's different from every other player around you because they reflect your priorities.
- The goal is for all end-game systems to be accessible within your first week. It'll be paced a little bit so that you don't arrive at your Covenant and have a ton of systems unlocked.
- Soulbinds and Conduits are simple modifications that should be powerful that you customize your class and spec abilities for certain situations.
- Conduits are bonus items on top of the helm or the shoulders you might get from defeating a dungeon boss or a raid boss.
- Conduits are put into the Soulbind device in your Covenant sanctum and replacing it will destroy the existing one in that slot.
- You'll need to be in your Covenant Sanctum to change your Soulbind. Respeccing the Soulbind will be a minimal anima cost. You'll need to unlock the full tree over time, it's only fully unlocked in Alpha for testing.
Story
- The Horde is definitely in for a period of rebuilding.
- The Horde vs Alliance story isn't the main focus at the outset of Shadowlands, but there will be some story there.
- Having the final boss known at the start of the expansion makes telling the story easier, somewhat like Deathwing in Cataclysm.
- Recent expansions haven't revealed the end boss to preserve twists in the story. Sometimes the story needed to be told before the end boss made sense.
- One of the challenges in creating Shadowlands is introducing a villain and building up a villain for the very first time that we previously have known nothing about
- Villains need to be at least at Titan power level now to be a credible threat.