It feels rare to describe a game that’s coming up on its 20th anniversary as having a pep in its step, but that’s exactly the vibe I got from Blizzard’s upcoming World of Warcraft: The War Within a recent hands-on preview event for the game.
First shown and announced back at Blizzcon last year, The War Within is more than it initially appears to be. Billed as the first instalment of the ‘Worldsoul Saga’ storyline, the expansion pack won’t just bring with it a fresh storyline to follow, a new race to play as and previously-undiscovered regions to explore. It’ll also introduce significant quality of life changes, such as a new warband system that allows you to easily share items and reputation progress across multiple characters.
Six months after the unveiling of The War Within, the development team involved is finally letting the world have an early taste of those things via the usual closed Alpha testing period.
This preview section of the game mostly takes place on the Isle of Dorn, which will act as the onboarding zone for players when The War Within kicks off in full. While it’s hard to fully escape the reality that this expansion pack is the tenth of its kind, one of the most striking things about its opening act was how quickly it moves and how effortlessly it pulls you into the action.
Rather than the purer emphasis on discovery seen in Dragonflight or Shadowlands, there’s a real sense of urgency that grounds The War Within from the get-go. It doesn’t feel like you’re just going through the motions, even though you are.
Speaking to Reviews.org, production director Michael Bybee spoke to the specific structural differences between The War Within and older World of Warcraft expansions.
“When we launched Legion and people had access to that whole continent and that whole set of islands it was all on the surface. You could see everything largely, even when you sitting in Dalaran [and] looking over the island.”
Prior to working on The War Within, Bybee was helping to ship Diablo 4. However, as someone who had worked on Warcraft before that, the upcoming expansion has proved to be something of a homecoming.
“Honestly, coming back to the WoW team was a really fun experience for me. I love Diablo and that team. I thought that was a great experience shipping that game but WoW is my home and I play this game with my family and friends and a lot of people on the team I’m close with and we’ve had a lot of shared experiences.”
Naturally, after his sojourn in the grim world of Sacturary, Bybee found that some things were not as he remembered them upon his return to Azeroth.
“The structure of the team has changed. We’ve brought more people into the fold since then. Classic was new when I left the team before and now it’s just a part of our day-to-day operations and we have something called the live team, which is a dedicated separate team which is entirely focused on providing live content to World of Warcraft on a regular basis.
More broadly, he said there’s been a “big change” in the way that the team thinks about serving the players and listening to feedback.
Of course, with so many years of experience when it comes to making expansion packs for World of Warcraft, maybe it’s not that much of a surprise that The War Within does make as strong a first impression as it is.
Senior game designer Sean McCann said that this quality comes down to two key factors.
According to him, it’s “a combination of expertise – of knowing the game – and being willing to iterate on things and calling a spade a spade if it’s something’s working or if it’s not working to being willing to pivot on that and not being married to things if it’s not serving the overall narrative flow of the game.”
Asked for a specific example of this dynamic in action, McCann pointed to up Delves.
Delves are one of The War Within’s big “back of the box” features. They’re pitched as a new solo-friendly take on dungeons where players fight through a scenario alongside AI-controlled companions that grow stronger with each adventure.
When it came to the way the feature was introduced, early incarnations required a number of changes. The specific goal of these revisions was to make the introduction of your first companion – the Dwarf Brann Bronzebeard – feel a little more natural.
“We had an issue early on where Brann kinda came out of nowhere. He was a sheep and then, he’s not a sheep and then all of a sudden he’s in the delve with me shooting Nerubians,” McCann explained.
After this issue was flagged with the rest of the team, another designer had the idea of placing Brann outside the mine shooting Nerubians and adding both an earlier encounter with him in a nearby settlement and additional dialogue from villagers who overheard his local activities. These small continuity-centred additions go a long way to making the final result feel like a more meaningful moment that doesn’t outstay its welcome.
Writ large, Delves have also evolved significantly throughout the development of The War Within.
Asked how much work goes into adding a new noun to the World of Warcraft, McCann doesn’t shy away from describing it as “a lot.”
“So how do give something that can be challenging content that can ramp up to be hard, make this group of people go ‘I can increase my item level, I have something to achieve’ but also we want to make it flexible. We don’t want it to be solo – we’re an MMO – but you should be able to do it solo if that makes sense,” he explained.
World of Warcraft is, fundamentally, a somewhat repetitive beast. However, McCann has high hopes that the variety of experiences on offer with The War Within’s initial catalogue of Delves will prove to be a hit for longtime players.
He’s particularly excited to see if players take to his personal favourite: a Delve in the subterranean zone of Hallowfall that takes place entirely underwater.
“We disable swimming so you kinda run around and play like normal and don’t have to worry about any vertical gameplay but you do have to worry about your breath bar. I like it a lot because it’s very simple.”
According to McCann, this Delve has been a lot of fun to playtest internally because of the insights it gives about which games gave what generations “water trauma.”
As for whether Delves will make their way outside the boundaries of the new expansion pack, McCann said that there are currently no firm plans but there has been plenty of talk about where the feature could go once The War Within ships.
“I’m excited for where we can potentially go and take the system,” he said.
“Once we get Delves out the door, we have a foundation like dungeons and we know what Delves are. We understand what it is and how far we can stretch it and now we can go do a bunch of crazy stuff with it.”
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