The release of Dragonflight, World of Warcraft's ninth expansion pack, is imminent. Dragonflight steeps players in Azeroth's history by taking them to the Dragon Isles, ancestral home of dragonkind. There, they will discover ancient secrets of the dragons and Titans, battle against Raszageth's Primalist cult, and explore lands untouched by the outside world for 10,000 years. The expansion marks a new era for World of Warcraft, bringing changes to old systems like the user interface and Professions, adding the fourth new class since launch, and formally ending the war between the Alliance and the Horde.
Game Rant spoke with narrative director Steve Danuser and lead quest designer Maria Hamilton ahead of Dragonflight's release. They shared insights behind the curtain for lore and quest design, and spoke about the importance of diversity, equity, and representation in and outside World of Warcraft, reaffirming its commitment towards making an Azeroth where people of all races, creeds, and identities can feel welcome. Interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Q: The new launch cinematic, “Take to the Skies,” did an excellent job of showcasing the spirit of adventure while introducing the imposing threat of Raszageth. How do you strike the balance between Dragonflight’s vibe of exploration and wonderment with the over-arching threat of the Primalists?
Danuser: The story definitely needs to build to big moments of showdowns between heroes and epic villains - that’s part of the Warcraft DNA. So even as we set out to make Dragonflight an expansion that felt like it was adventuring into an unknown land as the front and center storyline, we need to weave those threats and start building them up. We talked about the dracthyr starting experience as a great place to introduce someone who would be a persistent threat throughout the leveling story and leading into the first raid of Dragonflight.
That’s where we thought about Raszageth, what she represented, and her ties to the Aspects. We find out they have this shared history, and when Alexstrasza realizes she’s been unleashed, this troubles Alexstrasza because when you think about the Aspects and everything they gave up to defeat Deathwing, they’re at a relative low point right now. They don’t have the Aspect’s powers they once had. It puts a challenge in front of us, and sets the stage for an expansion that is about discovery, trying to help the dragons in different ways as you are adventuring through this land.
It strikes the balance of having a threat that’s out there, but keeping the large part of the story focused on exploring the land, helping our allies, and building up our strength so we can face off against that adversary when the time comes.
Q: Dragonflight Legacies set up Emberthal as a major representative of the dracthyr, but she doesn’t seem to play a major role in the main story of Dragonflight. Will we see more of her and the other dracthyr in the spotlight as the expansion progresses?
Danuser: The dracthyr as a collective, and Emberthal as a character, have an arc that will span this expansion. That’s because they represent the players’ perspective in a lot of ways. They’re recently awakened, their memories are scrambled and unclear, and they’re trying to figure out what their past was and what their future is going to hold. They do make a great sounding board for asking the same questions the players would: How did we get into this situation? Who did this to us? What did these Aspects mean, and what was this war they fought so long ago, and why is it happening again? All those questions are great for them to ask on behalf of the players.
We weave the dracthyr in to the leveling experience a bit too. In fact, we have some quests you play along the way where you get some unique text if you’re playing as a dracthyr, and some quests that are only for the dracthyr, though some of them are available to non-dracthyr characters as well. Some little side stories, local stories that fill in some of that context and that feeling of discovery and mystery.
We do want to fill in that storyline and have you understand them better, especially by the time you get to the max level content for Dragonflight at launch. Those storylines will continue through our game updates as well, where we will delve much more into the history of the dracthyr. Emberthal’s perspective and what she’s trying to achieve for her people becomes one of the pivotal story legs of this expansion.
Q: In the past, shifts in narrative direction has caused dissonance with some themes and characterization, like with Sylvanas between Legion, Battle for Azeroth, and Shadowlands. With World of Warcraft beginning to weave narratives over the course of multiple expansions, what safeguards are you putting in place to make sure your stories aren’t disrupted by similar unexpected factors in the future?
Danuser: The team has changed over the years, so I can’t speak to the decisions made before my time - I can only speak to the way we’re planning things now and how we look at things. We are mindful about how stories have been built up in the past, and we want to take all that knowledge, all that learning, and apply it going forward. That’s why Dragonflight represents what we think of as a new book in the Warcraft saga. People like to compartmentalize things into phases, and you can do that if you want to, but we just think of it like a starting point for a new series of stories focused on the world, the characters we’ve gotten to know and love over the years.
Dragonflight is a love letter to the dragon Aspects, dragons as these awesome characters in fantasy literature, and what’s unique and distinctive about Warcraft dragons in particular versus dragons you meet in other forms of media. Our whole team - the design team, the art team, everybody - really dove in and showed how much love they have for these characters, as well and the stories they are involved with.
When we look ahead to future updates and expansion, we do want to build upon the themes we’re introducing in Dragonflight. There is a sense of hopeful optimism about the world, the Dragon Isles themselves awakening. Hopefully that represents a feeling players will have as they return to the game and see all the new stories, features, and updates we’ve made to everything from the interface to the talents, all to breathe fresh air into the game. I think that comes through in the story, and how it will unfold in the future as well.
Q: In The Dragonflight Codex book announcement, there was a mix-up where it had erroneously identified Khadgar as a bronze dragon. Do you know if there is a story behind how that mistake happened?
Danuser: There’s really no big story; we have our publishing team, who I collaborate with on our books and upcoming things. There’s different people who work for different publishing companies whose job it is to write blurbs and things like that. In this case, it’s just someone was tasked with writing this blurb and got some of the details wrong. It wasn’t any nefarious or hidden trickery or anything like that. Once we saw it, we jumped in to correct it, and they fixed it on the website as soon as I pinged someone. No big story, just a mix-up.
Q: There was some pretty big lore drops in Uldaman: Legacy of Tyr and the Dragonflight Epic Edition Collector’s Set art book - two pieces of optional content not all players will see. Is this lore going to recur throughout the main story so players can more easily access it?
Danuser: In terms of story, that’s definitely something we think about. Not just where can we drop these nuggets of information, but one of the things we’ve really tried to do is to reinforce those and make sure they do get presented in a variety of different ways. These books you find in the world, for example, they’re all written from someone’s point of view. Ideally, we want to put in different perspectives from those same events. This is what Tyr thought of this. Well, this is what someone else thought of that time or those events.
Through the accumulation and the different ways you’ll encounter that information as you play, you can piece together your own perspective on that story. You can decide who’s perspective is right, who do you agree with, or maybe none of them are right and you want to form your own opinion on these things.
The other thing I’ll say, even in the beta, there were a lot of things we didn’t put out there for people to run through. This is something Maria and I talked about extensively with all the leadership on the team. We really wanted to try to hold back as many of these big story reveals - and even whole questlines - to not spoil them on the beta for those people how read news or fan sites, or who play beta a lot and feel like they know everything that’s going to happen.
There is, for example, a great quest line that delves into Tyr’s history, so you get a lot of different perspectives on the events that happened. What were some of those choices he made? We know some of the big historical beats of Tyr and his allies, and how Tyr fell and all that stuff, but we’re giving some more nuance, some more perspective. It was really the quest and narrative teams who worked together to delve into some of those historical moments. It’s really exciting for us to see there are some things players have to look forward too and have yet to delve in to.
Hamilton: This is something we trialed a bit in 9.2.5 when we put the Lordaeron stuff in, to see if we could keep something back. To see if we could manage to keep something hidden so it would be a surprise so players would have that moment of “Oh, what is this? Oh my goodness!” This time around, we took some important story moments with questing in game and tried to hide them. Hopefully we will get a really good reaction to some of those things and people will be surprised.
We do consider and look at when we are planning our questing to make sure we are telling those big moments in gameplay, and not in a book or something like that. We try very hard to make sure that core thing is in gameplay.
Q: We’ve seen some great representation for non-white, handicapped, and LGBTQ+ players in Dragonflight, but outside a few examples, many of these characters show up in side stories and Warcraft media outside the game. Will we start seeing more characters from these groups take center stage in the future?
Danuser: From a story perspective, that’s something we embrace fully. Our team is super behind having increased representation, and we love having the tools to be able to do that. You’ll see a continued commitment to that. There’s things we have in the works. When you’re dealing with a game that has been around for a long time, and has an older engine, there’s some behind-the-scenes things that need to be updated to fully support these features, but it’s something we’re committed to seeing unfold as time goes on. We love to see that representation, but it takes time to take some of these characters to rise up and gain prominence.
Warcraft is rooted in the storylines that have these beloved characters from a couple decades now, as you think of the Jaina Proudmoores and the Uthers of the world. That was a very different time, and we do try to make the game feel more contemporary and reflect the audience that plays it in a much more tangible way. Our commitment is that we will continue to have characters that represent all kinds of people in the world, and we will see them take more prominent roles as the story builds up.
It does take some time for those storylines to unfold, but we’re really excited about some of those characters we have planned for the future and the story arcs they’ll have. That doesn’t mean the characters people know and love will go away, but it means they will have an even larger cast of characters they can adventure alongside and get to know that represent all kinds of perspectives in the world. Hopefully people can see themselves in these characters as well. That’s something that’s very important to our team.
Q: There are some beautiful quests in Dragonflight that especially stuck out to players when they discovered them in the beta, like one revolving around an old orc from the Dragonmaw clan. When you’re developing quests in a particular zone, how do you decide what stories to tell?
Hamilton: Yeah, the Dragonmaw orc story was a really good one. There are a number of surprising moments you’ll come across. Part of this is understanding what quest design is responsible for. We work collaboratively with our narrative partners. We build that main story in gameplay, and make sure we’re hitting all those high-franchise moments. But we also need to make the world feel alive. We need to make these characters and cultures in each of those zones feel like they’ve been there for a while, or they just arrived and they have certain goals, or just really flesh things out so when you move through the place it feels real.
One of the things we committed to for Dragonflight was adding more local stories than we might normally do, because that’s how you get that feel of a place that’s real. We have a diverse group of quest designers, and we ask them to pitch ideas. We ask them to pitch stories. Because they all come from different places and have different interests, experience, and knowledge, we got a lot of interesting threads that all came together. Then, we sit down and figure out which ones would fit best where, and how to make each place show those opposing and different viewpoints so well, so beautifully. When you have a lot of people who are pitching ideas that are so dear to their heart, you get those very true-feeling moments.
We have some really cute ones too! You got that whelp that needs their stuffed duck fixed too, right? There are a lot of people who love that one too. A diverse group of people pitching ideas that are dear to their heart, a diverse community; seems like it worked out pretty well this time around. People do seem to like the local stories. And every now and then, you get those hard hitters like the Dragonmaw one, or you sit down and have a chat with a guy sitting on a ledge, and, surprise! That’s actually one of my favorites.
I remember when I was providing feedback on all the quests as I played through them early in the process, I remember going, “Woah, where did that come from?” It wasn’t what I was expecting, it surprised me. We really want those places to feel like places, where there’s lots of different people with different perspectives. We lean into the diversity of our crew, our group, our quest designers and our narrative designers, to tell those stories.
Q: Any final thoughts on Dragonflight and the future of World of Warcraft?
Danuser: We’re super excited to see players delving in and finding all those secret things and storylines we’ve been waiting to unleash upon them when the game goes live. So much to discover, so much passion and care and thoughtfulness. Like Maria was just saying, we have a great team of people who love this game, and I think that love really comes through in Dragonflight, and we’re just excited for people to see it.
Hamilton: I can promise the team is at least as excited as the players. They really want to get you out there. They want to have the community playing, they want to snoop on all the Twitch streams and watch you guys play. That’s a big day; launch day for us is a huge day because everybody is very excited and letting each other know, “Oh, so-and-so is playing your quest! You should go watch.” It’s a big, big day for us. We’re really looking forward to it. I hope players have a great time.
Dragons are such an epic thing, and the opportunity to just hang out with dragons and help out and help them regain their power? It’s just fantastic. I think there’s no better time than now to come play. We’ve got a complete refresh of a whole bunch of foundational stuff like talents and professions and the UI. Now’s a great time, so I hope we’ll see people really having fun with Dragonflight.
World of Warcraft is available on PC. Dragonflight launches on November 28.