World of Warcraft recently announced Dragonflight, its ninth expansion pack. The highly-speculated release will bring players to the mysterious Dragon Isles–the ancestral home of dragonkind. Mounting up on special dragon mounts, they will soar across the skies, discovering hidden secrets of the Titans and dragons, and facing forgotten foes from ancient history. Beyond that, World of Warcraft is adding the playable drakthyr race–humanoids who can shapeshift between their elf-like visage forms and their true draconic forms. These supersoldiers, originally created by Neltharion before he became Deathwing, play as the new Evoker class; a drakthyr-exclusive damage dealing and healing class that channels the powers of the five dragonflights in battle.
Game Rant spoke with lead game designer Jeremy Feasel and senior game designer Graham Berger about Dragonflight. They shared what parts of the upcoming update had them most excited, and shed some light on some features and changes coming for World of Warcraft. They also teased some major conflicts and lore discoveries players could look forward to discovering on the Dragon Isles. The developers also illuminated the parts of World of Warcraft's history which gave them the tools to build the best experience for players in the upcoming expansion.
Q: Please introduce yourselves and what you are working on in World of Warcraft: Dragonflight.
Feasel: Hi, I’m Jeremy Feasel. I am a lead game designer. I oversee world design, so that’s quest, content, level design–all the overworld stuff
Berger: And I’m Graham Berger. I’m a senior game designer on the system’s team, and I’ve been overseeing the drakthyr evoker feature, and helping out with talents.
Q: Over the last few months, players have speculated about a dragon expansion coming to World of Warcraft. Do you watch that speculation as it unfolds, and if so, how does it feel to see the fans' reaction to the actual reveals when they happen?
Feasel: It’s always a ton of fun. That’s always one of the most fun parts of the year, even in the past at BlizzCon when we did similar things. Lurking and seeing what the leaks are and what people are excited about is a great way for us to gauge what ideas people would be jazzed about. But then, there’s the fun announcement day of “I was right! I had this idea correct a long time ago, that it was going to be dragons, and Dragonriding, and dragons to fight, and dragon friends!” I personally only liked tweets that included the banana island of Tel’Abim in the leaks, though. That’s my line in the sand.
Graham: We play World of Warcraft too, right? So being a part of the community and watching what they come up and speculate is a lot of fun. “What are they excited about?” But revealing it, and seeing all the hype today, and finally being able to show what we’re actually doing? Seeing how excited people are about it has been energizing, electrifying.
Q: The dragons and titans are intrinsically tied to the history of Azeroth. How would you compare and contrast the process of designing content for things like Dragonflight, as opposed to the higher concepts of Shadowlands?
Feasel: In Shadowlands, we got some opportunities to tell some crazy cool stories with cosmic implications. I mean, we ended up in Zereth Mortis, the place of the First Ones, where there’s a machine that creates realities! That’s a ton of fun to write for. But in this case, Dragonflight gives us a chance to go in a very different direction and return to core Azeroth. Not just returning to Azeroth from the lands of death physically, but a return to core Azerothian and World of Warcraft things. The Dragon Isles are a mysterious space which tells a deep story ingrained within World of Warcraft, and it tells a lot more about elements of the dragonflights we haven’t heard until now. We haven’t heard a huge amount about their lore, but they are a huge part of Azeroth history. What happened when they made their oaths to the Titans? What even were those? The oaths of safeguarding life, the Dream, or magic; where did these oaths take place? Those stories exist in our history, but we’ve never been able to show them within World of Warcraft until now.
You can imagine there are a ton of people on the team excited to jump into this. What was the birthplace of the Emerald Dream? What do the timeways of the bronze dragonflight look like, and what could a big dragon city look and feel like? There are core creatures that have existed since Classic, like the dragonspawn and the drakonids, we’ve never gotten to know. We’ve gotten to kill them a bunch, but what is their purpose in dragon society? Who are the ancient enemies of the dragons? It was a lot of fun coming up with some of the baddies we are going to be fighting in this expansion too.
We had some similar feelings on the system side of things. We are returning to Azeroth–what are core parts of our game we want to last another 20 years? There are elements that have been sitting around for quite a number of years without a refresher, like the UI and class talents. Those elements are core to the Warcraft experience. If we can think longitudinally about them this time, we can design them with what the talent tree could look like over the next couple of expansion packs in mind. It gave us the opportunity to take the learnings from the past 17 years and apply it to core elements of our game to make everything better for everybody. And then, when you’re making a brand-new race and class, you have to think about how that fits into all of these things too, and what the gameplay is going to feel like.
Berger: WoW’s been out for a while, and we are the caretakers of the world. We want to stay true to the story and lore, but still explore new things. Drakthyr was a really cool opportunity for the team to do just that. As Jeremy said, we’ve seen dragons, and we’ve fought a lot of them, but we want to let you be one: be draconic, cast draconic spells. How do we take what we’ve seen–fire breath, green acid breath–and fully-flesh out that concept into a piece of story? Building out the different type of red or black spells a player could cast has been a lot of fun.
Q: The drakthyr were one of the most standout parts of the Dragonflight reveal, as they are World of Warcraft’s first race/class combo. What was the design philosophy behind linking the race and class together, rather than allowing them to be other classes, like Warrior or Mage?
Berger: Early on, we knew we wanted to make a playable dragon. We started with the pillar of making you feel like a dragon–not just looking like one, but feeling like one. Everything came out of that. If we want you to feel like a dragon, we want you to fight in certain ways. What does that mean? We want you to breathe fire, we want you to fly across the battlefield. Being able to embrace the uniqueness by adding the class restriction actually lets us do a lot of things otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to do. If they had to have every capability other races have, that’s going to restrict us in other ways on the class side. Embracing what is special about them felt really uniquely draconic, like the Empower mechanic we are introducing with them. You start casting your fire breath dragon, breathing in and building up this power, and then you choose when to release the spell. In the future, I can imagine other applications for it, but for now, focusing on Dragonflight and dragons let us take that fantasy as far as we could.
Q: The drakthyr are getting a huge amount of character customization options. Will any of the existing classes get more customization options like they did in Shadowlands?
Feasel: We added some additional options in 9.1.5 as a part of our community initiatives. That was really cool; it was fun to be able to add additional customization options there, including things like the incubus for the Warlock. That was great, and people on the team are jazzed about adding stuff like that. I think player customizations are always awesome, and we definitely realize its value, and how much players are asking for it.
But we’re going to be heavily focusing on the Drakthyr for launch of Dragonflight. They’re our most heavily-customizable race and class we’ve ever done before. They have way more customizations–and two different forms full of customizations Graham can probably talk more about. But we will definitely be looking for community feedback about when you would like to see additional customizations in the future, but right now, we’re heavily focused on drakthyr.
Berger: Their draconic drakthyr forms are super customizable. They have four or five different categories of options–I think most other races currently have two or three. You can do the stuff you would expect, like scales and horns. But on their faces alone, you can have spikes on their chin, frills on their neck, and all different kinds of ears. It is detailed and in-depth, with a slew of options. Their visage form, the humanoid form we’ve shown, has a masculine and feminine model. They have a lot of similar options to the drakthyr. Ton of their own, but you can match the scales, horns, and some facial features if you want to. You can have your drakthyr and your visage look similar, or you can make them entirely different, if you want to play that Onyxia style of “Oh, I’m amongst the humans and they don’t recognize me.”
Feasel: Class tier sets are another way we are looking at for players to customize themselves. We thought that went great in Zeroth Mortis, and it would fit with the Dragonflight theme. They are a great way to show off you’re this particular class, and the multiple different colors as you get different difficulties helps players show off as well. It’s a lot of fun for our art teams too, to come up with different armor sets for each class that feel core to those class fantasies.
The Dragonriding system gives players four different model shapes to customize, too. There’s the classic proto dragon and drake, but this is the Dragon Isles–we see greater dragon evolution here than in any other place in the past. There’s wyvern-style dragons and various different other dragon forms you’re going to see here. There are even creatures with draconic elements to them because of the magic of the space–the draconic energy causing evolutions to the creatures over the years to give some of them scales, frills, or additional spikes. But this gives us the opportunity to provide players with the most customizable mount we’ve ever put in our game.
For each of the four different model types, there’s multiple different colors and over 50 different customizations you can get per drake. This is a legendary mount, and the idea is to make your perfect dragon friend. Something that says your warrior, your gnome, your blood elf. Options include everything from fur to horns, and you can get a variety of different colors. There’s a big long beak that makes your proto dragon look like a parrot! The art team had a lot of fun creating a wide variety of styles here, and it feels like draconic evolution has gone wild all across the Dragon Isles. I think it’s going to be really cool, and it’s going to be fun to see what combinations players put together, and how that goes with their transmogs.
Q: The Dragonriding mechanic looks like it will make exploration and flight more engaging than ever before. What was it like designing zones with this new mechanic in mind, and do you think it will change how you design zones in future content?
Feasel: We wanted to design zones with this idea in mind from the beginning: that you would have this unlocked from very early on. But we also wanted this system to feel very fast, fluid, and fun. When you’re running along on your drake, if you double jump, you unfurl your wings and give a great push upward and get this initial launch. The whole minigame is height versus distance versus speed. If you start to aim the front of your dragon downwards, you’ll gain additional momentum past what you would usually have. If you aim yourself fully down, your wings will tuck in–we’ve got animations for all of these things, so they all feel visceral, and you know when each state change occurs so you can get mastery associated with the system. You’ll tuck your wings, you start going really fast, and you get those contrails, because you need those three-dimensional elements to feel the speed. You get a screen effect when you hit max speed, and then once you even out, your wings will unfurl, and you’re just gliding across the landscape. If you can stay relatively close to the ground, you’ll be going really fast. You can get additional height, but it is at the cost of speed. It’s an interesting minigame about how you’re going to traverse the landscape. In that way, we wanted to turn traversal of the space into more of a three-dimensional element. It should feel cool to have mastery over figuring out which cliffs to jump off, and how to get the best use of your momentum.
You can translate that mastery into minigames we can put into the game–like Dragon Racing. We're even looking at multiplayer racing tournaments so you can race against other players. The traditional way we did the Fishing Tournament, with achievements and special rewards, was an inspiration for it. We want to do that kind of thing for Dragon Racing because it’s feeling like an awesome system.
But it’s also become a part of our level design. Certain spires exist specifically so you can climb to the top of them for great spot to jump off of, and we have some of the most expansive zones we’ve had in World of Warcraft. All the zones in Dragonflight are absolutely massive, and have a huge amount of negative space in between. It’s reminiscent of old school Stranglethorn Vale, where you’d be traversing huge chunks of jungle and find special points of interest in the middle of a chunk of trees. That’s the feeling you’re going to get from Dragonflight. That allows us to scoot you across the landscape on your Dragonriding dragon faster than existing flying mounts so you get that feeling of speed and traversing the landscape. We are incorporating this into our level and world design so we give you the opportunity to fly out there like a dragon. We can also create spaces that make sense for really big things. It would make sense to have this giant rolling space in the Ohn’ahran Plains where a huge dragon could land and do dragon stuff at. Part of the Dragonriding system will be applied to the drakthyr as well.
Berger: Drakthyr as a racial get a style of Dragonriding flight. They aren’t going to participate in the whole progression system themselves, but their racial flight will a streamlined version of the full drake skillset. Drakthyr can participate in Dragonriding too–you get a drake and ride on in your visage form.
Q: Though Dragonflight has shown off a few antagonistic forces so far, there hasn’t seemed to be a major villain revealed so far, like the Jailer was in Shadowlands. Is there going to be a primary antagonist this expansion, or will it be focusing more on smaller conflicts surrounding the restoration of the Dragon Isles?
Feasel: It’s a little bit of both. We want to delve into a number of different stories with the dragons. There’s a ton of history with their ancestral enemies, like the djaradin. These obsidian weapon-wielding dragon slayers are fire-resistant half giants. They’re the perfect dragon killers. Their whole thing was slaying dragons for sport. We’re going to learn a little bit about them, and we’re going to do a whole dungeon associated with them.
We do have some solid antagonists set up especially well through some awesome in game, but one of the core stories we are telling is the ancient history of the dragons. Long ago when they made their oaths to the titans–when they decided to become ordered after the fall of Galakrond–they went down a specific path the other dragons didn’t necessarily agree with. These five great dragons decided to take on responsibilities over life, the dream, magic, and time, that other great proto dragons–the great children of Galakrond–thought they shouldn’t do. They shouldn’t become ordered by the titans, and they were becoming lesser by becoming different creatures. The proto dragons are what dragons should be. They shouldn’t take oaths, they shouldn’t be defending life on Azeroth. They’re the most powerful creatures on the planet–they’re certainly one of the biggest–and they should be the one running everything, and everyone else should be subservient to them.
These ancient Primalists have their own leaders we’re going to be meeting over the course of this expansion pack. They are their versions of the aspects that are directly antagonists to dragonkind. We’re going to be getting into some great dragon politics, of dragon versus dragon. Did you make the right choice in ancient history, or do you follow the wrong path?
In the history of Warcraft over the last many years, we’ve met many different dragonflights, many orphaned dragonflights. The twilight flight, the stone drakes of Deepholm, the storm drakes of Legion. They weren’t allowed into the dragonflights, and they may harbor some resentment. We’re getting in to some juicy dragon politics as part of one of our overarching storylines.
Q: For the first time ever, the Alliance and Horde are entering an expansion’s story with a truly joint operation. What was it like designing a unified Warcraft experience featuring both factions side by side, rather than against each other?
Feasel: I think it is a fun and interesting story to tell in World of Warcraft, especially with cross-faction play coming. With the storyline, the Alliance and Horde have come together to fight some cosmic villains and have begun burying the hatchet in a lot of cases, so this is an awesome opportunity for us to have a couple of those groups come together. It’s fun to have groups that are usually enemies, and maybe harbor some antagonistic tendencies, interact with each other, sometimes in snarky ways.
And in this case, it just made sense. This isn’t a military operation–we’re not sending the armies in here. We’re sending the explorers, researchers, and catalogers. That’s why the Reliquary and the Explorers’ League threw their hands up and said, “Yeah, we want to be the ones to charter the ship for the Dragon Isles!” That’s a core part of the initial kickoff story: going to a mysterious place filled with exploration, finding great, primal difficult things to fight that might swoop down and eat a couple of us, and having to come together in a way militaries may have not wanted to do. But it makes sense for these two non-militaristic forces to group together. They’re actually going to form a coalition called the Dragonscale Expedition early on in your adventures, and will be one group the Alliance and Horde work together with. It was a great opportunity for us to not only get some of those interactions, but also for Alliance and Horde players to be in the same space and interacting with each other in a positive way outside of cross-faction dungeons. Except in War Mode!
Q: What are some of the most important lessons you’ve learned from Shadowlands and other expansions you think helped improve Dragonflight?
Feasel: One of the expansions we were looking back to for inspiration was Mists of Pandaria–our last great exploration-based expansion. We didn’t necessarily have an overarching villain directly in our face. We had a mysterious place to go to, we had some exploring to do, but a lot of story was left to find out during the course of the expansion. Who the bad guys are, what they were like, what their attacks were like. All those great exploration things you do in a place filled with mystery. Mists of Pandaria was this great space where there wasn’t a lot of established story. There was a ton of new things to learn, and you were meeting all kinds of different groups, like the hozen and jinyu. You even got to go to a brewery!
It was a fun adventure, and that was the vibe we were going for here: an awesome adventure in a space where you can explore these expansive zones, find little side stories everywhere, and tell local stories. You get to meet people who have been living here for some time, and you get to help them out with their day-to-day activities, or by defeating some new villains that have awoken there. You’re going to learn a lot about the cultures there, which is the core of an exploration-based expansion pack. It’s a lot of fun to go to a very Warcraft space with ancient lore and fill in some of those gaps with stories we think would be interesting, whether those are stories about an entire dragonflight or an individual character. Those are a lot of fun to write for, and even more fun to find in the world.
Berger: In that theme of returning to roots and exploring the heart of Warcraft from a systems perspective, the past three or four expansions, we’ve done a lot of different systems, including progression systems and variations and evolutions of professions. We’ve taken the lessons from a lot of those going into Dragonflight and looked at our core systems, like talents, professions, and the UI, and said, “These are starting to show their age, we’ve learned a lot, let’s take another look at these and revitalize them for the future.” I think this was a big opportunity and a big challenge for the team.
Q: Final thoughts on World of Warcraft: Dragonflight?
Feasel: I can’t wait for players to see what we are doing to the outdoor sandbox, which may be because I was one of the designers associated with working on it back in Legion. For the first time in World of Warcraft history, we have a specific team dedicated to working on awesome overworld sandbox activities–our content team. They have their own leadership group, and been staffing up for the past number of years, and now we have a whole group to make cool sandbox things, whether that is how you hunt rare spawns or minigames associated with climbing walls, they ensure we will have a whole bunch of depth to those systems. It will be an awesome chance for us to revamp the outdoor sandbox world in a way we haven’t done since Legion.
I’m a solo/small group, outdoor sandbox player myself, and I’m a big alt player, so those things are really important to me. But one thing that group is heavily focused on is big social outdoor group gameplay. What are really cool ways to get a bunch of players together in the outdoor world? What are ways we can plus up things, like our reputation system, so it doesn’t feel just like the normal revered/exalted that you’ve done in previous expansion?
One way we are going to advance that system in particular is by taking the Renown system we used for Covenants applying that to our four main reputations for this expansion. You can kind of think of them like plussed-up reputations. There’s a number of reputation levels associated with them, and you can see what cool cosmetics you get and can unlock questlines as well. But the important thing here is you don’t have to pick which of those you want to level up in. It’s basically reputation 2.0, so it’s up to your character. You can log in and do Valdrakken Accord things that feel very dragony, you can log in and do Dragonscale Expedition things which involve mountain climbing and explorative stuff. We want it to feel very “spend your time how you want” friendly, very alt friendly, in terms of an overall reputation system. Because it’s something I engage in quite a bit, it’s really cool to put a bunch of eggs in that basket and plus up the system to make our sandbox feel awesome.
Berger: I’m excited about Evoker, but that would be cheating, so I’m going to say something else. For me, I’m actually most excited for professions. I’ve had blacksmithing forever, and jewelcrafting since Burning Crusade, so I always need a mining alt. It’s one of those things I invest in heavily at the beginning of an expansion as a player, and then trail off. With the revamp coming, to be able to continue investing in that and become the master blacksmith for my guild is amazing –I want to make the best helmets for everybody! I’m excited to be able to invest in my character more than ever before.
And Work Orders are going to be awesome. Instead of linking my recipe to you, and we have to find each other and trade, it’s, “Hey, send me a work order, even if I’m not online, tell me exactly what you want, give me the mats for it, and I can go to that UI and send something back to you.” You can give a little note to say exactly what you want, and hopefully leave a compliment and a tip, or say something really rude because you’re guildies. But being able to invest in that, and share it with my friends much easier than with the current profession system is going to be really exciting. I think players have been looking for that kind of gameplay with professions for a long time, and they will really be able to show off with it.
World of Warcraft is available now on PC.