The War Within Developer Q&A

• Author: Luxrah
• Date: November 10, 2023
• Updated: November 10, 2023
• Expansion: World of Warcraft

Today we saw another episode of Blizzard’s WoWCast developer chat series with answers to the Q&A that was put out following BlizzCon. Game Director Ion Hazzikostas and Associate Game Director Morgan Day sat down with Community Manager Bethany Stout to answer a slew of questions about the upcoming expansion, The War Within, and other future content for retail World of Warcraft.

They covered a lot of ground in this Q&A, so let’s get down to it! We’ll do our best to sum everything up for you.

Early Access

• The epic edition of The War Within includes beta access and 3 days of early access, which has been a point of contention among players since it was announced. The developers addressed this by saying they felt they needed to add value to the highest tier, and early access is an increasingly common way of doing that. But they emphasized that players with early access will only have a head start on leveling and won’t get any competitive edge in terms of gearing or advancing their character beyond that. Mythic+, raids, and valuable loot from world quests won’t be available until later on.

The Worldsoul Saga Content and Pacing

• Although they plan to release the next three expansions at a quicker pace than ever before, they will still be full expansions with all of the content you expect from one. The goal is to reduce lulls and gaps in content releases and establish a more steady cadence. They plan to continue the quicker update schedule from Dragonflight.
• There will be no time travel involved in the Midnight and The Last Titan narratives. Instead we will be revisiting old zones and seeing how they’ve changed. We can expect revamped versions of blood elf zones for Midnight and Northrend zones for The Last Titan. These zones will be updated to allow dynamic flying and travel across Eastern Kingdoms without loading screens. They’ll also be updated to the graphic fidelity of modern zones.

Warbands

• Tier set tokens may still require you to get them on the right class in order to unlock them.
• Likewise, any item that requires class-specific logic such as a class quest will still require that class to unlock.
• There are no current plans to allow players to opt out of warbands, because they don’t see a good reason for it – but are open to it if a reason exists.
• They have discussed the possibility of excluding certain elements such as exploration for new characters, but no solid plans yet.
• Your warband is tied to your Battle.net account, so if you have multiple game accounts, they will all share the same warband. Your login screen will only show characters from your current account, however.
• Account-wide reputations will be limited to The War Within and possibly Dragonflight since it will become the default leveling experience. Making legacy reputations account-wide will take some time.
• Factions that you must choose between such as Scryers and Aldor will likely always remain character-specific, though their rewards should be account-wide.
• It doesn’t sound like they plan to raise the number of characters per account from 60 for The War Within.
• Mythic+ portal unlocks will become account-wide in The War Within.
• They want to let us change the look of our warband login screen in the future, perhaps by displaying different faction banners etc., but it won’t be possible at launch.

Inventory

• They want to improve character banks at some point, probably with tabs instead of bags, but for now they’re focused on warband banks.
• They’re looking at ways to reduce the amount of stuff in your inventory rather than continually adding more bag slots. For example delve keys will go into their own UI, not your bags.
• They’re also adding subheaders in the currency tab to move seasonal currency items out of your bags.

Dynamic Flying

• Dynamic flying will be available much sooner in The War Within than traditional flying, just like in Dragonflight. They feel that it’s more engaging for the leveling and questing stage, whereas traditional flying is less active.
• Not all mounts will be equipped for dynamic flying at the launch of The War Within. It requires a new animation suite, which looks too awkward on some mounts. They plan to eventually make all mounts work with dynamic flying but it will take some time. There will still be hundreds of mounts available for dynamic flight at launch.
• All druid flight forms will be eligible for dynamic flying.

Professions

• There will be new specialization points in The War Within, although they didn’t give any details about what those will be.
• They’re reexamining the way inspiration works because they don’t want a crit to feel required -“Then it’s not a crit anymore, it’s a success.”
• They want to broaden the availability of crafting orders for players who aren’t on the leading edge of content, potentially by adding NPC orders.

Miscellaneous

• They plan to continue the Trading Post and already have plans for it well into 2024.
• They plan to continue steadily adding new character customization options.
• There are no plans to merge servers for reasons of preserving people’s character and guild names. Instead they just want to make it not really matter what server you’re on.
• There will be no stat squish for The War Within, but there will be one for Midnight.
• Timewalking may become cross-faction for the sake of convenience, but it doesn’t sound like LFR or LFD will.
• Delves won’t have lockouts, but the rarest keys will be limited in terms of how many you can get per week.
• Archaeology is not likely to return in its current form, as they have heard from players that the triangulation minigame is more tedious than fun. They feel that other features in the game will scratch the same itch, such as delves and the upcoming Azerothian Archives feature in Dragonflight.
• Hero Talents aren’t intended to make big changes to classes on their own, so don’t expect to see two-handed Enhancement Shamans or dual-wield Survival Hunters.
• There are no plans to extend the multi-stage casting mechanic to other classes in the near future. They want to keep it unique to the class for a while. It’s possible down the road, however.

You can watch the entire WoWCast video below. We also have summaries of the Season of Discovery Developer Q&A and Cataclysm Classic Developer Q&A.