'You want to make sure that all 500 mounts feel relevant': World of Warcraft's dragonriding won't make traditional flying obsolete

With the latest Dragonflight expansion being touted as a return to World of Warcraft's (WoW) roots, it's no surprise that a quintessential fantasy creature is taking centre stage in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game.

Yep, we're talking about dragons — it's in the name after all — and the expansion also takes place on the ancestral home of the dragonflights of Azeroth, the Dragon Isles.

Among the new additions to the game are a new race of humanoid dragonkin called Dracthyr, a new Evoker class, and, the cherry on top, a feature called Dragonriding.

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Dragonriding appears to be well-received by players but for those who aren't keeping up with the game, an essential question hangs in the air: How will this affect the traditional flying experience?

With the flying mechanic first introduced in 2007, the experience has gone beyond a way to traverse the expansive worlds of Warcraft. It also includes a stable of exotic flying mounts — some of which players spent months to get — that can be used as bragging rights.

In an interview with AsiaOne on Nov 16, game director Ion Hazzikostas said the development team is definitely mindful of "the huge amount of collections people have and some treasured possessions over the years in the form of those mounts".

"We are very mindful that for those folks out there who have 500 mounts and got a brand new '500 Mounts' achievement and unlocked the cool reward for that, you want to make sure that all 500 feel relevant," Hazzikostas said.

He added: "We want to make sure that we don't create a world where only a handful [of mounts] are worth using. [Dragonriding] is limited to working within the Dragon Isles. So when players go elsewhere, when they're in dungeons, when they're playing on alts, when they're going back to Stormwind or Orgrimmar and so forth, the full array of other amounts will be available."

As for the future plans of this feature or how it'll work beyond Dragon Isles, Hazzikostas said it's something the team is actively discussing and they are aware of the positive feedback on dragonriding but there is nothing "specific to announce right now".

Back to the roots

Set five years after the events of the previous expansion Shadowlands, Dragonflight serves as a soft reboot to the almost 20-year-old video game series.

When asked whether the expansion was guided by a singular goal or philosophy, lead user interface (UI) designer Laura Sardinha said in a separate interview that it's about "going back to Azeroth" and "coming back to our roots".

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But it's not just the in-game world Blizzard is hitting the reset button on; the team even revamped the game's "foundational systems" such as the talent system, the profession system, and even the UI.

Dragonflight was "an opportunity to really revisit a lot of those systems and kind of refurbish them from the ground up", associate game director Morgan Day added.

For starters, talent trees are returning and it was a result of feedback the team has received about players missing out on the experience.

Day elaborated: "With talents in particular, a major goal of ours is to have different builds be viable... Or even in some cases, we want you to be able to engage with the talent system, maybe just based on the type of content you're doing. You might have a different loadout for Mythic Plus [dungeons], versus PvP, versus, your raids or your questing."

The one thing that Sardinha wished she had more time to work on was the UI.

"It's such a huge, huge, huge project. So since the beginning, we're like, okay, we know we're going to do this. Well, we can we do first? What can players gain more [from] and what can really drive us to the future? So that's why we picked the heads-up display (HUD) because it's everything that you see when you're playing the game."

Sardinha explained that the UI revamp — including visuals and user experience — also encompassed "evolving some of the tools" they used since the Legion expansion in 2015.

"It was a massive task to just do all at once. So slowly, we kept increasing our technology on that. But when Dragonflight came, we have the tools to just make it happen," she said, adding that the introduction of the Edit mode to the MMORPG was because it's something players have come to expect from the genre.

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Hazzikostas also affirmed that player feedback has influenced the design of Dragonflight from the ground up, especially after the reaction the player base had coming out of the Chains of Damnation patch (prior to patch 9.1.5) last year.

He explained that the direction of that patch "moved away from putting too much weight in kind of character investment in ways that could feel unfriendly to players' time at times".

"Ultimately, we just realised that those values weren't serving our modern player base. And they may have been the right thing for WoW 15 years ago, but the players weren't having a lot of fun at times during Shadowlands (the previous expansion)."

Said Hazzikostas: "But Dragonflight is the first expansion that really, from the ground up, is responsive to and reflects our shift in approach to things like valuing players' time, being alt friendly; ultimately not putting content the players may not prefer as a requirement or in front of the content they enjoy most."

World of Warcraft: Dragonflight is available for purchase now.

bryanlim@asiaone.com

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