In World of Warcraft: Shadowlands, new game tech and old code are at war


Game director Ion Hazzikostas faces a rough challenge for this fall’s World of Warcraft: Shadowlands expansion. Blizzard Entertainment must make a (sometimes poorly) aging game feel relevant and new again — while still remaining true to what people love.To get more news about buy WoW Classic Items, you can visit lootwowgold official website.

World of Warcraft occupies a unique place in the gaming world. After 15 years, it still dominates massively multiplayer online RPGs in Western gaming, and people keep playing it.

Blizzard Entertainment never launched a World of Warcraft II; it just kept iterating on the original. In recent years, that philosophy has created a WoW world where decade-old game tropes coexist alongside quests with current sensibilities. Modern game systems clash with distinctly lower-fidelity graphics, and the core game UI shows none of the finesse of modern user experience research.

The revamped leveling experience features a new starting zone and progression through 60 levels instead of 120-130. Designers had the first real chance to quietly tweak and update quests and leveling since the 2010 Cataclysm expansion literally broke parts of the game world. For new players, the experience will skip huge, poorly aging chunks of the franchise’s history altogether.

We can have a finely paced, crafted experience that really reflects the best of what WoW has to offer in 2020, that reflects the modern game. So a new player isn’t playing 2010 content, and then graduating to 2012 content or 2014 content,” Hazzikostas said.

Blizzard made a few modest tweaks to the game’s UI for Shadowlands, including new character design screens and updated button looks and behavior. But the look doesn’t stray far from the classic appearance players have grown familiar with. Shadowlands’ new afterlife setting means that artists can take brand-new directions in how they craft areas. Their designs harken back to familiar elements, but also create brand-new ones.

“Yes, there is content in the game that is 15 years old, and we just revisited that in WoW Classic last year,” Hazzikostas said. “But each new expansion marks an evolution in our storytelling and our engine, our visual fidelity and just our general design that draws upon the lessons learned along the way.