WORLD OF WARCRAFT: SHADOWLANDS
No decision in World of Warcraft matters more than your race and class. Every character, from hardcore raiders to that level 14 undead warlock you started six years ago on a whim but never touched again, is defined by these two traits. And few of the choices you make in the countless hours that unfold after starting a new adventure are ever as meaningful. World of Warcraft: Shadowlands is going to change that.
NO DECISION IN WORLD OF WARCRAFT MATTERS MORE THAN YOUR RACE AND CLASS.
EVERY CHARACTER, FROM HARDCORE RAIDERS TO THAT LEVEL 14 UN DEAD WAR LOCK YOU STARTED SIX YEARS AGO O NA W HIM BUT NEVER TOUCHED AGAIN, IS DEFINED BY THESE TWO TRAITS. AND FEW OF THE CHOICES YOU MAKE IN THE COUNTLESS HOURS THAT UN FOLD AFTER STARTING A NEW ADVENTURE ARE EVER AS MEANINGFUL.
WORLD OF WARCRAFT: SHADOW LANDS IS GOING TO CHANG E THAT.
When it launches later this year, Shadowlands will take players on a journey to the afterlife in order to save the world of the living. And at the end of that initial story campaign, players will have to make the most difficult choice they’ve faced since the character selection screen. But Shadowlands is more than a chance to inject some much-needed feeling of consequence back into your adventure. It’s also an opportunity for Blizzard to tear the veil off an entirely new part of the Warcraft universe – one that wasn’t spelled out in game manuals, tie-in novels, or lore bibles decades ago.
“Many of our past expansions had a clear anchor in some large established villain, piece of lore, a place in the world,” game director Ion Hazzikostas tells me. “There were reams of novels that have been written or past references in games like Warcraft III or otherwise. But Shadowlands really started from almost a footnote, frankly. It’s a world created largely whole cloth from the imaginations of our artists and our narrative designers.”
THE OTHER SIDE
To understand what’s happening in the Shadowlands, players must be familiar with what happened during the climax of the current expansion, Battle for Azeroth. After being ousted from her position as Horde Warchief, the undead banshee queen Sylvanas Nightrunner flees to the frigid continent of Northrend. It’s here that she battles the new Lich King, Bolvar, for his Helm of Domination that Arthas once used to rule the undead Scourge. Instead of wearing it herself, however, Slyvanas shatters it, tearing the veil between the living world and the Shadowlands – Warcraft’s version of an afterlife. Obviously that’s not actually a good thing.
If you can believe it, the Shadowlands has it even worse. As lead narrative designer Steve Danuser explains, “The Shadowlands isn’t just heaven or hell. It’s an entire realm made up of different microcosms – each one a unique slice of a different kind of afterlife. When a mortal soul dies, each is judged by a cosmic being known as the Arbiter who determines which area of the
Shadowlands is most befitting of their deeds and thoughts. Of those, players will explore five main zones, four of which are ruled over by a different Covenant.”
“For example, Bastion, the first zone we’re going to go to, is home to the Kyrian Covenant and these are bright, angelic spirits and they are the ones who ferry souls to the afterlife,” Hazzikostas says. “On the other end of the spectrum are the Necrolords of Maldraxxus, the military might of the Shadowlands. When the Shadowlands wage war against other powers in the cosmos, that’s where those forces come from.”
EVERY SOUL THAT ENTERS THE SHADOWLANDS GETS AN EXPRESS PASS STRAIGHT TO THE WORST OF ITS HELLS
“All of those are beings that are of death in the same way that a demon is of disorder or fell, or a fire elemental is of fire,” Danuser explains. “These are magical creatures, and we get to explore the rules and the groundwork for this new kind of cosmic influence.”
That’s how the Shadowlands should work, but thanks to Sylvanas and her new benefactor known as the Jailer, that delicate cycle is broken. Now, every soul that enters the Shadowlands gets an express pass straight to the worst of its hells: a fifth, nightmarish realm known as the Maw. Souls that are sent here are imprisoned and tortured forever, causing the rest of the Shadowlands to experience what’s basically a cataclysmic drought.
As players work through the story campaign and gradually reach max level, they’ll tour each of these zones, learning about each Covenant that exists there while also puzzling out how to restore balance and return the Shadowlands to its normal order and defeat Sylvanas and the Jailer. At the end of that first chapter, players will have to make an important, longlasting choice to join a specific Covenant. Each one offers different powerful abilities, unique loot, and their own story quests to complete. It’s a decision that will affect the next few years of your life in Azeroth, and it’s one not to be taken lightly.
BLOOD PACTS
“WoW has relatively few things that feel like they constitute your identity,” Hazzikostas says. “It’s your class, your faction, your race, maybe what professions you pick – because those are pretty weighty and hard to change easily. We’re looking to add another piece to that identity, which is an essential part of the MMORPG genre with an emphasis on the RPG part of it. It’s the role that you’re playing, the things that distinguish your character from all the others that you’re sharing the space with, that add a lot of depth and texture both mechanically, but also in terms of the story you’re experiencing. Covenants are all that.”
Once you reach the new level cap, your Covenant will be the hub of all your endgame activities. Each one has a unique storyline that’ll see you unearth the mysteries of the Shadowlands and take the fight to Sylvanas and the Jailer, but the real draw is the powers that each provide. Joining a
Covenant unlocks
two new abilities: one signature ability that is universal to all players in that Covenant, and a second that is based on your chosen class.
Signing up with the vampireesque Venthyr of Revendreth, for example, earns you the Door of
Shadows, which opens a ghastly portal that you can step through to teleport yourself 30 yards away. The
Night Fae of Ardenweald, however, offers you the Soulshape ability, which turns you into an agile fox that can zip through any environment.
These signature abilities have caused hot debate in the community, with players worrying that some might feel punished for making a decision that isn’t considered the most optimal. Door of Shadows, for example, could theoretically be used to skip a combat encounter in a dungeon entirely – but if you decided to join up with the Kyrian instead and can’t use it, players might not want to play with you. “That is a very legitimate, real concern,” Hazzikostas says.
FEAR AND FEEDBACK
Covenant abilities have become the defining discussion of Shadowlands’ beta test, but Hazzikostas is hoping that as more features are added in preparation for launch, the choice of Covenant will become more nuanced and complex than merely enlisting with whichever one has the best ability as decided by the meta.
Covenants not only offer unique armour sets and cosmetic upgrades, but they also have an individualised system called Soul Binds. It’s a bit complex, but in essence Soul Binds are a skill tree that represents your relationship to a notable character within your Covenant. As your relationship improves, you choose between new passive abilities on the skill tree – and there’s even slots where you can socket gems that have their own abilities too. Each Covenant has three unique Soul Binds skill trees to unlock and level up, offering a ton of character customisation. Now, WoW is starting to feel a lot more like an RPG.
At the same, Hazzikostas says the team is listening closely to what players are saying and making adjustments. Initially, joining a Covenant seemed like a permanent decision, but recently systems have been implemented on the beta servers to allow players to switch – though that decision will carry consequences that make it impossible to jump from Covenant to Covenant as you please. Hazzikostas says a lot of it also factors down to balance, too.
“We’ve had these powers largely playable [in the beta] so we can start getting feedback on them, giving us time to iterate to basically solve the balance problem and make sure that if we’re hearing that there’s one clear outlier on the high end, we can rein that in,” Hazzikostas explains. “If there’s some power that feels like it’s useless, we can redesign it or buff it significantly, and try to learn from some of the mistakes, frankly, that we made in a couple of our past efforts like some systems in Battle for Azeroth that didn’t get enough early attention to let us really tune them.”
DEAD STRAIGHT
Lessons learned from past mistakes like that can be found everywhere in Shadowlands. Battle for Azeroth, for example, tried to tell an intricate, multi-faceted story that changed depending on which faction you belonged to, with an overarching plot about Old Gods woven in between. In addition to zone stories that were disconnected from one another so that players could tackle them in any order, it made Battle for Azeroth’s narrative jumbled and incoherent.
Shadowlands changes all of that. This time around, the storytelling is linear, and your quest to save the Shadowlands moves you through each zone in a specific order so there’s better pacing and narrative cohesion – but that only happens on your first character. After that, you can tackle zones in whichever order so that levelling alternate characters has a bit of variety to it. “That was one of the lessons we learned as we were talking about going to
Shadowlands,” Danuser explains. “We wanted to tell a more focused and straightforward story.”
Other ideas that failed to catch on in previous expansions, like Legion’s ultra-powerful Legendary items and
Battle for Azeroth’s Island Expeditions have also been iterated on and have been transformed into entirely new systems. It makes
Shadowlands feel like an expansion where years of experimenting and reimagining the tried and true MMO tropes could really pay off.
In Legion, for example, players often hated Legendaries because they were earned entirely through random drops. You could kill a beach crab and find it was holding an ancient and all-powerful piece of loot – or even worse, it was holding a Legendary item that was virtually useless for your character. Players hated that
kind of randomness. In Shadowlands, however, Legendaries aren’t randomly awarded but earned by tracking down specific recipes and taking them to a special crafter who will make them for you. It’s a deterministic system that gives players total control over which Legendaries they want. The idea is that, over time, players will amass a collection of Legendaries that will suit different situations.
DIE, DIE AGAIN
Earning the resources required to craft a Legendary piece of gear, however, requires braving Shadowlands’ biggest experiment yet: a procedurally-generated roguelike dungeon that changes each time you enter it. Called Torghast, Tower of the Damned, it’s one of the central pillars of Shadowlands’ endgame. After playing with it for hours in the beta, I can honestly say it’s one of the most exciting new features ever added to World of Warcraft.
Torghast is a bit bizarre, though, if only because MMOs and roguelikes couldn’t be more opposite in so many ways: one is about long-term persistence and a steady increase in power while the other is about wild power spikes, oppressive challenge, and the inevitability of dying, losing everything and starting over. That’s exactly what senior game designer Paul Kubit finds most exciting about Torghast. “There’s been a lot of challenges for us to marry the two concepts together,” he says, “but we,
IT’S ONE OF THE MOST EXCITING FEATURES EVER ADDED TO WORLD OF WARCRAFT
as developers and gamers, enjoy playing them enough that we wanted to have one in our game too. It ended up working out great.”
If you’ve played a roguelike before like Dead Cells or The Binding of Isaac, Torghast is exactly what you might imagine. Alone or with a party of five, players enter whichever two wings of Torghast are open that week and navigate through a procedurally generated dungeon, facing puzzles, monsters and boss fights that can change between each session. The higher you climb through the different floors, the tougher the fights become. And with six different wings that each have their own aesthetic, monsters, and bosses that rotate weekly, there’s a whole lot of variability between runs.
The real fun of Torghast is its Anima Powers, though. As players explore, they’ll periodically have to make a choice between one of several powers that can fundamentally change their character in exciting and often wild ways. The further you explore, the more these chosen powers begin to stack, creating sometimes hilarious combinations. As a Demon Hunter, for example, I found an Anima Power that extended my powerful demon form if I killed rats while it was active. I soon stumbled into a room that was full of rats, turning what should be a 15-second ability into something that lasted almost ten minutes. Just after that, I found an Anima Power that turned me into a giant too. By the time I got to the final room to fight the boss, I wasn’t sure which of us was the real monster.
“That’s something that we focused on a lot,” Kubit says. “[Because] the powers that you get in Torghast are per run, we can make them super punchy. You can feel the impact of any power you get instantly. When you compare that to almost anything else in WoW – when you get a new weapon or something like that, you might go up by a couple of item levels, but unless you’re paying attention to the numbers, you might not actually notice that effect. We can really, really focus on that here.”
CHOOSE WISELY
Sixteen years after its launch, it’s a bit surreal to be excited about another World of Warcraft expansion. It’s a testament to how tenaciously Blizzard is tinkering and experimenting with the foundations of its MMO, forging onward even when those experiments fail and
trusting that those lessons can inform better ideas in the future. It’s exactly why, after players complained about the way randomness was infesting so many of WoW’s systems, Blizzard is pivoting to focus on giving you more control over your adventure. “It’s come from listening to the community and it’s evolving the game in a way which we think is more fun,” Kubit says.
“Player agency is something that we’ve heard a lot in terms of desire from the community,” Hazzikostas says. “But also, in reflecting on our own designs and on places where randomness went too far and made players feel like they didn’t have control over working towards specific goals. Over shaping their characters into what they wanted them to be. It’s something that we’ve been talking about internally a lot for the last couple of years, and that became a really defining pillar.”
That renewed investment in making choices matter along with more complicated progression systems like Soulbinds and Legendary item crafting makes World
BLIZZARD IS PIVOTING TO FOCUS ON GIVING YOU MORE CONTROL OVER YOUR ADVENTURE
of Warcraft feel a lot more like an RPG in ways it often hasn’t. It feels like both a return to what originally made World of Warcraft so captivating while also pushing onward into parts unknown. And Hazzikostas agrees. “It was a tremendous challenge,” he says. “I think we knew it was going to be coming into this project, but having worked through it for the last couple of years, it’s been all of that and more. Shadowlands is the most high concept, the most ambitious expansion we’ve ever undertaken.”