Early buzz surrounding WoW Dragonflight has been incredibly positive, as players become obsessed with the new dragonriding mechanic and the revamped evergreen systems. Things are definitely off to a strong start, so it should be very interesting to see if the hype maintains as more players reach the endgame and the real grind begins.
A sound endgame philosophy and gameplay loop is crucial to any expansion's success and World of Warcraft Dragonflight is aiming to take some lessons learned from Shadowlands and provide an even better experience this time around. The team hopes to win over players and keep them engaged with a combination of open-ended weekly activities and alt-friendliness out of the gate.
Game ZXC recently had the chance to sit down with WoW Dragonflight Associate Game Director Jeremy Feasel and Lead Software Engineer May Flores Garcia as part of a roundtable interview. During the conversation, Jeremy broke down the team's approach to endgame content and how they were focused on giving players plenty of choice as to how they achieve their weekly goals. He also emphasized the importance of being alt-friendly out of the gate - rather than down the road in a post launch patch...
Jeremy : There are a number of different quest lines that are going to unlock as you progress into the max level Renown. I think one of the most interesting things about our particular endgame system this time is everything in that world is encrypted and hasn’t been played in the beta. So players are aware that there are chapters that unlock in the max level and are tied to the Renown but they’re not exactly sure what those chapters are! I’m really looking forward to seeing how people react as the in the moment storytelling happens and you get to sort of watch the next episode as it happens.We’ve really taken an eye towards alt friendliness and progression friendliness with just about all of the max level Renowns that we’ve put into Dragonflight . As you progress your main Renown track, which is largely through your weekly activities, we tried to really center things around a weekly cadence this time so you can play how you want throughout the week and pick which one of those Renowns you want to increase during the week to get your weekly reward. You’re going to be able to pick which one of those you want to spend the time on and it’s fairly open-ended - it’s not completely open-ended- but you can progress each one of them at your own pace. And as you progress each of those tracks, you’re going to unlock progression speed-ups for your alts. So if you want to play on alts, it’s easier to get into each of those Renown tracks and it’s much faster in order to progress them right out of the gate. This isn’t something that we’re bringing in with a 10.05, we want it to be right out of the gate friendly for your alts.And then on the dragonriding side of things we’re also going for maximum alt friendliness there. As you get additional unlocks it’s very alt friendly. The mount system already felt like a very account-wide system, so a ton of that is also tied into how you can progress how you want to on each character.So I think there was a lot of learnings from 9.1.5 here in terms of taking a lot of Covenant elements and making them significantly more alt-friendly that we’ve really attempted to come out of the gate with in Dragonflight .
Lots of players have been hitting max level this week and the endgame grind should begin to play out over the coming weeks. It will be very interesting to stay tuned for community feedback and see how well the revised endgame approach holds everyone's attention throughout the winter.
Be sure to check back soon for more WoW news, updates, interview, and strategy guides. Until then, For The Horde!
World of Warcraft Dragonflight is available now for PC.
