World of Warcraft: Dragonflight is jam-packed with new features and updates to evergreen systems. The expansion is such an overhaul that it's even being considered the start of the third era of WoW. Although the game was definitely due for some updates, ensuring that none of the core evergreen systems are changed in a negative way was a major concern for the development team as they worked on the new content.
A system as major as dragonriding obviously requires a ton of planning, thought, and careful implementation. So far the system has been very well received and players are even begging for dragonriding leaderboards to be added to the game. Although the physics came together beautifully and feel right at home in World of Warcraft, implementing the momentum-based system was no easy feat.
WoW's movement system has remained largely untouched since it's implementation at launch and ensuring that reliable and responsible experience wasn't impacted was a main priority during the creation of Dragonflight. 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 chat May Flores Garcia, a gameplay engineer, discussed the challenges surrounding dragonriding implementation...
May Flores Garcia: "The movement system was architected a long time ago and when it was first created it was not with this kind of physics and math in mind. So, when I first start prototyping and looking to see if we could actually add momentum and can we get some physics into the system, one of the things I did was… The typical way that you would go and implement physics wasn’t possible. You couldn’t just take those techniques and bring them into WoW very easily. We needed to get a little bit creative. So a lot of the project was figuring out how we can get these physics into the system without heavily having to refactor our movement system. One of the strengths of our movement system is how responsive it is and in order for us to achieve that we need to implement the math in a very specific way. So I had to figure out how to get that math with the new physics we had in mind into the game."
"That was the main difficulty we had when we were trying to see how we could make this work. At the end of the day, as we progressed and got the physics in - and it is actually real physics - we did discover that we did have to make a few changes in our movement system to be able to support it properly. We were very careful though. About not changing or making major refactors in the movement system. We refused to compromise how responsive that system feels."
At the end of the day, WoW's movement system definitely still feels as responsive as ever and dragonriding has become a very popular activity in the new expansion. It will be very interesting to see where things go from here and if dragonriding is implemented elsewhere or with other mounts in the future.
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.
