World of Warcraft Patch 8.1 Livestream Transcript

NEW ISLANDS

Ion: We’re going to have two new islands coming in Battle for Azeroth in Tides of Vengeance.

So first: Jorundall. It is a Vrykul themed island. Full of looming ancient Vrykul ruins and mysteries to explore. As well as: Havenwood, which is a gloomy abandoned Gilnean city that looms and towers over this island giving it a gothic vibe.

A bit more civilized than a lot of the islands that we’ve come across so far, and players will jump in, explore it in search of Azerite, of course.

Now as we look at the island system as a whole, we’re not just adding two new islands. We’re also learning from a lot of the feedback that we’ve gotten in the last month since the game has gotten live; and our own experiences playing the game; and continuing to improve the underlying system.

I mean, an area that’s a major focus for the team is adding significantly more variety. Adding new events. New exciting things that you can come across that more meaningfully deliver on the idea that each experience is going to be different from the last.

So look for things like holdouts that you can trigger, or Azerite extractors that you might set up and defend on behalf of your faction to give you a slow trickle of Azerite while you control them; but then you have to worry about the enemy forces recapturing them and shifting them over to their side while you’re away, making the island a bit more dynamic rather than giving you a sense that: “Okay, you’ve cleared out this area, there’s no reason to come back”.

Now underlying all of this, we’re looking at the broader systems and that means both: rewards, but also the way the islands are spawned in general. How we have some major spawning improvements coming to islands in Tides of Vengeance where it’s not just going to be– we want to move a bit away from the feeling that the islands can be uniformly blanketed with spawns by whatever enemies are currently occupying them; and a bit more of a feel that better reflects the traditional flow of World of Warcraft gameplay where there are more tightly clustered hubs that are more likely to have rares and treasures, and things to do there; and more gaps, more navigability of the island as a whole between those hubs. So more clustering.

And I think in our internal playtests thus far this has made an immediate improvement on the overall feel. We’re looking forward to letting people jump in on the public test realm and check this out.

NEXT: NEW RAID: SIEGE OF ZULDAZAR

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