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World of Warcraft game director Ion Hazzikostas says using Warcraft villains established outside the MMO in earlier expansions worked in the short term but left Blizzard with narrative challenges in the long term.
Speaking to GamesRadar+ at Gamescom, Hazzikostas points to the major villains established in real-time strategy games like Warcraft 3. Villains that have undergone extensive character development, and in some cases, ones that players have played through entire campaigns as or alongside. As such, by the time they appeared in World of Warcraft, they did so with a pre-existing history with fans.
"We could just say, 'You're gonna get to fight Illidan,' and a lot of players are then like, 'That's incredible! I can't wait to fight Illidan,' Hazzikostas says. "You never interact with Illidan. You never learn anything else about him in World of Warcraft. But it didn't matter because he had been built up beforehand.
"In later expansions, I think we struggled on a couple of occasions to really introduce and build up a credible, engaging villain that was going to have to ultimately face defeat at the hands of our players a mere 18 months later."
Hazzikostas explains that's partly why the Worldsoul Saga is, well, a saga. Blizzard started planning with one expansion in mind, but it just wouldn't do.
"As we started brewing the overall plot and our plans for this story, we did start off thinking it was just this will be our next expansion, and the more we thought about it, the more we realized there's just too much story to fit into a single expansion," he says.
"There's too much story to fit into even two expansions. And I think being able to build up a threat and give it the time that the story deserves, to let us follow the natural twists and turns and offshoots and intricacies, instead of having to rush ahead to stay on track, I think is going to enable us to really do every aspect of it justice."
World of Warcraft's The War Within expansion is out now, and, so far, the general consensus is game good - some leveling gripes and Auction House snafus aside. The reviews are still coming in, though Metacritic has given the expansion a 'generally favorable' score thus far. As ever with MMOs, we'll see how it shakes out in post-expansion content but it looks like we're off to a good start.
Beyond the Worldsoul Saga, World of Warcraft lead Chris Metzen says Blizzard is "mapping out" the MMO upwards of patch 17.0
