World of Warcraft is entering a new era. “Even though we’re entering our 20th year, it’s a time when new and returning players can jump into a story from the beginning,” World of Warcraft game director Ion Hazzikostas said in an interview at Gamescom with PC Gamer’s Harvey Randall. The Worldsoul Saga, the three-part story arc that begins with the upcoming release of The War Within, gives Blizzard a chance to shape WoW’s story on a larger scale. And according to Hazzikostas, no character embodies the new age of Warcraft storytelling better than Xal’atath, WoW’s newest archvillain.
High fantasy is a hard sell without a compelling antagonist, and WoW has struggled with its villains for years. “It’s easy to underestimate – and we certainly have in the past – how much time and effort it takes to build a compelling new character within the confines of an MMO,” Hazzikostas said. In WoW’s early history, it benefited from what Hazzikostas called a “cheat sheet that could draw on Warcraft 3” for the big villains that formed the narrative foundation for the first expansions. By the time players were chasing Illidan through the Outlands and storming the Lich King’s citadel in Northrend, they had already experienced those characters’ stories firsthand.
“You played as Arthas. You embodied him for a moment. You actually guided him through the culling of Stratholme,” Hazzikostas said. “You felt a connection and an understanding in just a few hours of play that is incredibly difficult to achieve in an MMO.”
After using up its Warcraft 3 antiheroes, however, Blizzard struggled to make the subsequent arch-enemies compelling characters. As World of Warcraft introduced ever-greater threats, there was little room to weave them into compelling stories. “This is actually a problem that goes back to Cataclysm, with Deathwing as the villain,” said Hazzikostas. “Dragons are really cool, but it’s hard to understand the motivations of a being the size of a city. They can’t just stand around and talk and engage.”
The clearest example of WoW stumbling over its villains is the Jailer, the antagonist of the oft-maligned Shadowlands expansion: an “unfathomable being of immense power that,” Hazzikostas said, “almost by definition had to exist off-screen.” Otherwise, the Jailer would simply annihilate the player character at his whim. When your villain is a being that exists on such a different scale than the player that they can’t share the stage, it’s difficult to build a coherent character around them within the context of a single expansion’s plot. “We introduced a big villain and didn’t really have the time to develop that villain,” Hazzikostas said. “Before you know it, you’ve defeated them and it’s over.”
Xal’atath, the being from the void who now serves as Warcraft’s arch-enemy, gives Blizzard a chance to explore its public enemy number one at a slower pace. She didn’t emerge from the ether as an apocalyptic threat. Though she’s recently risen into the world, players have spent years grappling with Xal’atath as a schemer who operates on a smaller scale—knife-sized, to be precise, at first. “Xal’atath is a character whose origins lie in that,” Hazzikostas said, “in the compelling aspect of her personality that goes back to the Legion, where she was the artifact weapon that shadow priests carried and would whisper to you and occasionally get you into trouble.”
When the Worldsoul Saga concept took shape at Blizzard, Xal’atath was “the natural and immediate choice” – a character who could grow along with the longer-term story World of Warcraft wanted to tell. “We started to realize that we couldn’t do justice to the scope of what we wanted to do here in a single expansion,” Hazzikostas said. “And that got us thinking, ‘Well, what if we dreamed a little bigger? What if we gave this a little time to breathe and gave ourselves some time to let the story go where it needed to go without having to rush through to get to an endpoint on a fixed schedule?'”
Being able to shape the evolving story so far in advance is a new opportunity for the World of Warcraft team. “We always knew what the next expansion would be, but if I’m honest, two expansions in advance was unrealistic for our traditional development processes,” Hazzikostas said. Now Blizzard can look at the shape of its story from a broader perspective, giving itself the chance to create spaces for its characters to develop.
“What can we do to make this make sense now?” Hazzikostas said, describing questions the World of Warcraft team is asking in meetings as it plans the final chapters of the Worldsoul saga. “How can we include them in ways we might not have otherwise thought of, but that will be essential for players to know who they are when it’s their turn to be in the spotlight?”
World of Warcraft: The War Within is released today for Early Access players. The full version will be released next week on August 26, 2024.
