Despite all the death, ‘Shadowlands’ is a space for growth in ‘World of Warcraft’

World of Warcraft’s eighth expansion, Shadowlands, sits on the edge of reality, throwing high-level players into the realm of the dead after one of the game’s most iconic characters, Sylvanas, tore open the fabric that separated the land of the living and the Shadowlands.

A live-streamed developer update on Wednesday detailed some of the experiences players will see in Shadowlands. There are the four Covenants that rule over the disparate realms of the Shadowlands that players will ultimately have to pick between, the deadly Maw zone where players can test their skills against deadly creatures to rescue lost souls, and a newly revealed end-game dungeon called the Theater of Pain that looks metal as hell.

Experienced players will jump right into that content with its new zones in the afterlife, new dungeons, new raids, and new stories to level up through. In a basic sense, it’s more of the same for a new World of Warcraft expansion. But outside of that core content, Shadowlands is an opportunity for the developers behind this 16-year-old game to look back and create a more welcoming experience to new players and returning players alike.

After the stream, I was able to jump into a build of the game to test out some of the new content as well as talk to lead game designer Kevin Martens and game director Ion Hazzikostas about the team’s goal with this expansion and how it differs from most previous expansions.

Entering the Shadowlands

There are four new leveling zones in Shadowlands, each of them representing a different aspect of the afterlife. Some, like Bastion, are almost heavenly. Others, like Revendreth, are dreadful. Each zone has a Covenant and players have to choose which one they’ll align with once they reach the newly reduced level cap of 60.

“They are the filter through which everyone will see the entirety of the end game,” Martens said. “We wanted this to be holistic. It is the theme of the Shadowlands. All of these different zones share the same purpose. They are the place where the dead go. They all have their own role.”

In my time with the game, I was able to make a max-level character and check out the Venthyr Covenant, which calls Revendreth home. The Venthyr are very powerful, vampire-like beings who are frequently fixated on blood, have a massive Castlevania-esque castle in their realm, and like to throw big, sexy parties.

“The worst of the worst go there,” Martens said of Revendreth, and that seems to be true just based on aesthetic alone.

To improve my relationship with them, I had to head into the deadly Maw and gather resources for them to help them increase their power amidst the turmoil that the Shadowlands are experiencing. The system of death has been broken by Sylvanas, and souls no longer go these different realms — they go straight to the Maw. So these Covenants that used to have a friendly rivalry with each other are now becoming outwardly aggressive. With player characters in the game being some of the only people in the universe that can enter the Maw and return, they’re a valuable resource to the Covenants.

As I worked for the Venthyr, I could begin to see the benefits of that relationship on my side, some of which Hazzikostas pointed out in the developer update. As you improve your renown, you form bonds with characters that can go collect items and currency for you, and unlock things like fast travel to make traversing your home zone extra convenient. For the Venthyr, this takes the form of bloody teleportation mirrors. Fitting.

As for the Maw, I’ve never seen a more oppressive looking area in all my years of playing. It’s largely desolate except for the tons of demons roaming about. Although they were level 60, they were much more difficult to take down than level 60 enemies I found in Revendreth, and they didn’t drop any loot.

The longer I stayed in the Maw, following quests to navigate to certain areas, the more a meter filled up at the top of the screen. This meter was an indicator for how much Jailer was taking notice of my actions.

The Jailer is a being who rules over the Maw, and the more souls that get sent to there, the more powerful he becomes. He is, accordingly, one of the biggest threats we’ve ever seen in Azeroth, and you do not want him to notice you mucking up the Maw. To reduce that attention, you have to wait it out for a day or so, which is an interesting mechanic to stop people from spending all their time grinding in the Maw.

This grand concept of death as a realm to explore is something that’s been bubbling beneath WoW‘s surface since the beginning.

“Fantasy is so important.”

“The idea of the land of the dead has been in our cosmology for some time,” Martens said. “Of course as a hero character, you don’t really die, right? You go to a spirit healer and you come back so you don’t get to experience this yourself, but many other characters die in the classic sense. This is where they would go.”

That’s a lot to build off of, giving the developers a plethora of avenues to flex their creativity and create new experiences.

One of those experiences is the Torghast, Tower of the Damned dungeon, which has been detailed pretty extensively already. It’s an ever-changing labyrinth of challenge for players to jump into again and again to earn rewards for completing different parts of it.

Another new experience is the Theater of Pain dungeon in the Maldraxxus zone, which Hazzikostas likened to a battle royale. In it, players compete with various enemy forces to determine who is the strongest. This is more of an arena than your typical WoW dungeon.

“You’re not just going into a structure that’s hall, room, hall, room, with a boss at the end, but rather a dynamic environment where there are a bunch of competing enemy forces and you’re choosing to work with one against the other initially and then switch sides to ultimately prevail on behalf of the forces that you were championing as a party of adventurers,” Hazzikostas said. “It’s us trying to take traditional WoW gameplay and really put a twist on it to create a memorable dungeon experience.”

As Martens put it, when the team adds something new they want it to feel like WoW but freshen up the gameplay.

“A dungeon is a dungeon, a boss is a boss. True, technically, but you can make it feel very differently based on the filter you put it in and the fantasy that you put it in,” he said. “That’s why fantasy is so important. If you play some of your favorite games, you’ll find yourself doing the same thing over and over again but you don’t feel like that because they did a great job with the fantasy.”

Martens also spoke on freshening up some other aspects of the endgame, pointing the new Callings events as a space for the team to improve on previous mistakes.

A common criticism of the current expansion Battle for Azeroth was how world quests were handled, which Martens readily took full responsibility for. Asking players to hop around to do a handful of one-minute quests every day, often visiting the same places again and again, just wasn’t engaging enough for players. They often just felt like a chore list.

World quests are back in Shadowlands, but as Callings they take on a new, improved form.

“Callings are a way to activate some major part of the world for everybody,” Martens said.

They are effectively major events that are more tied to story than rewards, but will hopefully be a more engaging experience. Instead of doing five one-minute world quests, Callings will have players joining a single 15-minute experience in a specific part of the world, he said.

“Next time you go to some other point of the world, that’s going to feel fresher than having already visited it for 60 seconds yesterday,” Martens said. “We have these big worlds and I think we spread it all too thin last time around.”

It’s certainly true that World of Warcraft is huge, and the idea of making it more palatable extends into the rest of the game with Shadowlands, not just the endgame.

Back to the beginning

One of the big changes coming with Shadowlands is a new starting area for new characters called Exile’s Reach. For the first time ever, World of Warcraft will have a tutorial-like starting area that isn’t tied to a character’s race.

Since the game launched in 2004, selecting specific races for a new character meant that players would start playing near that race’s home city. If you made an orc or a night elf, you’d primarily be seeing other orcs (and trolls, because they shared a home back then) or night elves for quite a while until you leveled up enough and reached your first major city.

Now, when new players make a new character, they’ll start off at Exile’s Reach for a much more robust tutorial about how combat works, how to complete quests, and even how to succeed in multiplayer dungeons. Previously, players were all but thrown to the wolves on this stuff.

Horde and Alliance players will find themselves playing through it together in their separate factions until about level 10, and from there they’ll be welcomed into the bigger world of Azeroth and have freedom to explore of their own volition. Don’t worry though, veterans, because the starting areas we have come to know like the backs of our hands will still be available to choose from when making a new character — just not if it’s your first ever character.

Exile’s Reach is a way for the team to put their best foot forward for new players, Hazzikostas said.

“We wanted to create a modern introductory experience that really gives a sense of what playing World of Warcraft is like in 2020,” he said. 

The whole team had a massive series of brainstorms around this topic, even asking ex-WoW designers and external people to get their thoughts on how to manifest that in the best way, Martens said. As it is still being developed, new players are running through the tutorial; family, friends, significant others, and kids who had never even played a PC game before to get their thoughts on Exile’s Reach.

“We keep working on the tutorials to try to make them friendlier and make no assumptions about what’s obvious or not,” Martens said, noting that controls for movement in PC games are not exactly common knowledge outside their sphere. “WASD on the keyboard is obvious to PC gamers and only PC gamers. You can use a PC all day and every day at work not know WASD.”

Exile’s Reach also serves as a way to revamp a part of the game that really hasn’t been touched since most of the world was updated in the third WoW expansion, Cataclym, Hazzikostas said. 

“If you played World of Warcraft today, literally go and log into Battle for Azeroth, make a level one character, you’re by and large playing content that was made 10-plus years ago and was a reflection of the way we built the game back then.”

And while many of those classic starting areas do have a bit of a tutorial feel, not all of them were built for new players, Hazzikotas said. He pointed to the goblin starting experience on the Horde side.

“Back then we assumed goblins were only being made by people who owned multiple expansions and were World of Warcraft veterans,” he said.

Exile’s Reach feeds into a much broader approach with Shadowlands to make the 16-year-old game more approachable, Martens explained. “It’s hard to get into the game because it’s quite overwhelming.”

No kidding. With Battle for Azeroth, WoW upped the max player level to 120, which is double what players could get level up to in the vanilla version of the game. That takes quite a bit of time to reach and it’s daunting to anyone who wants to either jump into the game for the first time or someone who wants to start with a fresh character.

New players won’t feel like they’re too far behind.

Martens likened it to being a hunter seeing the leavings of prey and spotting people way up ahead. That hunter is going to feel way behind and need to run and run to catch up.

Now leveling is faster and the player level cap has been dropped down to 60, a much more reasonable number. New players won’t feel like they’re too far behind to ever catch up in a reasonable amount of time.

Additionally, for those players who make it to the endgame in Shadowlands and want to bring an alt character up to experience the story of another one of the four Covenants, alts will be able to align themselves at level 50 instead of level 60. That way they can start advancing their relationships with their chosen Covenant and begin reaping the rewards from that aspect of the game a bit earlier the second time around.

Altogether, Shadowlands is doing a lot to not only push the regular player experience forward but also to improve a lot of the content and the way the game works for people playing through older content. 

We’ll see if it all comes together into an entertaining expansion when it launches in the fall.