July 25, 2024

Blizzard Warbands and Hero Talents interview: Key Moments

In a recent interview with Gamespot, Blizzard discussed Warbands and Hero Talents, their future, and their impact on the game.

According to Peter Hodge, Senior Software Engineer at Blizzard, it is no secret that World of Warcraft is undergoing a significant change right now regarding simplifying the experience for players with multiple characters across different realms and factions. The reason for this is an everlasting desire to keep moving forward by improving the game and making it more accessible to everyone.

As Hodge shares, given the many requests to simplify playing alts and improve access to account-wide features, combined with the significant improvements and quality-of-life upgrades introduced in Dragonflight, why not uphold this approach and integrate these ideas into a comprehensive feature?

As perfect as it sounds, the fact that World of Warcraft is a game with a 20-year-old history and fundamental manipulation of how characters, items, and accounts have always worked is still an extra credit question. For instance, when dealing with inventory, you handle parts of a system with a long history. The major difficulty is that neither Developer considered making it account-wide when its code was written 20 or more years ago. Peter Hodge admits that this is why it is a significant challenge from an engineering perspective.

As you can see, Warbands and Hero Talents are not entirely new features but enhancements of existing systems in World of Warcraft. While the Warbands system builds on alt-character-friendly changes and account-wide unlocks, Hero Talents expand on the revamped class Talent trees from Dragonflight, inspired by WoW’s original Talent ones.

According to George Velev, Blizzard’s Game Producer, expanding the Dragonflight Talent tree system without overwhelming players was a unique challenge. To address this, the team added 10 extra Talent points for a separate tree, allowing each spec to choose between two of three new Hero Talent trees per class. When a player reaches the max level, they fully unlock their chosen Hero Talent tree, unlike the normal class Talent ones where they must make choices due to limited points.

While each Hero Talent tree has some choice nodes where players can pick between two skills, the overall similarity of the trees across all players of a specific class makes them easier to fine-tune and balance. The fact that every Sunfury Fire Mage will have 10 core abilities with a few choice nodes will allow Blizzard to balance them against specs like Spellslinger or Frostfire.

This way, when deciding whether to play one spec or another, you can focus more on what appeals to you rather than simply choosing the strongest option, as George Velev shares. The team aims to allow players to switch Hero specs if one tree is better for a particular type of content. Velev added that Hero Talents are a permanent feature, and balance adjustments will continue through The War Within and beyond.

With that in mind, it seems that featuring Hero Talents and Warbands in is a turning point in the game’s future. Blizzard is interested in how players interact with them within the game, but at the same time, it’s clear that the developers are prepared to adapt to an enhanced player experience. Hopefully, this trend will continue in the future, for what is happening now is a good sign.

What do you think about this interview? If you had the chance, what questions would you ask the Developers? Share them with us in the comments!