World of Warcraft: Civil War is coming. This is an ambitious expansion that takes players deep underground to explore hitherto unseen lands and cultures. But according to associate design director Maria Hamilton and lead prop artist Jordan Powers, this new area option is built behind a special zone.
“I would say we learned something from Zalalek Cave,” Hamilton said. “We were trying to make Zalalek Cave big enough so that it didn’t feel too tight or restrictive, and we realized we needed these moments of vastness and untetheredness, even when we’re underground. Hollowfall made that very clear that we is doing so.
Manage cookie settings
Hamilton continued: “We’ve been traveling underground for quite some time. We’ve had to make some technical improvements so that we can do it effectively without load and get to the depths we want. So. Zalalek Cave! This is the first time we have the opportunity to achieve a seamless layer underneath another layer, something we haven’t been able to do in the past.
“Zalalek Cave gave us an opportunity to try something out, but also learn how to tell interesting stories in that space and understand how big of a space we needed. How high the ceilings had to be, and how to create the feeling of an aerial ride. It feels good to be in that space. […] This is very important to us. It was valuable to have the opportunity to try these things at the time because otherwise we would be trying it for the first time now and it wouldn’t be as good.
Zalalek Caverns, a mid-term expansion area released with Dragonflight, is to many a regular old path area, filled with numerous daily quests, rare monsters, and reputations to grind. But in retrospect, you do get the sense that this was an attempt at building large, exciting underground areas. Even better than Deepholme, Blizzard’s first attempt to explore Earth’s subterranean regions, Zalalek feels like a rich new world beneath the surface, mixing a few things you know with a ton of things you don’t. thing.
According to Powers, this was a key point in the design of these new areas, including the Ringing Abyss. “We wanted to give players a sense of familiarity, with the cenotes and the beautiful divine light coming down from the holes in the ceiling, illuminating these lush pools. It’s important to establish that you’re in this cave, that you’re still underground, Live out this fantasy.
As you get deeper into the expansion and progress, this sense of familiarity fades away, and the expansion’s HollowFall probably reaches the pinnacle of this overwhelming sense of strangeness. Not only is this the largest area in World of Warcraft’s history in vertical terms, but it also brings a lot of fresh ideas to the table.
“We want you to have a never-ending feeling,” Hamilton said. “We have an endless underground sea there. The idea of vastness goes on and on. Coming out of the Ringing Abyss, we wanted it to expand in such a way and reveal this strange place, which is not what you want at all” d expectations .
“We give you a little bit of what you would expect from Ring Abyss, which is machinery everywhere, some greenery scattered around, a very natural environment. And then you enter this unexpected space. I was at BlizzCon and seeing people flying down and going “ooh” when they were experiencing it for the first time, it’s probably not what you thought it would be.
