Discussing Delves with Maria Hamilton
Delves were targeted for a particular type of player, those who can't set aside a big block of time or often get interrupted and need to step away for a moment. That's difficult to do in group content where other players can be kept waiting or a timer is ticking down, so the developers started looking for a less restrictive and more solo-friendly piece of content.
Once they started working on Delves, they started trying new things. Nemesis summons, K'aresh gates, traps that players or enemies could be lured into, and Midnight is adding mount-capable outdoor delves as well.
The developers have been looking at data on how players spend time inside delves, and they think there's room for a longer experience, leading them to Labyrinths. Somewhat inspired by Blackrock Mountain, which had several interconnected but separate activities, the idea is to allow groups to progress at their own pace, rather than requiring them to go through everything all at once.
A team is already working The Last Titan, and they've chosen locations for new delves and talked about what's happening in its zones at this point in the story, what kind of dungeons they should have, what kind of creatures should be there. With so many previous connections to Northrend, there's a lot of nostalgia and easter eggs to explore, but the team still want to make it fresh and exciting for players who never experienced those areas before.
The developers like to try to guess what players will do first when they arrive in a new piece of content and are very interested to see who is right or whether players surprise them.
Player Housing with Jay Hwang
Watching players engage with housing has been a dream come true. They couldn't be happier with the way players have engaged with the system, making their own tutorials and creating their own communities around the feature.
Housing is starting here. They still have a backlog of creations to release, but seeing players come up with new ideas they didn't even expect has led to even more ideas to support in the future. Developers try to prepare themselves for players to break the game in unexpected ways, but sometimes they become really cool features.
Because they decided not to include any kind of player power with housing, the developers have a lot more freedom to allow bugs and unexpected ways of engaging with the system, even deciding to adopt and support some of them as official features, like adding native support for floating houses.
More exciting than any one individual type of racial architecture coming to housing is seeing how players mix and match them together to create entirely new themes.
