World of Warcraft: Dragonflight Interview

World of Warcraft’s Dragonflight expansion is scheduled for a November 28, 2022 release, which is now less than two months away. And if you’d like to learn more about this new expansion and its many overhauls (talents, UI, professions), you should check out this recent PC Gamer interview with a couple of Blizzard developers.

Here’s a sample question to get you started:

PC Gamer: The last time we saw class talent trees was during the Cataclysm expansion. Was there anything that prompted you to bring them back for Dragonflight?

Brian Holinka: I think maybe a few things. One was just the length of time between when we last revisited them. Just whenever we look to a new expansion, we’re looking at opportunities to excite players and do something different. We have this game that has gone on for so long and we always want to provide new things to players, particularly in the class arena. Players want new abilities, they want new forms of power. And how do we keep stacking new exciting abilities onto players without it becoming overly cumbersome?

Since Legion, we’ve done these endgame systems that players have often referred to as borrowed power, where [we say] “Here’s something cool and new,” and “All right, the expansion is over, we’re going to retire that”. Trying to find a solution that works, that provides players with new opportunities, and that’s why we’re like, let’s revisit the talent system.

So that was one [reason], and then the other was when we added Exile’s Reach in Shadowlands, a new way for players to start the game: there were a lot more people, especially on the team, who were levelling up again. And when you compare that to, say, the experience that a lot of us were starting to have in Wrath [Classic], there was something to getting a talent point every time you levelled, instead of just being explicitly handed a spell and saying this is your upgrade. And so those things made us revisit them. And I believe that’s really what landed us on “let’s do talent trees again.”