Endeavor System, Black Blood, Beledar, and uniting the scattered tribes – Destructoid

WoW‘s next expansion, Midnight, is still a ways away, but thanks to the team over at Blizzard, we had a chance to dive deep into the Housing update and find out about all sorts of other interesting aspects of the game.

At Gamescom, we got a chance to sit down and talk to two faces working on WoW‘s next significant expansion, Maria Hamilton (Associate Design Director) & Gabriel Gonzalez (Lead Visual Development Artist), and we had a lot to talk about.

Note: Parts have been edited to allow for better text clarity and to avoid everyday speech repetitions. Some audio was also lost during recording, sadly.

So, the first thing I and they wanted to ask is, could you talk a bit more about the Endeavor system that is coming in here? Specifically, what players can expect from it, and what were the team’s main goals in creating it?

Maria Hamilton (Associate Design Director): So the Endeavor system is an opportunity for a neighborhood to come together and achieve a goal, and what you need to do for that endeavor is quite varied, depending on which one it is. Some things can be accomplished within housing, within the neighborhood itself, because there are people who we expect won’t necessarily want to go out and adventure. They might just want to hang out in their house, and that might be a really fun thing as far as they’re concerned. And we want to support that. Other people will have tasks to do out in an older zone, and in exploring that older zone, the neighborhood is slowly accomplishing the endeavor, and then when they complete the endeavor, they get the prize, the rewards for that.

On that, can you talk about what rewards players can expect?

Maria Hamilton: Well, I think there’s a concept of unlocking visitors who can come and see you. And they might have interesting things to sell, for example, or they might have interesting little activities for you to do. So there’s that kind of sort of reward. There may very well also be decor items that you’ve unlocked in your neighborhood. Anyone in your neighborhood can now get that decor item, for example. I don’t have an exhaustive list, honestly, but the idea is that people can work together to achieve this, and we’re going to appropriately adjust and scale based on the size of the neighborhood, because some neighborhoods would be very large [or] very tiny. So we don’t want to give them the same sort of requirement. We don’t want you grinding it.

War Within fans want to know if Black Blood, Beledar, and all these things that appeared in War Within will actually make an appearance in Midnight, and how might they play into the story?

Maria Hamilton: Thinking about the Black Blood in Midnight… It’s not something that you are likely to fight against or see… With the idea of a trilogy, we have the opportunity to introduce elements and try to pace things out. And these elements could be true later or not. We can introduce characters in the same way. So, we’ve learned some essential things. We’ve seen Beledar and are beginning to understand what happened there…Oh, my goodness, this is the number of Gods. Blood seeped into our planet when they were killed. That’s probably not great.

So this is all very pertinent. And as we move in and we start looking at what [they do]… but directly fighting with Black Blood? Probably not, at least in launch. That’s probably not, because we need to introduce more stuff. We’re doing the let’s introduce things and bring threads together. And we have that luxury this time.

Gabriel Gonzalez (Lead Visual Development Artist): I will say in terms of the Black Blood and sort of visual storytelling there, it was very much coded to Old Gods and a lot of the residual stories, right? But for Midnight, we’re gonna see more of the cosmic void sort of energy, which visually, has a really distinct language. There are visual themes of crystals. It’s a lot more light, it’s a lot airy. It’s not quite as thick and liquid-feeling as some of the wolf gas stuff that we’ve seen in the past. And I think that is something that we’re gonna see. The cosmic aspect of it is something that we’re gonna see more in the void lands. It’s more central.

Moving on from the Black Blood and looking more at the Housing and Endeavour system you are bringing in, I was wondering how the team plans to avoid the criticism that Garrisons created the previous expansions, as it seemed to incentivize solo play.

Gabriel Gonzalez: I would say they really have two different goals right now, looking at Garrisons. Housing is not really something that is tied to the campaign necessarily, as much as Garrison was, but there was, like, that sense of progression that was really personal. With Housing, we’re really just focusing on the act of creating, customizing, and creating community in that sense. So, I would say that was the focus from the outset: finding ways to encourage folks to collaborate, create those communities, and work together.

Maria Hamilton: It’s our hope that you will choose who to live in a neighborhood with, friends or guild members. But if you want to do a sort of public one, where you don’t necessarily have anyone in the neighborhood that’s available to you, too. We didn’t; we’d want to constrain players in that way. But I would guess that people would want to do this based on real-life friends. They’ll want to have a neighborhood and hang out together, so we incentivize socializing by allowing you to unlock things, progress through endeavours, and make it possible to do things together in that way.

I’m not opposed to a solo experience, though. If that’s something you want to do, great, as long as you’re having fun. We want anyone with any play style to have a good time. But at the same time, we also want to provide social opportunities. I think neighborhoods are an area to lean into. As soon as we can get players playing it pre-launch and gather some feedback, I think we’ll be able to plan for additional adjustments. As I mentioned, it’s an evergreen system. It’s going to continue to go from there.

While we might have answers as to what people will like, those are just moments, and people sometimes surprise you. So yeah, I think social activities inside our neighborhood make a lot of sense. Being able to visit your friend’s house… Otherwise, [Garrisons] wasn’t all the same, because it wasn’t focused on expression. It was focused on convenience. What’s the convenience of buildings to build for you? Oh, I’m in the alchemist, I’m in the alchemy building, right? So, it’s not the same as here is a section of my house, which I have decided to turn into a total spider theme, right? I’m gonna do all spider stuff, and then I’m gonna show my friends my cool spider stuff. It’s a different thing we’re going for here.

So I don’t know if you’ve told me the answer to this, but what happens if, say, I want to move to a new neighborhood with a friend who just started? Does my endeavor like basically reset to that neighborhood? Or do I keep my endeavor?

Maria Hamilton: Yeah, I suspect what happens is you’ve unlocked a thing. I don’t think we would take that away from you if you change neighborhoods. That seems unlikely, but your neighborhood might not have unlocked that feature. Perhaps the Endeavor hasn’t been completed in that neighborhood, so you could help them unlock it.

If there was something like that, it was unlocked. I think people choosing to leave neighborhoods or deciding to move neighborhoods is something that the team is working directly on. Housing has thought about a lot, just the ease of packing your stuff up and then unpacking your stuff on the other end, for example, we want that to be easy, we don’t want you to have to replace all the things again, in that you’ll be able to say, yeah, just get me here.

But a lot of the details around exactly how things work in the housing team are being worked on. We have some devs who are familiar with the details, and I think either Dave or someone higher up has provided education on the specifics.

So, going back to the narrative behind Midnight, and also in general, with this trilogy you are doing right now. I’m curious if in Midnight, we will discover how players will start to unite the scattered elf tribes?

Maria Hamilton: This is a really hard battle, and there are many, many years of trauma between the Elvein tribes, and it’s not the kind of thing that is easily solved. So you know the common threat is severe, and it means that those groups need to talk again. So through questing, you will definitely experience pulling those tribes together and working together and fighting together against the large threat, and some discussion about why they were separated, why they walked away from each other in the first place. A lot of players don’t know that lore and don’t know what happened. They don’t understand why the Blood Elves were banished, for example… This is an opportunity to educate those folks about that part of the story, but also reveal them coming together, and when we think about Midnight, or any of the expansions of the saga, we’re thinking about it all the way through to our final large content release. So things are spaced out over that period of time, and things will happen in those later content releases over the span of the entire expansion. But I can’t say that in Midnight proper you will begin that effort to bring the tribes back together.