At BlizzCon 2019, Blizzard launched World of Warcraft : Shadowlands, the eighth MMO expansion. Over the weekend, developers have desc...
At BlizzCon 2019, Blizzard launched World of Warcraft : Shadowlands, the eighth MMO expansion. Over the weekend, developers have described many new features that will be available in World of Warcraft next year. One of the most exciting sound activities is a new Roguelike-inspired dungeon called Torghast, the Tower of the Damned.
In the show we talked to the technical director Frank Kowalkowski and the senior game designer Paul Kubit and compared with a mission Torghast favorite of fans of World of Warcraft: Legion.
"While building things like Torghast, we were inspired by another favorite Legion mode: the training of the withered army," said Kubit. "Which is a villainous mode in and of itself."
During the withered army training, players were able to take an elven army to a dungeon. The players controlled their habitual character, supported by these elves, almost like the Overlord or Pikmin games. As the players descended, they could find new elves to add to their horde or fire some of their soldiers with heavy treasure chests to train their army for future careers.
The mode was an explosion and a great experience to show how malleable World of Warcraft is The search engine appears to be. But as with all rascals, the players finally gained enough strength to cross the rooms. This created a sense of accomplishment: destroy enemies with ease, which has already caused you many problems. Even so, the players found each other for no reason to complete the mission, and the withered army training remained on the road. Since then, Blizzard has implemented nothing similar.
Torghast brings a race-based game to Shadowlands . It is a dungeon that is never the same twice. The winding halls and hostile locations are different each time than with the training of the withered army. You step in, you gain strength as you play, you fail, and you start over.
In Withered Army Training you reach the end of the mission. Not at Torghast; This continues until I defeat you.
"You finally got very good at it," said Kowalkowski of training the faded army. "Ultimately, you can build this huge army and just go to the end. Torghast has no end. Your end is the point at which your player can reach that point. So it will really be something where you can continue to challenge yourself , and you will reach the point of the challenge where Torghast will say "go out".
Torghast's infinite repeatability is partly due to this challenge. But it is also influenced by the differences in the dungeon on every excursion. Kubit told us about an event that occurred shortly after launch that will fill the enemy animal space for a while and change the enemy's enemies again.
But all things age over time, just like the training of the Withered Army. Kubit realizes that this can be fine, although the team is still trying to keep it entertaining and cool for the duration of the expansion:
I'll add my analysis of a game that is generally similar to a racket. They usually burn well enough, don't they? When I play with one of them you play a lot and when you master the mechanics you lose a lot of interest. This is one of the things we see at Torghast to ensure that we can keep it in cool mode for a long time. Your level of equipment or some progress. Within the Torghast system itself, which detects new things, it detects new powers, detects new ecologies to fight and problems to solve.
While we don't know all of the rewards for Torghast, we do know how players make their own legendary items in Shadowlands .
Most things in World of Warcraft are based on something else, even a single little mission like Withered Army Training can one day inspire a full mode. Players cannot control huge armies of elves through the new dungeon, but twisted halls and career-based encounters should never be boring.
Blizzard has not announced when World of Warcraft: Shadowlands will launch. He usually launches new World of Warcraft expansions in the fall, such as August or September.
