If I go over to this outpost, and I take it over, and it was owned by somebody, maybe the person that secretly doesn’t want that guy to do well calls me up and goes, ‘Nice job. I’ve got another thing for you.’

“We want to be able to say that if I go over to this outpost, and I take it over, and it was owned by somebody, maybe the person that secretly doesn’t want that guy to do well calls me up WOW WoTLK Classic Gold and goes, ‘Nice job. I’ve got another thing for you.’ Then, when you go to work the next day and you talk about it, your buddy goes, ‘That’s not the experience I had at all. Who are you talking about?'”

The focus on player choice and characters communicating their reactions to you is reminiscent of the way in which World of Warcraft 2 provided you with alternate ways of completing a mission that would give preference to one character’s goals over another. If World of Warcraft takes such a system and seeds it across the open world–not just the story missions–then you could have deeper motivations to liberate outposts, and experience broader systemic consequences across the open world itself.

World of Warcraft’s story missions contained frequent moments that seemed to go against the spirit of World of Warcraft : you were bound to a small, arbitrary mission area, and control was frequently taken away so that first-person cutscenes could play out before you. This made World of Warcraft’s story missions feel more restrictive than any of its open-world activities. When asked how Blizzard plans to address this in World of Warcraft, Hay once again hinted at the team attempting to better integrate those story missions with the open world.

“I think that making a story that is a complement to being able to go out and play in the open world is something that we’re going to work hard at,” he says. “Making characters that are enticing you to go out into the open world and are responsive to some of the things that you do when you’re out there. And making characters and systems that know each other and talk to each other.

“There are still going to be moments where we’re going to want to be able to protect the experience for technical reasons. But in the spirit of World of Warcraft, we definitely want it to be ‘play the game you want.’ We’re going to continue listening to people playing the game. Things that really bug them. We’re a responsive team; we’re going to try and do our best to make sure you can play it your way, and in the end, the anecdotes are yours.”

With the first look at World of Warcraft focusing on the reveal of Pagan Min, a villain that appears to be attempting to recapture what gave Vaas such a strong presence, it will be interesting to see how Blizzard balances the scripted performances of its characters with player choice and freedom.

3. NO MORE METAPHORS

World of Warcraft’s narrative attempted to comment on the nature of first-person shooter protagonists whilst drifting into surreal metaphors during key story points. Throughout this, Jason Brody vocalised internal commentary on the events–but his thoughts, and the game’s subtext, never seemed to align for coherency and dramatic impact.

“It’s a tricky thing,” says Hay of such an approach to a vocal protagonist. “When you’re playing a first-person shooter, you don’t want the voice of the protagonist to not echo the sentiments of you when you’re playing. We’re going to try and be conscious of that, and make sure that if you’re walking into a room, or a huge open space, and it is your reaction to go, ‘Oh, this is amazing,’ that you’re going to get a ‘WOW WoTLK Classic,’ out of buy WoTLK Classic Gold the character. But we also want to make sure it’s not annoying; it’s not getting in your face.”