World of Warcraft: Dragonflight – Hand in hand, in class balancing and user interface with Brian Holinka and Crash Reed

As we approach the release of World of Warcraft: Dragonflight, it’s time to learn what makes the game tick behind the scenes. Today we have Brian Holinka, Lead Combat Systems Designer, and Crash Reed, Lead UX Designer. Things might get a little technical here, so let’s get right into it.

BUILDING BLOCKS

How closely do your departments work together? I figure you need to do the balancing, then determine their placements in the UI, so to speak.

BRIAN HOLINKA: Yeah, great amounts. The systems and UX team work very closely together; you have to imagine any system that is created in a game that has to be communicated to players in some ways, and UX is the primary way to do that, right? What was great was that we got a different perspective than what we’d normally get from within our own team.

CRASH REED: As a UI/UX department, we think ourselves as support for most of the others and try to help out in as many places we can. We work very closely with every department.

BRIAN HOLINKA: I wanted to add that we at Blizzard have a tradition to keep our UI design to be straightforward which makes for great design constraint. We have to think about how we’re going to communicate the system to the players, and it prevents us from making overly complicated systems.

As I understand it, the UI changes were made in part as a response to add-ons. Could you talk about any lessons you learnt, or if you worked with their teams in any capacity?

CRASH REED: Our approach was less specifically focused on the add-ons, and more to accessibility and customization. We really wanted to give players more abilities to customize what they want to do, so we tried add-ons, other games, research, listened to players, our community team and user research team to bring it all together to make a UI we felt could help players create the experience they’re looking for.

It comes down to customization, and accessibility. Players can increase the size of the action bars, make frames bigger, move things around, and we even added textures to the cast bars.

Since you mentioned the textures, I noticed that there was what seems to be a layout style; is that part of it?

CRASH REED: We’ve come with two presets;  Modern is basically a layout you see a lot of popular streamers and players use, based off how they generally moved their UI elements. It’s mostly bringing things closer to where your eye is, towards the center.

For those players who like how it was back in the day, you can select Classic layout to put the elements where they were originally.

What does the grid size for the layout setting do, actually?

CRASH REED: It’s an artificial scale for you to line things up, so we have a snapping and a grid. You can change the grid itself to give you nice visual lines and have things line up just so, if you’re someone like me.

Speaking of accessibility, has that changed class design / balance significantly in any way? I’m familiar with “low intensity builds” that don’t require many button presses, so I’m wondering if that’ll become a thing in World of Warcraft.

CRASH REED: For the UI portion for talents, we’re introducing sample builds, a preset they can put in.

BRIAN HOLINKA: Whenever you make a talent tree, you can save the loadouts for another time. Every specialization has a Starter Build, a build we’ve chosen for players to follow if they’re wary of engaging with the system or just want to be guided through the talent tree that don’t have as many active abilities. It’s meant to give the players a straightforward way to play but not necessarily push them into a min-max style.

THE TIGHTROPE OF BALANCE

Is there a certain “class fantasy” you want to provide with these talents?

BRIAN HOLINKA: The reason why we’re doing the talent tree this way is to provide the opportunity to customize the classes the way you want for your character like how you do with your armour set. Over the past couple of years, you only had seven real choices about the abilities in your bar.

We wanted to provide more of the feeling of you growing your character, give players more autonomy in how their class is created. If you still like that heavily curated experience, that’s what the starter builds are for.

How long you would consider a good time for class hotfixes, or for a larger patch in general?

BRIAN HOLINKA: What we do is that every time there’s a new season – new raids, dungeon affixes, content – we look at how classes are performing in a regular schedule. Before it starts, we do a ready check to make sure things are ready for launch, then about a week of the season starting to get data from players to analyze if things are performing well, or if there’s any big outliers.

We aggregate the data and decide how to adapt. Two weeks later, we make those changes, then see how they are every other week for about a month or two. There are margins of performance that we feel are worth taking action over and stretch that out over time until the next season.

The closer it is to a new system, like our talent system, the more likely we are to make a hotfix change, because these things are new and people haven’t become too used to them and are a little more receptive to change. It’s a careful balance between the changes you need to make and disrupting people if there’s too much change.

Considering the talent trees expand player choice, would that mean balancing will now be harder?

BRIAN HOLINKA: I think it would be a great challenge, but we’ve grown our team to be able to do it. As I said, the closer we are to release, the more likely we are to act quickly than with previous systems. Coming in from Shadowlands, the classes have been that way for a long time so we didn’t make as much change in reaction to problems because we kinda focused on what’s new. Well, now, everything is new, so everything is fair game for us.

This one’s to Brian; now that you’ve done all these balancing, any particular class archetypes you’re looking forward to seeing?

BRIAN HOLINKA: I’m excited for Demon Hunter. They were a class made in Legion, and the model then was very much specialization focused. You would be either a Havoc or Vengeance Demon Hunter with very different abilities so they felt like two different classes, in a way.

Where other classes have a “history” of shared things between them, we really had to come up with ways to share the tools between Demon Hunter specs, so I thought it’ll be a really cool opportunity to see how it plays out, and it’ll be a fresh take for Demon Hunter players to have Sigil of Flame as Havoc, or Vengeful Retreat as Vengeance. It’s these different things you can play with that you never had before.

WHAT DOES THIS BUTTON DO

I’m not too familiar with World of Warcraft, so seeing the professions menu from the beta felt really daunting. Could you walk me through the changes you’ve made to the UI?

CRASH REED: Professions is a much larger system than the UI itself, adding things like quality indicators, more things for players to collect, clothing, and so forth.

For the UI specifically, it’s trying to highlight those pieces, and there’s a lot going on. Our goal is to help make some of those things clearer, more approachable, streamlining your entry in and make each of those interactions more understandable.

I feel like balance changes would likely affect the UI to some degree, so how hard is it to actually test placements and such? Do the technicalities make it time consuming?

CRASH REED: Once we get them implemented, it’s mostly something each of us can go in and experience for themselves, so it’s been kinda a fun experience having each developer share their ways of building things. It’s all about how they want to approach the game, having different setups from a PVPer to a Mythic raider.

The really fun part is giving each their own loadouts to set and change between them and share them with one another. Just watching people use it and express themselves throughout the beta and internal testing, it’s been really great.

Since the UI layout you’ve called it as part of players expressing themselves, was there some particular updates that you considered especially important?

CRASH REED: I’ve been playing World of Warcraft for so long now, and being able to move my action bars anywhere is amazing, and not only that, being able to change the layout shape, orientation, size and padding… the ability to do that out of the box has been amazing, something I wanted to do for a long time.

I think the other thing that’s been really rewarding is seeing the different responses from people, seeing them get the same emotion as I have getting to move those elements around.

ONWARDS TO THE DRAGON ISLES

I know it’s a really common question, but following on the beta, what has been the most valuable feedback you’ve gotten when it comes to designing your respective areas?

CRASH REED: Oh man, I don’t think there’s any one thing. Getting it in general is valuable, having the players engage and have so much passion in what we’re doing. I don’t think we could do it without the voices of the players; it’s very very important.

BRIAN HOLINKA: Totally agree. We have so many players who experience the game in different ways, and getting feedback from them has been really advantageous. Hearing people talk about what content they like to do and the choices they were making helps us understand if we have something good going, or make changes if they feel they can’t make the choices they want to.

Closing words; what are you most looking forward to in Dragonflight?

BRIAN HOLINKA: I’m excited for Evoker, that experience of being a dragon, flying around, breathing fire, picking up my friends and moving them around, knocking people out with my tail… I think the team has done such a good job of giving that feeling of being a dragon in World of Warcraft and I’m excited for players to get to try it.

CRASH REED: I’d second being a dragon, evoker, is fantastic. I’m also really excited for dragonriding, to soar in the sky differently than what we ever had from our mounts from before, dive bombing and gaining momentum… getting to experience that all throughout these new zones is gonna be awesome.

Keep your feedback rolling in so that they’ll know to get on it. There’s plenty of new systems that could act differently in the live release, so stay tuned to whatever interactions will come into play. Much thanks to Brian Holinka and Crash Reed for taking the time to answer my questions, and I wish you good luck in balance and fixing.

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