World of Warcraft: The War Within Launch Q&A on Dungeons, Raids, and Art

Early access for World of Warcraft: The War Within is live now for those who purchased the Epic Edition. As part of the launch push, Blizzard invited Wccftech and a couple of colleagues from other publications to a roundtable Q&A with Associate Art Director Tina Wang and Lead Encounter Designer Michael Nuthals, who answered a great many questions on art, raids, dungeons, and more pertaining to the tenth expansion pack for the acclaimed MMORPG (which is also about to celebrate its 20th anniversary). You can find the full transcript below.

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Heather Newman (PC Gamer/Forbes): I'll pitch a question to Tina. In terms of the art direction for The War Within, I think folks have talked a lot about Hallowfall and some of the cool things that are happening there. I would love to hear from you about Ringing Deeps and the efforts that you specifically made to make that zone feel perhaps a little bit less oppressive and cavern-like than recent underground zones that we've had.

Tina Wang: Absolutely. The Ringing Deeps is a fun one because it is the first zone where we go underground, right? You start at the top and then go to the Ringing Deeps. We did want to meet that subterranean fantasy to some degree where you're creating the sense of caverns, but again, not create something that's super oppressive or claustrophobic to the player. We initially described it as a bit of a mix of Black Rock Depths plus Maraudon. These are some traditional places that maybe some vanilla World of Warcraft players would have recognized.

But there's this idea that there's tons of Earthen industry embedded in this space, and we're constantly looking for ways to create atmosphere and light sources. So in those spaces, we added tons of lava falls, there's these giant buildings, and also in a lot of the places of the Ringing Deeps, if you look up, you'll see that there's these layers of rock that lead to a brightness above. It's this