As World of Warcraft enters the Shadowlands: "Why should it ever end?"

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As World of Warcraft enters the Shadowlands: "Why should it ever end?"

In four days, Blizzard Entertainment will launch World of Warcraft: Shadowlands -- the MMORPG's eighth expansion in 16 years.To get more news about buy wow tbc gold, you can visit lootwowgold official website.

Eight major expansions is no small feat. Neither is the fact that World of Warcraft is still a powerhouse so long after launch, remaining steady even as contenders like WildStar had their flash in the pan, and others such as The Elder Scrolls Online and Final Fantasy XIV manage to co-exist with, but not topple, Blizzard's creation.

But that has not left World of Warcraft without challenges, specifically many associated with the game's age. Speaking with GamesIndustry.biz, World of Warcraft executive producer John Hight and lead game designer Morgan Day are candid about the fact that the leveling experience specifically has needed an overhaul for sometime, saying that it wasn't exactly friendly to new players in its current state.

It's finally gotten that overhaul in Shadowlands, with a level squish bringing player levels back into a less daunting range and sweeping changes to how experience, leveling zones, and progression work so that players can tackle all of the game's content in almost any order. There's also a brand new tutorial zone specifically geared toward brand new players -- something the game never had before.There were a lot of challenges along the way," Day says. "As you can imagine, changing everyone's level and touching, essentially, every creature and spell that we've ever made in World of Warcraft is what was required to make this work, and it was a tremendous undertaking by the team. But so far, the community reaction has been really positive. We've been really excited to see the stories of people who are checking out World of Warcraft for the first time, and hear the feedback of how leveling from one to 50 feels so much more manageable now."

The leveling changes dropped a few weeks ago with a pre-patch even though Shadowlands proper doesn't launch until next week, and Hight says he's seen an increase in the number of brand new players coming into the game since. He adds that he saw a similar increase in new subscribers when World of Warcraft: Classic launched last year, indicating that interest in the original version of World of Warcraft transcends nostalgia.While perhaps no expansion has had quite the sweeping impact that Shadowlands has with its leveling adjustments, all eight have added new areas, characters, stories, gameplay mechanics, and often even classes or races on top of everything that's existed before in the already-massive world of Azeroth. I ask Hight and Day if they ever find that new expansions end up encumbered by what has existed before, or if the game's long live history ever makes it challenging to change or innovate.

Hight says that to Blizzard, each expansion is equivalent to a major game release and the team isn't afraid to scrap features from previous expansions to keep the game from having far too much weight and complexity. He isn't worried about being limited in what they can do by having to build on what's come before; rather, he thinks it is beneficial to have a "heritage of content."