Exclusive Developer Interview: Ana Resendez & Clayton Stone on WoW Classic, Season of Discovery

Today, we present an exclusive interview with World of Warcraft Classic developers, Ana Resendez and Clay Stone, where we explore the exciting new content and changes coming with the Season of Discovery. Read on for a transcription of our interview or click the video below!

Table of Contents

Introduction

Q-1: Ana, Clayton, it’s great to get to meet both of you. I’m Aesyric with RaiderIO. Thank you so much for taking the time to sit down with us and talk about the addition of Season of Discovery to WoW Classic! To start, if you could both please introduce yourselves, and us a bit about what you do on the WoW Classic team?

Ana Resendez: Yeah, hi! I’m Ana Resendez. I am one of the Lead Software Engineers on the World of Warcraft Classic team. I work with the leadership team on Classic to ensure that we are creating really good experiences for the players and that everything is ready. Of course, I mainly focus on the technical side of things, but I’m happy to be involved in the whole project in general.

Clay Stone: Hi, I’m Clay Stone, the Associate Production Director of the WoW Classic Team. Essentially, my responsibilities are looking at everything we want to do, everything we want to accomplish, and everything we want to bring to our players, and making sure we have the resources and the time to do it, and that we’re focusing on the right things when we need to be to deliver fun new experiences in the Classic space, the next one (of course) being Season of Discovery.

Aesyric (RaiderIO): Okay great. I know we have a brief interview today so I’m just going to jump right into it.

Design & Development

“...We took a look at our current audience and the audience that plays the modern game, but ultimately the choice of direction in Season of Discovery was around what new experiences we can give the Classic universe.” –Ana Resendez

Q-2: When designing things like Season of Discovery, is there any thought process put into trying to make a version of Classic that will attract more “retail-only” players? Is Season of Discovery intended to bridge the gap between Classic and Retail players, or is this more of a response to the outcry of “Classic Plus” from the Classic Community?

Ana Resendez: The Classic team is a team that works within the greater World of Warcraft team. We all work together on creating new experiences. When it comes to Season of Discovery, really it came about as an internal review of, “Hey, where in the Classic universe can we go next?” Of course, we took a look at our current audience and the audience that plays the modern game, but ultimately the choice of direction in Season of Discovery was around what new experiences we can give the Classic universe.

One of our biggest inspirations was our source, in the sense of looking back at the Classic Beta in 2019. That’s where we started with the level caps, like we had a level cap of Level 30, and then we saw that during that period of time, it kind of enabled people to play more at level 30 and create a whole new meta; we had duel tournaments, people were discussing the best in slot of each of the different phases. It allowed people to come and join in (on different phases). Definitely that was one of our big inspirations.

The second one too is that Azeroth is huge, right? And we want to make sure that we explore the world within a new lens, and we’re able to have different, new experiences within the Classic universe. The perfect way to achieve this was the idea that, “What if we have discoveries around the world, and you get to discover new experiences within the Classic universe that you already know so much about without drastically changing your feelings or whatever passion you have about the world?” It’s just about making it a little more interesting, not necessarily changing the world. So that’s where our talks about Season of Discovery were coming from, from that angle of like, “What do we want to do in the Classic universe?” And, I mean, we really hope that people who have Classic come and try it, people who play the modern game come try it, and also new people. We’re really excited for anyone to come in and try Season of Discovery.

Clay Stone: To add on to what Ana said, to the point about Classic Plus; we’ve certainly been in development on Season of Discovery for awhile now, and we’ve listened to the community and we’ve heard the calls for something like Classic Plus, and it’s tough to define exactly what that is, based on who you ask and what they’re most interested in. But as players of Classic ourselves, we asked ourselves, “What are those new experiences and content that we want to bring to the Classic space? What would excite us most?” And then listening to the community and hearing what they tell us about what they want to experience.

I think what we’re most excited about in Season of Discovery as it relates to this concept of Classic Plus is that three of the things that we hear the most consistently and frequently are: we want subtle or not-so-subtle changes made to Classic classes; we want new experiences but set in the Classic space with Classic vibes; and we want to do it all in the original Classic Azeroth. When we look at those three things, that’s really something that we’re doing in the Season of Discovery, and something that we’re trying; being able to do it in a season space allows us to really take some big swings and experiment quite a bit with what we’re bringing to the table for players, and we’re so excited to see how they respond to it, what they’re most interested in, and what gets them excited, and be right there along with them, playing it.

---

Q-3: This approach of adding a new specialty-type server to Classic is very exciting and allows for a lot of different playstyles. Do you think there’s a future where this technology for different servers is used in retail? Also, is there any chance we can expect future seasons or iterations of Season of Discovery to take place on the Official Hardcore Servers?

Ana Resendez: On the first note, we work really closely with the modern game, with the people who focus on the modern game. Right now, there’s no plans, at least from our involvement, to go in and do that, but what I can say is that part of the technology is shared between the two platforms, so it’s definitely something that like, we really try to do with the Classic side and with the modern side: to share as much technology between the two games, so if at any point we want to take advantage of systems from the modern game or the opposite way around, we’re able to share that and do so. So I wouldn’t take it off the table completely, right, but there’s no current plans for any kind of special season event in the modern game.

Clay Stone: Something that we’ve talked about is that we now have version 1.15.0, which is supporting Classic era realms, it’s supporting Hardcore era realms, and it’s soon to be supporting our Season of Discovery realms; for Hardcore, as Ana announced at Blizzcon onstage, we’re really excited to be bringing self-found to those realms in early 2024. We know that’s something that players have been asking for for a while, and we’re very excited to deliver that. When we’re thinking about Season of Discovery and Hardcore, I would say it’s not lost on us that we have the same build now that’s effectively supporting these three different versions, including Hardcore and Season of Discovery, and Season of Discovery is certainly set in that Classic 1-60 level bracket. I think, thinking about the future of Hardcore, and maybe Hardcore existing in Season of Discovery, that’s something we’ll continue to discuss, and we certainly want to hear from players as they jump into SoD as it exists at launch. I think there may be something interesting there, and something exciting, but nothing to discuss about it today.

---

“Even though WoW has always existed on the internet, the information just travels so much faster now, so we’re definitely living in a different era than almost 20 years ago. But at the same time, we do remember that nostalgic feeling of going into the game without knowing exactly what to expect, and not knowing all the secrets before you get to play any of it.” –Ana Resendez

Q-4: Speaking of exciting, one of the most exciting aspects of Season of Discovery is, of course, the Discovery… and the fact that there has been no PTR testing has been great for that! There has been a little bit of datamining, of course, but overall it really seems like everyone is going to jump into a fresh experience where players get to discover things as they go. Can you give us some insight on the motivations behind this decision when it was being developed? What were the discussions like amongst the team when this idea was brought forward?

Ana Resendez: I mean, when we were talking about the Season of Discovery, one of the biggest learning experiences that we have had in Classic is the fact that the community has evolved a lot over the years. We came out with World of Warcraft Classic, no changes, let’s keep everything the same as it was back in 2004, and we realized that the community has changed, right? Even though WoW has always existed on the internet, the information just travels so much faster now, so we’re definitely living in a different era than almost 20 years ago. But at the same time, we do remember that nostalgic feeling of going into the game without knowing exactly what to expect, and not knowing all the secrets before you get to play any of it. We definitely wanted to get that essence and bring it into us, develop it, and bring it back to the players, and we definitely came to the conclusion that we needed to keep it all a secret until it comes out; otherwise, what would probably happen is that if we had a PTR, some players might come in and create their own guides on how to discover it, and (bring those to) the other players who were not a part of the PTR, so definitely it’s something that we really want to protect.

That said, we also have taken into consideration that, even though we wanted to go completely dark on it, there are certain aspects that, you know, we’re okay sharing with the public and that it would be really helpful to get some feedback on, and that’s why we decided to have the playtest at BlizzCon where you were able to do the raid and have all the runes, so at least we got that data and were able to take a look at how the build was looking, how the players were reacting to it, and getting a little more information. But we really, really want to protect the discovery of the runes, because we really want each player to go in and discover the world, and pay attention to the details of what’s going around them, and go in like, “Hey, this is new!” and, “Was this like this before?”

Even internally, I feel like it has happened a couple times where it was like, “Ohh, I really thought that this was part of the original release, and I just realized that this is something new in Season of Discovery!” Or the opposite has also happened where it was like, “Ohhh, I really thought that that was going to be a discovery, but really it has been there since 2004!” So it’s kind of like, we want to really encase that, and definitely we’d prefer, on Thursday, to jump in and fix anything that might be making people have issues. We’re definitely going to be there, on call, making sure that we’re unblocking any kind of difficulties that the player might have.

PVP

Q-5: We recently saw the announcement that there will be attempts to faction-balance the PVP realms for Season of Discovery. This is very exciting, especially from a player perspective. I’m sure you all know how frustrating it can be to have imbalanced realms. As this is a new direction, can you tell us more about how it will work? Will there be faction locks and/or faction queues? If a faction gets locked, will it ever become unlocked as things balance out? Additionally, as this is a new direction, are there any potential issues you’re anticipating and how will they be managed?

Clay Stone: Yeah so it’s certainly something that the whole team feels is ambitious; we’ve never attempted something like this before. In order to do it, we’ve developed some new tools that we’ll be able to be extremely hands-on with as we watch the way the realms develop and the way that balance develops. There may be a point where, if things get too imbalanced, players would not necessarily be able to create a new character of a particular faction, and that would be limited in time until the balance reestablishes itself, but it does mean that there is a potential scenario where one player wants to create a brand new character on a particular realm that they don’t already have a character on, of a particular faction, to play with their friends, and they’re unable to because the balance has gotten too one-sided. So, that possibility (certainly) exists. Now, it’s for the benefit and support of pushing for balanced factions on these PVP servers, and we think that the benefit outweighs the challenge that comes with it, and we’re excited to see how that plays out. I should also note that this is only applicable to PVP realms. PVE realms, players will be able to spin up a new character, roll a new character on whatever faction they want to, no matter what the balance on that realm looks like.

To the last point, we also have the ability to change course if necessary. If it turns out that all the players who have been saying forever now that they want balanced realms, that this is what they want on PVP, if it turns out that we’ve all made a big mistake and we actually don’t want that at all, we would have the ability to change course and change direction on that if necessary. But we’re excited to see that play out and see how players engage with it. I think something that we discussed briefly when we put the announcement out about it is, for players who have not played on a balanced-faction realm before, and choose to engage with Season of Discovery this way on one of those realms, they may come across some challenges or some difficulties or hindrances that they have not experienced before, due to more of the opposite faction PVP players being in the same space as them. So, I would certainly encourage players to think about that before jumping into an experience like that, or maybe talk with their friends about what that experience is like. But for those players who are up for the challenge, we’re looking forward to following along with them and playing along with them as we watch this ambitious new feature from the Classic team.

---

Q-6: Speaking of PVP: Ashenvale. Can you tell us a little bit more about how the World PVP event is going to work there? How will this function on PVE realms? Will it be similar in any way to Wintergrasp or Ashran with a queue system? Will it function on a timer or anything of that sort? Will players be able to stack the on-use World Buff item received from winning the event?

Ana Resendez: So, first, queue system. There will not be a queue system, it’s not an instance; you’re not going to queue into the battle. It’s going to be a world event, living in the world. The way it’s going to be initiated is that there’s some logic going on in the area, in Ashenvale, that basically the event will start when there’s been PVP action in the zone, and the PVP action has been in a certain PVP balance of the factions, then the event will start. Once the event starts, the raid leaders from each of the factions will appear, and they’ll be warded; it’s going to be a bit similar to Alterac Valley, where if you defeat other camps, it will reduce the amount of protection that the raid leaders have, so you will be able to complete the event like that and kill the raid leaders easier. So that’s the overall idea of how it’s going to happen, how it’s going to work. But, for example, if you’re on a PVE server, if you go into the area of the battle, you’ll need to flag yourself as PVP in order to be part of the event, or else you’ll be basically observing.

I think it’s going to be some super epic battles, I think that’s definitely something that makes Classic very unique. PVP evolved a lot during the different expansions, including Wrath of the Lich King and even Burning Crusade, they had the addition of arenas. But when we’re talking about Classic, the Classic universe, it’s really a lot of those epic battles in the outdoor world. Those battlegrounds, and going through your honor grind…in that sense, you’re going to be able to start your honor grind from the beginning, it’s going to be open, Warsong is also going to be open, the PVP event is going to be open also, so there’s going to be tons of PVP going on. I’m really really excited, especially with the faction balance servers, to see how PVP evolves on these realms. About the World Buff being stackable, I don’t know the answer off the top of my head, but I can get back to you with the answer.

Editor’s Note: Ana got back to us and added, “If you have the (on-use World Buff item) consumable, or the quest item, or the active buff, you should not be able to get a second one.”

Leveling & Classes

“...Seeing the new metas that formed at the level 30 cap or the level 40 cap of the original WoW Classic beta, when players developed those metas, it was awesome to see. And we want to give enough time for each of these level brackets to sort of develop their own meta.” –Clay Stone

Q-7: Is each leveling phase intended to take as long as the previous one? Are any changes being made to XP gain or questing during each phase? How will each leveling phase differ from the same level ranges on regular Classic Era servers?

Clay Stone: So that’s a great question about this, and something that, unfortunately, I don’t have specifics to give you just yet. When we talk about these phases, some of the things that we’ve discussed in the past have been, as we unlock each new phase, do we increase experience accumulation for the previous level bracket? I think that’s something we want to do, so let’s say when we unlock the level 40 cap, allow players who maybe are creating a brand new character or trying to catch up with their friends to be able to progress through that level 1-25 bracket a little bit quicker.

As for total length of time of these phases before we unlock the next bracket, this is something that we’re really looking to the community to determine; as Ana mentioned previously, seeing the new metas that formed at the level 30 cap or the level 40 cap of the original WoW Classic beta, when players developed those metas, it was awesome to see. And we want to give enough time for each of these level brackets to sort of develop their own meta. We want to see what a level 25 best in slot looks like for each of the different classes, and see how players approach that. So, we don’t want to cut that off so quickly and force players to move on to the next one, but at the same time we don’t want players to feel like they’re sitting around waiting forever for the next one to come out, so we’re going to see how quickly players progress through level 25 and use that to determine how long we wait until we unlock the next phase, and so on and so forth. We’re fortunate in that regard to be a little bit more flexible here than we otherwise would be.

---

“...Something that we consistently say on the team is that we’re balancing for fun. We’re trying to give every class something fun to do, and we’re balancing for fun.” –Clay Stone

Q-8: The concept of New Class Roles is very exciting, and we’re all very interested to learn more about that. We cannot wait to explore tanking on Rogues, Shamans and Warlocks, and healing on Mages! What were some of the considerations in both class design and lore that went into deciding which classes should be given which additional roles? If this system is successful, is there a chance we’ll see it expanded, and if so, what might that look like?

Clay Stone: We want to give every class something fun. When we look back at the balance of the original Classic experience, I know that the team at the time was really striving for balance, but I think most of us realize that it’s not perfectly balanced. We expect that that’s probably going to be the case as well for SoD, but something that we consistently say on the team is that we’re balancing for fun. We’re trying to give every class something fun to do, and we’re balancing for fun.

So that being said, when it comes to something like class archetypes, something I’m particularly excited for is our Mage healers. If you look at some of the abilities we’re giving Mages, a lot of it is now time-based abilities; that was sort of born out of the discussion we had internally about, “Okay, what are some of these other archetypes that we can be doing? What if we had a Time Mage, or something like that, and how would that allow them to fulfill a new role that they haven’t filled before?” So, when we look at the game, we’re not actually calling it, in the game, you’re now playing a “Time Mage”, or anything along those lines, but similar to Classic as it exists in our Classic-era realms, there are no specs for our classes, so it allows you to be pretty flexible about how you play them. I would expect that, as we go forward and allow players to collect new runes, that some of those could be tailored around new archetypes that maybe WoW hasn’t explored before, and we’re excited for players to discover what those are. But there certainly has been some discussion internally about that being a genesis point for some of the abilities that we’ve added to classes. Ana, did you want to add anything else to that?

Ana Resendez: Yeah, I just want to say that Clay got it perfectly, that we are balancing for fun, and in the sense of just like Classic itself, each of the different classes, you’re not really choosing a spec or anything; the game doesn’t dictate to you how to play a role or even in Classic without SoD, you’re not being told, “hey, you need to be a healer…” If you’re playing a druid, right, you’re not being told you need to be either a healer, or a tank, or a dps. The game doesn’t detect it like that. You do so by choosing your talents. That’s something that is really fun about Classic, is that you’re able to have hybrid specs if you want to. It might not be the best of whatever guide you’re looking at, but if your heart desires, you can go in and put your talents across all your different (trees), that’s really up to you. This is the same with the runes; we really want to have the ability for players to choose whatever direction they want without feeling like they’re constrained to a certain archetype.

With that said, too, our plan is not to balance in the sense that like, each of the different specs and archetypes that the player can find are going to be 100% viable and 100% that they all do the same damage and healing. That’s not our goal, our goal is not to go in that direction. Our goal is really like, “Hey, whatever class you’re playing, are you having fun? Do you have a fun ability that you’re really excited to get?” It’s going in that direction and not so much, “Let’s have the perfect raid team.” As mentioned, the raids themselves that we’re creating, the content is tuned in a way that it’s not going to be the most challenging content you’ll ever have, so we also expect people to have fun with their builds a little bit.

Tuning of Raids

Q-9: We’re curious about the design philosophy behind tuning and difficulty. What is the goal for end-game raids in each phase, in terms of difficulty? Are these meant to be more or less challenging or somewhat equivalent to content at that same level on normal Classic-era servers? Additionally, once we hit level cap 60, will the level 60 raids be more difficult than the same raid on Classic, and will we be doing 20 and 40 man raids, or will they be reworked possibly for a 10 man raid size?

Ana Resendez: I’ll talk about the first bit. The raid difficulty is definitely going to be a little bit more difficult than your outdoor world content or your dungeons. We want it to be a little bit of a challenge considering that you’re going to be having to join with 10 people and jump into these new experiences. That said, our goal is not, looking at our partners on the other side of things; we’re not looking into, “Okay, are we going to have a mythic difficulty that only top guilds are able to do?” That’s not our goal. Our goal is to be a fun experience for players to come in and try it. There’s going to be also, talking about leveling, some updates on the world itself also and the levels. Well, not the levels, but the NPCs and all of the people that you’re going to be finding in the world. There’s going to be some adjustments there to take into consideration some of the runes that we’re taking, so definitely the world is going to be looking a little bit different there. And Clay can talk a little more about the end-game part of it.

Clay Stone: Sure, thank you. It’s tough to say at this point. We’ve discussed previously, what if we brought some of the changes that we brought to Season of Mastery to some of our end-game raids? When we look at changes that we might make to them, I would envision any changes that we do along those lines, but not necessarily to difficulty just yet. One of the special things throughout the life of this season is really going to be players being able to take these characters with these all-new abilities for Classic into these existing spaces and then seeing how it feels from there. Kind of as Ana mentioned, if we determine that something winds up being a complete cakewalk, then I think that we would likely want to make it a little more challenging in the spirit of Classic so that you couldn’t just go through it with a blindfold, but we’re also not interested in creating end-game content that is only accessible by 1% of the player base and that would almost feel unrecognizable to our original Classic players or our players of the Classic “era”. So there’s certainly going to be a fine balance there, but something that we are exploring as we continue development is certainly seeing how players engage with this existing content with these all new class abilities and then making tuning adjustments from there.



Aesyric (RaiderIO): Okay, great! All the answers that you both have given today have been awesome, I am very very excited, and it looks like we’re at the end now, so I just want to thank you both so much, Ana, Clayton, for taking the time to sit down with me and talk about Season of Discovery, and I cannot wait until Thursday!

Clay Stone: Neither can we! It’s so close, I can’t believe it.

Ana Resendez: I’m so excited! I just want to see everyone discovering everything and be able to talk about it! Thank you very much for joining us!

Clay Stone: Thank you for the great questions!

Aesyric (RaiderIO): Thank you for the great answers! See you next time!

---

Links

• Join Raider.IO on Discord
  
• Support Raider.IO on Patreon
  
• Follow Raider.IO on Twitter
  
• Subscribe to Raider.IO on YouTube
  
• Download the Raider.IO Client

About the Author

Editors