World of Warcraft: Shadowlands is a shot at redemption

Sometimes those foundations feel like shackles instead of a peak to stand on, he admitted. Hazzikostas has been working on the game since 2008, when he joined as a game designer, and became director in 2016.To get more news about buy wow gear, you can visit lootwowgold official website.

"Of course there is tech debt. That’s a double edged sword, where we are in some areas beholden to decisions made 10, 15 years ago by people who couldn’t imagine the situation we find ourselves in now, or the ways in which we want to apply that technology to new systems,” he said. "But that’s why every expansion, we’re constantly going back and refreshing and updating some of our old infrastructure.”

One example Warcraft: Shadowlands brings is the new character customization system. A flood of new options will greet players, thanks to updates in the way new customizations can be designed. Those features also retroactively bring a welcome swath of personality and color to the game’s legion of lookalike NPCs.

"I think the character customization project is one of my favorite new features in Shadowlands,” Hazzikostas said. "It’s as much an achievement and a product of the artwork that has gone into it by our character artists, as it is [by] our engineers.”

In the old system, when designers added customizations, they added exponential manual work. The new systems are more modular, allowing near-infinite creativity that scales well.

"There are those sorts of examples, where we realized that we’re running into the limits of old tech choices that we made in the past. We can redo it,” he said. "We can break those limits and clear the way forward for further advancements.Hazzikostas said that one saving grace has been WoW’s painterly, brightly colored art style. Because the game never aspired to be photorealistic, it’s held up better versus its competitors than it might have otherwise. As a bonus, players can still use basic PCs.

Shadowlands will take advantage of newer graphics tech. Engineers added support for ray-tracing and ultrawide resolutions. But many workplace-style PC potatoes will still play the next expansion as well.

The team tried and rejected some other advanced technology for Shadowlands. When designing the new endless Torghast dungeon, Hazzikostas sat with the Diablo hack-‘n’-slash adventure team to explore new ways to build infinite content. Should they use procedurally generated maps? Artificial intelligence?

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