World of Warcraft: Civil War is coming. It’s an ambitious-looking expansion that will take players deep underground to explore previously unseen lands and cultures. But according to associate design director Maria Hamilton and lead prop artist Jordan Powers, this series of new areas is built on the foundation of one special area.
“I would say we learned from Zaralek Caverns,” Hamilton says. “We tried to make Zaralek Cavern big enough so that it didn’t feel too cramped or restricted, and we realized we needed these moments where things felt expansive and unconstrained, even when we were underground. Hollowfall is a very clear example of us doing that. You come out of the Ringing Deeps and you see this giant cavern.”
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Hamilton continued: “We’ve been preparing for this underground journey for some time. We had to make some technical improvements to be able to do it efficiently, without adding burden, but still get to the depth we wanted. Hence the Zalalek Caves! This is the first time we have had the opportunity to create a seamless layer underneath another. This is something we haven’t been able to do in the past.”
“Zalarek Cave was an opportunity for us to try out some things, but also learn how to tell interesting stories in that space and understand how big we needed to be. How high the ceiling should be and how to make it feel good to glide through that space.” […] That’s very important to us. It’s very valuable to have the opportunity to try these things, because otherwise we’d be trying them for the first time now, and that wouldn’t be good.”
The Caverns of Zalarek, an expansion released mid-way through Dragon Legion, will feel to many like a run-of-the-mill area packed with countless daily quests, rare monsters, and reputation to grind. But looking back, it does feel like an attempt at making a large, exciting underground area. Even better than Deepholm, Blizzard’s first attempt at exploring a planet’s subterranean regions, Zalarek feels like a rich new world beneath the surface, mixing some of the things you know with a lot of things you don’t.
Powers said this was a key point in designing these new areas, including the Loud Abyss. “We wanted to give players some sense of familiarity, like the cenotes and the beautiful holy light that comes down through the holes in the ceiling, illuminating these lush pools. It was important for the player to feel like you’re in this cave, that you’re still underground, to fulfill that fantasy.”
As you delve deeper into the expansion, that familiarity wears off, and perhaps reaches its apex with HollowFall, the expansion’s largest zone ever (vertically speaking), and it brings a lot of fresh ideas to the table.
“We wanted you to have a sense of limitlessness,” Hamilton said. “We built an endless underground ocean there. This ocean stretches out infinitely. When you get out of the Loud Abyss, we wanted it to expand in this way and reveal this strange place that you wouldn’t expect.”
“With Rising Abyss, we gave you something that you’d expect, with machines everywhere, some greenery scattered around, a very natural environment. And then you enter a space that you didn’t expect. I saw this at BlizzCon when people experienced it for the first time. Seeing people fly down and go ‘ooooohhhh.’ That’s the experience we wanted. Maybe, the center of the planet isn’t what you thought it was. The art team did a great job.”
