During Blizzcon 2016, our own interviewer dignitas Novalas met up with Jeremy Feasel, a senior designer for World of Warcraft over at Blizzard. We had a chat with him about multiple topics, including Legion and discussing it's mistakes, new features, what they plan to do with the game later on and more.

Alright, so can you describe your role for me?

Jeremy: Sure! So on Legion, my particular responsibilities were heading up the intro team, we did the Legion invasions, the Broken Shore, we killed all the major dudes as well as the endgame, worked on the world quests system, and then I also do some of the fun extre stuff like Darkmoon Faire, battle pets and hunter pets.





How long have you been at Blizzard? And have you been working on World of Warcraft that entire time?

Jeremy: 6 and a half years! I started out on the encounter design team, my very first fight was Alysrazor in Firelands, and then I've kind of just a hodge podge of random things since then.





So how do you like the shift of focus from Cataclysm to now Legion, the shift of focus being that in Cataclysm it felt like the game was very focused around hardcore raiding, then Mysts of Pandaria became a little more casual, daily quests and now we're at Legion (skipping Warlords of Draenor) and we have a plethora of everything?

Jeremy: I mean that was kind of the goal, is to be able to allow players to play how they want to play, so that you don't feel like you hit a brick wall when you hit the end game, whether you're a casual player or a hardcore player, you should have avenues to continue playing the game where you feel satisfied, where you feel like you can leave happy and come back for the next chunk of content, but at the same time we wanted to create a continuous stream of content so it always feels like there's something new for you to do.





So would you say that the team has learned fairly well from the mistakes of the previous expansions?

Jeremy: I think Legion is kind of our love letter to the fans, it was a chance for all of the dudes that were really passionate about what they were working on to get to get a chunk to work on. We split up a lot of the responsibilities, and everybody was able to take their thing to 11, which is how were able to iterate on so many systems simultaneously, everything from daily quests to professions, to raiding, Mythic plus, to new additions to the game. Our end goal being that it felt like this should be an iteration on just about everything in World of Warcraft to take another look at it and say: "What is the best game we can possibly make" rather than just making the same game over and over again.





Since then, what would your favourite part so far of Legion has been?

Jeremy: I'm a little more a casual player, and I play a lot of alts, so my favourite part has been able to drop in and drop out whilst doing world quests and getting gear for my players, whether or not I'm keeping up with my raid guild anymore. I have a 10 year old son now so I can't be a super hardcore raider anymore. But I'm able to get in there, get some items, get a legendary or two , and then maybe jump into one of the Heroic or Mythic runs, have some fun and then log off for the night.





How would you address the following statement: "The world quests in Legion are basically just a rehashed version of daily quests, but you did it in a different way" - would you say that's a correct statement or would you disagree with that?

Jeremy: Well I think that they are daily quests, but it's an iteration on daily quests. It's out ability to take just about any kind of content that would have been daily in World of Warcraft before, anything from dungeons to pet battles, to trade skills to the future of world quests, which includes things like scenarios, region-wide events, really rare events or events that take over an entire zone, and put it under a single wrapper to see what was going on in the world. So it didn't really feel like a revamp of daily quests, so much as the next iteration of it, plus what else can we throw into the system that makes it feel like the world is alive and active? And I think our three major benefits from that are that you don't see the same thing every day, it's no longer daily anymore. That you have new things happening every couple of hours, and that every day that you login the rewards are different, so how you're going to approach the world is different. And on top of that, the emissary system! So that you always have a new place to start your adventure for every day, and that the end result of that is that even a year down the line, you're not going to have the same adventure for when you login on the day.





The other thing I wanted to talk about is that class halls, they've been a concern for people in the sense that they're a really cool concept, it's amazing being able to be surrounded by everyone who plays your class, it also is amazing that you get these artifact weapons that are these super cool concepts of just having a superpowered weapon, how do you one up that though?!

Jeremy: I mean that's the challenge of being a game designer, is that in the next expansion what you do instead of class halls or artifact weapons, garrisons, whatever system in the past. Of course we can't talk about that yet, and in a lot of cases those haven't even been designed yet, but that's going to be our challenge moving into the future. What I think we have learned from what we've done this time is that order halls were a great addition on garrisons that we liked was the idea of people coming together as a single class and being able to hang out with people of their class. You're going to see more of that in patch 7.2, when all the orders come together out on the Broken Shore and push back the Legion. And putting it back out into the world there so that you can see Paladins doing Paladins things, Warlocks doing Warlock things, we feel like there's even another awesome iteration of that system, so you can really feel the other order halls as well where it may feel a little segregated right now.

Artifacts is an interesting one, because it really went back to the old talent tree's, and it felt great to level up! You were getting new things all the time, you were getting to make some choices, that as a model we really like. How that's going to be implemented in the future we're not too sure yet, but we felt like there's definitely some things we can learn from there, with regards to things like artifact knowledge and how that played out across alts, and as for how we're going to transition, we don't know yet!





What would you say is the biggest mistake the WoW team has made so far with Legion?

Jeremy: With Legion in particular? I don't think we've made any really big missteps with Legion itself, I think there were some small things which we maybe hotfixed because we felt like they weren't really an optimal experience, and of course there's things we're continuing to iterate on.

So, to give you a couple of examples of things that weren't ideal: The initial experience of Legion invasions gave you no reason to level an alt. It was actively better for you to just go into dungeons and run them all day rather than engage in this new piece of content. And even though we probably went way overboard with the XP we gave you, what we saw was huge crowds of players flying from zone to zone, and that really felt like we were defending ourselves from the Legion. We felt like that was a good decision to make given that it was a very short duration event.

Another example might be the unlock of world quests across alts. That felt very alt unfriendly, which is why we decided to change it and unlock it for all alts as soon as one person has unlocked it, same thing with the Broken Shore introduction, that it felt like you didn't want to go through it on all your alts, lets get right into the game! And I think that we're actually really happy with the reception and what we've created right now, of course there's always going to be questions to answer in the future but I don't think there's anything which is an immediately glaring issue to us, outside of probably the thing that Ian talked about yesterday, where it feels like two things, one, we may have over pruned in some cases. There are some talents that 99% of people are taking that we should bring back into the fold of the characters because it re-adds utility to them, and the other thing being secondary stat waiting, which a lot of players have seen and are feeling like getting an upgrade isn't often an upgrade for them and those are two major things we want to head up in in 7.15 and 7.2.





The other thing is that you previously said that you worked on the encounter team, with the Alysrazor being one of the fights you worked on. You said you were a casual player now, but I guess you still have some input or still look into the design decisions when it comes to the encounter team?

Jeremy: Not really, I mean I'll hop over there every once and a while just to say hi, but Morgan Day is actually the lead designer of the encounter team right now, so I try to stay out of their way. They're an awesome crew, and I think all the feedback we've heard is that raiding continues to be awesome in Legion. One of the things I think we feel like can be slightly improved on is that Emerald Nightmare was probably beaten on Mythic a little bit too quickly, so we're going to look at that in the future.





Prior to working on World of Warcraft, how long have you been playing World of Warcraft

Jeremy: I've played World of Warcraft since beta of the classic game, and I've been in the same guild since then on Tichondrius!





In the past we've had those borderline impossible raid encounters that only the worlds elite could do, for example Lich King in Wrath of the Lich King until the nerf, and then we have fights now like Emerald Nightmares encounters where they're just dying too quickly. From your perspective not as someone on the encounter team but as an overall game designed, which is preferable or are you gonna look for a healthy balance inbetween?

Jeremy: I think that's a really interesting question because ultimately the slice of the pie of all the players that play Mythic level raiding in a progression sense, not 3 months down the line but soon as it comes out, we have 18 alts that are all ready to swap in whenever the flavour of the day most powerful people are at that point, it's a very hard thing to balance for. But at the same time there's a huge amount of community involvement in race for world first, and that's super valuable, having a group to look up to that is the most amazing at PvE in WoW has created this community which is very strong, and that's absolutely something we don't want to get rid of.

We feel like community is the backbone of an MMO, so you really need to strike a balance between when that encounter comes out how difficult it is immediately (which should be pretty difficult) and if you're going to get up to Mythic, I mean you've already gone through LFR, Normal and Heroic at that point, so there's 3 other tiers for every other player to do. We feel like that plus world quests, plus having dungeons give you constant upgrades to gear really gives the casual player like me a little bit more to do on the average, it's not longer raid or die. But at the same time we have to realise there's a huge amount of value of the race for world first, and have the excitement associated with that, and it's something we need to continue doing. It's a balance, and a part of that balance is how much does the player gain power over time, when can they overcome that challenge, if it's not until, in some cases the very end of the expansion pack or beyond for example the Lich King while maybe the Emerald Nightmare is on the other side, and is a little bit more on the easy side.

If you're intested in following Jeremy Feasel on Twitter, you can do so here.