World of Warcraft director Ion Hazzikostas says the Worldsoul Saga is letting Blizzard give its villains some much-needed character: 'Dragons are really cool, but it's hard to grasp the motivations of a being the size of a city'

World of Warcraft is entering a new era. "Even though we're entering our 20th year, it's a time when new and returning players can get in on the ground floor of a story," Ion Hazzikostas, game director for World of Warcraft, said in an interview at Gamescom with PC Gamer's Harvey Randall. The Worldsoul Saga, the three-expansion arc beginning with the imminent release of The War Within, is giving Blizzard a chance to sculpt WoW's story with a broader scope. And according to Hazzikostas, no character better embodies the new age of Warcraft storytelling than Xal'atath, WoW's latest archvillain.

High fantasy is a difficult sell without a captivating antagonist, and WoW's been struggling with its villains for years. "It's easy to underestimate—and we certainly did in the past—how much time it takes and the work that you have to do to build up a compelling new character within the trappings of an MMO," Hazzikostas said. In WoW's early history, it benefited from what Hazzikostas called "a cheat sheet of being able to draw on Warcraft 3" for the big bad guys that formed the storytelling foundations for its first expansions. By the time players were hunting Illidan across the Outlands and storming the Lich King's citadel in Northrend, they had already experienced the stories of those characters firsthand.

"You played as Arthas. You personified him for a moment. You actually controlled him through the culling of Stratholme," Hazzikostas said. "You felt a connection and an understanding through just a few hours of gameplay that's incredibly challenging to achieve in an MMO."

Once it'd expended its Warcraft 3 antiheroes, however, Blizzard struggled to make compelling characters from the archenemies that followed. As World of Warcraft lined up ever-greater threats, it left itself little room for weaving them into engaging stories. "It's an issue going all the way back to Cataclysm, actually, with Deathwing as a villain," Hazzikostas said. "Dragons are really cool, but it's hard to grasp the motivations of a being the size of a city. They can't really just stand around and talk and relate."

The clearest example of WoW stumbling over its villains is the Jailer, the antagonist of the oft-maligned Shadowlands expansion: an "inscrutable being of immense power that," Hazzikostas said, "almost by definition, needed to exist off camera." Otherwise, the Jailer would simply annihilate the player character on a whim. When your bad guy's a being who exists on such a different order of magnitude from the player that they can't share a stage, it's difficult to build any coherent character around them in the space of a single expansion's storyline. "We introduced a major villain and didn't really have the time to develop that villain," Hazzikostas said. "Before you know it, well—you defeated him, and it's over."

Xal'atath, the void entity now acting as Warcraft's archenemy, gives Blizzard a chance to more slowly explore its public enemy number one. She didn't appear out of the aether as an apocalyptic threat. While she's recently moved up in the world, players have spent years engaging with Xal'atath as a schemer operating on a smaller scale—specifically a knife-sized scale, at first. "Xal'atath is a character whose origins lie in that," Hazzikostas said, "In the compelling aspect of her personality going all the way back to Legion, where she was the artifact weapon that Shadow Priests wielded, and would whisper to you and occasionally get you into trouble."

As the concept of the Worldsoul saga started to coalesce at Blizzard, Xal'atath was "the natural and immediate pick"—a character that could grow alongside the longer-scale story World of Warcraft was setting out to tell. "We started to realize that the scope of what we wanted to do here, we couldn't do justice in a single expansion," Hazzikostas said. "And that's what got us thinking, 'Well, what if we dream a bit bigger? What if we give this some time to breathe and give us some time to let the story go where it ought to go, without needing to rush through to get to an end point on a fixed schedule?"

Being able to shape its developing story from so far in advance is a new opportunity for the World of Warcraft team. "We've always known what the next expansion was going to be, but if I'm going to be honest, two expansions ahead was unrealistic for our traditional development processes," Hazzikostas said. Now, Blizzard is able to survey the shape of its story with a broader view, giving itself a chance to build spaces where its characters will have room to develop.

"What can we do to make that make sense now?" Hazzikostas said, describing questions the World of Warcraft team is asking itself in meetings where, already, it's plotting out the Worldsoul saga's final chapters. "How can we involve them in ways that otherwise we might not have thought to do, but are going to be essential for players to know who they are when it's their turn to be in the spotlight?"

World of Warcraft: The War Within opened for early access players today. Its full release arrives next week on August 26, 2024.