Stepping into the private room for our meeting with Blizzard to cover World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria, the new expansion from the World of Warcraft series, we were sat across the table from Lead Encounter Designer Ion Hazzikostas and Lead Game Producer John Lagrave. To one side mounted on the wall a flat screen played the new Mists of Pandaria cinematic playing on loop that was revealed at GamesCom.

The two began walking us through what we could be expecting in the new expansion; a level 85-90 region that introduces the new continent of Pandaria including the new Monk class and the new Pandaren race (that look like Panda bears) who first appeared in Warcraft 3. Whilst strands of the history made in Warcraft 3 will appear in game, Pandaria features a full in-depth look at this strange new world and the battle between the Horde and Alliance to claim its lands and resources for their own. However, civilization existed long before the races of Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms stumbled upon them, this ancient continent has a history of its own including an age old war between the Pandaren and the Mantids; insectoids who have been hidden for millennia behind a Great Wall which divides the continent from where they raid the peaceful Pandaren.

The new continent will include seven new zones to explore, 9 high level dungeons, 18 new Raid Bosses and 2 new World Bosses that will appear in PvP areas. For those who do like their PvP challenges Hazzikostas also revealed a new “Black Market Auction House” that will appear in an area on Pandaria, your typical Auction House but in a full PvP zone where some rare items can be bought and sold. Fully expecting that players who have made a bid on these rare items will have to fight others to stop any counter-bids from “ninja bidding” the item before the auction ends it should make an interesting addition to the Auction House system.

One of the newer features that is also exclusive to the Pandaria continent is the new “Challenge Mode” available in its dungeon instances; a race against the clock to finish an instance as quickly as possible where the quicker you finish the greater the reward. The main feature of this new mode is that regardless of the gear you have equipped if you choose to do an instance in “Challenge Mode” then your weapons and armor are normalized, in that they are scaled down and you are given set items appropriate to the instance. The reason behind this, they explained, is to do away with the huge advantage players with epic tier equipment, that for bragging rights and who can do the instance in the fastest time it will come down to player skill and team organization.

For those who like team co-op and story Pandaria brings the new “Scenarios”, a story telling mode where three players are put into short, instanced adventures and given a number of goals to achieve to successfully complete the Scenario. The Scenarios are essentially small instanced mini-quests with their own storyline which is balanced depending on the classes of the character involved, meaning that three characters of the same class are as balanced as a mixed group with the classic healer, dps and tank.

Away from Pandaria there is of course new content for those who haven’t quite reached the level requirements to take advantage of what the new continent has to offer. Plenty of new daily quests, as well as the availability of the new Monk class and Pandaren race, will be available to lower level characters. As well as this is the new Pokémon-esq “Pet Battle System” where the pets who have previously been cosmetic additions to the game are now able to do battle against other players pets and gain their own XP and level up, making them tougher and giving them new abilities. With over 200 pets to capture, trade or buy, including some rare spawns that can be found out in the wilds, we expect that this meta-game will bring lots of hours of entertainment to the players.

Following on from pets Pandaria will have flying mounts available to level 90 players; when asked why the requirement is max level Lagrave said “It marks a milestone and serves as a great reward to the player. Not only that but once a player has hit 90 [level] they don’t want to keep walking through the same areas and so can skip them, plus it opens up new content as there are some areas throughout Pandaria that you simply can’t reach without flying.”

As part of our Q&A we finally asked whether we would ever see World of Warcraft go Free-to-Play like many other MMOs have chosen to and many soon to launch MMOs are starting off as. Lagrave took the reins on this one and said “We’re happy with our current subscription method and already offer a free-to-play option up to level 20. As long as we keep providing content and people feel like it is good value, we’ll be keeping the subscriptions as they are. To try and simply change the game to a Free-to-play model would simply mean completely redesigning the game.”

World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria will be released on September 25 2012.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 22nd, 2012 at 12:22 pm and is filed under MMO News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.