World of Warcraft is taking us to the Emerald Dream as part of the upcoming Dragonlight: Guardians of the Dream update

World of Warcraft continues to expand over the years, and this time Blizzard has prepared for the arrival of a dream zone, in this case, a literal one. As part of the upcoming 10.2 update, the champions of Azeroth will travel to the Emerald Dream, an area where they will have to unite and fight against Fyrakk, who seeks to invade the area and absorb the power of the World Tree. As usual, this update will bring new quests, inhabitants, items, and places to visit, as well as a series of public events starting with the Superbloom activity.

To understand a little more about how special this zone is for the players who make Azeroth their virtual home, we had the opportunity to sit down with Associate Design Director Maria Hamilton and Game Designer Laura Spreitzer last week to learn more about the development of this update.

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No problem if you don’t know the Emerald Dream

One of the striking aspects of World of Warcraft has always been its extensive lore. To mention the Emerald Dream is to talk about a reflection of what Azeroth is, and for many players who may not be as immersed in the mythos and history of Warcraft, it could be overlooked. In response to this, Laura Spreitzer commented on the amount of work that goes into these types of updates when there is important lore involved.

“In general I think that is something that we always keep in mind when we are writing our quests and dialogues,” commented Laura “There is always that question about if what if this is a new player who just walk-in and knows nothing about the Warcraft lore, how lost and confused are they going to be? Generally, throughout the dialogue, we sprinkle things in. We have been putting special dialogue options on important characters, like asking ‘Who are you? I wasn’t here 20 years ago, I don’t know who you are. Please tell me about yourself.’ We will continue to do that to make sure players have the context they need to understand the story and to encourage them to go and look at the history.”

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Gameplay always as a basis

Entering the Emerald Dream also promises a series of activities that will begin with Superbloom and then lead us to Superbloom, Emerald Frenzy and Emerald Bounty. In these public events, we will help Arbolón take care of the World Tree through a series of activities that are all related and themed around nature. We asked about the process of developing these types of activities.

“We knew that we wanted to focus on nature of course because we are on a dream. We knew that ‘we should do something with the tree. We should protect the tree. It’s the crux of the entire story.’ We went through a few different ideas, I think at one point we even thought about moving through the seasons and the trees experiencing accelerated growth. We have to move from that because the dream doesn’t have seasons, it doesn’t make sense, " mentioned Laura.  “We were thinking about ‘what if it moves?’ what if we go all around the tree, what if we went halfway the tree and things like that. It was a process of making it work out. We had this Ancient and we said, hey, what about if this Ancient is really sleepy? And if it’s sleepy, he should have a caretaker, and she is looking at him, and they can have this grandparent-grandchild kind of dynamic. A lot of the time we start with ‘What is the gameplay purpose we are trying to serve here.’ We know that we want players to have a public event that in some way is entitled to the Renown system and takes 15 to 20 minutes to do. I think we start at gameplay, what is the purpose that we are trying to serve, and then flavor, it’s the absolute delight.”

Guardians of the Dream will be coming to World of Warcraft: Dragonflight on November 7th.