Blizzard’s World of Warcraft is entering its most ambitious era to date as the iconic MMO gets ready for the upcoming release of The War Within expansion later this year. Along with plenty of new areas to explore beneath the surface of Azeroth, TWW will have a slate of new features for players to try out with their characters, which developers worked tirelessly to accomplish.
One of their most impassioned accomplishments was the rigorous expansion of Dynamic Flight to nearly all existing and new flying mounts in the entire game. During a recent interview with World of Warcraft Production Director Michael Bybee and Senior Content Designer Sean McCann, they revealed to Twinfinite that the endeavor to expand the Dynamic Flight system, which was introduced in Dragonflight exclusively with drake mounts, actually almost didn’t happen in time for The War Within.
From a production perspective, there was a lot of anxiety about ‘Oh my gosh, how much time is that gonna take?’ We were really worried about that. And so initially it was scoped to be a much smaller set of flying mounts.
Michael Bybee
It was therefore entirely possible that The War Within would have debuted with only a handful of new Dynamic flying mounts for players to try. Alternatively, it probably would have been a more staggered release of a few mounts per major update. However, despite the trepidation with how long the process of adapting hundreds of mounts to Dynamic Flight would take, the drive to make it happen didn’t slow them down.
Production Director Michael Bybee further explained that much of that achievement goes to the team’s artists and animators, who essentially made the impossible possible in time for the debut of the Worldsoul Saga.
Honestly it was the artists and animators working on it. They were like, ‘We’re going to find a way to make this be as true as possible for as many mounts as possible’. So it’s really cool, it’s almost every flying mount in the game now will have Dynamic Flight.
Michael Bybee
Thanks to the incredible determination and efforts of the team behind The War Within, players will get to enjoy the expansion’s mystifying new areas from the saddle of any Dynamic flying mount in the game.
World of Warcraft’s The War Within is slated to release later this year and is currently available for pre-order via their official website.
