One of the features I’m most excited for in World of Warcraft: Midnight by far is the ‘Prey’ system. In case you’re unfamiliar, Prey is an opt-in PvE system with three difficulty tiers where you’ll claim a target, and get targeted in turn—with said enemy being able to ambush you while you’re out in the open world and bully you into 1v1 brawls. Eventually, you’ll get to hunt them down instead.
It’s a really elegant way to add difficulty to world content: Entirely optional, keeps you on your toes, and packed with fun gameplay flavour. I got to speak with associate game director Paul Kubit and design director Maria Hamilton about the upcoming feature.
“Prey was a feature that we were talking about pretty early on, while we were building Midnight, as we ideating what could be an exciting way to get people a little bit more engaged in the outdoor world,” says Kubit.
“Then the team who were working on this really ran with it. They were the ones who took this idea ‘we really want to take this and make the outdoor world more difficult’ [and then] we wanted to add Hard mode and Nightmare mode.”
The elephant in the room—that this is a little like the still-patented Nemesis system—doesn’t escape Kubit, but he says that Blizzard more looked backwards to the kind of open world content they’ve done in the past:
“We take inspiration from from lots of games, we look a lot actually, into the history of World of Warcraft, and what modes people have enjoyed playing in the past … way back in the days of Burning Crusade up on the plateaus, where you were fighting against difficult monsters there, and other people would gather around to fight them. All these things inspired what eventually ended up becoming the Prey system.”
The more surprising tidbit, from Hamilton, was that she wasn’t entirely sold on the idea of nemesis-style foes who’d pop up to ambush you when they added them as a core part of Delves in the present expansion, The War Within.
“One of the successes we saw with Delves was the idea that there’s someone hunting you … someone you could chase down as a seasonal enemy to go after. Seeing the reaction to that, and seeing how excited people got about that, led us to ‘think, oh, people really like this gameplay. This is cool. Let’s see if we can spread it to the outdoor world.'”
And yet, Hamilton adds, “we weren’t sure how people would react to that. I was initially doubting that people would want some enemy jumping in unexpectedly like that. But it turns out people really like it. So we thought, yeah, let’s do more of that in the outdoor world.”
Given both Delves and Prey contain modular difficulty systems for solo players, I asked Kubit whether Blizzard would consider doing anything similar for other content like questing in the future—and while he said “there’s nothing like that coming in Midnight,” he adds that the team never likes to shut down possibilities for the future: “In Legion remix, there are going to be some outdoor world tiers where you’re going to see the outdoor world be scalable like that.
“We’re really looking to see how players respond to Prey. How many people are opting into that ‘I want my outdoor world to be difficult’ versus ‘No, I like to have it nice and easy’, because it’s easier for me to pick herbs when there aren’t things trying to murder me. And we’ll go from there.”
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