If you're at all familiar with my WoW coverage for this site, dear reader, you might know that I'm overall a fan of the MMO's new shift towards evergreen systems such as skyriding, warbands, delves, and the like—all things that could be used in future expansions to great effect and, in the case of skyriding, already have.
The new DRIVE system, at first glance, seemed like one of those—it's a bit of a madcap move, adding a ground mount to the game that allows players to literally Tokyo drift around its new GTA-style goblin map. Speaking to Ion Hazzikostas and associate design director Maria Hamilton at an event celebrating all things goblin last week, I asked how it actually came about. Did someone at a meeting just go 'let's do drifting?'
"You're not far off … We kind of had some very silly meetings at one point, laughing and joking about what would be fun in Undermine," Hamilton admits.
"We were planning out the zone, and we were talking about what we thought, how we could deliver the Undermine people have been waiting for a very long time. What would that look like? … What would those 'Mean Streets' be? And how can we make it chaotic and goblin? And that led us to drifting, believe it or not, and boosts and crazy jumps and dangerous vats of chemicals you can accidentally fall in."
If you haven't gotten a chance to do donuts on the PTR (or on the live servers, as of today), let me explain. The DRIVE system is a ground cousin to Skyriding, in that it has bespoke, momentum-based controls that allow you to zip around the map at unsafe speeds. Having messed around with it a bit myself, it's incredibly chaotic and a little hard to control—the downside of WoW gradually upping its fidelity over time being that there's now a whole lot of ground clutter to bump into.
Still, I couldn't help but wonder if DRIVE would be transplanted in some form to the real game. While you can't really make a horse drift (though I'd like to see Blizzard try), it does seem like its devs are laying the groundwork for something. The answer, as per Hazzikostkas, is yes. But also no—as of right now, Blizzard's been focusing on DRIVE working for this patch and this patch alone.
"Currently, our focus really has been on building this bespoke system for the Undermine area and making it as awesome as it can be," he says. "But of course, everything we do, the lessons learned, the engineering, the tech that we got to make handling feel better and more dynamic to enable things like drifting, we're going to think about how we can apply those tools to make just gameplay and, WoW, more broadly, fun going forward. But as far as the DRIVE system goes, that was built to be an Undermine-specific system."
Now, I'd be shocked if we didn't get some equivalent in the future—maybe different control styles for different categories of mounts—but it does surprise me a little bit to hear. Still, Blizzard has had a clear thirst for experimentation, so it's not actually too surprising when you consider the bigger picture.
Plunderstorm is a great example. I imagine a considerable amount of resources went into building a battle royale mode with Guild Wars 2-style action types—the only difference with DRIVE is that it's been worked into the fabric of the main game. And, just like with Plunderstorm, I wouldn't be shocked if Blizzard is building up a bank of technological know-how that it's going to use later. For now, my dreams of doing donuts in the Stormwind Cathedral Square (violating several civic laws) are dead in a ditch. Specifically, the one I crashed my hotrod into.
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