Author: Game Infliction

Gearbox Software just wrapped up its Borderlands 4 State of Play, revealing 20 minutes of new gameplay and details from its highly anticipated looter shooter.

The presentation hops right into the action with the promise that the 2025 Borderlands entry is the studio’s best and most grounded outing yet, promising major gameplay changes that range from new traversal abilities to loot drop formula changes. Gearbox managed to fill the 20-minute showcase with reveals about how Borderlands 4 ups the ante with new mechanics and refreshed existing features, and we’ve got all the highlights right here.

Movement Abilities

Every Borderlands title updates its traversal mechanics in new ways, and Borderlands 4 looks to be no different. We’ve seen hints of some of the new looter-shooter tools players will have at their disposal when its release date rolls around this September, but today’s gameplay footage gave us a clearer look at what’s to come.

Vault hunters can take advantage of a very Destiny-like midair hover this time around, giving players the freedom to shoot while airborne or reach faraway ledges. There’s also a grappling hook that can be used for both combat and exploration, as well as a dash for those last-second dodges. Vehicles, of course, continue to be a major component in Borderlands 4, too, and this time around, it appears we’ll have the freedom to spawn our rides, including the new Digirunner, wherever we please.

Guns and Manufacturers

We’ve gotten a taste of the new Vault Hunter traversal mechanics in previous showcases, but today’s State of Play really put the gun manufacturers in the spotlight. There’s a total of eight companies supplying players’ adventure this time around, meaning three new ones – Order, Ripper, and Daedalus – will be behind some of Borderlands 4’s new toys.

Like the other returning manufacturers, each newcomer features unique weapon designs and abilities. Borderlands 4 is taking things one step further, however, by introducing a new spin on its existing gun mechanics: the Licensed Parts System. Gun can now be comprised of a variety of different parts from different manufacturers, meaning you can find an assault rifle with elemental components developed by Maliwan, an ammo clip made by Torgue, and a shield from Hyperion. Higher rarity weapons come with more parts, making that quest for big loot drops more crucial than ever.

Story

The Borderlands 4 State of Play follows two Vault Hunters: Vex the Siren and an exosuit-wearing former Tediore soldier named Rafa. The former playable character uses Siren abilities to conjure beings to help in battle, while the latter builds tools like Ark Knives to tear enemies apart on the fly. Today’s gameplay sees the duo fighting through cold, open arenas throughout the Terminus Range, one of four zones to explore on the planet Kairos.

Borderlands 4 will follow the series’ trend of running into old faces while introducing new ones. Some familiar names that showed up during today’s State of Play include Moxxi, Zane, Amara, and, of course, Claptrap, though there were also a few hints that we might learn more about Lilith, too. New characters include a towering, armored individual named Rush and a helpful robot named Echo 4. The handy robot companion will follow players for the duration of Borderlands 4, aiding with exploration by scanning environments, hacking, and leading lost Vault Hunters to their next objective.

Multiplayer

Borderlands 4 players will be happy to hear Gearbox has made an attempt to streamline the co-op process this time around. In addition to what it calls “an improved lobby system,” it should be easier to join up with friends at a moment’s notice. Crossplay will be available at launch, too, with all loot instanced for each player and dynamic level scaling meaning you’ll have freedom with friends on any platform.

Customization within your parties goes even further, as Gearbox has implemented a feature that allows everyone to have their own difficulty settings separate from one another. Making the journey with friends easier is split screen couch co-op, which will be available at launch, as well as an addition that allows players to fast travel to their buddies if someone gets lost.

Borderlands 4 also features a lower chance for Legendary loot drops, dense new skill trees, and so much more. Rep Kit gear will have players choosing between a quick revive and temporary combat buff, while Ordnances give fans the option to fill a cooldown weapons slot with either grenades or unique heavy weapons. There’s also Enhancements, which replace Artifacts in favor of gifting bonuses to guns from specific manufacturers.

Borderlands 4 recently moved up its PC via the Epic Games Store, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X | S release date 11 days from September 23 to September 12. A Nintendo Switch 2 version is due out at an unspecified point later in the year, too.

Despite speculation from fans, Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford says the scheduled shake up has nothing to do with the long-awaited release date of Take-Two Interactive’s Grand Theft Auto 6. Expect to learn more about Borderlands 4 as we wait for Gearbox to reveal more about its upcoming hands-on gameplay event in June.

Michael Cripe is a freelance contributor with IGN. He’s best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP. Be sure to give him a follow on Bluesky (@mikecripe.bsky.social) and Twitter (@MikeCripe).

With the so many different reasons to celebrate Star Wars sprinkled throughout the year, there’s never a wrong time to shop for Star Wars merch. If you’re a fan of the franchise or know someone else that is, we’re here to make your Star Wars gift shopping a lot easier.

We’ve assembled a list of some of the best Star Wars gifts we’ve found online, from books and Blu-rays to video games, shirts, and LEGO gift sets. So, without further ado, here are some of the best ways to bring a galaxy far, far away into your home.

Star Wars Gifts for Gamers

Best Gifts for Fans of the Books

Gifts for Fans of the Movies and TV Shows

Gifts for Adult LEGO Fans

Star Wars Gifts For Board Game Fans

Gifts for Puzzlers

Apparel and Accessory Gifts

Gifts For The Home

Warning: this article contains spoilers for TMNT: The Last Ronin II – Re-Evolution #5!

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin has always been a particularly dark and tragic take on the TMNT franchise. After all, this saga started in a futuristic world where Michelangelo was the sole surviving member of the Turtle family, a lone hero pursuing one final quest of revenge. The original series ended on a hopeful note, with the birth of a new generation of Turtles, but even that birth was countered by Michelangelo’s death.

It’s pretty clear from reading The Last Ronin II finale that this story isn’t done yet. To find out more about the tragic but heroic sacrifice of April and what might lie in store in The Last Ronin III, IGN spoke with writers Kevin Eastman and Tom Waltz. Read on to learn more about the grim new direction for this popular TMNT spinoff.

Pushing The Ronin-Verse Forward

Before we get to issue #5’s big death, it’s worth taking a step back to look at The Last Ronin II as a whole. There’s been a noticeable tonal and stylistic shift in this sequel. The original series depicted its futuristic version of New York as a classic cyberpunk dystopia straight out of Blade Runner or Akira. But with the death of Oroku Hiroto and the dawn of a more hopeful era, the series has shifted to a more grounded take on the Big Apple. The Last Ronin II shows us more of what it’s like to actually live in this uneasy future environment, and that was definitely intentional.

“I thought it was a little Star Wars-esque, in the sense that if you go from the New Hope era to the Abrams era, this idea that at the end of Return of the Jedi we feel like there’s been a victory. And to a certain extent there was a victory. But if you don’t take care of things, things can fall out of control again,” Waltz tells IGN. “And I think that was kind of our story here. Yeah, they had beaten the Foot Clan and they had beaten Hiroto, but what was the plan after that? It almost felt like things will go back to normal, but what is normal? The police were corrupt before, they’re going to be probably corrupt now. There were three gangs before, now they’re probably going to feel more empowered, the Foot Clan’s out of the way.”

And I always think, power, when there’s nobody in charge that invites, it creates a vacuum of power. Somebody’s going to fill that vacuum. And that was kind of the overarching story we were trying to tell was, who was going to be the first one to take control of the city?

“When we designed The Last Ronin I, it was the end,” Eastmas says. “It was like, the final triumph, the final battle, the blood feud has ended, all these things that have been accomplished through these incredibly insurmountable epic terms that’s like, ‘Okay, here is an ending, boom.’ Tom and I both loved the Ronin-verse, so when it came time people said, ‘Well, what would you do with a continuation of the series?’ And so we had a lot of conversations. And we dug deep and said, ‘Well, alright, we need to find, most importantly, what is that purpose?’ And that was the driving force for Last Ronin Re-Evolution, for sure, finding that purpose.”

There’s an obvious question many fans ask themselves when reading The Last Ronin – in what universe is this story taking place? Is The Last Ronin meant to be a continuation of the original Mirage Comics TMNT universe, or maybe the current IDW TMNT-verse? Is it a sequel to the cartoon series?

The Last Ronin II only further highlights that question because one issue delivers a specific callback to an issue from the original Mirage run, as April recounts her ordeal when she and the original Turtles fled New York for the safety of her father’s country house. Should fans take that as confirmation that The Last Ronin is a Mirage-verse story? Not necessarily. Waltz and Eastman make it clear that the Ronin-verse is still its own thing, and it’s intentionally left up to the reader as far as how the continuity works.

“When we approached Last Ronin, we both said, ‘Look, we have all these Turtle universes, let’s make this our Dark Knight universe. Let’s touch on a few of the other universes, but mainly lean heavily into the Mirage universe.’” Eastman says. “So we dismissed Bebop, and Rocksteady, and Mutants, and that kind of stuff. So this story was one unto itself, and it created a happy space that we didn’t have to stick with storylines, or logic, or history, or just different things that Tom had set up. Again, we’re talking about, when he wrote a hundred issues, that’s like 10 years, almost 11 years of stuff.”

“Yeah, I call it Mirage-adjacent. It’s the dimension right next door to the project,” Waltz adds. “I think what Kevin and I realized early on, I think early on we were looking at Mirage, specifically. And we knew we were veering off that course when Karai became Shredder’s daughter, as part of this story. But it worked better for the story. And so in the Mirage universe, that wasn’t the case. And so we said, ‘Well, that’s different. That’s a little bit of a retcon right here.’”

Waltz continues, “And then at that point, we started saying the term Ronin-verse. I think we’re creating our own universe here, but I call it very Mirage-adjacent. The Dark Knight Returns, for me, works so well, because if somebody really wants to say, ‘It’s Adam West’s future,’ it could be Adam West’s future, because all the basic elements are there for a Batman story… I think it works so well in a generic sense, because there’s just certain elements of Turtles that you have to hit, and everybody knows those things by now. Most people know what those things are, where they come from, that you can write this kind of story and let people fill in the blanks as they want.”

April’s Heroic Sacrifice

The Last Ronin II has certainly added new layers to April O’Neil as a character. She’s become the figurehead of an underground resistance movement and a grandmother figure to the new Turtles. At the same time, the series has cast April in a somewhat darker light, revealing her hidden intentions in creating the new generation of Turtles and how she effectively played god by giving them each superhuman abilities.

Ultimately, though, April is given a heroic death in issue #5, as she goes out in a blaze of glory fighting the Purple Dragons gang. As Eastman and Waltz explain, April’s whirlwind journey in the sequel was all about serving their larger goals with The Last Ronin saga. This series needed to end with the last bastion of the original TMNT generation handing the baton to the new generation.

“What we wanted to say in The Last Ronin II: Re-Evolution covered almost this very important, I want to say chaotic, but also very trying time for the family,” Eastmas says. “April’s decision to create these characters, was it necessary? Was it important? Was it specific? Was it something that she missed about the original Turtles? Was something that she was trying to create something that was the potential future protectors of New York City? As the foundation of the superhero concept that we love so much, not only with the original Turtles, but then finding their purpose.”

Eastman continues, “So what happens in The Last Ronin II is, of course, the unfortunate, but very critical, story concept of April passing. It really is handing the torch to a new generation that we wanted to make very specific. So she’s kind of the last of the original series, last of Casey, last of Turtles, last of Splinter, last of everything. So that is officially handing the torch to the new Turtles, much like we did with Last Ronin I, which was having each of the Turtles have a specific, and very significant, and very important demise in that series, that transitions into a much bigger picture.”

“It’s not only the end of the family side of things, when you think of Casey, and April, and Michelangelo, and the rest of the Turtles, and Splinter, but it’s also end of the old enemies, because that’s really the demise of the Purple Dragons,” Waltz says. “And so I felt like April settled some unfinished business, in a sense, in her final act, by taking out a threat that, all the way back to The Lost Years, she knew was posed to her family with Jigsaw and the Purple Dragons.”

Waltz continues, “This moment became even bigger than I thought it would be, before we got to it, because all the pieces were there, and it came together, and it was just a matter of putting words in their mouths and actions in their hands. And I had a hard time writing it. It was hard to write that with April. I like April, as a character across all iterations, very much. She’s one of my favorite characters. But like Kevin said, it was time. All this work she’s done, and the Turtles before, now what is the payoff? Will these kids be able to continue forward successfully? Was it worth it or wasn’t it? And that’s the story that’s yet to be told.”

The Last Ronin III and Beyond

As Waltz alludes above, this clearly isn’t the end of the overarching Last Ronin storyline, given that this series effectively ends on a cliffhanger. No sooner do the Turtles and Casey Marie mourn April’s death than we learn the Resistance was betrayed by one of its own. Their ally Jiro is secretly allied with the Foot Clan, an organization that has survived the deaths of both Shredder and his grandson and is now seeking to reclaim its hold on New York.

Ubisoft has outlined its plans for the first year of post-launch content for Assassin’s Creed Shadows, including promises to add features like new game+, more difficulty settings, additional story content, and more.

The Assassin’s Creed company detailed all of its plans for 2025 in a four-and-a-half-minute roadmap update video published today. It’s a brief but enlightening video with a specific schedule for May and June as the team behind the latest stealth-action entry plots out how it will keep fans coming back with free updates throughout the year.

Blizzard is preparing to add a new feature to World of Warcraft that might sound strange at first: an option to have the game tell you what spell you should optimally cast next in combat, with an additional option to simply let the game cast the ideal next spell for you.

Today, in a lengthy video interview between game director Ion Hazzikostas, Team Liquid raid leader Maximum, and content creator Dratnos, it was announced that the upcoming World of Warcraft patch 11.1.7 a new feature will be added called Rotation Assist. Rotation Assist, when turned on, will highlight in combat the recommended next ability for your character to use based on class, specialization, and the combat situation.

Additionally, the feature will come with an optional “one button” option that will allow a player to simply press one button to automatically cast whichever spell the game is recommending cast next. However, there’s a penalty for using the one-button option – it will add an additional small amount of time to the global cooldown, meaning players using the single button option will overall cast spells slower and deal less damage than someone playing manually.

In the video, Hazzikostas explains that the new feature is based on the popular add-on Hekili, which similarly recommends optional next spells to cast but does not provide a one-button rotation. As Hazzikostas explains:

“Add-ons are amazing. The things that the community has done over the last 20 years to allow people to experience different aesthetics, different functionality, have information available at their fingertips like that is a huge part of WoW’s success. And we don’t question or want to undermine that for a moment. At the same time, ideally…if you ask people you know, ‘hey, how can I get better? I’m really struggling at this.’ The first answer shouldn’t be, ‘Well download this add-on, this add-on, this add-on. Otherwise you’re doing it wrong.’ Because that’s starting to get into that mandatory place, whether we like it or not.”

Hazzikostas goes on to explain that long-term, Blizzard is thinking more deeply about the role of add-ons in World of Warcraft and how for players wanting to participate in competitive content, many of them have essentially become mandatory. The team, he says, wants to move away from that philosophy, and is thinking down the line about improvements that can be made to World of Warcraft’s class design, boss encounter design, and UI that will ensure the functions players feel are necessary from add-ons are built-in natively.

And though Hazzikostas says they’re never going to simply ban add-ons outright, once the team feels their objectives around reducing the necessity of add-ons are accomplished, he wants to “rein in” some of the functionality of add-ons around “real time in combat problem solving, specifically where like automating, coordination, communication, in ways that are always going to be better than anything the UI could natively provide you, as long as they remain possible.”

If you’re not sure what Hazzikostas is talking about, these changes likely won’t impact you. But as he, Maximum, and Dratnos discuss in the video, high-level raiders have frequently felt the need to rely on add-ons such as WeakAuras that allow players to essentially build custom tools to solve difficult raid encounters in real-time, such as telling them where exactly to stand or assigning them groups on the fly. And while this might feel like cheating if you’ve never experienced it firsthand, Hazzikostas is candid in the video that some of the team’s raid encounter design decisions may have pushed players in that direction by being a bit too difficult to figure out sans add-ons. “The way we design encounters has been influenced in significant ways, by the way players use add-ons,” he says. “I know you know the community sometimes speculates that [certain encounters were] built clearly to require an add on. I can’t say that’s never the case.”

Hazzikostas goes on to explain that while encounter designers are never specifically designing mechanics with the intent for players to create add-ons to solve them, when players inevitably do so in testing, they have historically seen feedback from playtesters using add-ons complaining that the fight was too easy. But instead of redesigning the encounter to make the add-ons unusable and reinstate the intended difficulty, they have simply added more mechanics. “I think that’s not a great place for things to land,” he says.

You can watch the full 45-minute video here, but we also spoke directly to Hazzikostas to ask him questions about both the upcoming new Rotation Helper feature and the developers’ intentions for future add-on restrictions and interactions. Our full interview is posted below, lightly edited for brevity and clarity:

IGN: I think you talked around this a little bit in the video. But is it your opinion that it’s essentially become mandatory to have add-ons to play WoW at anything above a basic questing level at this stage?

Ion Hazzikostas: I don’t know that I would go that far, but certainly it’s been something that’s been part of community trends over time, where players are clever. When you give them a very versatile toolbox, they will make more and more clever and more and more powerful things. And when it gets to competitive content, trying to defeat challenging raid bosses, trying to clear the highest Mythic+ keys that you can or PvP at a competitive level, every advantage helps. And while certainly people can and do play the game without using add-ons and succeed, I think most players at a high level, including Max[imum] and Dratnos, and I was talking to them in this , agree that you are at a disadvantage if you’re not using some of these tools.

And in social content, if you’re in a raid group, if you’re part of a group that’s running Mythic+, there’s an expectation that it doesn’t matter how you personally want to play. If everyone requires that you use this tool, then you feel like you have to. And on the one hand, while the legacy of add-ons over the course of 20 years of World of Warcraft is an amazing part of how the game has grown and evolved, I think looking at a world where someone is told that they need to use an external third-party tool if they want to play the game the way that they prefer, that’s not healthy, we think.

And so, that’s the question of, how do we tackle that really has begun with us trying to look at building up the native functionality of the game’s UI, of the game’s systems, of how we’re presenting information, not just through the user interface, but also things like visual effects and how we’re telegraphing the clarity of different boss mechanics or class mechanics or the like.

I know this is something you’ve probably thought about for a very long time, but was there any moment or any particular raid boss or something that made you go, “Okay, we actually need to address this.”?

Hazzikostas: Honestly, I don’t know that I can pick out a single thing. I mean, I think there have definitely been occasions over the years. This is not the first time that the World of Warcraft team has waded into this space. I mean, even before I worked on the team going way, way, way back, like 20 years ago, literally in vanilla World of Warcraft, add-ons could do very powerful things like automating targeting. People who raided in the early days of Molten Core, right? If you played back then, you probably had Decursive if you were a healer. And you would just push a button, and it would automatically, intelligently dispel someone in your group who needed dispelling.

And the team looked at this at the time and was like, “This feels like it’s actually kind of undermining some of the core gameplay of the game. Let’s restrict this functionality. But also, let’s continue to improve our built-in raid frames. Let’s continue to improve these things.” And so, I think there’s been an ebb and flow there over the years. But I think increasingly, when I’m just reading through community discussions on our official forums, on Reddit, wherever, and it’s very common to see people ask like, “Hey, I need help improving. I’m trying to play Mage really well. I’m trying to play Rogue well and it feels like I just can’t compete with other people.” The first question that they get asked is, “Well, what add-ons are you using? What’s your weak core configuration?” Not, “What is your rotation? What is your talent build? What decisions are you making?” It’s like, “What tools do you have?” That’s not healthy. It’s a barrier to approachability.

And so, again, the path here is not to… Really, just to try to narrow that gap by improving the baseline functionality that our game is providing, and really focus in any long-term efforts in terms of what we might limit or restrict on just that narrow sliver of combat functionality stuff.

And that’s why we’ve tried to make it super clear here. We have no intent of touching anyone’s RP add-ons, world informational helpers, accessibility tools, gathering assist. Any of that stuff is great. It really is just a question of like, how do we improve the information that our default UIs giving combat-wise? And then once we’ve gotten 90% of the way there, what do we do about that last mile or so that includes functionality that feels like it wouldn’t really make sense to come from our UI? Like things that are solving a raid mechanic for you and telling players where to run, that’s kind of the point of the gameplay itself.

We want to provide information, make it clear how you’re supposed to tackle the problem. But at the end of the day, it should be up to the raid group to figure that out for themselves.

Obviously you always want to improve your UI and improve your boss encounters. But as far as adding stuff like a WoW internal version of Hekili. You talked in the video a little bit about looking at maybe doing in-house damage meters at some point or other things like that that are currently solved by add-ons. Why not just continue letting the community handle that level of stuff? Is there any concern that if you try to start doing the job of modders, you’re going to need a lot more time and resources when currently you’ve got basically crowdsourced problem solving?

Hazzikostas: To some extent, so I think, yes, it’s taking on more responsibility for the team. But I’d argue that this is responsibility that we really should’ve been shouldering for a while now. And I think the community at times has said that add-ons are solving problems in our games design, and I think sometimes they’re right. Sometimes there are places where a class mechanic or a talent really is asking a player to do something that the game isn’t natively giving them the tools to do correctly, like tracking stacks of a buff and making decisions on the fly based on how many stacks you happen to have based on some proc that triggered.

That’s not a reasonable in-the-moment computation for a human, but add-ons streamline and simplify that. Similarly, when something isn’t clear in an encounter, when a visual effect is not clear, but someone has an air horn that’s telling them when they’re standing in something to make up for a lack of clarity in our VFX, that’s a completely reasonable criticism. And if some of this means that we need to do extra work to fix issues, honestly I think that’s in players’ interest and something we should’ve been doing all along.

And again, to be clear, we’re not looking to, in any way, marginalize or push aside our wonderful add-on author community. Step one here and step two and step three involve nothing about restricting any sort of add-on functionality. They’re just continuing to build up our alternative solutions, give players a chance to give us feedback on those, understand what more they would need to do, what more would need to change for those to feel like they’re sufficient.

And then when we get to the end of that road, eventually restrict some things. Because again, that part is required, I think, in order to solve the problem of joining a group and being told you have to download this or use this week or whatever. Again, when there’s an open-ended toolbox, players are always going to try to computationally solve the challenges we put in front of them. And of course, people are going to use every advantage that’s at their disposal. That’s just the nature of competitive players

…Another aspect is there are tons and tons of players, even setting aside accessibility concerns that may limit someone’s ability to do a mechanically intensive rotation. There are many people who, honestly, combat is not what they enjoy most about WoW. Mastering and optimizing how to use all 20 of their abilities in sequence to maximize their damage is not what’s fun. It’s immersion, exploring, collecting, doing all these other things. And the mechanics of the game are sometimes an obstacle to enjoying the parts that many players want to embrace. And so, I think offering just a baseline way of opting out of that complexity is something that, I think, will be welcome to many players. It’s the same way, when we changed our talent system in Dragon Flight. We offered just a default starter spec.

If you didn’t want to deal with optimizing and placing all your points, you could just use our preset loadout for yourself and focus on the parts of the game you enjoy. At the end of the day, this is about giving players more options and more customization. It’s also an example of how, in some of our sort of built-in solutions, we can do things that add-ons couldn’t. Hekili obviously can highlight the next buttons for you, but it can’t actually automatically pick which ability to cast based on a single key bind, whereas our solution is able to do that.

Have you spoken to the Hekili folks at all? Do they have an opinion on this?

Hazzikostas: Personally, not yet. I know that our UI team, and particularly the engineers on our UI team, have close communications with our add-on author community. A lot of bug reports and updates and things go back and forth. They’re usually trying to keep them up-to-date on any changes we’re making to the APIs, so they’re not caught off guard. So I think that’s going to be part of this conversation going forward for sure. And I think we understand that when we offer a solution ourselves, it’s not going to be as deeply and fully customizable as add-ons for power users are.

And so, our goal is not to kind of subsume, like take over a space entirely, but rather offer a strong baseline solution to something while still leaving add-ons as a space for people who want cosmetic customization. They want to tweak the display of the information even more than what the base UI allows. And also, again, it’s a chance for us to get feedback on the nature of those gaps, so we can try to offer as much of what our players want as possible.

As far as the functionality of this thing goes, how reactive is it to different types of builds? When I play, I have set up builds for a single target spec, a single target with cleave, a multi-target Mythic dungeon, a Delve loadout. And with Undermine right now, there are a lot of fights where I’m using my single target rating build mainly, but there are also moments in the same fight where I have to switch to cleave damage or something like that. And so, I’m curious how adaptive this tool is going to be towards what sort of build you’re running and what sort of things you might want to do in the moment in a fight.

Hazzikostas: So I think that’s going to vary a little bit by specialization. I’d love to say that we have every possible permutation that someone might spec into accounted for, but we don’t. And we’re going to get feedback on that. Some of that will simply be a bug or something we overlooked. But the system itself is designed to be very versatile and something that our team can continue to update over time. It is looking at what talents you currently have, but it’s also making recommendations situationally based on your current available resources, whether there’s one enemy in front of you or four enemies in front of you, so you don’t need a separate preset loadout of dungeon versus raid.

It will recommend an AOE ability if it’s going to hit five targets or a single target ability if there’s only one boss in front of you. And again, the goal here is, not absolute perfection. There’s certainly all sorts of little sneaky min-max tricks that players have optimizing for movement and things that the system can’t know about. But the goal is really to be something that helps if you’re trying to learn a new spec or if you’re just trying to, like you’re trying to learn an encounter and you don’t want to put too much of your bandwidth into thinking about your rotation for a bit. The same way people use many of these add-ons, we think this will be a very helpful tool for just approachability of spec gameplay and just trying to raise the skill floor in the game.

Especially with the one button option, is there any worry that it might inadvertently have the opposite effect where you’ve got people joining up into a normal or heroic group through Group Finder, and then just sort of closing their eyes and hitting the button, and then pissing off a raid leader or something. I can hear the comments coming in now.

Hazzikostas: I mean, honestly, frankly, for some folks who may struggle with their rotations currently who haven’t really kind of grasped how they’re supposed to build, spend their resources, and use their different tools situationally, I think even the one-button rotation will be an improvement. Certainly, it will allow them to focus on mechanics and focus on other parts of something that they’re doing. I think we’ve crafted that. It has a small penalty that’s incurred to the global cooldown when you use it, to make sure that… It’s never the best way to play.

We definitely don’t want a world where a raid group is failing to meet some damage check, and the raid leader tells all other players, “Stop trying to play your class. Just turn on this one button thing and that’s going to be the right way.” But as just a simple baseline, that should be adequate for solo gameplay, for outdoor questing, for raid finder, things along those lines, this should be more than sufficient and allow people to just focus their attention on other parts of the game that they find more engaging.

Do you think that raiding has gotten harder over the years?

Hazzikostas: Yes. I think that it has gotten more involved, more complex. I think that our targets for how many attempts we wanted to take to defeat a certain raid boss at a certain difficulty haven’t changed, right? In that sense, we may think, “Okay. On heroic mode, the final boss should take 20 or 30 attempts. It should take a few hours for a group to beat for the first time.” That’s true today. That was true 10 years ago. Now the thing is, players on average have gotten better, as is the case in any game, right? Whether it’s a PvP game, otherwise. I mean, it’s easiest to see in PvP games where someone maybe has stepped away from their favorite MOBA, or Overwatch, or whatever and they used to be a platinum player. Then, they come back and they’re like, “Oh, wow. Everyone is so much better now.”

And that’s the same phenomenon that we’ve been working through in our dungeon and raid gameplay. We do have to offer novel looks at things. We have to throw a couple more mechanics in the mix to provide the same level of relative challenge that we used to be able to do with less, right? Going all the way back to Classic, you could see clearest-cut example of bosses that seemed impossible, that took groups literally months to defeat that now look simpler than a common dungeon boss, and that modern players without prior knowledge go in and steamroll in classic versions of the game. That’s just how the player base has evolved.

You’ve also designed things differently too in that regard, right? Raiding with 40 people was much harder just purely on a communications level. If you want to provide challenge when we have fewer people, you have to make things harder in different ways.

Hazzikostas: I think that’s certainly part of it. I think another factor is… I think this is something that was touched on in the conversation with Max and Dratnos. We never design things with the intent that add-ons are going to solve them, but we also can’t be ignorant of what add-ons are capable of doing. And if we have a fun idea for something that might be a fun mechanic, that might’ve been done years and years ago in terms of a raid-wide coordination challenge, the puzzle that you have to solve as part of your group, we know that someone’s just going to make a WeakAura that solves it for you. The raid leader’s going to pre-type everyone’s name into it before they’ve even pulled the boss once, and that mechanic is not going to play out the way we wanted it to.

And so we’re probably just not going to make that mechanic period. And so instead, I think we have probably over time skewed more and more towards testing skills in players that add-ons can’t trivialize, things like just reaction time, getting out of a lot of stuff that’s under your feet, rapid movement, twitch reactions, things on that level. And I think while that’s a niche that should exist in WoW encounters, I don’t think it’s healthy for the game. And I think players agree for all encounters to be like that. I think if you’re a raider in the World of Warcraft today, here’s a challenge. Try to count the number of bosses that aren’t at some point putting a swirly under your feet that you have a couple seconds to move out of. Good luck. It’s basically all of them. I would love for the game to just have more variety in the challenges that it’s posing to players. And I think that eventually when we get there, being able to restrict a couple of aspects of what add-ons can do today, I think will open up a very fertile design space and allow for encounters that are equally challenging in terms of how many hours they’re going to take your group to learn and to beat, but that put that challenge in different places that are, hopefully, a bit simpler and more engaging.

Is this something you have already been slowly trying to implement as far as Undermine goes? Are we already subtly seeing changes to encounters to move in the direction of that philosophy?

Hazzikostas: A bit. Yes. I think that we’ve gotten feedback from the community on Liberation of Undermine. But I think there are fewer fights in this tier than in previous tiers that feel like they were solved by an add-on, that they really almost required one. There were encounters in past tiers like Broodtwister or the like that made people feel like, “Okay, we don’t know how to do this without using an external tool.” And we are consciously trying to steer away from that. Another example of a way that we’ve continued to improve things in our Undermine update earlier this year, one of the changes we made was really revamping a lot of our spell visuals for increased clarity.

Ultimately, I think philosophically for years we had often said, “Okay, we want these things not to feel too gamey.” We want them to feel a little bit like chaotic fire or whatever. And ultimately, just kind of accepted that that’s not in the best interests of gameplay and readability. And let’s get some hard edges on things and let’s make it really clear cut when you are or aren’t standing in something. And even things like that can instantly help players to be able to just jump into an encounter and feel like they know what they should be doing as opposed to needing assistance to let them know what’s safe versus what isn’t.

Long-term, how soon should we expect some of these bigger changes to what types of add-ons you will and won’t allow? Is this a next raid tier kind of thing, a next expansion kind of thing?

Hazzikostas: Yeah, so I think there’s no specific date in mind. It’s more kind of kicking off a conversation and signaling a general trajectory, a heading. I think we know we have a bunch of work to do. I wanted to kind of put into context some of the changes that players have seen that feel like probably like a departure from past practice, like the cooldown manager that we added as a first iteration of helping to track your own abilities and cooldowns in our most recent 11.1.5 update.

Of course, this combat assist coming in 11.1.7, and more things that will follow. I think we know that before we reach an eventual endpoint of limiting the ability of add-ons specifically to parse real-time combat events, we’ll need to have our own solution for a customizable damage meter for things like encounter boss timers, letting you know when an ability is coming next and how far away it is. Things that players have relied on add-ons based on real-time combat information for a long time.

Our intent is not to suddenly just break things and leave players in the lurch. We want to build up a solid foundation. And then, when the community feels and we all collectively feel like we’re ready for that next step, we think it’s one that the community will hopefully embrace and be for the good of the game in the long run, making things more approachable while keeping the full array of informational and cosmetic customization that add-ons have always offered.

Do you expect that long-term, your changes to design are going to dramatically change the flavor of any classes or specs? I know you were talking in the video a little bit about Outlaw Rogue – I don’t play Rogue, but you suggested it was maybe perhaps a little too complex.

Hazzikostas: Honestly, I don’t think it will dramatically change the flavor. No. I think there are certain mechanics that will need to be revisited. Outlaw Rogue is a fun spec, but it’s one that I pick on for these purposes. Because if you go look up a guide for playing Outlaw Rogue, you’ll see that there’s some situations where it’s like, if you have more than 60 energy, and the cooldown of this ability is less than 12 seconds, then do this. And it’s like, “Come on.” There’s no way that anyone is going to parse that in real time without just having a way forward that pops up and tells you, “Okay, push this button now.” And those are the sorts of things where it’s like, “Is that fun? Is that part of the flavor of the spec really?” What could an alternative implementation of that sort of general vibe based around the idea of re-entering stealth and unleashing your attacks and combat as a rogue? How can we realize that without leaning on something so intricate and mechanically intensive?

Have you looked at all at what Final Fantasy 14 has done in terms of how much they restrict add-ons? They restrict them pretty heavily and always have. How do you look at what they’ve done and how it’s impacted the flavor and the type of game that they have over there?

Hazzikostas: I think it’s their decisions made at the start that inevitably affects how things evolve. There’s certainly a lot more control that you have as a designer of understanding exactly what information your players are going to have at their disposal, what tools they have at their disposal to overcome an encounter? And so, you can design in that world for everybody in a more level playing field, or as we have to accept that people will have a bunch of different ways of looking at or processing things.

But that’s part of how World of Warcraft has evolved. I think that we want to be very narrow and surgical in these restrictions, and they’re not terribly different from things we’ve done over the years in the past. Years ago, add-ons could draw things in the 3D game space, and that was something the team looked at and was like, “No, this is clearly too far.” That’s not a thing that add-ons should be able to do, and that functionality was restricted, and players evolved, and the game moved on. There’s an alternate world where if the team had never done that, if 15 years ago the team in Wrath had said, “Yeah, this seems fine.” Today, every encounter you go into would be full of these virtual 3D markers that are telling you exactly where to run and stand, and that would be how people played the game. And so, it’s like having this powerful ecosystem.

It’s tremendously empowering to players, but it also requires vigilance on our part as developers to ensure that we’re kind of preserving the integrity of the game and giving people a level playing field. Where if you just install World of Warcraft and you want to play the game and experience what it has to offer, it really it is our obligation that the out-of-the-box experience should be sufficient. And if it’s not, that’s a problem we need to work on solving.

Is there any concern that it’s sort of a one button rotation is going to lead to people doing annoying exploits? Going into LFR or basically AFKing or something like really causing issues with it?

Hazzikostas: I hope not. Honestly, you’ve been able to go in and try to fly under the radar and just auto attack. Those are situations that have happened in groups for a long time, whether it’s non-participation in Battlegrounds or just trying to coast and leech off a group. But I think most players when they’re sitting down to play World of Warcraft or looking to play World of Warcraft and accomplish some goals, and I think that’s always going to be, we want to design in the interest of the majority. And we have tools, whether it’s reporting or other measures to make sure that people aren’t disrupting other people’s gameplay or being toxic.

So you said that you’re not looking to mess around with people’s quest add-ons and stuff. But you’d also talked about wanting to build in-house tools like damage meters and stuff like that. Would you ever consider doing more internal stuff that is based off add-ons that people use for stuff that is outside of combat? Pet battling, auction house stuff, professions, anything like that?

Hazzikostas: I mean, I think absolutely and that’s stuff that we continue… We’re definitely inspired by the sorts of tools that the players turn to for outdoor world game plan for convenience as we look to continue to just make the game more approachable. I mean, things like, this has been several years now, but in the world of 3D navigational marker when you have a quest tracked or some objective tracked is something that in the past people would use an add-on to do for them to add kind of wayfinding support. That just felt like a more modern way of doing it than asking you to constantly pop open your 2D map to see where you were headed. So we added something like that. We’re going to continue improving all of that functionality. I don’t think there’s any world though where we’re going to restrict what add-ons can do in that space, because I think there’s a big difference between convenience and competitive advantage.

Someone might say, “Oh, having this gathering add-on or having this World Quest tracker or whatever, it’s convenient. Or someone with a Quest add-on maybe saves themselves a couple of alt tabs to look something up. But I don’t think anyone would seriously claim like, “Oh, no. You have to use that add-on if you want to succeed in World of Warcraft.” And that really is the difference. It’s us looking at add-ons where someone is pretty reasonably, incredibly able to say to a new player or to their group mates, “Really, you pretty much need to use this if you want to succeed.” And our goal is in this blue sky idealized world, that we can say that there isn’t a competitive advantage to using add-ons in World of Warcraft, that they’re a powerful tool for customizing your aesthetics, for customizing your information, and for kind of add an extra layer of self-expression in your game experience, but not a competitive advantage.

Is there any concern as you think about what sorts of things to add and how to add them, that the UI might become too heavy or too complex or actively work against the player in becoming unapproachable? Right now, opening World of Warcraft for the first time, there’s already a lot of things on screen. And we’ve all seen that sort of joke screenshot of someone’s UI with all the add-ons on it.

Hazzikostas: Always. I mean, I think we’re always mindful of trying to strike a balance between serving our engaged core players who’ve been with us for years and making sure that the game stays approachable to someone who’s coming back to it or picking it up for the first time. Because if we’re not hitting both of those, really, we’re not going to be able to continue to serve our audience and grow our audience. And so when we talk about these things, we have a lot of customization built into the UI. Some things are going to default off, some things are going to default on.

We’re talking about how we want to introduce some of these new elements to players in their new player experience, kind like if you’re level three on Exile’s Reach and you only have two abilities, do you need to know about a one button rotation? No. We’re actually like, “Press frostbolt. You’ll be fine.” At some point, maybe when you’re level 40 and you just spent your 30th talent point and you have a couple dozen abilities, might that be a great time to introduce something like this and make sure you were aware that exists? Yes. And so, I think that’s how we want to continue to think about and iterate on our onboarding experience as we add more customization built into the game.

Well, thank you so much, Ion. I really appreciate you taking the time. This has been really interesting. I’m very curious to see what my guild thinks of this announcement.

Hazzikostas: Me too. And truly, the goal here is really just to kick off a conversation. I know it’s a scary looking 45-minute video that’s really just announcing two minutes of new stuff at the start. Then, the rest is like, “Let’s talk philosophy and let’s get a sense of how open players are to us walking down this long path.”

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.