WoW's new DRIVE system probably won't be used outside of its GTA-style goblin zone, but devs are 'going to think about' recycling its parts elsewhere
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
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