World Of Warcraft’s Undermine(d) update launches tomorrow, 26th February 2025, as part of the long-hauling MMO’s War Within expansion. It adds a whirring underground goblin city complete with nickel-plated palm trees and quarrelsome cartels, a new raid, a new four-boss dungeon, a PvP arena and a host of smaller, systemic adjustments. I do not play a lot of World Of Warcraft, so when Blizzard came knocking about an interview, my reaction was a blend of being caught dozing off in history class and being casually asked to defuse a bomb. But Undermine(d) does harbour at least one addition that an Azeroth tourist like myself can understand: cars.
The wily tinkerers of Undermine have come up with something called D.R.I.V.E., aka Dynamic and Revolutionary Improvements to Vehicular Experiences, aka automobiles. The new G-99 Breakneck player mount is a clattering goblin roadster that, unlike prior ground-based mounts, is subject to arcade racing physics. Unlocked by talking to the inventor Nanny Talullah, it lets you drift to accrue energy for boosts and avoid enemy entanglements. You can also customise it with different engines, tyres and paintjobs. I doubt all this will give the makers of Forza Horizon or Mario Kart the cold sweats, but as lead software engineer May Flores-Garcia explained to me, it’s an interesting tune-up for an MMO based around on-foot exploration, whose supporting tech dates back to the noughties.
Undermine’s greenskin gas-guzzlers actually owe their origins to World Of Warcraft’s previous Dragonflight expansion, which treated players to a bunch of rideable dragons. As Flores-Garcia recalled, WOW player mounts prior to this had basically just been a way of upping the percentage of movement speed. Dragonflight’s dragon-riding – which was subsequently expanded into a general skyriding mode for flying mounts – complicated things by adding a physics simulation. “It was the first time that we started kind of thinking a little bit about our movement system, what we could do,” she told me. “So that was the first time that we introduced some physics to our movement – momentum, [so that] you accelerate when you go down, you can boost.”
Skyriding has been a hit among the Wowsers, Flores-Garcia went on. “Almost since the beginning of that expansion, it got such a positive reception from players. So now, with the War Within we were thinking, OK, what if we did something like that? But for ground mounts, right – pushing against the limits of what our movement system can do.”
If skyriding has “laid the foundations” for Undermine’s buggies, that didn’t make designing them as straightforward as giving the dragons big fat tyres and fenders. Of all Undermine(d)’s additions, D.R.I.V.E. was “definitely the one that required the most engineering time”, Flores-Garcia went on. “We did have some new challenges, some new things that we had to consider. For example, collisions, right? With skyriding, you may actually go and collide with a branch, and then you kind of stop. There’s a lot of memes about how, you know, branches are like a dragon’s worst enemy. But when you’re in the ground and you’re underground, we needed to be a little bit more careful with that, because if you collide with something minor in the street, and suddenly all of your speed goes away, that doesn’t feel great.”
One way Blizzard have addressed the finickiness of collisions is by designing whole new areas for cars. “When we introduced dragonriding in Dragonflight, the zones for Dragonflight were built around that system, right?” lead visual development artist Gabriel Gonzalez pointed out to me. “They were very large, expansive, there were really a lot of opportunities for you to get the most out of that feature. And I think equally for Undermine, this D.R.I.V.E. system is also meant to fit really well and really firmly into the fantasy of the space. You’re in a more dense space, you’re in this urban setting, and it requires a different type of movement that also fits really neatly with the fantasy of goblins, with the fantasy of the city.”
It’s no small thing, adding new forms of movement to a decades-old MMO that is still played daily by hundreds of thousands, some of whom have accounts as ancient as the game. The potential for audience upset is vast, but Blizzard feel more confident about it all in the wake of Dragonflight. “Before dragonriding, we were very hesitant even to touch the movement system, because movement is something that is so core to a video game, right?” Flores-Garcia told me. “It’s not something that you can just kind of switch, especially after 17 years. So yes, it was definitely challenging, but at the same time, since we had done this before, in the previous expansion, we were relatively comfortable about how much we can actually push this new system.”
While goblin hot rods will remain confined to Undermine(d)’s new areas for the moment, there’s the possibility that those newfangled horseless carriages will eventually catch on across Azeroth, assuming Blizzard can figure out the collision issue. Perhaps they’ll add the drifting functionality to other wheeled vehicles, like Horde Mechano-Hogs. Personally, and again bearing in mind my own relative ignorance, I’d be intrigued to see Blizzard alter the wider geography of WOW to suit the arrival of automobiles with halfway credible physics. I’m imagining a lapsed player returning to the game in 10 years time to discover that all their favourite village trails have been tarmacked over by Horde tycoons. Hmm, perhaps that would be a historical parallel too far.
“It’s very specifically for the Undermine, and very similar to what we did with dragonriding, where we first wanted to see the reaction from players and the feedback before we decided, okay, is this something that we actually want to keep or extend?” Flores-Garcia concluded. “I think we want to have the same kind of approach for Undermine(d), we want to see how players feel about the system. And then after that, we can actually start discussing if it’s something that we may want to extend more, or if we want to continue exploring other types of movement.”