WoW lead says they 'lost something along the way' by building dungeons for sweaty Mythic+ timers instead of 20-boss mazes like the good old days, but Labyrinths could be the solution

Remember back in the good old days, when MMO dungeons used to be big, sprawling mazes you could spend hours just getting lost in? Now most of them follow a similar formula: Narrow-ish corridors with three to five bosses. Sure, the set dressing varies, but the mechanical template is always bite-sized.

World of Warcraft is an old enough game to have had both, and it might one day have them both again. I recently spoke to associate game director Paul Kubit and lead encounter designer Dylan Barker about Labyrinths, an upcoming feature in World of Warcraft: Midnight. It's still a large work in progress—not releasing on launch, but instead a few patches down the line—but it seems like a huge evolution of The War Within's Delves system.

Kubit, meanwhile, sees Labyrinths as a sort of counter to how WoW's Mythic+ dungeons—timed, high-stress gauntlets designed to be completed in minutes, not hours—have shaped the game's design philosophy.

"If you remember, back in Classic, we had dungeons like Maraudon, Blackrock Spire and Depths, where we had like 20 bosses in a dungeon. And that's not something that happens anymore—dungeons have three or four bosses … And maybe we lost something along the way."

"That RPG fantasy feeling of getting lost in a big dungeon doesn't exist in the dungeon space anymore—but it could in our Delve space, if you look at something like Labyrinths. So that's something that Labyrinths are trying to tap into from an emotional point of view."

I, myself, am all for it—I often lament the loss of the oldschool MMO, not just in the fact it doesn't exist anymore, but also in the fact I don't really have time for one, either. If Labyrinths can bring a little of that old school magic back for a modern era? I'll be there, getting lost.

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Harvey's history with games started when he first begged his parents for a World of Warcraft subscription aged 12, though he's since been cursed with Final Fantasy 14-brain and a huge crush on G'raha Tia. He made his start as a freelancer, writing for websites like Techradar, The Escapist, Dicebreaker, The Gamer, Into the Spine—and of course, PC Gamer. He'll sink his teeth into anything that looks interesting, though he has a soft spot for RPGs, soulslikes, roguelikes, deckbuilders, MMOs, and weird indie titles. He also plays a shelf load of TTRPGs in his offline time. Don't ask him what his favourite system is, he has too many.

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