World Of Warcraft: Midnight's New Solo-friendly Prey Mode Will Have...

A new game mode makes the open world a dangerous place, developers warn—and also makes it lucrative to kill critters

(Thanks to the player Sykeen, who provided some of the screenshots used in this article.)

Prey, World of Warcraft: Midnight's new open-world system, will have bosses attacking you out of nowhere come the expansion's launch on March 2.

We spoke with Blizzard game designer Noah Smith, an informal lead on Prey, about what to expect. It's primarily designed for mid-core players, he says: People who like to seek out a challenge in open-world content and the solo-dungeon style encounters of Delves. But the difficulty of Prey ramps up quickly, and top-end encounters should provide challenges even for mythic-geared raiders, should they decide to become the hunted.

"Prey is inherently an overlay system," Smith says. "So regardless of the content you engage with in the open world, you will also be dealing with Prey."

Players interact with an NPC in Silvermoon city to pick their difficulty, zone, and target from a collection of 30 bosses. World quests specific to Prey will pop up in the zone, and the area will be empowered with torments that make killing things—for those quests or anything you want to do in the zone—more difficult. In that way, it's similar to the Heroic outdoor world difficulty in the currently-running Legion Remix game mode, though it's not the same system.

But anytime you're in combat you're a legitimate target, and this is where Prey truly gets its name: not from the mob you're hunting, but because that boss is now hunting you. Your target will attack when you're occupied with other mobs and least expecting it. Watch out for the gnomes, Smith says: They do like their shrink rays... and to stomp on tiny heroes.

"We don't want it to feel like you're doing a series of check marks and then getting to the final thing," Smith explains. "We didn't want to make it feel like there's any one specific thing you should be doing above anything else."

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Players will generally stack up their Prey targets to align with other open-world activities they need to do, including regular world quests, gathering and the like. You do need to be fighting to trigger the appearance of the target, but that's because of difficulties other than Nightmare (where time limits and more tortuous challenges await), Blizzard wanted to make it generally safe to AFK

Source: PC Gamer