Winterherz
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How do you balance redesigning Azeroth and Kalimdor without compromising nostalgia?
We think nostalgia plays the smallest part. The biggest thing for us is creating something that’s as fun as possible and is going to fit the story.
Nostalgia does come into it in a small way based on each individual designer. You’ll see that there are individual quests that are very beloved by players that we’ve taken extra care with, and you’ll see that all throughout the game. What we have changed, we’ve tried to change it in a way that made sense, so that when you see it, you’ll be like, ‘Oh! I remember that! That’s really cool!’ But the majority of the ‘Kill X number of Y’ stuff we’ve gone and changed to feel more like the Northrend quest lines. So you’ll see actual storylines developing, you’ll get to use vehicles, you’ll see phasing tech, stuff like that.
Speaking of phasing tech, the Worgen and Goblins have phasing starting zones, are you planning to add phasing tech to the other starter zones?
You’ll see some, in some of the starter zones. It’s not in every one. The big thing about the phasing tech is that we can now do it on an individual basis. It doesn’t have to require a building or something to change, we can now take a player and just throw them into a phase.
For example, on a quest we might send you to go kill a specific quest mob. When we do that now, we can phase you and have that mob act like you’re the only person there – no other players are visible. It creates a much more customised experience, we can do a cinematic, you’ll get more of an individual set up. So you’ll see a lot of that happening, as well as what you saw in the [new] starter zones where the whole world actually changes.
And obviously that’ll cut down on crowding on quest mobs.
Well that’s the biggest thing! We have a population control system already that says ‘Spawn X mobs based on the number of players in the area,’ but sometimes that’s just not enough – like on the day when the game goes live – so that’s when that individual phasing will be really useful.
What steps – if any – have you taken to increase the relevance of the more remote cities in Kalimdor and Azeroth, for example Exodar and Silvermoon?
We’ve done a couple of things: Exodar has a direct port to Stormwind now so that you can get back and forth between the two. It’s something we feel we probably always should have had and it made sense to add it now. Darnassus is going to get a small Worgen district because Worgen are the new Druid-like race for the Alliance, so it makes perfect sense that they would have a spot there. We have a whole new art style we’ve created: It’s these buildings that look like they’re built out of trees but they’re Worgen-style, so they’re dark and spooky – they fit the Gilneas style. And those will go into a section of Darnassus.
Ragnaros is back and he’s moved from the Molten Core to Mount Hyjal. What other plans are there to revisit the raids of “vanilla” World of Warcraft?
One of our new raids is called Blackwing Descent and that takes place inside of Blackrock Mountain. It’s very derivative of Blackwing Lair – the bosses and creatures you see in there, there’s a chance some of those might be things you’ve actually seen in Blackwing Lair, so that’s a very nostalgia-driven raid.
For the old raids themselves, you’ll see guild achievements added for them. Take the raid meta achievement that we have now, we’ll have a new achievement that is a ‘Classic Raid’ achievement – but it’s a guild achievement and that’ll have a very specific reward attached to it, so even if you’ve completed it in the past, you may want to go back with your guild to get the reward.
And those raids will still be tuned to their traditional levels?
Exactly, so Molten Core will still be a level 60, 40-man raid – we’re not going to change that, even though you could probably do it with ten!
You’re overhauling the classic dungeons Shadowfang Keep and the Deadmines –
Actually, now we’re planning those for a patch, they won’t ship with Cataclysm. So one of the big things we’re doing, like what you saw today, you saw Silverpine?
Yep.
The whole new storyline through there really builds up the change that has happened in Shadowfang Keep.
And a zone that you didn’t see today, but a zone that has had a 95% revamp would be Westfall. Westfall is completely different, huge changes. Almost no quest line is intact because the Defias don’t make sense any more as a threat. Now the Cataclysm is a threat, so things have really changed and all of that will play into the new Deadmines, the boss there and the way that experience is going to happen.
So you’re going to see the set up when Cataclysm ships for both those zones and right now we’re targeting patch 4.1 for those revamped instances, and they’ll also be level 85 heroics.
Can we expect other classic instances to get that kind of treatment as well, for example Stratholme?
Yeah, we’re looking at that. We actually have a list of old dungeons that are the highest candidates to actually do revamps for. Stratholme’s on that list, Scholomance and Diremaul are there – there are a couple of others that players also really, really liked. So [revamping] those instances are things for when there’s a patch, a gap, and there’s time for us to do it, that’s what we’d fill it with, rather than making entirely new content. We’d probably take something like Stratholme, make it into a level 85 dungeon, give it all new boss fights – not just tuning up the stats on existing bosses – we want it to make sense, because otherwise that’s not very different for the player. Even if you’re going through there with your new class or whatever, it has to feel different or else there’s no reason for us to do it.
I’m a new player. Playing levels 1 to 58, I’m experiencing the Cataclysm. Then, I go to Outlands and need to deal with Illidan. Then, I move on to Northrend where Arthas (whose death has dramatically shaped events in the new 1 to 58 experience) is the main threat. How do you ensure that Outlands and Northrend are relevant narratives?
That’s always a problem. Typically what we say is that we have time continuums, because if you look at Northrend, the entire game is built around Arthas – if you’re a new Death Knight, Arthas actually trains you, he gives you all your quests. But clearly, Arthas has been killed many times over now.
So for us, we just had to make the decision that the content lives in that space. Say in a future expansion we decided we wanted to revamp Burning Crusade to make [narrative] sense. It’s a very difficult thing to do, because what do you do with Illidan? Illidan’s already gone, Lady Vashj is gone – is the Burning Legion still a threat?
So for us we just have to say that that is it’s own contained space, we want it to have its own storyline - and those storylines are still strong, especially if you’re a new player: You don’t know who Illidan is, or what’s going on, so he’s still a threat to you, and you’re probably never going to do Black Temple and see that raid anyway. So as long as the dungeons make sense, the naga are still a threat, all that kind of stuff, we feel good with it.
I think the gameplay experience is still strong. As soon as it starts to make the gameplay experience feel weird, or broken, or somehow strange, that would be one of the first things we would look at fixing.
So Outlands now will be the only zone that doesn’t include any phasing tech – are there any plans to introduce phasing tech to Outlands at a later date?
Not currently. Outlands is something that we’re going to look at probably very closely over the course of Cataclysm because we’re going to see how people transition. We already know what they do now, most people go to Outlands at 55 – they don’t even wait until 58 – and a lot of people end up going to Northrend some time around Nagrand, they don’t even get to Blade’s Edge Mountains anymore because we’ve increased the experience gain. So your time there is very short.
So it’s something we’re going to be looking at very closely, it’s something we’ve talked about – you’re not the only person to have asked that question! On the development team we’ve definitely had those concerns, so it’s something we’re going to keep an eye on and se how it goes. It’s something we could make time for, we just need to know how it’s going to play out.
What’s in store for the Caverns of Time?
We have a number of things in store! We haven’t announced what we’re actually going to be doing for Caverns of Time, but I can tell you that we’re definitely going to do something in Cataclysm, a dungeon or a raid will be available in the patch content, somewhere between [patches] 4.1 and 4.3. We haven’t done much design work on it yet, but we are going to be doing something there for sure, so you can definitely expect to be going there.
Cool.
Yeah, that’s what’s great about it, you know? We can use it any time we want. If we don’t use it, it’s always there. But I think the players love that stuff, the idea that they get to go back and experience some crazy piece of Warcraft lore, so we definitely want to keep doing that.
What lessons have you learned from Wintergrasp, and how will they affect Tol Barad?
Oh, numerous, numerous lessons! I was in charge of design for Wintergrasp; that was my project. Probably the biggest thing we learned from Wintergrasp was how to deal with such a large number of players in a gigantic open space. You’ve seen us make a large number of changes just over the patch cycles to where we are now. So the biggest thing now is queuing for Wintergrasp and limiting the number of players per side so that you don’t get terrible lag. Probably the biggest problem overall was the lag situation.
From a gameplay standpoint, we learned a lot about destructibles and how people react to them. We also learned that people don’t necessarily like being in vehicles and having all their abilities taken away from them. You go from having your 40 abilities on your action bars to like, four – and you have to be in the vehicle because it’s the only way to break down a wall. So a lot of lessons learned there, and you’ll see all the outtakes in Tol Barad.
Tol Barad is going to be very smart about the way we queue, smart about the way it affects the other zones around it, it’s not going to slow down the rest of the world. You’ll see much less vehicle combat in Tol Barad – there’s still vehicles, but to a much lesser extent to what we saw in Wintergrasp.
We’re also trying to make something that’s a lot more balanced between offense and defense. You’ll see some unified buffs. We had Tenacity. Tenacity worked for the most part but it fell apart in certain places – it never affected vehicles, which didn’t really help the situation. So you’ll see some evolution of Tenacity and the way it works in Tol Barad.
And finally, the biggest thing is that Tol Barad is actually our daily quest hub for all of Cataclysm, so you’ll see that [Isle of] Quel’Danas thing – and that’s something we really want – we really want players to conglomerate in one spot. And on PvP servers, it’s gonna be nuts!
Chaos, yeah, that was great.
Yeah, that’s what we’re looking for. A lot of people really liked that from [patch] 2.4, they remember that, so it’ll be cool to bring that back.
So can we expect to see vehicles in raids again, as we did in Ulduar?
You can expect to see vehicles in raids again, but only where they make sense. The lessons we learned from Malygos are huge. It’s that same thing: Players don’t like their abilities being taken away from them.
The best thing I can tell you about that is that we’re only going to do that when it makes the gameplay experience better. Sometimes it’s very difficult to navigate 3D space, so flying, even though it sounds like it can be really cool, it’s very difficult to know how far away you are from something. The discs in the Malygos fight for melee were difficult and that’s something we’re looking into, we’re looking into 3D targeting, doing outlines around characters so that you can tell how far they are from you, things like that. Similar kinds of things as to what they’re doing in StarCraft II, where they draw a line to the ground. They’re all things that we’re looking at.
So again, you’re only going to see it if it makes the gameplay experience better, otherwise, we’re going to try to avoid it.
On StarCraft II - Blizzard tend to cross-pollinate games. Can fans of StarCraft II expect to see the odd reference to that game buried away in Cataclysm?
I think they totally can. Half the team is playing StarCraft II. The guys are working very hard to hit their ship date and we’re involved in that and we’re trying to give them as much gameplay feedback as we can, so there’s no way that doesn’t rub off in places!
Many players have data caps that make large downloads problematic. Can you ballpark how large the Cataclysm patch will be?
It’ll easily be the biggest patch we’ve ever done, by far. If you think about how big patch 3.3 was – something like 1.1 gig – it’s going to be much bigger than that. I don’t have the actual data size, but that was just one zone, whereas this will be the whole world. So it’s easy to say this will be the biggest patch we’ve delivered by far, so the background downloader will be huge.
What’s cool is that we can do background downloads in increments. We can say, ‘this part of the game is done, send it out.’ We don’t have to wait until the whole game is done and then load it onto the downloader, which is great because it means we can start the downloader four months early, letting you download the content really slowly over time. So we’ve worked on that tech to a point where hopefully even though it’s going to be a large patch, our hope is that it’s not going to be super inconvenient for people.
Finally, what can you tell us about the launch event for Cataclysm?
Oh, awesome! We’re planning a huge launch event. You remember the zombie plague? Yeah, so the same team that built that is working on the Cataclysm launch event, and you’re already seeing it beginning to play out now, with the stuff going on with the gnomes in Gnomeregan, and the trolls recapturing the Echo Isles. So they’ll both have completely new starting areas, and that’s the very beginnings of the world event, and it’ll play out all the way up to launch. And what’s happening with the Cataclysm, you’re seeing the elementals – when Deathwing breaches the elemental plane, he’s bringing the elementals with him, so what we’re looking at is doing something along the lines of an elemental invasion that infects Azeroth as a whole.
So there’s a bunch of details still to be figured out, but man, you’re gonna see something spectacular. If you take the Scourge invasion, imagine that, and then multiply it by ten – possibly in major cities! – and the way we want it to work is very similar to the way the plague worked, where we’d start it up a few weeks early, and then you’ll see a build up… build up… build up, and then in those last two or three days before we flip the switch, Azeroth will be in chaos, and any player who didn’t know the cataclysm was coming will definitely know something’s going on!
