Episode 3

Dustin Browder:We’ve tried a lot with the Ultralisk. This is one of our favorite units. There are a lot of opportunities to do some interesting with this unit. The same time we are really concerned about complexity. We want to make sure all of these units are as simple as we can really make them and fit that original StarCraft game design which was so clean and so crisp, where everything had such focused abilities. The cleave attacks seemed like an obvious thing for it to do, just by the shape of its blades. We haven’t really done a lot of testing on it as you can imagine. Anything like an Ultralisk that is at the very end of the tech tree, is something that just inherently gets less play time, as opposed to something like a Zergling or Hydralisk. So we’re really still looking at that to see how balanced it is and it gives the Ultralisk a little more teeth and it makes it feel a little less gimped against tier 1 units which is kind of nice and a bit of a fun thing that is not huge strategy thing yet, just because the Ultralisk has a lot of trouble getting into the middle of enemy forces right now. I mean you can kind of use the burrow and unburrow and that has been kind of fun, so the people can know, having seen our Zerg announcement videos that the Ultralisk can burrow and unburrow like the rest of the Zerg army. So that is a little bit useful, but we’re still trying to work out, is this as useful as we want it to be? Is there something else we should be doing with this unit to see if that is a good hit for that unit or not?

Dustin Browder: He is terrifying. If you walk into an enemy base and suddenly there were three Ultralisk that you didn’t expect to see there, it can be quite a shock!

Dustin Browder: If I had a good answer, I’d give it to you, though I really don’t have one.

Dustin Browder: Like I said, we’ve got a bunch of bad solutions we’ve been talking about for quite a while- well not quite a while. We have different bad idea every week, but we’re trying lots of different ideas to do it. The simplest way to do it would be to roll back the interface to StarCraft one, the original StarCraft, which is definitely an option for us, but we really want to pursue and see if there is a way to make it work with the interface improvement that has become standard both for our games and our competitors titles. But we know right now that our hardcore guys are really worried about this, but at the same time if we roll back the interface that is like the original StarCraft, a whole bunch of other people that we aren’t hearing from right now will be very angry with us. We’re looking to make everybody happy with this, and it is a hard problem and we will keep working at it.

Jeff Kaplan: Sure thing. The idea behind 10 and 25 person raiding isn’t to make one easy mode and one hard mode. We want to have progression in both the 10 and 25 person raid format. So for example Naxxramas is supposed to be an accessible early tier raid which will actually be pretty easy for both 10 and 25 person groups. Those groups will however graduate in the next tier in a zone like Ulduar to a more difficult set of raid encounters and then the raid zones that will exist past Ulduar will ramp up in difficulty.

Jeff Kaplan: They should be able to expect having at least 15 more people there with them. In all seriousness, the fights will change anytime that you raise the number of people or just introduce different people to a raiding environment or change up class composition it changes the general vibe of that raid so I think it will always feel different, not just from 10 to 25 but whenever you switch up raid composition.

Jeff Kaplan: The art will probably look a little bit different between the two dungeon sets, meaning the 10 and the 25 person version. It might be things like a different color version of the same armor or the higher level, the 25 person content, might have more particle effects, so something along those lines.

Something that I am excited to talk about is that the PvP armor will be different from the PvE armor entirely in looks and colors this time.

Jeff Kaplan: Right now we’re going with the concept that 25 person raiding would be a full tier in item progression above the 10 person raiding so it’s quite a jump once you get the extra 15 people together.

Jeff Kaplan: We definitely want to continue the story of Ashbringer, it’s one of our favorite things and we actually have a lot of fun with Ashbringer internally so we want to continue that storyline. Whether or not Atiesh exists in its current form or a new form that’s a great question, it’s still undecided. We really want to keep doing Legendary items though, we love the Legendary items we’ve done so far they’re really important to the story of Warcraft as a whole. So I think we’d like to bring back Atiesh at some point but Naxxramas is going to be really exiting. It’s moved over Nothrend now, it’s over a zone called Dragonblight, it’s currently laying siege to one of the Alliance towns there so I think fans are going to be really excited by sort of the return of Naxxramas, one of our best dungeons ever.

Bornakk: Sounds really exciting.

Jeff Kaplan: Probably the most difficult part is going to be overcoming peoples’ nostalgia for what was cool and what wasn’t cool in the dungeon. I think keeping the spirit of the dungeon while not forcing ourselves to do everything exactly the way it was done originally. We want to change as little as possible, we want to keep the dungeon, you know, it’s Naxxramas, we want the bosses to be who they were doing the abilities that they were doing. While we get a lot of credit for Naxxramas being a great dungeon I do think there are things we could have done better, I do think there were some flawed encounters in there that we could actually improve upon. I’ll say the Four Horsemen is one of those encounters because I think part of the reason it’s such a highly regarded encounter is that so few people actually did it and experienced it, it got placed in its own legendary status without a lot of people having ever tried it knowing what the fight entailed. Obviously we can do a better job with the Loatheb encounter, we can get the tuning on Grobbulus correct this time, but Naxxramas is going to be an introductory dungeon so we need to make it a lot more accessible to new raiders, so that’s going to be a challenge. Where it sat before was the end of regular WoW, the raiding tiers there, so we need to move to the front of the line and be an introductory raid.

Jeff Kaplan: We’re thinking right now roughly about a dozen and all those would have heroic difficulty and normal difficulty. So roughly about a dozen give or take a few we’ll see when we’re sort of at the end of the development cycle where we’re at.

Jeff Kaplan: Yes, we want to have definitely a dungeon daily quest similar to the one that’s in the game right now available from the start of Wrath of the Lich King, same would go for heroic mode. Daily quests in general are a concept that we want to explore more. We want more daily quests with more randomization in them to keep them from getting old and repetitive and we want to try to have them in place when Wrath of the Lich King ships. Daily quests were actually introduced after The Burning Crusade shipped in our first patch, it wasn’t even something we had the technology to do when we shipped Burning Crusade, but we’ve been learning a lot of lessons in our patches in 2.1 and 2.3 and 2.4 on what’s good and what’s bad about daily quests and we hope to refine the system and have those in place when Wrath of the Lich King ships.

Jeff Kaplan: Definitely, I think class composition is one of the trickiest things to get right. The larger the raid size the easier it is to tune the content because you can expect a little bit of everything. The smaller a group size gets, down to five people, we’re at a really challenging spot in a lot of cases. Basically what we can guarantee is that you have a tank, you have a healer, and we can’t even really guarantee that you have crowd control at that point. We are assuming you have dps, if you don’t have dps that means you brought more tanks and healers or crowd control, and therefore you know you don’t need to do as much dps. The goal is to really tune the five person content so that it doesn’t require a specific class composition but rather you could tackle the content with a mix of class compositions. So really the trick there is just not overtuning the content, I think we run that risk much more with something like a heroic mode than we do in normal mode, but players would be surprised. I’m often baffled, I’ll be in Shattrath on one of my characters and I’ll be looking at the Trade channel where everybody LFGs in the Trade channel and I’ll see, “We need a Shadow Priest for Shadow Lab and then our group is ready, we have everything we need but we absolutely have to have a Shadow Priest” or a Frost Mage or like these crazy specs and compositions that I really question if players actually need that specific spec or if they’re just sort of putting an extra burden on themselves when it comes to putting a group together. Most players are usually pretty surprised that even in Shadow Lab if you go into Blackheart’s room and pull the biggest pull and you don’t have any crowd control that usually means that you’ve got more dps or more people who can drop fears down and just pull the pull back a little bit further and use all the little tricks your class has and you can usually pull something off. So I think the power is kind of in the player’s hands at a certain point too.

Jeff Kaplan: Yeah, exactly.

Joeyray Hall: Hello, how are you?

Joeyray Hall: Making the South Park episode was a lot of fun but it also was a whole lot of hard work, there were a lot of 20 hour days. It took about two and a half weeks to do and we did all of the work up at South Park itself in their studios. So we had our own little server and stuff setup there that we all played on but we also did it on a live server which was really cool because people would always come in and interrupt our shooting going, “What are you guys doing here?” and we’d have to teleport them away, it was a lot of fun but it was interesting.

Working with Matt (Stone) and Trey (Parker) was a little intimidating at first because it was kind of like “Oh wow, it’s Matt and Trey - you know, South Park, yay!” But basically the workload basically went like this, they’d come in, we’d go over all the shots for the day and then Trey would come in, we’d sit down, and he’d direct us all through. The team would be playing all the parts, like all the characters, we’d have our little signs above our computer of which character we were playing so in my particular case I was playing, who was it, I was playing Stan, yes! Yeah so I played Stan in all the footage that we used. Trey directed our team through the shots, each one, so he would sit there and Chris would be our camera man and each us, each of the other people on the team would be one of the parts and it was a lot of fun. One thing that was really bizarre about working there was that they bring in food every three hours, 24 hours a day, so when we finally left it took me about two weeks to lose the extra weight I gained while there, but it was a lot of fun.

When we first got there it was really cool because my guys had only been working with me for about three weeks, we had just started putting the team together and they had only been with Blizzard for three to four weeks. So we get there and we sit them down and I didn’t really tell them exactly what we were going up there to do, so we go up there and I sit them down and the next thing they know Matt and Trey are standing over there going, “Oh no we need more of this on this character and this on this character.” And they are just there like shaking and I’m just like, “Calm down, take a breath, it’s going to be okay.” And by the end it was like everybody had been together forever, it was a lot of fun to do. And I think the guys did a fantastic job, I think that Matt and Trey were extremely happy with what we got for them and if we ever do it again we have a ton more tools we didn’t have then so it’s going to make it a lot easier.

Joeyray Hall: Actually we did. One of the things that was cool about the South Park episode was that when all was said and done and the Emmy was awarded the South Park guys were very kind enough to have us put on the list to have us receive an Emmy certificate that we keep in our museum here at Blizzard. So it says, “For their contributions to the South Park episode Make Love no Warcraft” and it says Blizzard Entertainment so that was very cool to have.

Dustin Browder: Thanks man.