Odcinek 3

Dustin Browder: Well, I think we’re still playing a lot like the original StarCraft in a lot of places. I think we still have some room to innovate and reimagine the race a little bit more, but so far I think it is coming along pretty well. They are a pretty fun race to play. I don’t think they are quite as exciting to play as the Protoss are, and is definitely the weakest of our three races at the moment, but that is to be expected, as it is the race we started to work on the most recently. We’re still working on it really hard to get it done, but it is coming along pretty well.

Dustin Browder: Sure, so the queen is a unit that the team wanted to do ever since original StarCraft. They have been talking about it for years and years and they really wanted to make more out of that unit. They felt that the original Queen didn’t really meet the name “Queen.” It didn’t really say this is the leader and creator of the Swarm in a lot of ways. And obviously, in the story evolved, the Queen of Blades became a big part of the experience and the side changed a bit, but the team still wanted to explore this idea of a classic ‘insect-like’ Queen that rules over her whole hive. So that was the original creative idea for the Queen, to see if we could create that kind of unit. It felt like it fit the kit for the race pretty well, but could we find some cool mechanics to make it work. Right now with the Queen, she is sort of a mobile buff that you can move around your base that you apply it to your base defenses making your base defenses stronger, better, possible, wherever she goes. So, she has got a lot of gameplay to her right now in the sense that she is pretty mobile and can get to where she needs to be, but she can only be at one place at once. So you got to kind of chose what is the most important place for her to be right at that moment and I suppose more interestingly, from the enemy’s point of view, the Queen can be killed. So, enemy players will often be hunting for the Queen, to remove the threat of this defensive buff, before they invade the base, which really makes for some interesting cat and mouse gameplay, between enemy players hunting for the Queen, and the Queen trying to find a good place in her base to hide out while she is preparing for the inevitable enemy attack. So it feels like the queen as the owner of the hive and master of that space is fitting pretty well to the story idea of a Queen. We’ll see what people think when people get a chance to play with it in beta, and obviously we have more testing to do internally before we’re even ready for that step.

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.

Dustin Browder: That’s a really tough question. I guess all the races are really challenging in the sense that we’re really trying to walk the line between the greatness of the original StarCraft and at the same time, trying to give new strategies and tactics to players. So I would say, just like the other races, that has been one of the most challenging aspects of the Zerg and I think we’re not quite there yet. I think a lot of the old tactics and strategies yet remain, and we’re not offering enough new for players to learn and master and really figure out and really enjoy. So I would say that is probably the biggest challenge. I would say if you pick the single unit that has been the biggest pain to deal with would have to be the Queen. We have worked on the Queen for probably two years straight, trying variations from one to the other. I don’t want to say we’re even done yet, because I don’t think we necessarily are but she has probably been the single most challenging unit, much is something like the Mothership was probably and remains one of the most challenging units to work on for the Protoss.

Jeff Kaplan: I think we learned a lot of really good lessons from the original game. I think we were a little bit too hardcore early on. We didn’t introduce people into the raid content in a smooth enough curve. We tried to fix some of those issues in The Burning Crusade.

We also looked at things like the raid size and switched over from a 40 person raid cap to a 25 person raid cap. We introduced the concept of Heroic Dungeons which were extremely successful and we also introduced full blown 10 person raiding in the form of Karazhan and Zul’Aman.

So hopefully with Wrath of the Lich King we can take some of those ideas that we sort of evolved with Burning Crusade from the original game and continue them into the next expansion.

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.

Jeff Kaplan: It’s very challenging. Part of it anytime we work on one of the Caverns of Time dungeons, we get obsessed with what we did before so we had this moment when we were working on Hyjal where all we wanted to do is stay as true to the Warcraft III Battle of Mount Hyjal episode as possible but at a certain point you have to say to yourself, “What game play works better for a Real Time Strategy game versus what game play works better for World of Warcraft?” So I think that’s one of the things that we have to focus on, not just recreating The Culling mission from Warcraft III which is where Stratholme took place but finding out what was cool in The Culling and what can translate into MMO game play for World of Warcraft. So sort of managing the expectations that the map is going to play out exactly like it did in Warcraft III, that’s one thing for sure. Making sure we pay homage to Stratholme from the original shipping game is also really important because there is a lot of WoW players who haven’t played Warcraft III and are only going to know Stratholme as that burning city in Eastern Plaguelands so making sure that it’s cool for those people. And then I think it’s also really important that we continue to tell the story of the Infinite Dragonflight and sort of explain what’s going on with the Caverns of Time in general. But I have got to say on the development team it’s one of the dungeons we’re most excited about working on.

Jeff Kaplan: Yes, I think we’d really like to continue to do timed events. We’ve learned a lot, actually the first time we introduced people to it was the 45 minute Baron run, so it’s a concept that we’ve been working on for awhile. We need to be careful with it, we can’t make the timed run be too consuming or else it actually takes away from some of the fun of the dungeon. Where I like a timed run is where the time is a reasonable length, it doesn’t feel like a necessity to progress, it more feels like an additional challenge to the dungeon. So Zul’Aman is a great example, the first few times you do the dungeon, you’re really just learning the boss mechanics and the mechanics to clear through the dungeon as a whole. And then later when you’re more comfortable with it you really start challenging your group to see if you can tackle it. So I hope our future timed runs sort of go along those lines and also don’t become totally consuming. An example is early on in Zul’Aman, people were talking about a timed run actually being all the way through Zul’Jin, but I felt like on a personal level that was just too long of a time to sort of be playing at 110% which you really need to do.

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.

Joeyray Hall: I think that there’s not a matter of easier or harder. I think that what the lore gives us, even though it does appear at times to be limiting, lore gives us the story that we’re telling. I think that it’s important to tell the story at hand as correctly as possible, I think that bringing the visions of our story tellers to life through the use of video is a very important way of doing it. And the more lore that we have the more understanding we have of what the original vision was, things like that, the more we’re going to get into it. Whether it’s easy or hard really never comes into play because it’s just that’s the fun part of actually making it happen. When we finish a piece and it’s written and it’s done and it’s finished and we’re showing it to Chris (Metzen) or Mike (Morhaime) or Frank (Pearce) or anybody and they’re looking at it and they’re just so geeked up because it’s exactly the way they envisioned it, that’s the best thing in the world.

Dustin Browder: Thanks man.

Dustin Browder: Well we’re trying to figure out how to do that, so we haven’t decided exactly what we are going to do or even exactly what our approach is going to be. It is a very real issue and it is something we have been working on for quite some time and we will keep working on until we get it pounded out but I do not have an answer for you today as to what specifically we are going to do but it is definitely real and we are totally aware of it.

Jeff Kaplan: I think we have a lot of cool things planned. It’s really difficult for me to give you a bullet point list of sort of what is going to be new and unique without showing you the new dungeons. I think the fact that we are working on over a dozen, simply 5 man instances that will all have heroic mode all with new scripted boss encounters is going to be pretty amazing. Then what we have planned for the raid game is also going to be really cool so nothing new to the fundamental system of PvE as a whole but a lot of brand new super creative content that I think will really keep players challenged.

I think something else that players need to be aware of too is that we have got a really strong grasp on how to itemize the heroics this time around and how to balance itemization between 10 person raiding, 25 person raiding, the Arena, and the Honor system. Players have to remember that when Burning Crusade came out we’d never had the Arena before and the Honor system had just gotten revamped to a new system that we weren’t really familiar with. We had never balanced Heroic dungeons before or knew where the itemization needed to fall for Heroics versus 10 person versus single raids like Gruul and Magtheridon. We have a much better understanding of what works and what doesn’t work so I feel like a lot of those itemization balance changes that we are looking into making will really create an exciting PvE environment for players in addition to PvP.

Jeff Kaplan: It is funny because we have been thinking a lot about that lately and we don’t have it quite figured out yet. We know we can’t do it strictly based on reputation at this point because not all the dungeons that we have in the game are on clean reputations like they were for Burning Crusade. In Burning Crusade you had the Coilfang instance wings were all on Cenarion reputation or you had the Hellfire Citadel dungeons were all on either Thrallmar or Honor Hold. The dungeons aren’t quite laid out like that in Wrath of the Lich King, so we’ve been thinking of some hybrid ideas that revolve around reputation and quests. One idea is that there would be a quest that takes you through all the max level instance wings that would unlock heroic as a system as a whole. So we know we want to do some unlocking mechanism, we want to make sure though that it’s not so tough that if you miss the initial leveling curve you can’t catch up that you feel like you are constantly shut out of it. So it is something we have been thinking about a lot lately but we do not have a firm answer just now.