BlizzCast 6 and Other Blues
BlizzCast episode 6 landed in iTunes and the BlizzCast page this morning.
BlizzCastIn the sixth epic episode of BlizzCast, we spend a day with a developer and find out what life is like for World of Warcraft Lead Tools Programmer Monte Krol. Next, we take a look at StarCraft II unit design from concept to creation with Senior Art Director Samwise Didier and Lead Game Designer Dustin Browder. In our third segment, Bashiok spends some time with Anthony Rivero, senior artist for Diablo III, and discusses “bridging the gap” in the series’ character design. Bornakk wraps the episode up by answering some questions from the community.
Community Q&A
BlizzCastWill there be a new line of class quests in Wrath of the Lich King, aside from ones that are for the Death Knight?
Not at release. We do have some things planned for the upcoming patches but for release nothing. We love to do more there is just some trickery involved with class quests, the main problem being that – at least we’ve learned in the past – that we don’t want to roll these things out piecemeal, so a couple classes at a time. We did that with the hunters and the priests and the fan reaction wasn’t really good. Although they did like the quests it’s just that I think everyone wants their own class to get a quest and we agree we think that should.
Are there any updates as to the whereabouts of General Turalyon?
So Turalyon, last I heard, he was locked away in some legion home world but you know that’s just a rumor. But really there are plans for Turalyon, it’s one of those things that we keep every content patch we try and work out something. Invariably it goes another way and so we’re hopeful that eventually we’ll get to him.
Some players are particularly interested in quests that will involve these famous lore heroes, do you find these quests more challenging to implement than others?
Oh yeah, they are way more challenging to implement. The main hurdles basically are that our established lore characters have histories and stories, there’s memories attached to all those characters so players remember them from not just World of Warcraft but all the Warcraft series. So we have to be really mindful of giving them the proper due respect. We’ve done things in the past where they weren’t received as well and even doing something as simple as changing the appearance of a hero that currently exists causes some uproar. It’s definitely getting that entire questline or storyline built up is a challenge more so than just introducing a new hero.
What do you think of the new Sylvanas model?
I personally like the new model much better than the Night Elf that we had but we are getting a new custom built model which looks amazing.
Is there any particular storyline from the original game that you are excited to be picking up again in Wrath of the Lich King?
Several. It’s been a nice expansion, it was a good break from Outland where things got a little… different I guess is the best term for it. Anything that involves Arthas, Lich King, we’re all over, we love that stuff. Expanding Tirion Fordring’s line and roll rather in the expansion is huge for us. A personal favorite of mine if the Forsaken’s involvement in the early zones with their plague, their blight, that’s something we’ve been forming for years with the old world and we obviously paused it for Outland and we’re coming back. I think we’re just releasing some new stuff in this next build that will kind of bring all that to a head that I’m pretty excited about.
Aside from that there’s also a whole lot of new stuff that we’re also excited about, so Vrykul and Brann and his involvement with the Titans. The power struggles in the Horde, we’re going to start seeing some of those in the next upcoming beta pushes that I’m really excited about. The whole Wrathgate series which we’re just getting ready to release that movie and I hope the fans will love it, I know I love it, so I’m pretty confident they will.
I think the good thing with Northrend is the whole atmosphere of the world just lends itself to a more natural storytelling environment. I think myself and all the other designers really kind of attached to it.
Another thing is, we talked in the past about is how we plan for Arthas to play a bigger role in this expansion, a bigger role than Illidan did in The Burning Crusade, so without giving too much away how well would you say this has gone so far?
I think it’s gone really well. If you start as a Death Knight, the first person you see is the Lich King. Going through our zones, Howling Fjord, Borean Tundra, Dragonblight, Grizzly [Hills], Zul’drak, I think almost every zone has at least one encounter with the Lich King, some with Prince Arthas himself – the Alliance get a series in Dragonblight for that – so I think it’s gone really well. Then in Icecrown again, you’ll get several interactions with the Lich King and then going forward in patch 3.1 and beyond there will just be more.
Equality in Tanks?
GhostcrawlerThere are four tanking classes in the game. They are intended to be roughly equivalent. That means that some classes may have an easier time on some fights because of their specific stats and abilities, but overall you should be able to beat any boss in the game with any tank of appropriate gear and skill without undue hardship.
The goal is roughly equivalent. The goal is not identical. Identical would mean making all abilities identical, down to things like Divine Shield and Innervate. I also want to caution you all that there are plenty of players who are concerned about the degree of homogenization we’ve done to get the tank classes as close as they are. It’s cool for everyone to have their different visions for what the game should be, just make sure not to impose your vision on everyone else. There are eleven million people playing WoW….
As far as the other arguments are concerned…
– You can argue that our design is for warriors to be the best tanks. But I can debunk that right here. It’s not. They will probably be superior in some cases and inferior in others, but never to the extent that you bench the warrior and bring in another class for a certain fight.
– You can argue that some classes need to tank worse than others to compensate for their other abilities or degree of hybrid-ness. But that is not our design.
– You can argue that some classes end up being better tanks for some reason or another. This is a totally legit concern. I don’t think we have any evidence that this is really happening yet, but it is something we pay a lot of attention to.
– In Classic WoW there was really only one tank, the warrior.
– In Burning Crusade, we added two other tanks, but the design was that they were typically used in an OT role. There were exceptions of course.
– The design for Lich King is four tanking classes. You should be able to raid in Lich King without a warrior tank, or without a warrior period. You can replace “warrior” in that sentence with 9 other classes. One of the reasons we spent so much time on the warrior Prot tree is we wanted to compensate them for removing them from the “best tank” pedestal, or at least making room up there for druids, paladins and DKs as well.
Class Scaling Equality
GhostcrawlerOur general philosophy is that we don’t want relationships to be too predictable. Much of the fun of improving your character is seeing the effects that different kinds of gear have on different rotations. To use an extreme case, if every piece of armor just said “improves stats by 1%” getting loot would be a lot less fun.
Similarly, we don’t want classes to be too similar. It’s interesting and fun when you switch classes from say a warrior to a rogue and see how different stats affect you differently.
Scaling is very important to us in the sense that we don’t want certain classes or specs to completely fall down at certain gear levels. This has happened in the past. But what those levels are is very important. If mages dramatically overtake warlocks when everyone has 20,000 spellpower, then I just couldn’t care less except possibly as an item of trivia. If and when WoW ever reaches numbers of that level, the class mechanics will have changed so much in those years that its just not worth worrying about at this time.
First CM to hit 80?
ZarhymBornakk was first.
They’re not allowed to play the game with such powers. They only have access to these tools while at work and on accounts used solely for assisting customers. We are very strict about employees not having access to any tools that would enhance their play characters.
The powers exist for testing and assistance purposes only. There’s always the misconception that we can do whatever we want with our characters in the game. Trivializing the game and keeping clearly unfair advantages over other players would not be conducive to an employee’s knowledge of how the game plays.
Edit: In other words, Bornakk worked hard at it in his spare time.
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[...] Random Feed wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptBlizzCast episode 6 landed in iTunes and the BlizzCast page this morning. BlizzCast In the sixth epic episode of BlizzCast, we spend a day with a developer and find out what life is like for World of Warcraft Lead Tools Programmer Monte Krol. Next, we take a look at StarCraft II unit design from concept to creation with Senior Art Director Samwise Didier and Lead Game Designer Dustin Browder. In our third segment, Bashiok spends some time with Anthony Rivero, senior artist for Diabl [...]
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