Tinie
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http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=170930&skip=yes
Whether Blizzard can actually achieve its plan of releasing a new World of Warcraft expansion every year remains to be seen, but it didn't take the developer long after the debut of expansion number one (The Burning Crusade) to announce the second.
Wrath of the Lich King opens up the new continent of Northrend and brings with it an increase in level cap (to 80), the introduction of Hero classes with the Death Knight, siege weaponry and destructible buildings in Battlegrounds and further additions to keep fans hooked forever.
At last week's Games Convention in Leipzig we grabbed senior art director Sam Didier and lead designer Jeffrey Kaplan for a sausage and a chat:
Looking back, are you happy with how The Burning Crusade turned out?
Jeffrey Kaplan: We feel we're only as good as our last game... That's why we're very proud of The Burning Crusade, we felt it was a game that stood on its own. We want Wrath of the Lich King to stand on its own as a great game too, not just an expansion.
What attracted you to Northrend, from an artistic side?
Sam Didier: We've always wanted to visit that environment and this felt like the right time to do it. The community's voiced concerns that it'd just be a huge continent of ice and snow.
We're addressing that by doing a lot of green zones and a lot of transition zones and coastal areas. It seemed like a really good opportunity to shift some stuff around and give it a new face and visual feel we haven't really seen before.
Also it's a reaction to how high fantasy we got with the last expansion. Going to space and some of the stuff that strayed from the feel of Warcraft and some of that hardcore fantasy vibe.
We want to get back to that with Northend, go for that gothic fantasy vibe where it's a little bit darker and a little bit more hardcore - especially with the Death Knight.
The Death Knight armour is very dark with spikes and skulls, and then we have the 15-foot tall Vikings who are going to be very prevalent in this cold environment, as well as some others which are just really hardcore, brutal cultures. The art team and designers talked and wanted to get back to that kind of feeling of a threatening, cold, hardcore world.
Why introduce the Hero class rather than flesh out the base classes in Wrath of the Lich King?
Kaplan: We're actually still going to flesh out the base classes, they'll get another set of spells and abilities and additional talent points to spend, so we'll also be focussing on base classes.
We've wanted to add Hero classes for quite some time - not only that, but very specifically on the mechanics side we've wanted to add another tanking/melee DPS class.
This was a great opportunity to introduce a new mechanic that will feel very unique. A lot of people will experiment with the Death Knight. The way we're setting up the Death Knight, a lot of people will want to just interact with the introduction to the Death Knight and see what he's all about and get to know the class.
What major level 80 end-game content are you including?
Kaplan: There's a few things. We've a number of instances. We're doing instances to cover all the levelling up experience as well, not just end-game instances. We'll have five-person instances at the end-game and for the levelling up experience.
We'll also do the heroic dungeons again, so that provides a lot of end-game content right there. We're going to do a 25-person raid game.
We're going to focus on bigger raid instances, meaning more like Naxxramas with lots of bosses rather than the smaller ones like Tempest Keep.
The big lesson we learned from The Burning Crusade was that our ten-person instances are extremely popular. So for Wrath of the Lich King we wanted progression in the ten-person raid game for the players... who want to stick to that ten-person cap.
We'll also add a new arena, and there'll be new arena awards.
Something we introduced in patch 2.1 - that we're going to be [building on] in upcoming content patches as well as Wrath of the Lich King - is our system of daily quests.
Daily quests make for good end-game content for players who don't want to PvP, who don't want to do instances, who don't want to raid and don't want to group - they just like doing quests by themselves.
Daily quests are quests you can do once per day and then it resets the next day. And to alleviate the feeling that those create grinding or repetitive content, we're coming up with daily quests with randomisation.
There's a lot of talk about now being the time to innovate in the MMO genre from certain developer corners currently. How important is innovation to you? Is it too much of a risk to innovate in WoW gameplay when you've such a huge subscriber base already?
Kaplan: I think as a company we've always been more focussed on evolution rather than innovation. But sometimes people take that as, "Oh, these guys never innovate".
We actually operate on a much more detailed level in our game design systems - we have done a lot of innovative systems within World of Warcraft.
We're not really terribly concerned about the risk that comes with innovation.
We feel like the time to innovate is when we can't accomplish our goals within the game and within current systems - as opposed to some trends in the industry which appear to be innovation for the sake of innovation. That's not a limb we're willing to go out on.
We want to make sure the game is really fun for people and we'll innovate as demand calls for it.
Is there interest in MMOs beyond World of Warcraft for Blizzard?
Kaplan: As far was working on another MMO project or a WoW 2, obviously as a company we'd be very interested in further exploring the MMO space but we don't have anything official yet to talk about in that direction.
But we're definitely looking towards the future as well.
Stuart Bishop
Whether Blizzard can actually achieve its plan of releasing a new World of Warcraft expansion every year remains to be seen, but it didn't take the developer long after the debut of expansion number one (The Burning Crusade) to announce the second.
Wrath of the Lich King opens up the new continent of Northrend and brings with it an increase in level cap (to 80), the introduction of Hero classes with the Death Knight, siege weaponry and destructible buildings in Battlegrounds and further additions to keep fans hooked forever.
At last week's Games Convention in Leipzig we grabbed senior art director Sam Didier and lead designer Jeffrey Kaplan for a sausage and a chat:
Looking back, are you happy with how The Burning Crusade turned out?
Jeffrey Kaplan: We feel we're only as good as our last game... That's why we're very proud of The Burning Crusade, we felt it was a game that stood on its own. We want Wrath of the Lich King to stand on its own as a great game too, not just an expansion.
What attracted you to Northrend, from an artistic side?
Sam Didier: We've always wanted to visit that environment and this felt like the right time to do it. The community's voiced concerns that it'd just be a huge continent of ice and snow.
We're addressing that by doing a lot of green zones and a lot of transition zones and coastal areas. It seemed like a really good opportunity to shift some stuff around and give it a new face and visual feel we haven't really seen before.
Also it's a reaction to how high fantasy we got with the last expansion. Going to space and some of the stuff that strayed from the feel of Warcraft and some of that hardcore fantasy vibe.
We want to get back to that with Northend, go for that gothic fantasy vibe where it's a little bit darker and a little bit more hardcore - especially with the Death Knight.
The Death Knight armour is very dark with spikes and skulls, and then we have the 15-foot tall Vikings who are going to be very prevalent in this cold environment, as well as some others which are just really hardcore, brutal cultures. The art team and designers talked and wanted to get back to that kind of feeling of a threatening, cold, hardcore world.
Why introduce the Hero class rather than flesh out the base classes in Wrath of the Lich King?
Kaplan: We're actually still going to flesh out the base classes, they'll get another set of spells and abilities and additional talent points to spend, so we'll also be focussing on base classes.
We've wanted to add Hero classes for quite some time - not only that, but very specifically on the mechanics side we've wanted to add another tanking/melee DPS class.
This was a great opportunity to introduce a new mechanic that will feel very unique. A lot of people will experiment with the Death Knight. The way we're setting up the Death Knight, a lot of people will want to just interact with the introduction to the Death Knight and see what he's all about and get to know the class.
What major level 80 end-game content are you including?
Kaplan: There's a few things. We've a number of instances. We're doing instances to cover all the levelling up experience as well, not just end-game instances. We'll have five-person instances at the end-game and for the levelling up experience.
We'll also do the heroic dungeons again, so that provides a lot of end-game content right there. We're going to do a 25-person raid game.
We're going to focus on bigger raid instances, meaning more like Naxxramas with lots of bosses rather than the smaller ones like Tempest Keep.
The big lesson we learned from The Burning Crusade was that our ten-person instances are extremely popular. So for Wrath of the Lich King we wanted progression in the ten-person raid game for the players... who want to stick to that ten-person cap.
We'll also add a new arena, and there'll be new arena awards.
Something we introduced in patch 2.1 - that we're going to be [building on] in upcoming content patches as well as Wrath of the Lich King - is our system of daily quests.
Daily quests make for good end-game content for players who don't want to PvP, who don't want to do instances, who don't want to raid and don't want to group - they just like doing quests by themselves.
Daily quests are quests you can do once per day and then it resets the next day. And to alleviate the feeling that those create grinding or repetitive content, we're coming up with daily quests with randomisation.
There's a lot of talk about now being the time to innovate in the MMO genre from certain developer corners currently. How important is innovation to you? Is it too much of a risk to innovate in WoW gameplay when you've such a huge subscriber base already?
Kaplan: I think as a company we've always been more focussed on evolution rather than innovation. But sometimes people take that as, "Oh, these guys never innovate".
We actually operate on a much more detailed level in our game design systems - we have done a lot of innovative systems within World of Warcraft.
We're not really terribly concerned about the risk that comes with innovation.
We feel like the time to innovate is when we can't accomplish our goals within the game and within current systems - as opposed to some trends in the industry which appear to be innovation for the sake of innovation. That's not a limb we're willing to go out on.
We want to make sure the game is really fun for people and we'll innovate as demand calls for it.
Is there interest in MMOs beyond World of Warcraft for Blizzard?
Kaplan: As far was working on another MMO project or a WoW 2, obviously as a company we'd be very interested in further exploring the MMO space but we don't have anything official yet to talk about in that direction.
But we're definitely looking towards the future as well.
Stuart Bishop
