World of Warcraft : interview

WoW Dev Interview: The Heart and Souls of Icecrown Citadel

Kody — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:06:34 GMT

It looks like World of Raids wasn't the only one interviewing Greg Street and Cory Stockton this week! Blizzard's community team sat down with them and grilled them on Icecrown Citadel, including their philosophies behind the dungeon and more. Check it out below!

Quote from: Zarhym (Source)

To shed some light into the chilly gloom of Icecrown Citadel, we sat down to talk about the decision-making process behind Wrath of the Lich King's ultimate dungeon, the World of Warcraft team's design philosophy, and the dangers that lurk in the heart of Arthas's stronghold.

Check out the resulting interview to learn more: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/underdev/3p3/icecrown-interview.xml

Quote from: Blizzard (Source)

With the final battle against the Lich King just on the horizon, Lead Content Designer Cory Stockton and Lead Systems Designer Greg Street discuss what awaits players inside Icecrown Citadel and offer a glimpse at the design process behind Wrath of the Lich King's ultimate raid and dungeon encounters.

What were you looking forward to most about developing Icecrown Citadel?

Cory: I think the most exciting thing about developing Icecrown Citadel was just knowing that we were working on the final chapter of the Northrend expansion, and that we'd really be able to give players that ultimate sense of completion of the storyline. Arthas is a huge character in Warcraft lore, so we took a lot of pride in making this the best experience we possibly could.

Icecrown and the Frozen Throne are important parts of the world of Azeroth and have quite a bit of history, especially for longtime Warcraft players. How do you convey the significance of these places and the events that took place there in design?

Cory: History was a large factor in the design of Icecrown Citadel from the very beginning. When we first sat down to discuss the layout of the raid itself, we immediately went back to Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne to think about how the spire from the ending cinematic could be translated into World of Warcraft. We decided to actually build Icecrown Citadel around the original spire to pull players even more into the storyline. This kind of thinking carried on throughout the entire design process.

Greg: We want Icecrown to be an epic experience from top to bottom, and that includes the loot you get. We're not going to shower players in items -- well, more than we already do -- but we do want to make sure the items are sufficiently powerful so that they're upgrades for all of our players.

Is there an existing model in World of Warcraft for Icecrown Citadel's itemization or style of play? What lessons that you'd learned from earlier projects wound up being applied to Icecrown Citadel?

Greg: The nice thing about Icecrown Citadel from an itemization perspective is that we have lots of bosses. That's something of a relief coming from the Crusaders' Coliseum, where we had only five bosses. For Icecrown, we can afford to have multiple options for a particular slot -- say a healing leather bracer or a melee trinket -- and even itemize some of the more unusual pieces. We have a pretty effective system for figuring out who is going to drop what to make sure that an individual boss will be interesting to a variety of players in terms of loot. Most of our lessons learned are in the realm of what differences there should be between 10- and 25-player itemization, the role of tradeskill recipes, and what kinds of items to place with badge vendors.

Cory: I think we learn lessons from every raid that we do. We didn't model Icecrown specifically after any of our previous raids, but you can definitely see influences. For example, we have a winged structure in Icecrown that players will remember from Naxxramas. Another example of an influence would be the teleporters from Ulduar. We know that players really loved that concept, so we brought it back in Icecrown.

Can you talk a little about how artists and designers on the team collaborated on the creation of Icecrown Citadel?

Cory: The design and art teams worked extremely closely throughout the entire development process. The biggest single influence on the look and the layout of the dungeon comes from our concept art, and there was no shortage of that for Icecrown Citadel. Once we locked down the layout, we were able to get to work on the final art extremely quickly thanks to the existing style we'd developed for the Icecrown zone. We really wanted the players to feel connected to the environment, but we wanted to make sure it still had an amazing look. Oftentimes, these two things are hard to mix, but in this case, I think we've been able to pull off an amazing dungeon from both the art and design standpoint.

What sorts of new loot and item abilities will we see in Icecrown?

Greg: There are three main sources of loot for Icecrown: the bosses themselves, the Emblem of Frost badge vendors, and a new faction, the Ashen Verdict, that will provide suitable rewards as well, particularly at the Exalted level.

As far as the items themselves go, we want them to feel epic. In addition to having favorable optimization, we also want to try a lot of experiments to make the items feel cool and unique. We are going to try to do a lot of weapon procs, for instance, which is something we haven't done much since the original World of Warcraft.

When you set out to itemize "sister" areas -- like the Icecrown Citadel dungeon and raid, or Halls of Stone, Halls of Lightning, and Ulduar -- do you take any steps to make loot from these places feel similar?

Greg: Absolutely. We approach that on two fronts: the art and the names. When we did the Halls of Stone and Lightning, we hadn't completed the Ulduar raid yet, so the items there didn't necessarily have Titan-influenced art models for us to use. We are doing the Icecrown dungeon at the same time as the raid, and it's a style we already know pretty well, from Naxxramas and even the Warcraft RTS games.

Naming is something we've had a lot of fun with. There's a ton of lore to draw from for Icecrown loot and it has a very strong "kit." World of Warcraft players know to associate the Scourge with spiders, bats, and cultists along with more traditional forms of undead, like skeletons and liches.

Do you itemize Icecrown's "trash" -- the enemies between bosses -- differently from elites elsewhere in the world elsewhere?

Greg: We make sure there is epic trash loot -- specific items that only drop from trash. It helps keep players interested between bosses. However, we aren't doing Heroic trash, just Heroic bosses, so there won't be unique trash loot for Heroic versions of the 10- and 25-player versions of the raid. We try to construct the trash in such a way that it isn't trivial to go farm the first pull or whatever in hopes that an epic drops. We make our raids more accessible now in general, so I'm not sure the motivation is there to try stunts like that the way it once was. We want players who have raided so far in Wrath of the Lich King to be able to actually fight the Lich King, so chances are a lot of raiders will have plenty of opportunities to gear up. Now, the Heroics are another story -- those will be as challenging as they were in Ulduar and Trial of the Crusader, and the items will likewise be even better.

What have you done to make the tier-10 sets feel like a meaningful advancement from tier 8 and tier 9? How do they visually represent Icecrown's lore and history?

Greg: Not only do we want them to be a meaningful advancement, but we want them to feel really awesome. This is Arthas loot you're talking about. We started by spending a lot of time on the concept art to make sure it tied into the type of creatures you'll encounter and the whole Icecrown art "kit" in general. For example, the rogue tier-10 set has a strong geist look to it, while the hunter set has strong Nerubian elements, and the mage set looks a lot like the Blood Princes. You can see the Icecrown look and feel in a lot of pieces, which itself drew strongly from the Lich King's original helmet. Look for lots of blue, ice, skulls, and spikes.

We have also spent a lot longer on the set bonuses than we usually do. It's important that they feel awesome for every class and spec. Going back to the Crusaders' Coliseum, part of the challenge we made for ourselves was to create an instance that didn't require as much time or resources as Ulduar to develop, yet was still cool. We had set bonuses for the tier-9 gear, but they were often simple -- more crit on a common ability was a typical one. For tier 10, we're really going for set bonuses that change your game up a little. At the very least, you should want to change your rotation a little, though this is easier with some classes than others.

If you had something like a mission statement or a slogan for itemizing Icecrown, what would it be?

Greg: Epic. Cool things. Proc'y stuff.

Seriously, that's our mission statement. One of the risks of itemization is making things feel too formulaic. We know that when we step outside the bounds too much, players can have a bad reaction to it, like, "Why does my gear for this tier suck?" It's easy to fall into the trap of making the new gear feel just like the last gear with 20 more stat points. That is the exact design approach we use for the PvP gear, and left unchecked, it would be easy to go the same direction with the PvE gear as well. We're trying not to do that. We think we owe it to Icecrown for the gear to be memorable, but that means we're going to take a few chances.

Can you talk about any of the new mechanics we'll see in the raid?

Cory: One of the coolest new things we're doing in Icecrown is the gunship air battle. Players will be able to board their respective faction's gunship and then take to the air for a battle to the top of the citadel. They'll be fighting on the decks as well as using vehicles' cannon emplacements. If you're really daring, you can put on a goblin rocket pack and propel yourself back and forth between the two battling gunships. Needless to say, this will be a type of encounter that our players have never experienced before.

Icecrown Citadel's structure is extremely vertical -- what challenges does that present from a layout perspective?

Cory: Well, we knew from the start that the layout was going to be vertical, just due to the nature of the original spire. There are a number of things that we're doing to help players get around and not get lost. We're using elevators, teleporters, and even gunships to get players where they need to go in the dungeon. We are also going to have an in-game map with full support for all floors -- that should help too.

Icecrown is the last major raid and dungeon before the release of Cataclysm -- how has that affected the design?

Greg: The major challenge from an itemization perspective is that the items have to last basically until Cataclysm. That means we can't afford to give them away too quickly, but they also need to feel powerful enough that players are motivated to keep trying for them. On the other hand, the really fun thing about doing a final raid tier is how it unties your hands. We can afford to make these items great because nothing needs to follow on their heels. It's cool to be able to optimize the items very well, because it's okay if players don't want to replace these items for a long time.

Cory: We are really pushing as hard as we can to deliver the most epic experience possible. We know that our players have been waiting for this for a long time, and we plan to deliver. Everyone should expect to see this sort of storytelling and attention to detail in Cataclysm as well. I think we are always striving to pull the people who play our game into the storyline and really give them an explanation for why they're there. It won't be too long before they'll get a chance to bring the pain to Deathwing!

Thanks, both of you - we're looking forward to playing through Icecrown Citadel after patch 3.3 is released!

GC Interview - New Icecrown Details Revealed

Zyuu — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 18:50:24 GMT

The GetBuffed crew has interviewed J Allen Brack (Wrath of the Lich King Lead Producer) and Tom Chillton (Lead Designer) at the Games Convention in Leipzig. The interview is focused on the Icecrown Glacier area. Some of the information learned in the interview is:

The Alliance and Horde quest hubs in said zone (Icecrown Glacier) will be flying gunships. The idea behind it is that Icecrown Glacier is so full of the Scourge that Alliance and Horde have not been able to set up a stronghold, so they ended up deciding to use gnomish & goblin engineering to create flying vehicles that would act as their base in Icecrown Glacier.
There will be an event at the Wrath Gate upon entering into the Icecrown Glacier zone, in which players will be able to see something exciting and interact with major lore characters.

GC Interview - Premades lvl 80, Naxxramas, level cap

Zyuu — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 04:01:20 GMT

The German site Gamona recently published an interview with J Allen Brack (Wrath of the Lich King Lead Producer) and Tom Chillton (Lead Designer) which was done at the Games Convention in Leipzig. Some of the information learned in the interview is:

They plan to make premade level 80 characters available towards the end of the beta, so newcomers on beta realms can test the end-game content as soon as possible.
New dungeons and level cap of 80 are coming soon – in an upcoming build
Instance runs in WotLK will be faster than those in TBC, heroics are included.
Naxxramas - 4 Horsemen encounter mechanics changed so the non-traditional tank classes (similar to warlock tanking in Black Temple) will have to tank some of the 4 Horsemen.

Say goodbye to Spell-damage only gear in WotLK

Zyuu — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 21:39:49 GMT

Recently PC Gamer interviewed Tom Chilton alias Kalgan, one of three Lead Designer's. Kalgan usually focus on PVP oriented things and is known as the 'Blizzard PVP guru'. If you're able to buy PC Gamer in a store near you, I highly recommend you get the latest issue, since it's filled with Lich King goodness.

One of the things that Kalgan unveil is that the spell-damage only type of gear will get replaced by a whole new system in Wrath of the Lich King. This is certainly interesting and fortunately he share further information about it:

PC Gamer: What else is changing?

Tom Chilton: We're also going to be doing away with spell-damage only type gear. We'll be moving to a system that, as part of your talents, will let players convert healing into spell-damage and vice-versa as part of their talents. That way they can use the exact same gear, but their talents just adapt what it does.

So, converting spell-damage to healing and the other way around is going to be a reality come Lich King. I'm not exactly sure how to react to this just yet, but it's definitely one way to solve some of the underlying issues with gear and it might balance things out or go the opposite direction -- unbalance things.

If done right, with the help of talents being able to go the spell-damage route or healing without having to change your items.. well, it's great! This will make it much less annoying for players and there will be no special need to carry around many different sets. At least not a spell-damage only set and a healing set.

In the very latest issue of PC Gamer UK there's a Wrath of the Lich King preview and interview with J. Allen Brack, the Lead Producer of the Lich King expansion.

J. Allen Brack (JAB) tells us about the biggest lesson they learned from The Burning Crusade. He say that he felt Illidan wasn't involved in the overall storyline of TBC, they wanted Illidan to be more interwoven into the plot and continue being there as players advanced further into Outlands. This is something he want to work on with Wrath of the Lich King, Arthas will be more involved from start to "finish".

I felt the same way in Burning Crusade, while I enjoyed most of the aspects, I always wondered why Illidan mainly remained in his Black Temple and wasn't out there more. It's good to hear that I'm not alone on thinking like this. Lich King will be more grim and darker with Arthas looming around -- a welcome and interesting change, also something I agree with since I played some Lich King at Games Convention last year and it felt darker, more grim and simply "cooler" (no pun intended).

Another thing is that he absolutely feel they are getting better at making World of Warcraft -- especially since 95% of the development team that made Burning Crusade, are now working on Lich King. And with time we learn a lot, this is a given. All lessons they've learned should show as you enter Northrend. Time will tell... time will tell.

Now, one of the biggest concerns is content being consumed too fast and the lack of it afterwards. JAB comment on this and feel it's the greatest challenge of World of Warcraft pretty much (from a Blizzard standpoint) -- to provide players with enough content. Due to the high standards of quality Blizzard have set, they just can't pump out content as fast as players might like. On the other side of the coin, you will be greeted with quality content when it finally is out. It's worth it, wouldn't you say? Or do you feel they should release content unfinished with more bugs?

There's a lot more and some of it have been mentioned in other interviews, articles and what not, but it's still a great read and if you're at the least curious about the future of World of Warcraft, check out the full interview.

Book: Rise of the Horde; Author Interview

Nimloth — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 15:40:38 GMT

>World of Warcraft: Rise of the Horde is a novel written by Christie Golden, which serves as an introduction to the origin of the Draenei and a prologue to the World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade expansion (MMORPG). Christie Golden is a veteran novel writer of Star Trek: Voyager, Ravenloft: Vampire of the Mists, Warcraft: Lord of the Clans, Invasion America, and A.D.999 among other works. > >Chris Metzen revealed at BlizzCon 2005 that you would be writing World of Warcraft: Rise of the Horde. The book would feature the story of the revealed new Wow race: the Draenei. However, the book title is Rise of the Horde. What is the plot of World of Warcraft: Rise of the Horde and from whose main character's point of view is the story told? > >Christie: The reason we went with that title is that's truly what the book is about, the tale of how the original Horde came into existence. And the draenei, as the story shows, were the primary reason. The Horde was created by Kil'jaeden to be used as a weapon against the draenei, who in this book are revealed to be uncorrupted eredar. The basic storyline is that of how the orcs went from being essentially peaceable people in harmony with their world to demonically tainted beings capable of genocide. Our main point of view character is Durotan, Thrall's father. > >This story fascinated me because in recent history, we have seen repeatedly how good people end up doing horrific things to other human beings. How does that happen? What steps have to occur in order for people to forsake their morals—or, rather, rewrite them so completely? Durotan is "Everyman," someone who sees what's going on, but is torn between standing up and fighting it and doing what will protect people he is responsible for. He's a great point of view character in that respect. > >Q: What characters are featured in the book? > >Christie: Ha, you name it! This is the fantasy equivalent of writing a historical novel. Durotan as I have said is the point of view character for most of the book. We also see Orgrim, Blackhand (and his kids, whom I loved portraying as teenage thugs), Ner'zhul, Drek'Thar, Gul'dan, and many others who are familiar names. > >Q: In the beginning of the book you mention playing on an RP server. I assume you play Horde there? If so, what have you enjoyed playing the most on a role-playing server? > >Christie: Very few people know who I am there (as of this writing anyway!) and that gives me a wonderful freedom to just play and make friends and do role-play just as "myself" without the encumbrance of "ZOMG you're Christie Golden!" out there. In the end, I am as big a fan as anyone, and I love the friends I have made and the stories I've been involved in. People are so very, very creative! As for what I play, I play both factions and enjoy them equally. I've played every single class one time or another. I've played orc, troll, tauren, human, night elf and gnome. Can't wait to play blood elf and, of course, a draenei! > >Q: Did the in-game Roleplaying experience help you with writing Rise of the Horde at all? -- by Grushnak @ Cenarion Circle Realm > >Christie: I think it would have helped more if the novel had been set in present day Azeroth. Knowing things like how far away Ratchet is from Stormwind is invaluable in making a place feel "right" to someone who knows the game well. What it did do was let me play with the orcs as characters, and nail down how certain spells looked. For instance, I would have had a harder time describing shaman and warlock spells had I not known how they "looked" to an observer.

Read the full interview here!

Interview with Jeff Kaplan

TIV73 — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 17:03:15 GMT

On MTV.com you can find an Interview with Jeff Kaplan, Lead Designer at Blizzard. He talked about the backgrounds of developing The Burning Crusade and also mentioned player housing:

>"I think housing can take 'World of Warcraft' to the next level," Kaplan said. "I want to make sure that when we introduce player housing to 'World of Warcraft' we do it right and give the feature the credit that it deserves, which is a massive amount of production time on the programming, design and art time. It's something we actually wanted to do for the original shipping game."

Read the interview here!

IGN Interview with Jon LeCraft and Itzik Ben Bassat

Nimloth — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 10:39:39 GMT

>... >IGN UK: Why did you decide to go down the route of lowering raid counts, designing more content around solo players and so on? > >Jon LeCraft: Well, we've always made sure that we've had solo content - we think it's very important for the gameplay that you should be able to play the game by yourself in case your friends aren't online, or if you haven't met anyone online yet or whatever. That's a core aspect. As for why we're doing it, it's a lot more manageable with these smaller groups and, ultimately, we can make better encounters for these smaller groups. We don't have to worry so much about things like 'Oh, well, if eighteen mages come along, they'll just Polymorph everything in this room'. Whereas, with 25 people, some percentage of that will be healers, some percentage will be something else, so really it just gives us much more flexibility with design. > >IGN UK: How much influence does your fairly vocal user base have on content updates or expansions and how much opportunity is there to experiment with new ideas and do something you want to do as a team? > >Jon LeCraft: Well, we take that feedback but we don't necessarily take it literally. We take it and we try to glean what people are asking for but just because they ask for something very specific doesn't mean that's actually what they want. You know, we try to see what's lacking there and then we mould our design in that direction. Ultimately, we're making the game for the players and it's great to be able to get feedback like that. Obviously now, we have test servers with thousands and thousands of players and it's the best focus group you can have - they give us feedback directly, not through the forums as ideas, but directly from the game saying 'Hey, we like that, we don't like that'. It's not necessarily the vocal groups then, it's everyone on the test servers so we get really good feedback. In fact, since we launched the servers, we've been able to launch better, more polished patches to players. > >IGN UK: Do you feel constrained by the framework you've now established for the game or do you think there's still a lot of room for experimentation? > >Jon LeCraft: I think we do still have some freedom for flexibility - I mean we don't want to radically change the game because it works and it's where we want it to be. We want to keep adding to it with content that works with the existing system and we do want to add some new systems, as long as they're well integrated and don't really fight against the game. So yeah, to some degree we are a little bit constrained, but it's okay, as we can still create massive amounts of cool content and sub-systems. >... Read the full article here!

Interview with Jon LeCraft

Nimloth — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 12:17:02 GMT

>GameSpot UK: There are a lot of people playing World of Warcraft right now, so how many of the 8 million do you expect to invest in the expansion? > >Jon LeCraft: I personally expect it to be pretty high; I can't imagine not buying the expansion if you're playing the game. I'm in a guild, where they don't know who I am, and everybody said yes, although one guy said he couldn't afford it. I told him it'd be worth skipping a few meals for. [Laughs] Seriously though, I do think it will help our numbers, because there are people who have taken a break, who'll come back and check Burning Crusade out. > >GSUK: The game was delayed from December to add polish--did that go well? > >JL: Yeah, definitely, and that time was really well spent--I'm glad we took that time. Not only were we able to polish the content, but we were able to add in some stuff that wouldn't have made it otherwise.

Interview with Jeff Kaplan (Tigole)

Nimloth — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 12:06:25 GMT

>FiringSquad: The Burning Crusade seems to have some sci-fi elements added to World of Warcraft's fantasy mix. What does this aspect mean for gameplay? > >Jeff Kaplan: Some have misconstrued a science-fiction aspect with the draenei, but what people tend to miss is that there has always been an otherworldly leaning in the storyline from the very beginning. The Titans themselves traveled through the Twisting Nether and shaped worlds. The orcs come from the very same planet as the draenei and were brought in via an inter-dimensional portal. These are elements of the story that haven't changed. > >I don't think this does anything to change the current gameplay so much as continues to advance the storyline and expand upon the idea that Azeroth is just one world of many that has been affected by the Burning Legion. We now have the opportunity to explore one of those worlds with the addition of Outland. > >FiringSquad: After the expansion's release in January, what can you tell us about future updates to World of Warcraft in terms of new free downloadable content? > >Jeff Kaplan: We do intend to continue producing free content updates for World of Warcraft. Blizzard recognizes how important it is to keep the game fresh; there is a lot more that we would like to do and we have no shortage of ideas. A lot of those ideas will be realized in content updates, while others may find their way into new expansions in the future.