World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Interviews

GameSpy brings us two more BlizzCon interviews that focus on World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King, StarCraft II, the event itself, and more. The first Q&A is with Blizzard co-founder Frank Pearce:

GameSpy: The Wrath of the Lich King expansion for World of Warcraft will be out in just over a month — what are the plans for the WoW franchise beyond that?

Frank Pearce: The team is initially going to be working on some content patches; we’ve got some good ideas in store. Historically, we’ve been pretty ambitious in terms of the amount of content and the scope of the content that we’ve put in patches, and that’s definitely been a factor in the time it’s taken us to deliver expansion sets. So we’re going to have to take a closer look at the content that we want to put in patches, and make sure it’s a reasonable amount that meets everyone’s expectations but still gives us the opportunity to work on the next expansion and deliver that in a reasonable timeline.

While the other is with World of Warcraft lead designer Jeff Kaplan:

GameSpy: In addition to the new zones, some old raids are being retooled, like Naxxramas.

Jeff Kaplan: Naxxramas is now level 80. You can do it as a 10-person raid, or a 25-person raid. I have a really high degree of confidence in the tuning of Naxxramas… I think it’s awesome.

Because of the smaller size, we’ve been able to test every single encounter on the development team, which is really nice. So we’ve all played through — all of the guys involved with class design and dungeon design have played all of the encounters in Naxxramas — which is something we couldn’t have said previously.

We also have our QA raid group, which is doing [Naxxramas] regularly, and then we hang out on the test realm with the top-end raid leaders. We give them our email addresses, you know, “who’s leading your raid? Oh, it’s this guy, OK.” I’ll get into /tells with that guy, have them send emails and say “hey, whenever you want, send me an email, we’ll come and watch you, we’ll parse your logs, we’ll look at the class balance.” So this beta’s been hands-down way more productive than our previous betas.

GameSpy: Are there plans to give the same treatment to other older dungeons?

Jeff Kaplan: For sure. I think it’s always weighing that balance between content that people have seen before… we don’t want people to think we’re retrofitting because it’s easy, we want people to think that we’re retrofitting because it’s cool and the right thing for the game at the right time.

The truth is if you take something like Naxxramas or Molten Core or Blackwing Lair, we do gain some production value out of the art assets: Naxxramas exists, the walls are there, we don’t need to retexture them. But from a balance and tuning standpoint, it’s a do-over. We’re just starting completely over with the dungeon at that point. So it really isn’t a huge gain for us to do it that often. We more want to do it because it’s really cool and it fits the story of what we’re doing.

Naxx sort of came up for two reasons. One, we’re going to Northrend, and it’s like the ultimate Scourge bastion short of Ice Crown Citadel. Two, it was a super hardcore raid dungeon right at the end of the raid cycle, and so many people had missed it. Amongst the player base, they considered it, like, “that was probably the best raid instance you guys have ever done,” and people got to do it for a very short period of time. So we said, “OK, what can we do to let everyone experience it?”

So not only is it getting a second chance, but we’ve made it super-accessible. It’s the entry-level raid tier in this expansion, and rather than making a big hurdle, we wanted a nice transition coming out of Normal, then Heroic, then 10-person raiding, or 25. It’s not that the 25-person is more difficult than the 10-person; the 10- and the 25- are both tuned with having Heroic gear in mind. So we really just wanted a much smoother transition.

We felt that in Burning Crusade, we gave you Normal-mode dungeons, which were great, and then there were more difficult Normal-mode dungeons, like Shadow Labs or Shattered Halls, and then there was this brick wall of the Heroics, which were extremely difficult, and then Gruul, Magtherodon, High King Maulgar…

People look back at them now and go, “well, those aren’t that hard,” but at the time, rolling out of Shadow Labs… if you take High King Maulgar, it’s a great fight. I really like that fight. It takes longer for the raid leader to explain the fight than it does to actually just do the fight. That level of complexity, I think, is awesome, but it was misplaced as being sort of the first raid that people were supposed to do. We shouldn’t have a raid encounter that’s that complex the first time that you’re showing up with 25 people.