World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King

Wiki: World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Guides

Anonymous — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 06:27:00 GMT

Guides for World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King

Blog Post: Afterwords: World of Warcraft: Wrath Of The Lich King

Phil Kollar — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 00:35:00 GMT

We normally publish our Afterwords interviews shortly after a game is released, but with MMOs, that concept doesn't quite make sense. These games continue growing and changing until...well, until another expansion is released. With the recently-completed patch 3.3, Blizzard's hit MMO World of Warcraft has finally reached the conclusion of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. We figured this would be a good time to check in with WoW game director Tom Chilton about some of the decisions made in the expansion.

Read the full interview to find out what hero classes almost got chosen to be added instead of death knight, whether or not we'll see any other new content before the Cataclysm, and how Blizzard is preparing for that next expansion.[Excerpt]

I wanted to begin with a sort of “state of the union” question. How is Blizzard feeling as you wrap up the Wrath of the Lich King content and move toward the next expansion?

We’re feeling good. As far as wrapping up Lich King content goes, I’m happier with the way the Lich King fight and all of Icecrown leading up to it has turned out compared to anything we’ve done in the past. It’s quite a bit more epic than what we did with Illidan. It’s a cooler climax than Naxxramas back in the day pre-Burning Crusade. I’m happy with how that’s come along. In general, it’s been an awesome expansion. I think players have been pretty excited about it.

With as many death knights as there are in the game now, I sometimes forget that they weren’t there at one point. As the first hero class, death knights were a huge addition to World of Warcraft. What was the process like for introducing this new character to the game, and how difficult has it been to balance them?

Definitely a difficult process. Obviously a lot of that is because of the balance complexities that get introduced by creating a new class. We always knew that we wanted to add more classes to the game, and we had a variety of different ideas for what classes to do. With Burning Crusade, we felt that it was a little too early to introduce a new class. With our second expansion, it seemed like good timing.

When we knew that it was going to be a Northrend-based expansion, we started thinking about character classes that would make sense within the context of the expansion. Among those were the death knight, necromancer, and the runemaster, a character class from one of the Warcraft RPGs, pre-World of Warcraft. Those were our primary contenders.

As we fleshed out the concepts a little bit, it felt like the death knight had more going for it than the other two. It was going to work out better both in terms of how well it fits with the Lich King expansion and also in terms of how it fills some extra need in the game. Obviously, you can make the argument that there still aren’t enough tanks around based on Dungeon Finder queues, but I think it helped. There are people out there playing death knight tanks.

So you do still plan to introduce more hero classes at some point in the future?

It’s a possibility. We have that idea in mind still for the future. We know that we probably would not be able to support introducing a new class with every single expansion, just like we probably wouldn’t be able to support having new races with every expansion. It’s a good candidate for the future, but exactly when that will be or what expansion it might be in or what class it might be is too early to say.

Wrath of the Lich King also brought some graphical improvements to the game. I know you’ve always tried to keep a balance between looking good and being able to run on a wide variety of computers. I’m curious about how you’ve maintained that balance during Wrath of the Lich King, and, particularly as you move forward with an expansion that’s going to be re-doing visuals on a lot of the original game world, if you expect the system requirements to keep climbing.

I can’t speak for sure as to the final system requirements for Cataclysm. It’s too early to say. There’s a possibility that they could go up a little bit, although we would still be talking about machines that are many years old being able to run it at this point. We try to make sure that we support older machines, and we’ll continue to do so. But an older machine today is less old than an older machine when WOW first shipped or when Burning Crusade shipped. If you make that assumption that the system requirements will creep up a little bit, there’s more we can do visually, but we’ll see.

We know that we’re going to introduce things like the improved water. Water’s been one of those things that we’ve never been entirely happy with ever since the original version of the game. It’s what we were able to do with the system requirements that we were satisfied with at the time. As technology advances, it gets easier to do a better job at that kind of thing. We’re pleased so far with how that’s been coming along.

Like you mention, a lot of the old world will also get a facelift, not only for new technology but also for new techniques. Our tools and our level designers have just got better at making the zones. They’ve been doing it for a long time. They have a better idea of how to do things that look really awesome efficiently.[PageBreak]

You added dual specs into World of Warcraft during Wrath of the Lich King, and various hybrid classes received some buffs. It seems like in some ways Wrath of the Lich King has made things tougher for pure DPS classes, just in terms of how much harder it is to get into random groups without a healer or a tank spec. And in a lot of cases, hybrid classes that are specced for DPS can do just as much damage as pure DPS classes. Do you think that’s an issue at all or something that will require more balancing?

It will always require ongoing tuning, although to be honest, we’re pretty happy with the way that balance works out right now. There’s not much question in my mind or the minds of our class guys at this point that the pure DPS classes do have an edge when it comes to straight DPS. They have the higher potential as far as we’re aware and anecdotally as far as our experiences in the game go. We have tried to tune classes like rogues and mages and warlocks and hunters to be a notch higher.

That can vary quite a bit from player to player just depending on their gear relative to the gear of the people that they’re playing alongside and just their individual skill as a player or even their connection. A player with a slower connection is inherently going to have a little bit of a disadvantage compared to somebody with a faster connection. Some of those things can confuse the results and sometimes give players the impression that their class does less than it should for being a pure DPS class.

But all things being equal, as far as those other variables go, we feel pretty good about where that is right now. There are some adjustments to be made. I definitely wouldn’t say that it’s perfect. If you’re talking about raid DPS, I could see bringing up warlocks a little bit, at least in certain scenarios. There are encounters right now in Icecrown where they shine because of the ability for DOTs to keep on doing damage even when you’re not fully active as a player -- when you’re having to run around or you’re stunned or whatever. So there are still some advantages to being a warlock.

All in all, there’s still some tuning to do, but it’s pretty close to what we want. We’ve been happy with the general philosophical approach of getting the hybrids to where they’re close to the DPS classes when it comes to DPS roles. Otherwise, those specs just turn into joke specs.

Well, my main is a mage, and I was just thinking that if you guys wouldn’t mind throwing in some sort of tank spec for me..

Yeah... [Laughs] Like the Gruul’s Lair fight in Burning Crusade.

There’s been some interesting PvP experiments going on in Wrath of the Lich King, in particular with Wintergrasp, which tried to introduce more world PvP. Eventually you had to go in and change it so that Wintergrasp now resembles something a bit more similar to what people are used to with Battlegrounds rather than open-world PvP. What are your feelings on the various iterations of Wintergrasp? Do you think it was successful? Are you planning to do another Wintergrasp-esque PvP zone?

I’d characterize Wintergrasp as a middling success in that in my mind it’s a clear improvement in terms of large-scale world PvP over what we had prior to Wrath of the Lich King. But it’s definitely not at the point yet where I would say it’s the awesome pinnacle of world PvP. There are a lot of issues, like what you pointed out. It brought out so many people that we had a really hard time supporting it on the servers. The player concentration was brutal. That’s something we want to continue to improve on in the future, at least with our new PvP zones. I don’t imagine that Wintergrasp will stay very populated after Cataclysm, so I don’t think it will be a problem in Wintergrasp itself.

In terms of the overall feeling of being a single person in a really huge battle like that – there were ups and downs to that part. If you’re undergeared as a PvP character, you still have a chance to contribute through vehicles, so that’s kind of cool. At the same time, there could be more depth and more to the vehicle gameplay itself to make that more interesting in the long-term. There was definitely some success as far as rewards go. The concept of Archavon and his buddies generally speaking was cool. It’s cool that a PvE instance opens up as a result of world PvP, and it’s cool that it’s tuned so that pick-up groups can get together and do it. After they win Wintergrasp, people can form up into a raid and dive right in to do that content. I also think the Wintergrasp rewards, the trinkets and various offset armor pieces, were successful. So there were definitely some highlights, some ups and downs to it.

One of the things we need to do a lot better is making it a live PvP zone in-between battles. We had this vision for Wintergrasp that when the battle wasn’t going, it would behave a lot like the Elemental Plateau in Burning Crusade. Back in Burning Crusade, players would go there to farm their primals, and there would be spontaneous world PvP that happened as a result of that. But that didn’t really play out in Lich King the same way that it did in Burning Crusade. It just turned out that farming for elemental fire in the Lich King wasn't as central to the game economy as it was in Burning Crusade. As a result of that, Wintergrasp PvP didn’t play out as we had imagined.

In Cataclysm, we’ve got that idea for Tol Barad, which is our new Wintergrasp-like zone. In-between battles, it will behave like the Isle of Quel’Danas, in terms of being a core daily quest hub. On PvP servers, it can have that same kind of spontaneous PvP that people had on Quel’Danas back in Burning Crusade, which a lot of people enjoyed.

Wrath introduced zone phasing, which allowed for more story-driven questing. Personally, I was a huge fan of how that system worked. But I know as the game progressed and people hit level 80 and cleared out their Icecrown quests, a lot of players struggled with some of the end-game quests that require grouping, because phasing closed them off to other people who had passed that quest already. Do you think the phasing system turned out well? Do you have any plans to change it in the future?

The phasing system was a huge advance in our overall ability to deliver quests that feel dynamic and story-driven. We’re really happy with how that came along relative to pre-Lich King. It definitely needs more polish. It’s exactly like you say. It’s really hard to share quests when there’s phasing involved. There’s awkwardness when you’re in a group with somebody who’s in a different phase than you.

For Cataclysm, we have high hopes to polish that experience and make it easier to share quests that involve phasing. We’ll have to see. We have work slated on that stuff, but I don’t know how much we’ll get done or how far we’ll get into that. It’s definitely on our list of things to try to address in Cataclysm.

The main plot arcs for Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King have involved wrapping up plot threads left over from Warcraft III. Of course, you’ve introduced some unique stories as well, but the focus of those expansions have been very much on these Warcraft III characters and stories. Do you feel like you’ve delivered properly developed final acts to these stories for fans of Warcraft who wanted to see how they played out?

I think so. Like I mentioned earlier in the interview, we did a better job of it with the Lich King than we did with Illidan. When it comes to the Lich King, we’ve done a really good job of closing that story while making it feel like players are a part of it and get to experience it first-hand. We gave him a fitting end. There are other characters from Warcraft lore that we continue to take advantage of.

Obviously, we’re digging up Deathwing for Cataclysm, so that should be big. Deathwing’s interesting in that he’s not a character that a lot of World of Warcraft players have prior experience with because he was in the earlier Warcraft games and not really the more recent ones. He’s a very central figure to Warcraft lore, but he’s not one that’s as well-known as the Lich King or Illidan, since they were Warcraft III main characters. But players will learn a lot more about Deathwing. They’re going to see that Deathwing is cool and different in his own ways and certainly super-duper epic.[PageBreak]

Clearly you guys have learned a lot about story-telling in MMOs. I agree that the shift between original WoW and Burning Crusade and then Burning Crusade to Lich King was pretty huge. But it seems like in the future of WoW, as you say, you’re going to have to go for – not necessarily stand-alone stories, but you’re certainly drawing on stuff that more recent fans of the Warcraft franchise won’t be familiar with. Are you nervous about that?

I’m confident that we’ll be able to build up new characters and storylines. Part of that is because we’ve become better at it. If we were looking at ourselves five years ago, I think I’d have a lot less confidence that we’d be able to build up new characters that were as compelling as some of the Warcraft III characters. But as we’ve become a lot better at doing things like the in-game cinematics and even just the intro cinematics for the game and the way we make our quests more cohesive and let you interact with major characters on a more frequent basis, I think we’re better at developing those characters within WOW itself than we were before.

With Deathwing, you’ll see a good level of support for him in the intro cinematic. The intro cinematic for Cataclysm will help players understand what’s going on with Cataclysm and who Deathwing is and what his deal is. We’ll also have in-game movies like we did with the Lich King that will help players understand him better. At the end of the day, I think he’s going to feel very familiar, very real, and cool.

As part of that effort to introduce this new villain, do you think you’ll end up using more in-game cutscenes than you ended up using in Wrath of the Lich King?

It’s hard to say whether or not we’ll literally do more of them. We certainly plan to use them, but as far as exact number of them, it’s too early to say for sure. We have plans for in-game movies like that. We may end up doing more of them or maybe less. We’ll do whatever number of them seems right for the needs of the game. We don’t try to just conjure up opportunities to make them. We make them when we feel like it would really contribute a lot to the storyline.

Making end-level content more approachable has been another big change for the game. It’s easier to get more powerful badge gear, you created the Dungeon Finder tool, etc. I know there’s always been that hardcore versus casual debate that rages on the WOW forums, where some people hate that stuff and some people love it. How do you feel like the general feedback among WOW players has been?

The general feedback has been positive. We definitely plan to keep going in the direction that we’re going right now. We’re really happy with the Dungeon Finder. I’d like to find a way to extend that at the very least to 10-person raids at some point in the future. There are a lot of complexities with making that work, but anything we can do to alleviate the annoyances or pains associated with players having to arrange their own groups would be great. Being able to extend that into raiding would be awesome if we could do it.

We also have plans to continue making PvP more accessible also. It’s interesting that in Burning Crusade our raiding game was extremely hardcore, and in a lot of ways the PvP was a lot more casual player-friendly. Through the course of Lich King, those have flipped around. A lot of that is just because of the development in our PvE game. We had really aggressive development in solving the problems that we saw in PvE in Burning Crusade as far as making PvE more accessible and easier to get into and more rewarding. Almost simultaneously, PvP either stayed the same or got more hardcore in some ways.

Those flipped roles in Lich King, and we really want to balance them out better than we have before in Cataclysm. We want to continue to advance on that front with PvE, and with PvP we really want to make sure that it feels better-balanced against PvP as far as how much effort it takes to organize stuff and how much reward you get for your time and effort spent.

I wanted to ask one question about the 3.1 patch specifically. This is the patch that introduced the Ulduar raid. That seemed like a strange break in the main Lich King storyline. I know that Hodir had an extensive and interesting questline in Wrath of the Lich King, but the focus for all the other raids was a little more directly on the Lich King himself. How early into the Wrath of the Lich King process did you decide that Ulduar would be the first content patch? Did it concern you that you might be taking attention away from the main villain of the game?

Not much. I agree that they feel a little too disconnected. There is supposed to be a tie-in between Yogg-Saron (the boss of Ulduar) and the Lich King, and that’s how that was supposed to make sense – through Yogg-Saron’s manipulation of world events. I don’t think that was obvious enough to the players. It’s hard for them to draw that connection even though theoretically that connection exists. In the planning stages, that wasn’t much of a factor for us, because in our minds that connection existed and was clear. We just didn’t do a very good job of expressing it.

From an execution standpoint, or even from a philosophical standpoint, it’s okay to have content that’s a little bit of a break from what else is going on. If you look at Onyxia, that’s kind of a break. Obviously, we did her as part of the five-year anniversary as a retro look back. But it’s okay to have content like that that’s a little bit tangential as long as the main story arc continues to progress and make sense and it doesn’t feel like we’ve abandoned the main story arc.

More than anything else with Ulduar, I think it was just bigger than it needed to be and more hardcore than it needed to be. Those were the biggest lessons for us along with making the connection to the main story arc clearer if there’s going to be one.

For the final question, there’s been some rumors going around and I wanted to clear them up. You guys have wrapped up the main Lich King storyline. Icecrown is out there, which you guys have said is the final major raid for this expansion. But there are some rumors that there might be another content patch of some sort before Cataclysm releases.

That is a possibility. We can’t say for sure at this point, but we are looking into the possibility of having a boss in the Ruby Sanctum, which is another part of Wyrmrest Temple. It’s a little too early to have a lot of details on that, but I wouldn’t characterize it as a huge chunk of content. It’s not a patch 3.4 or anything.

Not a whole raid, but maybe just a smaller boss instance?

Exactly. I think of it more as an extension of patch 3.3.

Wiki Page: WOW MEMBERS

Muntey — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 01:34:00 GMT

I'M A LVL 55 WARRIOR HUMAN DONASCAR IS THE NAME .

And I like to abuse the points system, with pointless posts like this one....

Blog Post: WOW's Lead World Designer Speaks On Newly-Launched Final Lich King Patch

Phil Kollar — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 00:20:00 GMT

Today is the day World of Warcraft players have been waiting for since...well, since patch 3.2 launched in August. But more importantly, it's the beginning of a moment Warcraft fans have yearned for since first witnessing the rise of the evil Prince Arthas in Warcraft III. With today's launch of patch 3.3 for World of Warcraft, titled "The Fall of the Lich King," Blizzard finally wraps up all of the major content for their second expansion, Wrath of the Lich King. And it's all leading to a major showdown with Arthas in his sanctuary of Icecrown Citadel, which is now home to three new five-man dungeons and one huge new ten- or twenty-five-man raid.

I had a chance to talk with Blizzard lead world designer Alex Afrasiabi about the patch, the build-up to this huge fight, and what's coming next for World of Warcraft. Read the full interview below.[Excerpt]

Game Informer: Patch 3.3 is arguably the biggest patch you’ve done for Wrath of the Lich King, if not for the game as a whole. You’re adding three new five-man dungeons and the new ten- or twenty-five-man raid. Did you guys set out to make patch 3.3 this huge to lend it an epic feel since it’s the last major patch for the game before the next expansion? Or is that something that just happened as you were designing it?

Alex Afrasiabi: It was definitely intentional. With all the big fanfare around the expansion itself -- I mean, it’s called Wrath of the Lich King -- we wanted to make sure that the 3.3 patch lived up to the name of the expansion. It was definitely one of those things we set out to do. We wanted to go out huge.

GI: Was it planned that way right from the beginning of when you started plotting out patches for the expansion or was it a more recent decision as you started nearing patch 3.3?

AA: We don’t set everything out in stone as we start an expansion. Things change, playstyles change, and we have to be in tune with everything. But the final patch is certainly something that we planned on going big with.

GI: A couple weeks ago you announced that the final raid is going to be released section by section over the course of a month or two instead of all at once. That’s similar to how the bosses were released for the Trial of the Crusader raid in patch 3.2. Why did you come to this decision? And what’s your response to the critics saying that it’s just a way of stretching out the content to keep people playing until Cataclysm comes out?

AA: We feel really good about the content. We feel like the content we’re releasing with in patch 3.3 will definitely give the players goals and things to work on. One of the things we noticed about gated content is that it almost feels like a mini-patch as we release the content. Think about world events and things that you can prepare for every month. It tends to give you something to look forward to, and I think gated content definitely works in that regard.

GI: I know it’s looking a bit ahead since there won’t be another major content patch for the game until after Cataclysm is released, but now that you’ve done it twice in a row, do you expect future raid patches to follow the gated content pattern?

AA: We can’t really commit to anything. It’s entirely possible. We haven’t hammered out everything for Cataclysm raid progression. It’s definitely a possibility. We’ll take what we learn from Icecrown and obviously apply toward the game going forward, but that’s several months of learning left to be done.

GI: Whether people are interested in raiding or not, I think one thing everyone’s excited about in patch 3.3 is the big finale to the Lich King storyline, where players finally get to fight Arthas, which most of us have been wanting to do since Warcraft III. I talked about this a little bit with Jeff Kaplan a couple weeks ago, but I’d be curious for your thoughts as well. I think it’s really unique for an MMO to have a villain and a narrative that players are actually invested in. How has that affected the build-up to patch 3.3 and the execution of that final battle with Arthas?

AA: When we started Lich King, one of the big goals was to make a much more cohesive story than Burning Crusade. Burning Crusade was cool, and it was definitely a step up from vanilla World of Warcraft, but if you recall, there really wasn’t much about Illidan. Each zone was it’s own self-contained zone. There were hints here and there, but we really didn’t play the story or narrative up at all.

Going into Lich King, straight out of the gate, we decided it was going to be three acts, and we knew how it was all going to play out. We had it all basically planned out from day one. It’s playing out the plan. When 3.3 hits and once the Lich King is unlocked, players will have -- I’ll go on record as saying -- probably one of the most epic battles they’ve ever taken part in. I don’t think they’ll be expecting what they’re going to get for this fight. I think it will be something that they’ve never seen the likes of. The finale will be amazing.

GI: Like I said, fighting Arthas is something that Blizzard fans have been waiting for and building up the excitement for since Warcraft III. That’s a long time. Have you guys felt any additional pressure beyond what you would from a regular content patch because you want to fulfill players’ expectations?

AA: I wouldn’t say we felt pressure. We really had our eye on getting this thing out the door and making sure it would meet and then shatter the expectations that players have. Bold words, I know, but I’m really proud of what everyone’s done. I think this thing will be amazing.[PageBreak]

GI: Another part of the narrative pull for patch 3.3 is that Jaina and Sylvanas (pictured above), two Warcraft characters who have been around as long as Arthas, will be joining players for the assault on Icecrown. How did you decide on these two character specifically to take part in the dungeon?

AA: It was a pretty easy decision honestly. We wanted key characters for both Horde and Alliance, and we wanted characters that have a vested interest in challenging Arthas or the Lich King, or defeating him for Sylvanas. Jaina obviously has a history with Prince Arthas. She was his -- I don’t know what you’d call her -- fiancé, girlfriend, betrothed. Sylvanas has a different history, in that he basically stole her body and turned her into a banshee, and she’s dead set on revenge. There’s some passion and emotion behind these two, and the Horde and Alliance are familiar with these characters.

GI: I don’t want you to spoil anything from the story, obviously, since I’m really excited to experience it for myself. But can you reveal whether or not Jaina and Sylvanas’ roles will be changing in the Warcraft universe following their involvement in Icecrown?

AA: I think we’ll see them evolve certainly. Sylvanas is obviously under great scrutiny by the Horde at this point because of the Wrathgate incident. Even despite claims of a coup, there’s still questions amongst the Horde about whether or not she had any responsibility, so she’ll definitely have her hands full in proving her loyalty to the Horde. And Jaina, of course, is ruler of Theramore. With Cataclysm coming into full swing, Kalimdor will be affected to a great degree as you’ve seen, and she’ll have a bigger responsibility as well.

GI: Jeff Kaplan also told us that patch 3.3 will contain Blizzard’s second-ever in-game cinematic. Do you have any hints as to where this moment takes place? Specifically, is it going to be immediately available upon 3.3’s release, or will it be during a part of the raid that’s not open right away?

AA: It’s going to…take some work from the players. It won’t be immediately available. We have gone to some work to make sure that it will be available to everybody at some point, but initially it’s going to take some work.

GI: Another big draw of the Icecrown raid for hardcore players is that they’ll be able to gather parts for Shadowmourne (pictured above), a new legendary weapon in the game. I know this is meant to be a replacement for Frostmourne, since that weapon would technically steal players’ souls, but what’s the story behind Shadowmourne? Where does it come from and what rewards (and risks) does it have for players seeking to use it?

AA: Shadowmourne is a weapon that’s being created or formed by the Ashen Verdict. Specifically, it’s something that High Lord Darion Mograine, leader of the Knights of the Ebon Blade, the Death Knights, has a keen interest in creating. It’s supposed to be the safe Frostmourne. Whereas Frostmourne will *** and curse its user for all eternity, Shadowmourne is supposed to be as powerful but without the drawback. Whether or not that happens, we’ll see.

The second portion of this is that the forces of light have their own powerful super-weapon, the Ashbringer. The Death Knights didn’t have an equivalent to that. That’s really where Shadowmourne came from, the need to hit the Lich King with the dark and the light, the Shadowmourne and the Ashbringer.

With Shadowmourne, you’re going to see a lot of people trying to get it. It will probably be one of our most challenging legendaries to acquire. It requires more skill in gameplay than previous legendaries.

GI: There are also some major quest log changes coming in the patch, such as the ability to look up previously completed quests.

AA: Actually, I’ve heard people talking about that, but that’s not actually something we’re supporting in this patch.

GI: Whoops! Well, there are still some big quest log changes coming, with new quest tracking options and a new look. Why did you feel like now was the right time to retool how the quest log works instead of waiting until Cataclysm’s release?

AA: If you look back at patch 3.2, we had a version of the quest log changes out then. It was supposed to come out then, and we tested it, but we simply weren’t happy with it. Being Blizzard, we iterate on these things. We went back to the drawing board and worked the issues out. We really thought it was important that players get this for Cataclysm because there’s so much change in the world for all the new zones and new content. At the same time, we thought it was important to get it out early so players could experience it and give us feedback as we work on it. Part of our iterative process is to get the stuff out and constantly change it and fix it and make it even better.

So we think that getting it out in patch 3.3 will be important. It’s the holiday season, and there are a lot of people that will be getting the game and also people who just want to re-roll and are using the quest mods that are out right now. We wanted to give them something that could fill that role without the need of those mods. Again, like I said, just working toward Cataclysm, we want to have something in place at launch that’s tested and solid.[PageBreak]

GI: You actually brought up something else that I wanted to ask about. I can’t help but notice that some of the quest log changes -- like the ability to see an area where you’re supposed to go for the quest on the map -- definitely reflect some of the stuff done in the popular Quest Helper mod. How much inspiration do you take from mods that end up proving extremely popular in the community? Is that something that you watch out for and try to figure out ways that you can implement it in the game yourselves?

AA: Totally. One of the big things here at Blizzard is that we all play the game. It might sound strange to say, but it’s something that I’ve found unique about this company. We all play the game a lot. We’re very aware and in tune with the way the game plays and the UI mods out there. It’s not just our game, by the way. We play a lot of other games as well. If you look at other MMOs, this is the direction that the genre is headed with quest details being something you don’t fight for and the narrative being something you can enjoy. We don’t want players to struggle with figuring out quest details or where to go. We want to show them what a cool quest it is through actually playing it. We’ll get you to the area, and then you can see for yourself.

GI: The ability to do cross-server looking for group for dungeons seems like a pretty major change to the structure of the game, as it essentially adds in a PvE matchmaking element. When did you decide that this was something that you wanted to add to World of Warcraft?

AA: A long time ago. The technology just wasn’t with us initially. Obviously we’ve been working on this for a while. This isn’t a minor feature by any stretch.

GI: No, it seems like a huge feature to me.

AA: A major game feature. It will change the way the game plays, we’re very well aware of that, and for the better.

GI: It also seems like this could open the door to other potential cross-server capabilities. I know with Battle.net coming, you’ll have the ability to see people on your friends list who might not be playing on the same server as you. Do you think it’s possible that in the future players could form groups for dungeons with friends who aren’t on the same server?

AA: I can’t really comment on that. Nothing’s out of the question. We’re always looking to improve the game, and the Dungeon Finder is one of those features that I’m certain we’ll continue to improve upon going forward as a major feature. So I can’t really comment. It’s entirely possible, but time will tell.

GI: I wanted to clarify this point since I’m personally just not sure: Does the Dungeon Finder only work for five-man dungeons, or does it work for raids as well?

AA: It does work for raids, but it doesn’t work cross-server for raids. So you can utilize the feature on your own server. Again, as time advances, we’ll certainly learn much about functionality and improve on it.

GI: You’ve got a ton of great new PvE content in patch 3.3, but there isn’t much for PvP players. I’m wondering if there’s anything special planned for people who are more into PvP to help tide them over until the expansion?

AA: We have a whole new arena season coming out with patch 3.3, so that’s a huge part of it. With a new arena season comes all-new gear. Of course, we’ll update the Wintergrasp raid, so there’s the new Toravon raid boss as well. That’s not necessarily PvP, mind you, but it will offer some PvP gear. This patch was definitely more focused on PvE. Last patch, 3.2, was our big Isle of Conquest patch for PvP.

File: World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King

Phil Kollar — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 21:49:00 GMT