Blizzard Talks About The Lead-Up To The Biggest World Of Warcraft Expansion Yet

Even if you don't play World of Warcraft, chances are you've heard something about the quickly approaching Cataclysm expansion, the third and largest paid update for the popular MMO. Whether it's been Andy, Adam, and I gabbing about the beta on Respec Radio or a passing news story here or there, Cataclysm is huge news. Not only does it add two new races and content for the new level 85 cap, but a patch released Tuesday reshaped all of the zones from the original World of Warcraft release back in 2004, effectively taking the streamlined storytelling and quest techniques that Blizzard perfected in subsequent expansions and applying it to the original two continents and all of the level 1-60 content.

Just days before this major patch hit, I talked to World of Warcraft lead systems designer Greg Street about the massive changes in store for Cataclysm, what Blizzard has learned from Wrath of the Lich King, and where they're looking to go in the future.

How long ago did you come up with the concept for Cataclysm? At what point did you realize that you wanted to remake the whole old world.

Before Wrath of the Lich King had even shipped, we started talking about what we want to do next. We had a lot of ideas around the Deathwing idea, which came up pretty quickly along with thinking we should change the world a little bit. We were initially going to focus a little bit more outside of Eastern Kingdom or Kalimdor, but the more we talked about it, we realized that the quest designers, the level designers, and the item designers were all really jazzed about was trying to fix some of this old stuff that wasn’t really competing anymore with the newer content we delivered in Wrath.

Were there ever any conversations that you had about how insane an idea that was? The undertaking of going back and changing all of that old content…

Oh, totally. The naïve thing we did is that we categorized every zone as green, yellow, or red. Red ones were total redo, yellow ones were some quest flow redesign, and green ones we basically wouldn’t touch. Everything ended up red by the end. [Laughs]

Looking at that huge amount of content that’s in vanilla World of Warcraft, how did you start sorting through that and deciding what to cut? I find it really interesting that you’re not just adding in new quests, but you’re cutting out lots of content that didn’t make sense or didn’t really work.

Yeah, for some of the zones, it’s like we just deleted everything and started all over.

So how did you figure out what to focus on with cuts?

It depended a lot. There were some zones we thought never worked very well in the first place. Hinterlands, for example, never had much of a story going on. Zones like Darkshore and Ashenvale had some interesting content, but the zones themselves were too big and didn’t flow well, so there was a lot of running back and forth. For some of the zones where the questing wasn’t bad, we just kind of reflowed and stuck a few new graveyards and a few new quest hubs in. So some areas, you’ll be doing the same quests, but you won’t be doing as much running back and forth as you did in the old days.

I know one example I’ve heard brought up of old world quests that don’t work very well – I think it was possibly even by you in a presentation – was the “Green Hills of Stranglethorn.” Is that quest still in the game?

It’s really funny, if you want me to spoil it.

Go ahead.

The quest is in the game, but now you only have to get a single page. [Laughs] It’s page 17.

I was curious to see what you did with that, because I remember it being brought up.

I think the questgiver even says something like, “Other adventurers have collected all of the pages for us but one.”

Clearly Cataclysm was a huge undertaking, but so much of the focus seems on remaking the old world, and the level cap is only going up by five levels. Are you worried about adding in less end-game content than in the previous expansions?

We would worry about that except that we’ve added a lot more end-game content than we’ve done in the past.

Really?

Yeah, particularly in the dungeon and raid end. I think there’s nine dungeons, but I’d have to count quick. We added in heroic versions of Deadmines and Shadowfang Keep late in the cycle, just squeezed those in. There’s also three raid zones. And rated battlegrounds as well. We’ve added a lot of stuff there.

We also spent a little more time on the very final zones, Uldum and Twilight Highlands, to make sure that the stories there drive to completion, and there are rewards there. We found that some people in Wrath of the Lich King would hit Storm Peaks and think, "I’m max level now, so I’m going to jump into dungeons." They never really finished the stories in Storm Peaks or Icecrown. We made sure this time that the quest rewards you get are competitive with dungeons to make sure players finish the stories out.

One of the problems people had with finishing the quest content in Wrath of the Lich King is that Icecrown, while it was an incredibly epic, very awesome zone, had troubles with how phasing worked in it. When you got into some of those later quests, a lot of them were group quests, but you’d run into problems where if other people in your guild weren’t in the same leg of the quest as you, they couldn’t help out, because they’re in a different phase of the zone. It made finding a group to help out more difficult than normal. How are you approaching that with the endgame zones?

Phasing was a new feature for us in Wrath of the Lich King. When you have a new hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. We were putting it anywhere we possibly could and definitely overdid it in some areas. I feel like our use of it in Cataclysm is much more judicious. I don’t think there’s anything in Twilight Highlands, which is the final zone, where you have phasing that would prevent players from grouping together. The phasing in that zone is early on as you’re sent into the zone to establish a beachhead for the Alliance or the Horde. You get that home base established, and from then on you’re good to go. Once players players get into the zone, they should be able to group up and kill all the dragons they’re going to have to fight to complete that zone.

You’ve been doing big world events to lead up to Cataclysm for the last few weeks. How far into the process of creating the expansion do you start discussing the world events and what you’re going to do with those?

We start talking about it pretty quickly, because we have to have a lot of plot that happens between. We don’t want to suddenly be like, "Hey, Deathwing’s here, and he’s got all these Twilight Hammer guys supporting him," and then players ask, "Twilight Hammer? Weren’t those guys in Silithus or somewhere?" We have a new bad guy, so we have to introduce his motivation and the whole elemental devastation.

So we start talking about world events early on. And then there’s novels going on the side, filling in the gaps of the story. We have to make sure that feels consistent with what’s happening in-game and isn’t a total side project.

I thought the zombie stuff leading up to Wrath of the Lich King was awesome, but I know a lot of players whined about it.

[Laughs]

How much do you worry about annoying people who are trying to do other things in the game with world events?

Honestly, part of the problem is that we haven’t done enough to change the world as time goes on, so players got comfortable with the idea that the world never changes. Azeroth is static. That’s not really what we want. We would rather it feel like a living, breathing world. We want more of these kind of things, so maybe players won’t be surprised when it does happen.

So do you have any plans or intentions to have more world events in the middle, during expansions, rather than just leading up to them?

We’d love to. A good example was the Argent Tournament patch. That was put together by our world event team. Up until that point, they’d mostly done holidays, like Winter Veil and Hallow’s End. Argent Tournament was their first chance to do something that felt more like a game-changing event. We’d love to do more of that and have some big plans.

One of the big announcements from Blizzcon was that in addition to the new content for the old world, you’ll be going back and streamlining a lot of the old instances throughout Cataclysm. For me personally, that’s both very cool but also a little bit disappointing. On the one hand, it’s obviously very smart to take a confusingly laid out dungeon like Wailing Caverns and clean it up so that people can get through it easier. But I’m also worried about – I know one of the other dungeons you mentioned was Sunken Temple. I may be in the minority, but I actually really like Sunken Temple. I like how it felt very puzzle-y. Wrath dungeons moved away from that puzzle-solving, trap-finding style, but I’d hate to see that disappear from the game entirely. What’s your perspective on that going into changing these dungeons?

The cool part of dungeons is often the boss encounters. The trash leading up to the bosses can be fun if done in moderation. Prior to Wrath of the Lich King, we tended to have lots and lots of trash, where you did 10 or 15 pulls and then a boss, then 10 or 15 more pulls, then another boss. A lot of what we did was just strip out trash. You’ve proven you can beat this group of three trolls and a flying snake, or whatever. We’re not going to make you do it 100 times. We’re going to make you do it a few times, and then you get to the undead troll boss and move on.

I talked to [World of Warcraft senior producer] John Lagrave at Blizzcon and asked him a couple of questions that I wanted to pose to you as well. I think a lot of players were bothered by the pacing of Wrath of the Lich King’s content, especially the long wait between Icecrown Citadel’s release and Cataclysm. Obviously plotting out when you release new content and how long to take with it for a game as huge as WoW can’t be an easy thing to do. Did you learn anything from the pacing in Wrath of the Lich King? How long do you expect the wait to be between new pieces of content for Cataclysm?

In an ideal world, we would get content out very quickly. It’s big for us. It gets a lot of attention, and it gets players to come back to the game. We’d like to have patches and expansions come out as quickly as we can. Those are the best intentions, and we can’t always deliver on that. We got super-ambitious with Cataclysm, and that ended up letting the Icecrown patch last longer than we would have ideally. Pacing-wise, there were a lot of players still working on the Ulduar raid when we came out with the Argent Tournament patch right after. Some players weren’t done with Ulduar and thought it came out a little soon. By contrast, Icecrown has been going for a while now, and players are rightfully starting to want something else to do. I totally agree.

So ideally you would have pushed back the release of the Trial of the Crusader raid by a bit more?

Yeah, that could have come out a little bit later. I think another pacing mistakes we made in retrospect, with the Icecrown raid specifically, was that we had the normal difficulty open a lot earlier than the heroic difficulty. The players for whom the heroic content was aimed had burned themselves out already doing normal modes. They knew how to beat the bosses and were all ready for it. If we had the heroic modes open earlier, that pacing would have felt a little better.

The other Blizzcon question: It seems like the class changes for the expansion hit the servers a bit too early. A lot of players – [Game Informer editor-in-chief] Andy McNamara not least of all – are upset with how much these changes unbalanced level 80 raiding. How do you decide on the right time to release the major pre-expansion patches?

There’s a lot of consideration to go on. First, we want to have time to react. If we have a new idea for a class and players just hate it, we want to make sure we have time to change that before they’re stuck with it for five or ten levels. That’s one consideration. Another is that we bombard players with so much new content when Cataclysm itself releases that also relearning how their class plays would make them have less fun. We try to release with enough time beforehand for players to learn the changes.

We made some mistakes when the patch changing the classes came out. A lot of what we contend with on our end is all of these different builds floating around. There’s the beta build, the public test realm build, Cataclysm itself, pre-Shattering, and post-Shattering. In some cases, we had been so focused on the beta build that we didn’t realize that changes we pushed to the beta build hadn’t correctly pushed to the live build. That’s why we had a whole bunch of hotfixes really quickly to catch things back up to where they should have been. Warrior and paladin damage was a little low, and mage damage was too high right off the bat.

Well, as a mage, I was totally happy. I was one of the few people I know who had no problems at all with the patch. I was doing great!

It’s funny. Players tend to view the patch as something official and special, like once we patch it, it’s done. My team, working on classes in particular, we really view it as more of an ongoing project. We never finish the classes. We’re always looking for what the new problems are and what we can do to fix them. We don’t necessarily wait for a major patch or an expansion to change things if they aren’t working.

You’ve changed the core mechanics of how a lot of classes work going into Cataclysm. What were the classes you looked at and decided you needed to do something to make them different?

Paladin and hunter probably changed the most in terms of their resource mechanic. We didn’t think they had enough gameplay going on with their resource. Hunters had mana as their main resource, but it wasn’t affecting them a whole lot. It was mostly, “What shot’s on cooldown? Okay, use that shot.” Paladins had some of the same problems, where it was very cooldown dependent instead of having gameplay with their resource, the way a rogue has with energy or a warrior has with rage. Those two had the biggest overhaul.

We also changed the way resources work for death knights and warlocks without scrapping the old system. We decided soul shard for the warlock wasn’t working as good as it could be. We knew there was more we could do with that feature. In the case of death knights, the rune system we introduced was cool but had some problems with pacing, where it felt like the runes were coming back constantly, and players couldn’t hit the buttons fast enough. It felt like a very spammy play style rather than actually thinking, "Okay, now I’ve got a frost rune and an unholy rune, so I can use this ability."

One of the weird things at Blizzcon this year – it kind of surprised me, because it was almost under the radar the way that you talked about it – you mentioned that you’re working on a fourth World of Warcraft expansion. Why did you decide to bring this up for the first time at Blizzcon before Cataclysm was released?

You mean the expansion that will follow Cataclysm?

Yes, you brought it up in this very quiet way. It wasn’t part of the big opening ceremonies. It wasn’t treated as a big deal. You didn’t give any details.

Right. I think we’ve established that our business model is that we release an expansion every couple of years to add new content and keep it going. I’m not sure many people would have been surprised that we’re thinking about the next expansion. Obviously when we get closer to talking about features and what’s in it, that’s a much bigger announcement. It won’t just be thrown out there in the middle of a presentation.

I was just curious why you decided to talk about it at all. Was it just thinking, "Well, people already know we’re going to make another one, so it’s not a huge deal if we mention it?"

Totally. In our minds, as we go through Cataclysm, we think, "Well, this could be a really cool feature, but it’s going to be a lot of work, and I’m not sure we can do it justice." Then it becomes a 5.0 feature, which would be the next expansion, instead of a 4.0 feature, which is Cataclysm. Already, we’ve been taking ideas – like, we can do more with the mini-map, or we can do more with dungeon maps – and pushing it to the next expansion.

You’re obviously not ready to provide details on the next expansion yet, but when I was talking to John Lagrave at Blizzcon, he did tell me that you have the central idea in place. I believe the direct quote from him is that it’s going to be "pretty f’ing awesome."  Care to drop any more hints?

It’s very exciting, and I think it’s going to surprise a lot of people.

I suppose that’s as much as I could ask for on that topic.

You mentioned the mini-maps and dungeon maps briefly. That was another cool announcement from Blizzcon that I think surprised a lot of people. You’re adding in maps for every dungeon in the game, and you’re also adding in expanded information on bosses and attacks that the boss has. When did you decide to do this? I know there are some popular add-ons out there with similar functionality, and Blizzard has always been good about bringing in ideas from add-ons that are popular in the community.

For us, it was that we play the game a lot and run dungeons all the time. We would see players grapple with the leader explaining the next fight and saying, "Alright, the next guy, I can’t remember his name. For his first attack, he does something with fire. You’ll see it. It lights up your screen. Then his next attack, he shoots a bunch of arrows. I don’t remember what it’s called, but you need to interrupt it." You don’t have a way of communicating intelligently about the fight.

So either you go and learn the fight by dying through it, or you have this 45-minute lecture with someone trying to explain what you’re about to see. We thought, "Let’s just go ahead and save players the trouble of having to go to a third-party website or install a mod." Instead, they can click and see that this is the dragon, this is what his breath is called. The leader can even link that to other players in the group. We’re not going to tell you how to fight the dragon, but we’ll at least tell you what his abilities are called so you have some idea of what’s about to kill you.

That actually does remind me a lot of my raid group.

[Laughs]

We’ll usually talk it out and then decide, "I think we got it, I think we understand how to do it." Then we’ll go in. Five minutes into the battle, four dudes die at once, and the raid leader says, "Oh yeah, he also has this ability! I forgot about that!" That will be helpful.

Something else that’s worth pointing out is that our attitude toward tuning dungeons and raids in Lich King was that with a certain amount of gear and perseverance, players could overcome the encounters, even if they didn’t understand them. We thought that’s a shame. We really want players to know what’s going on in the encounters and to understand what’s special about them.

We have some mechanics now where if you stand in the fire when you’re not supposed to, you’re probably going to die. It’s no longer a matter of, “Well, I can just heal through it.” So once there was more of a burden on players to actually understand the fights, we figured the burden was on us to communicate the fights. They get pretty complicated.

I’m not really into the PvP portion of the game, but I feel like I need to ask a quick PvP question. You mentioned rated battlegrounds, and you’re doing a lot of cool PvP stuff in Cataclysm. With each new expansion and with the content patches, you’re adding in new battlegrounds. You’re adding in new world PvP zones, like Wintergrasp in Wrath of the Lich King and now Tol Barad in Cataclysm. Are you worried about certain battlegrounds or PvP zones becoming outdated or too difficult to fill up with players because they’re focusing on other battlegrounds?

In the case of Wintergrasp, that’s content for Wrath of the Lich King. We understand that it’s going to die out as players move into Cataclysm and start doing Tol Barad, and we’re totally cool with that. On the other hand, the old battlegrounds like Warsong Gulch and Arathi Basin will be alive and well. Having rated battlegrounds will breathe a lot of life into those. It just depends on the content.

So you’re okay with Wintergrasp dying off, but you’re going to keep the zone in the game for anyone who wants to go check it out?

We’re not going to remove it. We’re tweaking things, such as how often the call to arms happens to where hopefully people who are at level 80 and want to participate will have a better chance of getting a group there. But we don’t expect to see a ton of action in Wintergrasp.

One last question, and it’s probably the most important question that I’m ever going to ask you. I know I’ve seen it all over the forums. Everyone wants to know: Why is there no free pet for the six year anniversary? What’s the deal with that?

We added a lot of pets for Cataclysm, and we started wondering if we wanted to do yet another pet for the anniversary and raise that expectation that every anniversary there will be a free pet there. We like giving pets where it makes sense and where there’s something special, but with all the new pets going into Cataclysm, we’re scared that a sixth anniversary pet would totally get lost in barrage of new pets. I know more pets is always more fun, but there are quite a few new ones waiting.