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Stligli smo i do druge epizode BlizzCast. Blizzard je objavio danas i pustio na zvaničnom sajtu sa punim transkriptom.
The second episode of the official Blizzard Podcast, BlizzCast, is
now available! It begins with none other than our Vice President of
Creative Development Chris Metzen who shares his thoughts and
experiences on building the stories for our franchises. From the origin
of Starcraft to the conceptual stage of continuing stories in Wrath of
the Lich King and Starcraft II, we get to share with you his point of
view on making some of the most epic stories we’ve ever had a chance to
play.
We also got a chance to sit down with one of our raid designers, Geoff
Goodman, to discuss the evolution of the raid dungeon encounter
Magtheridon and the changes it will see in patch 2.4. Then thanks to
the response from our players and fans we finish with a Q&A session
that has information on Starcraft lore and World of Warcraft design
changes.
Both episodes 1 and 2 are available right now here at the BlizzCast webpage: http://us.blizzard.com/blizzcast/
Kliknite opširniju vest kako bi ste pročitali ceo transkript.
Karune: Hello, Internet users. Welcome to our second episode of
our BlizzCast series, designed, once again, to take you behind the
scenes into the world of Blizzard. My name is Karune, the RTS Community
Manager here at Blizzard. First up, we'll be interviewing Chris Metzen,
our Vice President of Creative Development about the lore of Warcraft,
StarCraft, and Diablo. On top of that, we'll be also bringing in Geoff
Goodman, one of our World of Warcraft designers, to elaborate on the
newest changes to the Magtheridon dungeon. Lastly, we'll also be
answering questions from both the StarCraft and the World of Warcraft
communities. Without further ado, we'll get started.
Welcome, Chris, to the show. In case you guys didn't know, Chris was also the voice in our intro bumper for BlizzCast series.
Chris Metzen: That's right.
Karune: Pretty awesome. To start off, our first question. How
challenging is it to develop and manage the lore behind three very
distinct franchises: Warcraft, StarCraft, and Diablo? Do you find it
jarring when you switch between them or does the variety encourage
creativity as you change gears from one to another?
Chris Metzen: Interesting. That's two really good questions and
I guess I'll just take the first part. How difficult is it to manage
the lore behind the three franchises? I think if I was trying to do it
by myself, it would be impossible and I'd make just a complete and
utter mess of it all.
At the end of the day, Warcraft alone is such a huge setting and such a
big universe that there's no way any one person could manage all those
characters and places and things. The team we built for World of
Warcraft of quest designers and writers is just epic, so these days I
get to work with a team of really talented people that really kind of
breathe life into the setting.
A lot of my story stuff on Warcraft these days is coming from a very
high level, conceptualizing zones and characters, especially looking
forward to future expansions – expanded content – I'm really keen to
get in there and kind of create the broad strokes of things and then it
really goes to special teams. We sit down many times a week and really
walk through quest lines and characters and see how it all melds with
the art creation process. So that the story-telling of it all is much
more of a group activity these days on the Warcraft front.
On StarCraft, it's definitely taken that turn as well. I'm still very
involved at the scripting level, at the story-telling level – figuring
out how the game moves forward and how it interacts with the cinematics
and the whole ultimate linear progression, how that takes shape. But
we've got a really amazing team these days, it's absolutely not just a
one-man show.
On the original StarCraft, it was me and a guy named James Finney who
was one of our designers at the time and we pretty much tag-teamed a
lot of that story and pretty much defined how the story played out
through that single-player campaign. This time around, our lead writer
is a guy named Andy Chambers. He's a very good writer; he's worked in
science-fiction a long time. We're working with the cinematics
director, Nick Carpenter and we're all kind of jamming the story. It's
much more of a team effort this time as opposed to the story coming
from any singular spot. So, we kind of check-and-balance each other a
lot and we're able to kind of draw on our common geeky love for films
and science fiction in general. I think it's made the themes really pop
this time. It feels like a much more grounded story this time around. I
think the characters are a lot richer. I think the highs and lows they
experience are just a lot more mature.
We've come a long way since the original StarCraft. We've matured as
story-tellers; we've matured as a team. The instincts that define what
we dig and what we don't in story-telling are much more honed at this
phase of our lives. We were twenty-something back in the day; we're
thirty-something now, so all that life experience is definitely playing
into the themes we're bringing forward in StarCraft and the way we're
handling them. It's really fun. It's been a really rewarding
experience. As far as handling continuity, and the broad story for the
Diablo franchise, I guess that we'll have to see how that takes shape.
Karune: I think it must have been really crazy, especially
working with all the different teams and all the different franchises.
How do you think it has been to switch gears between the two or to
really…working with each different team, your schedule must be crazy
every day.
Chris Metzen: At this phase, I've actually cut a lot out of my
schedule these days so I only have meetings every hour of the day, so
that's good. I'm not double or triple stacked. For many, many years
now, I've spent a lot of my time ping-ponging back and forth between
different licenses every day. It's always a revolving door. But for me,
for my specific personality – we're all wired very differently – I dig
that. I dig changing gears all day long. You could be working in the
same universe for a day but changing gears on ‘well, this is a
level-design meeting,' ‘this is a quest/story meeting,' ‘this is purely
VO-let's-get-our-characters-down-what-actors-are-we-hiring kind of
meeting,' so, I like that. I like the up and down of the day and never
really getting bored with things. It's always moving fast and there's
always kind of – as the day goes on, there's always some new challenge
that's kind of fresh…
Karune: Do you find those ups and downs kind of influencing each other as far as inspiration?
Chris Metzen: Oh yeah. Absolutely. I think it keeps – as far as
I go, as I interact with the special teams and the different groups,
where my head may have been, in one hour, I walk into a totally
different meeting and that energy's still burning off. Or I might just
go ‘Gah, you guys just wouldn't believe what we just jammed out in that
last meeting!' And they'll go ‘Well tell us!' They might not even care,
the animators might not even care what a zone looks like but I'm so
geeked up about what we were just doing that I'll wind up babbling to
them about whatever we were jamming on. So, it kind of almost creates
this educational process where everybody's in the loop and it's just a
cool communication thing.
I like the up and down of it but, you can run into trouble sometimes
where, if you're walking in from one game to another game, back-to-back
creative meetings and come out of a StarCraft meeting with certain
themes that were big in our minds and I walk in and ‘Guys, I had this
idea for Warcraft blahblahblahblahblah,' and they're like ‘Woah, dude,
that sounds just like…there's no laser guns in Warcraft!' ‘Oh, that's
right!' So, sometimes you really have to change gears; your clutch can
get a little fried, but I dig that kind of stuff and it's just been
this way for years. I like being able to work on the different licenses
and kind of keep, from an artistic level or a conceptual level, keep
the old brain exercised. It's kind of cool to be able to jump around.
Sometimes, when you're focused on a single idea, day in and day out,
for a protracted amount of time, it dulls a little bit. At this rate,
the way my job is structured, I think it keeps me on my toes, you know
what I mean? It keeps me sharp – I hope! My coworkers may not think
that's entirely true because I also have a terrible memory – short term
memory, I don't even have that. What were we talking about?
Karune: For sure, I think the energy translates quite a bit to
the story-line of the games. To talk about StarCraft in particular, how
did that particular story-line get started with you?
Chris Metzen: You know, it's funny. What a lot of people may not
know is we were actually – Nick Carpenter and I, the cinematics
director, we were developing, for Blizzard, we were the young Turks
many years ago. After we had published Warcraft II. Nick and I spun off
and were working on a science-fiction concept for a game that was
actually more of an action shooter. It involved pretty gnarly stuff
like space vampires, kind of clans of them, and this really cool sci-fi
setting.
At the same time, a separate development team, or the main development
team at the time was developing science-fiction RTS. We had done
Warcraft II and now we're interested in trying to do the next RTS
outing in science-fiction. And early ideas like ‘well, let's blend them
together man, we can do this kind of space-vampire-clan-thing and
real-time-strategy.' We talked about that for a while and ultimately,
that game fell through and as momentum really started picking up on the
science-fiction thing, the group response is like ‘well, let's simplify
this, right. People, they understand space-ships. They understand
creepy, spidery aliens. They understand psychic brain aliens, right? So
let's just cut down to the core motifs that are really classic in
science-fiction. That's where we should start.' So we kind of threw
away the world concept we were cooking and ultimately StarCraft just
kind of took shape over time. It starts with, the way you build a
world, it starts with tanks and fighter jets and just cool-looking
alien shapes and ultimately that starts growing into a setting. Who's
this? Where's that vehicle from? Who pilots this? I think the StarCraft
setting really started taking shape at that conceptual level.
It wasn't the story-line, specifically, the linear flow of events, the
overthrow of the Confederacy, Kerrigan, Raynor, the Protoss, the
destruction of their homeworld. A lot of that stuff wasn't clear from
the get-go. We were just making the broadest science-fiction universe
we could and trying to make sure it really resonated with people. It
was only in constructing the single-player campaign that James and I
really started laying out the broad strokes of how the universe would
unfold and what this moment in time was really defined by: the
Confederate fall and ultimately the invasion of Aiur. So it's funny,
little ideas that weren't there from the beginning: the whole character
of Kerrigan didn't really exist until the middle of our construction of
that first campaign. We knew we had Ghosts and the joke was – I don't
know if this is common knowledge but I think it was Command and Conquer
that had a character named Tanya, back in the day. She was kind of like
an assassin, a badass. And we just had this conversation one day using
a Ghost character on a map, like ‘ha ha, how funny', the whole
ice-skater debacle was going on with Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan.
‘Haha, how funny, we'll make our super assassin named Kerrigan on this
one map.' And it was a total throw-away character but as we started
discussing it and really getting in to this character, we kept coming
back to her; she had a lot of gravity. It really created a cool, kind
of triangle of tension between Mensk and Raynor and this emergent
Kerrigan character.
Ultimately, it was pretty late in the game when we decided that she
would be betrayed and become the Queen of Blades. The Queen of Blades
was never an original concept; it really came about just at that, kind
of in the final stretch of that campaign. Just another testament to the
fact that what we publish and what people really cling to isn't
necessarily always defined from the beginning. You would think, looking
at StarCraft, that that was one of the core concepts but actually it
was kind of tacked in later. I think that's where we're strong as
story-tellers; when you pop ideas like that in the middle of your plan,
we tend to be able to jump on those ideas and weave them into the core
plot and really make them feel like they've been there from the
beginning. That's kind of the trick to it: can we flex fast enough with
emergent ideas and really make them feel contiguous?
Karune: Yeah, that stories kind of evolve into it rather than
set things that you try to throw in. That's really awesome. I think
that's different than how some other companies might handle it.
Chris Metzen: I think that's a big part of video game
story-telling, you know, you go out and write a movie script or comics
are like this a lot. It typically relies on the actor to – pardon me,
the writer to have conceived of the thing pretty clearly up front and
then you begin to build the mechanical component of the game on top of
existing plot-lines or characters. Certainly films are like that. You
start with a script. Comics, you typically start with a script.
So, when we construct stories for video games, more often than not, it
starts with a molten idea. Sometimes it's broad, sometimes it's not,
but as part of this team dynamic, as the special teams get involved and
as the designers and the writers and the artists all kind of start
talking about this molten idea, it hammers it out further. It becomes
clearer and clearer as you go. People respond to characters or themes
more than others. Like, you know what, this idea is cool but it just
isn't fun. It doesn't play well; it doesn't work in the context of the
game. Or, someone might go ‘Hey, what about this character Kerrigan?'
and we go ‘Woah, we should absolutely use that! I've got a crazy idea,
let's turn it into an alien!' So you never know where those ideas are
going to pop so the trick is stay loose and give yourself enough
breathing room that you can use those ideas. That you can jump on them
without derailing the train.
People typically worry about Blizzard, it takes us a while to get games
out. It ain't ready till it's ready. That is obviously a benefit. But
one of the things that also happens in our longer gestation period is
we're just talking about this stuff all the time and it gives us a
little bit of room and breathing space to really chew on some of these
ideas that might pop that other companies, with a tighter development
schedule, might not be able to chase. They might not be able to really
weigh things like that that might pop because it'll derail the train.
That's one thing I dig about the freedom we've been allotted all these
years is that we're able to really chase those things down and explore.
Karune: So what do you think about the StarCraft II story coming
many years now after you developed the StarCraft original story? What
has kind of been the popping elements to get that back to the story?
Chris Metzen: The StarCraft II story. You know its funny, while
I wouldn't say we had a lot of false starts, there were a lot of themes
I really wanted it to be defined by when we began. And at this phase,
some of those themes have fallen away. Some of them have become even
clearer. Ultimately, we had a number of hanging plot threads after the
first game. Obviously, you've got the huge thread of ‘Kerrigan's in
charge of the zerg now. What's she doing? What's happening with our old
buddies Mensk and Raynor? Where are they at? How do they play in to the
future of this setting? How can we resolve this split between the
Protoss civilization -the Light and Dark Templar? Will that be
resolved? And ultimately, the larger mythology question of: why all
this? Why now? The Protoss and the Zerg were created by some elder race
as suggested – who is that race? And ultimately, was there a plan and a
symmetry to all of these events that played out? Was it just random
warfare or is there a bigger cycle of events playing out?' So those are
a lot of the things we knew about right out of the gate.
We had many years to think about them, mull them around before we
started official development on a project. After we've been in this for
a while and we've really refined our story-telling process and our
cinematic process, this game is much more cinematic than the previous
game: we've got a lot of in-game sequences and the story mode space
which we showed at BlizzCon last year. So it's been, just a tremendous
experience to be able to really get closer to this universe. It's not
just talking heads babbling at each other in ready-rooms anymore.
You're really immersed in the tension and the drama and the story of it
all. These characters are, the artwork, the voice-over and all that
stuff, they're just more realized than we've ever really been able to
do. It's just been tremendously rewarding to shape this thing and
really see it take the shape beyond even what I had hoped for a few
years ago.
You kind of have a sense of the story and your expectations and your
hopes for it as a singular writer, but as the teams' gotten involved
and as we've been jamming on it all these years, the inclusion of fresh
voices like Andy Chambers and even old voices like Nick Carpenter, I
think we're all doing the best work of our careers. It's funny, I've
said a number of times. World of Warcraft kind of became the center of
the Blizzard universe, pardon the pun, for many years. The game was so
big, it demanded a tremendous amount of mind-share from us all. Even
though other games were in development at the time. Certainly StarCraft
II.
But now, it just feels like, with StarCraft II, as we're able to focus
more and more, it feel s like the best work we've ever done. It's
finally the story I really wanted us to tell. It's got a lot of heart,
it's got a lot of depth, and, on top of it, it's just a rip-roaring
wargame. It's badass. It's been very, very rewarding to see this thing
take shape. Just getting back to that Blizzard of yesteryear where it's
not all about WoW – don't get me wrong, I love WoW! But we're so much
more than that and I think the world will see, when we pop with this
thing that we haven't been idle.
Karune: And everybody's quite excited. Let's also use that to
shift gears from Warcraft III. How did the story evolve from Warcraft
III, an RTS game, jumping into World of Warcraft, the MMO?
Chris Metzen: I think at the end of the day, that you have to
remember that we developed both of them concurrently. I was lead
writer, creative director on World of Warcraft – sorry, on Warcraft
III. Same thing; both. As we were developing Warcraft III, the call
came down ‘hey, look, we're gonna try this MMORG thing. We're gonna
build World of Warcraft.' Okay. We kind of built them from the
conceptual standpoint at the same time, roughly. I knew what the
Warcraft III story was, I knew what the new lands were, I knew what
cultures were involved and ultimately where all the pieces on the chess
board would be by the end of that, considering The Frozen Throne
expansion. So as we were developing WoW, we knew where everything was,
we knew what the broad themes were, and we were able to build on that
snapshot of the world that Warcraft III left you with. So if that was
your basis; now we can take those maps and those ideas and those art
assets, that fundamental art direction and really launch off into a far
broader setting.
At the end of the day, the boxed product of WoW was pretty static in
terms of: it kind of re-introduces you to the setting, the world but it
didn't have a real strong sense of linear story. That would come, I
think, as we got into the Ahn'Qiraj patch event where Ahn'Qiraj comes
out and suddenly, no matter where you were, Alliance or Horde, at the
level you're at: suddenly, oh! There's an event happening! And the
world is kind of bent towards this new episodic content where
obviously, with the patches that followed and in Burning Crusade, we
began to get back into more of a linear series of stories.
Burning Crusade is a definite chapter, it's a year in the life of this
setting. And you could track all the events that played out, right.
Wrath of the Lich King again is that next chapter, that next vital
offering of events that are pushing this continuity forward where I
think WoW is more of a snapshot. I think certainly pushed the
continuity forward from Warcraft III but not in as dynamic a way as our
current expansion sets are doing. I'm not sure if that answered your
question, though.
Karune: Well, I mean, going even further into Wrath of the Lich
King, what types of stories – the storyline that was already told in
Warcraft III – will be told in Wrath of the Lich King and also what
types of loose ends that haven't been told or are going to be
introduced in Wrath?
Chris Metzen: Right. A couple that spring to mind – there's all
sorts of stuff going on in Wrath of the Lich King – it's big,
conceptually, it's like – if you look at Burning Crusade at a
conceptual level: we're going into outer space. There's clearly a war
between good and evil playing out in the greater universe. There's some
sort of predestination of the orcs coming to Azeroth. Now we get to see
their origins.
The Burning Legion, the Burning Crusade: it was huge on a conceptual
level, right? Some would argue maybe too huge, right. Whatever happened
to Gnolls and Kobolds. Suddenly, you're in outer space fighting angels.
With Wrath of the Lich King, you almost get both. We come back to
terrestrial Azeroth, so it's a little more back into the realm of
gnolls and kobolds – well, I'm not promising you'll see either of those
in Northrend – it's a little more palatable to classic fantasy. But at
the same time, we're also pushing forward hugely on the setting. We're
going to get into themes like the Titans and the creation of the world,
the function of Azeroth at the dawn of creation. Why this planet? Why
does this planet continue to be central to events? The whole dwarven
storyline of them trying to plumb the depths of their origins and how
that ties into the creation of the world. We're getting into a lot of
cool new territory with the war of magic and the creation of the dragon
flights – what's their function in the world? How are they currently
doing? At this phase of history, there's all sorts of big, broad themes
playing out – not the least of which are looking again at the Alliance
and the Horde from an overall angle and just gauging “How're they
doing, these days?” After the events of that first year of play
culminating with – I don't even know what it was – Ahn'Qiraj, Blackwing
Lair, Naxxramas, all the big event patches we put out which I kind of
look at as Year One, and certainly with the Burning Crusade: both
alliances sending expeditions into this burning, alien world and being
flung into those events.
What are the stresses that have resulted over time because of those
things? What are the discoveries? The discovery of the Mag'har in
Outland: what does that do to the Horde? That Thrall's finally found
his – where's his head at? The Northrend events, Wrath of the Lich King
kind of looks at each of these alliances and how these events have
played out and shows you the new stress fractures, perhaps appearing in
the upper echelons of leadership. There's new characters kind of coming
to the forefront that may or may not challenge the status quo for both
factions. There's all sorts of sweet – everybody knows about death
knights, but you know, we just had a meeting the other day about how
they play out, about how the storylines of potentially Mograine and the
Ashbringer and all those events in the Plaguelands: what was the point
of all of that and how does it really play out? There's all sorts of
little nooks and crannies like that, that Northrend really brings full
circle, that the Wrath of the Lich King expansion really brings full
circle. So, it's been really fun for me to be able to help steer the
setting.
If we were making a comic book series every month, obviously, you've
got to roll it out but while our expansion sets, they certainly don't
roll out month by month, they are episodic, ultimately, so it's been
really cool to push the setting forward and begin to bring some of
these characters and points of history back to the forefront so that
fans of the story of WoW can really feel immersed and that everything
is cohesive and compelling, we hope.
Karune: Very nice. I think that most people are hanging at the
edge of their seats right now about all of the Wrath of the Lich King
stuff. Our last question: how did the events of the Sin War Trilogy fit
into the Diablo universe and why was this an important story to tell?
Chris Metzen: At the most basic level, apart from the story of
it, in terms of just how the product came to be at a publishing level,
we were talking with our partners, PocketBooks, a couple of years ago.
“Hey, let's do trilogies per license; for each of these three
licenses.” My first instinct was, “hey, killer! Let's use go back and
those trilogies to really give people a sense of the origin of each of
these series.” Thus, with Warcraft, we did the War of the Ancients
which was the definitive, first conflict of Azeroth that really set the
stage for everything happening in the current age. StarCraft as well,
with the Dark Templar trilogy, even though it was spun with the
protagonist kind of reliving history in his mind, it really gave you a
sense of the mythology of the Protoss and the events that really echo
in the current day, in the pre-staging to StarCraft II.
With the Sin War as well, while we didn't want to get into
‘time-travel' or ‘character reliving history in his head' – it's more
of a straight look at ancient events – I think I may be roasted for
this, it happened about a thousand years before Diablo I, and really,
the Sin War trilogy was meant to take a snapshot of the Diablo world as
it was and really show you the events and characters that set in motion
everything that plays out in the present day.
Karune: Well, I think that's all the questions that we have for today so thanks a lot, Chris, for joining us.
Chris Metzen: Certainly. Thanks a lot!
Nethaera: Welcome everyone to the World of Warcraft portion of
BlizzCast Episode II. This is Nethaera of the World of Warcraft
Community Team with the ever present Bornakk nearby to help keep the
show rolling.
Today, we're going to take a look at Magtheridon's Lair, our 25-player
dungeon from the Burning Crusade expansion. Game designer Geoff Goodman
is here with us to discuss the evolution of this encounter, along with
the newest game changes available in the Sunwell Plateau patch. Welcome
to the show, Geoff.
Nethaera: To start off with, could you explain a little bit about your role in the creation of boss encounters like Magtheridon?
Geoff Goodman: Sure. Well, with most encounters, I have got to
start off with saying that with every encounter, we have a lot of input
from all of the designers. We have a lot of input from the story guys,
and Metzen, of course, to get sort of a base, root foundation. From
there, we kind of break it down into more specific areas of what we
want to focus on. Kind of take the best of the great ideas. And then
from there, break it down further to a single person who's actually
implementing the encounter and they kind of fill in the details and add
abilities where needed, kind of make it all come to life. And that's
what I do.
Nethaera: Where does Magtheridon's Lair fit within the
progression of boss encounters in Outland? We know that when you first
enter into Hellfire Peninsula, that's the first thing that everybody
sees when they go into Outland. So, where exactly will this fit?
Geoff Goodman: Well, it definitely was intended to be a first
tier – one of the first things you hit when you start raiding in the
expansion. Much like Onyxia was set up pre-BC. As the past has shown,
we've had to make some changes to make him a little easier over time
because he ended up being a little harder than intended but that is
definitely where he is supposed to fit.
Nethaera: We've seen a little bit of evolution in this encounter
and I wanted to discuss that with you a little bit before we delved
into the changes that are in the Sunwell Plateau patch. In the Black
Temple patch, we saw quite a few changes to the encounter which
included easing up on the difficulty of the encounter with adjustments
to damage output of Hellfire Warders, Hellfire Channelers, and the
Burning Abyssals, as well as some loot table adjustments. Could you
explain a little bit more about the design philosophy behind the
changes at the time?
Geoff Goodman: Sure. We focus a lot on feedback from the forums
and from everyone we know that plays it. Before we do any changes, we
gather tons and tons of feedback and make sure we're getting all the
right information first. Then we look at where people are having the
specific problems – in this case, where the encounter's too hard – we
look at where we can keep the feel of the encounter intact: we don't
want to pull out a whole lot of things if we can help it, try to keep
everything together. We look at where we can kind of lessen things,
where we can make it easier without gutting the encounter, per se.
In Magtheridon's case specifically, a lot of people, especially a lot
of people that have done it, know that the first phase with the
channelers is generally considered the harder part which is potentially
an issue in any case because you hate to have an encounter where it
starts off incredibly challenging and then peters out and you're bored
by the end. A lot of the changes in the past and the new ones coming
are focusing on the channelers, to try to put them in line with the
rest of the encounter.
Nethaera: As part of this evolution, we're making further
changes in the patch to entice players back into this encounter and
better allow players to experience facing down this infamous pit lord.
Rather than just listing out the changes, I'd like to go through the
encounter phase by phase to discuss how they are being changed with the
patch.
Let's start at the beginning with phase one. What are players going
into this encounter experiencing now and how is it being changed with
the patch?
Geoff Goodman: Well, like I mentioned before, it was definitely
considered the hardest part, not only from just a difficulty, numbers
standpoint of here's a lot of damage. It was generally the most
complicated part of the encounter so…it's kind of nice, sometimes, to
have sort of a – in Maulgar's case, a really hard, like a pole or
something – something that makes the challenge out the gate. But, as I
was saying before, if it ends up petering out and gets kind of boring,
you want to take some of that and even out the complication that we
use.
We've lowered the difficulty of a lot of things, made them easier to
interrupt when they're – when they die, they share powers, they
strengthen each other, make themselves cast faster, so that got slowed
down a little, make them a little easier to interrupt. The abyssals are
generally – were difficult before, they've become a lot easier now.
We've pulled some of their abilities that made them a little bit more
challenging than intended and generally tried to ease up on the
complication more than anything else, as well as dropping the numbers
down. First phase, we've definitely hit the hardest.
Nethaera: So, let's move on to phase two. At this point,
Magtheridon is let loose and things start to get a little more involved
with players. What is happening currently and how is that being changed?
Geoff Goodman: Well, there's a number of things. He has an
ability that causes basically instant death if you don't see it coming.
We're looking into that, it's still – instant death is always a tricky
concept, but as long as it's completely avoidable and it keeps you
watching the area and keeps your eyes on the gameplay, it's definitely
a positive thing. We just need to make sure that it's something that
players see and can see it coming. In this case, the case of debris
falling down, I have some changes to make so that it's easier to see,
so that it's more – so that the rocks that were falling before the
actual debris hit, there should be more of those and they should be a
lot more visible, as well as putting an icon on the screen, like a
debuff, you should be able to see it coming, so hopefully that will
give players more indication. This time, we didn't change anything,
just made it easier to see. A lot of stuff like that should help.
Nethaera: That takes us into phase three, of course, where
players literally have the ceiling falling down on their heads. Where
once, they could relatively safely look down on Magtheridon from above,
now nowhere is free of danger. What exactly happens in this phase and
what changes can players expect when the sky is, so to speak, actually
falling on them? You mentioned that there are better visual cues, now.
Geoff Goodman: That's the big change to that last part of the
phase, but as well as when he's channeling and he's – I guess this is a
phase two question as well – when you're supposed to use the cubes to
break him out, it's about, as I said before, lessening the
complication.
In the previous incarnation, you've had this Mind Exhaustion debuff
whenever you click a cube that made people switch which, the intention
of that is that not all a matter of complication and difficulty but a
lot of times, we'll design a cool interaction you get to have with the
encounter and we kind of, some of the raids will have like ‘you're the
guy who does this cool thing' and everyone else gets to just press
their heal button or something. So, we kind of like to spread that
around but in this case, it turned out, especially being an
introduction raid, that it made the whole thing a little too
complicated.
So, in the past, we've lowered the people required to rotate and, in
this latest change now, we've decided that you can just have the same
people do it. You still get a Mind Exhaustion debuff but the duration
will be shorter than you need to click it so you can have the same
people cycle the whole time. That will help the complication in
general. And, like I said, in phase three, the rocks falling down,
getting better indication on that, things like that will help sell it a
lot…
Nethaera:People will be able to see what's coming at them.
Geoff Goodman: Yeah, totally.
Nethaera: Lastly, we have some changes to the loot that players
can get from him. After all that hard work, we want it to pay off. What
can they expect to get out of it?
Geoff Goodman: Well, a kind of funny thing happens when we
change these encounters a lot. We'll put these changes out there and a
lot of people will try them again, but there's definitely a lot of
psychology that sticks around that people avoid things. So, to try to
entice people to play the encounter and try out the new changes and
everything, we are changing some of the loot.
You'll notice the cash drop, the pure gold drop, will be significantly
increased. If you just want money, you know, you have a lock out
period, but you still might want to kill him just to get some money,
he'll drop a bag, a nice twenty-slot bag. A lot of people really like
that Zul'Aman one we put in with the quest, so that's another
opportunity to get another twenty-slot bag. He also drops a bag of gems
– now this is an important one because it'll drop the epic, uncut gems
that are very difficult to get right now. Again, he's on lock-out so it
will be kind of hard to farm him but you should feel incentive to want
to kill him when you can.
Nethaera: Okay, great. I just wanted to say thank you to
everyone for listening in and thanks to Geoff Goodman for taking the
time to talk with us.
Geoff Goodman: Thank you very much!
Nethaera: This is Nethaera from the World of Warcraft Community
Team handing things off to Bornakk, who will take us into our Q&A
portion of the show.
Bornakk: Hi, this is Bornakk from the World of Warcraft
Community Team and welcome to our first BlizzCast Q&A session where
we'll be answering questions directly from our players and fans.
First up, we have Andy Chambers who is our lead writer and a great
source of knowledge for the StarCraft universe. Welcome to the show,
Andy.
Andy Chambers: Thank you, Bornakk. It's a pleasure to be here.
Bornakk: The question we have for you today is a bit of a
two-parter. What planet is seen at the bottom of the page at
starcraft2.com and what is happening at the planet's surface at the red
dot? People are referring to it as ‘the explosion.'
Andy Chambers: Well, as befits a two-part question, I've got a
two-part answer for you. The first one is the lore answer to it all.
The planet itself is Bel'shir one of the moons of the Mackan system
which has not previously been seen in StarCraft I. It's a Protoss
ex-shrine world that was invaded by the Zerg and much of the Protoss
have now been pushed out of the area. It keys in with the sort of
jungle tile-set that you may have seen in some of our previous videos
for StarCraft II. Now, the little explosion as people call it, is
actually a vent for an artificial volcano the Zerg have pierced through
the surface of Bel'shir to produce a heat-source for their nests full
of hot magma –because it saves them having to knit little cozies for
their eggs and things like that – so, that's the lore reason.
The actual reason there's a little dot there goes back even further.
Goes back to our career announcement. The world that you're actually
seeing there is the same sort of brown ringed world that we saw in the
announcement behind the space platform. As part of a test during that,
some of our artists wanted to do plasma bombardments, little explosions
going off all over the world all the time. So, when the guys in the
Community Team got hold of this piece of art, they reshaded it into the
green world you now see. But as part of that process, one of the little
explosions carried over into the new image that you now see.
So, as ever, lore must be responsive to art as art must be responsive
to lore, so I've incorporated that into the back-story for Bel'shir and
it's actually added this little unexpected bonus of like ‘oh, cool,
artificial volcano. I like it!'
Bornakk: Awesome. I know a lot of people are looking forward to
experiencing the StarCraft universe again. Should be a great time.
Thanks for the details there, Andy.
Andy Chambers: My pleasure. Thank you very much.
Bornakk: Next up, we have our World of Warcraft lead designer, Tom Chilton. Welcome to the show, Tom.
Tom Chilton: Hi there. How are you?
Bornakk: Doing good. So, we have a couple of questions for you
today. The first is, regarding Retribution Paladins, we've made some
recent changes to the class that were very nice and they're wondering
if we're going to update the Seal or the Judgement of Command with the
new model that we were following.
Tom Chilton: Absolutely. What we're trying to do, a big push
that we have in the expansion, is to get different specs and different
classes to use similar types of gear. What we don't want to have to do
is drop different kinds of gear for every single different kind of spec
in the game. Unfortunately, that has the side effect of making people
feel as though a lot of loot that isn't for them drops. It's great when
the item that is for your class, for your spec drops but you've got to
figure that there's a whole lot of other classes and specs out there
just thinking ‘another item that's not for me?'
So, what we're trying to do is make sure that the items are shared more
among the different classes and specs. So, we're really looking towards
moving Retribution Paladins farther towards using the same kind of
itemization that warriors use and we've made a couple of changes
recently in patch 2.3 that kind of go part of the way there. And
really, that was just to shore up some of the immediate problems that
we were having with it.
Really, we want to go further with that and make sure that across the
board, all the different Seals, Judgements, and all the different
paladin abilities in general kind of follow that same scheme. But
that's something we'll likely be seeing the full effect of in the
expansion.
Bornakk: The next question we have is ‘do you have any plans to
make more maps for the battlegrounds?' And, what I mean by this is have
a new map where you can use the same kind of gameplay as you use in
Warsong Gulch.
Tom Chilton: Yeah, we actually do have an idea to be able to do
that. I can't say we have absolutely final plans for implementation yet
but one of the things we want to move towards – beyond the fact that
we're going to be adding a new battleground for the expansion that
features siege weapons and destructible buildings – an idea we've had
is that we'd like for players to eventually be able to go to the
Battlemaster and, for example, they would queue up for a ‘capture the
flag' map or they would queue up for a ‘domination' style map or
whatever you want to call it. And that would put them in one of a
possible variety of different maps that actually feature that gameplay
type. The reason being, that way, you can still control the kind of
gameplay that you're trying to get into but it allows us to add a whole
bunch more maps without spreading players too thin among all the
different maps.
One of the problems that we have right now is, that if we continue to
add maps, we keep splitting players up between all the different
battlegrounds. And, as we split players up more and more between the
different battlegrounds, it gets harder to match them up against other,
similar opponents, like, for example, pre-mades versus PuGs, or
pre-mades with good gear versus pre-mades with very low-end gear. So,
it's important to us that, as we add new battlegrounds like this, we
really kind of have to re-factor the queue system to make it all work.
Bornakk: Awesome. The next question is for all those rogues out
there. Are there any plans to buff the Subtlety tree in rogues or,
specifically, the dagger rogues?
Tom Chilton: Well, I don't know that it's a Subtlety-specific
problem. We definitely have plans to improve daggers in general. One of
the things that was very popular before the expansion came out was the
Combat-Daggers build for rogues. That was obviously a very popular kind
of raiding spec. And that's kind of fallen by the wayside at this
point. Another one that you could point out would be the Mutilate spec,
we had issues, at first, with a lot of our mobs being immune to poison.
Then obviously, in PvP, it relies more on Seal Fate to build combo
points which relies on crit which is offset some by resilience.
So, in general, what we've seen is kind of a trend away from daggers
for the rogue and obviously, since daggers are such a big part of the
kit for rogues, we want to make sure that the dagger specs are very
viable. So, we do expect to, across the board, improve the daggers for
rogues in a variety of different ways, but I don't see this as just
being a Subtlety problem.
Bornakk: Okay, awesome. Next question. Do you have plans to add
a tab that will have one or two pre-set talent builds that you can
switch to when you respec?
Tom Chilton: We definitely want to make the respec process more
graceful, especially considering how much respeccing people are doing.
Right now, when you respec, it unlearns all the spells that you have
that are talent-specific. It takes them off your action bars, et
cetera, and, then when you spec into a new spec, it doesn't fill those
in for you. Something we'd like to do is have the game remember or be
able to save settings with different talent specs so that you can more
easily switch between them. That goes along with potentially, in the
future, doing some things to ease the burden of respeccing back and
forth. If you're doing kind of high-end Arenas, high-end raiding, that
kind of thing. Because we do want to encourage players to be able to
enjoy a variety of different elements of the game. So, we definitely
want to make that whole process more graceful in general.
Bornakk: The next question is: do we plan to have tanking specs get more integrated into PvP? For example, like a new Taunt mechanic?
Tom Chilton: Well, yes and no. To a degree, we definitely want
to improve the viability of the tanking specs in PvP. But I only mean
that with respects to casual PvP, like battlegrounds. We don't actually
have realistic plans to try to make the tanking specs be
Arena-competitive, viable specs, necessarily. We feel like it's okay if
there are certain specs that really aren't competitive end-game specs.
At the same time, we do want to make sure that when you roll into a
battleground, that you feel reasonably useful. We don't want you to
have to respec every time you go to a battleground or whatever. To some
degree, we have that, in that prot warriors, for example, are pretty
popular for running the flag in Warsong Gulch. They also can be pretty
useful for defending different points of interest, either in Arathi
Basin or even in, potentially, Eye of the Storm.
So, we have it to some degree, but we do want to moderate those
differences more than we have right now and make them a little bit more
viable for PvP than they are but I don't think that the expectation
should be that you'll be able to be a high-end, Arena- competitive
player.
And certainly, with the Taunt mechanic itself, we don't want to add
that as another kind of crowd control over what we have right now. We
really feel that if players were able to taunt each other, it would
really be just another sort of aggravating, annoying sort of control
mechanic that we don't necessarily want to go down that road.
Bornakk: Okay. And the last question is: will PvE players be
able to be more competitive in PvP in the expansion? There are a lot of
raiders out there who would love to be able to mix up their gameplay
but feel they're unable to do so due to the effects of resilience on
PvP and so they want to make it more accessible to go between the two.
Tom Chilton: Yeah, definitely. That's something that we have
identified as a problem; the crossover for players that are very deep
in the end-game PvE not being able to take part in PvP. Although, I
wouldn't even necessarily say it's people who are just deep in the
end-game PvE, in general, the PvE itemization won't allow you to PvP
very effectively. So, that's something that we are not only changing in
the expansion, but we also have some pretty significant changes going
in in 2.4 to help address that. Specifically, in patch 2.4, we've added
a lot of PvP-oriented loot to different areas of PvE without simply
just dropping them off a boss of instances.
For example, we have a lot of dungeon-quality PvP loot you'll be able
to get through the reputations, the different dungeon reputations, we
also have, in the different raid tiers, for example, the Karazhan raid
tier, the Tier 4 raiding gear, you'll be able to exchange those set
item tokens for the Season One PvP gear. You'll be able to take the
Tier 5 and 6 tokens and turn those in for Season Two quality PvP gear.
That way, once you've got a zone farmed out, you can actually go back
to it for longer to get some PvP gear out of it. It won't necessarily
be the absolute best stuff that's in the game, in the same way that if
you're just doing PvP, you don't necessarily have the absolute best
gear for PvE. But, it should at least get you to a point where you're
competitive.
It will also help in the case of where you're rolling up an alt. Let's
say you've dinged an alt recently at level 70 and you want to get
involved in PvP. You'll be able to both go through instances and do
some battlegrounds in order to get geared up and catch up and get into
the competitive PvP a little bit more easily.
Bornakk: Alright, that's very exciting! All this should be really a lot of fun when players get the chance to try it all out.
Tom Chilton: We hope so.
Bornakk: Thank you very much, Tom, and Andy, for answering these
questions for our fans. Let's also thank Geoff for his insight on the
evolution of Magtheridon, and Chris for all his details on the
development of the lore for all of our games.
Bornakk: We have one more thing to tell you today. We are happy
to announce the 2008 Blizzard Entertainment Worldwide Invitational will
be happening on June 28th and 29th in Paris, France. This is a great
celebration of our three franchises that brings the company and gamers
together. Both the World of Warcraft expansion, Wrath of the Lich King,
and StarCraft II will be playable at the Invitational. So, if you can
be there and are sixteen years of age or older, we welcome you to join
us. Please visit www.blizzard.com for more details on the event.
Bornakk: This is Bornakk on behalf of your Community Team, thank
you for listening to this episode of BlizzCast and we'll see you next
time!
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