WoW: Wrath of the Lich King Q&A Feature
TVG travels to the continent of Northrend (well, Leipzig), to speak to Wrath of the Lich King’s Lead Game Designer and Production Director…
Scheduled for launch in the fourth quarter, Wrath of the Lich King is the second expansion pack to the all-conquering MMORPG, World of Warcraft (Currrency wow gold ) . Over four years since the
Alliance and Horde first clashed in the online Azeroth, and Blizzard is preparing to add a new continent, the frozen wastelands of Northrend, to give high-end players the chance to go up against the Lich King himself, Arthas. TVG met the real Lich Kings, Lead Game Designer Tom Chilton and Production Director J Allen Brack, at the recent Game Convention in Leipzig to speak about the upcoming expansion… TVG: This time around, Blizzard is introducing its first Hero Class to World of Warcraft; can I ask why you chose the Death Knight, and why chose to have just one in Lich King? Tom Chilton: Well, we have this big dartboard… More than anything else, it was that we considered different classes for Wrath of the Lich King. When we went around different people around the company, of all the classes we were thinking of doing, the overwhelming feedback was “Yeah, Death Knights!” So that was certainly one impetus; the other was that over the past two years we’ve felt like there’s a shortage of tanks in four to five man instances. It wasn’t as bad when you got to twenty to twenty-five man instances, but once you have enough players there’s a higher chance that one of them will be a tank. So those two things combined, the fact that players were excited about the Death Knight and the fact that out of the choices we were considering it was the only Tanking class, made us lean towards it. It fitted so well into the whole Lich King/Arthas thing - he is a Death Knight essentially - that kinda worked out for us. As far as why only one [Hero Class], we don’t feel like we can just endlessly add new classes to the game without watering down the vision of the classes. We feel like we have a limited budget of good ideas for character classes, or really good ways of implanting them. We won’t be able to just jam them in every year necessarily. We really want to pick the right time and the right place and the right class. We’ll probably do more in the future, but again, with each expansion we’ll be evaluating whether this is the right time for new class, what does the game really need, does what the game need fit the kit of the expansion really well? Let’s say we were doing an expansion that was located on some fiery planet, I’m making it up to be honest, we wouldn’t necessarily want the ‘Rock-digging’ Hero Class or something like that… J Allen Brack: ‘Tom Chilton confirms Rock-digging Hero Class on a fiery planet for next Warcraft expansion…’ TVG: The idea of fitting things into a broad theme for an expansion is something that also has an effect on Azeroth itself. For instance, the Mage city of Dalaran has moved into a floating position above Northrend. Was this something that was always planned, because the purple dome protecting the ruins has been there since day one? At point during the development of Lich King was the decision to move Dalaran made? Chilton: Well we have for a very long time planned to do something with Dalaran, although I can’t honestly say we had this exact plan in mind since before the game was created. We had a number of ideas for Dalaran, we did for a long time have the idea that it would go somewhere, even it was just up in the air. One of the ideas a while ago was that it would just float off the ground, chained to the earth where Dalaran is now. But when we were talking about Wrath of the Lich King, we were talking about the central city hub was going be. It suddenly made sense that one of the ideas for Dalaran, that it would go somewhere, [re-emerged] and Northrend was one of those ideas. We need a city, we’ve got this city that we don’t use right now, but we had a cool idea for it. TVG: Blizzard introduced flying mounts in The Burning Crusade, and whilst there are flying mounts in Lich King, they’re unable to be used until players reach Level 77. How is this explained in the context of the wider storyline? Chilton: Certainly, it’s relatively gamey. Essentially the way we’re explaining it in terms of the lore is that the flying mounts you’ve gained in Outland aren’t accustomed to the weather conditions in Northrend, and they have to be trained to able to fly in the area. It just so happens that the guy they have to train with, you won’t have access to until you get to Level 77. So that’s sorta the justification. Very much the game mechanic reason is that it’s very important that for the majority of the zones, we flow you from one location to another in process of doing quests [so] you’ll come across ‘this’ quest hub - and in the process of doing that, you do another important thing. TVG: Is it for that reason that flying mounts are inaccessible across Azeroth? Brack: Yes, absolutely. Chilton: Well, in Azeroth actually we would like at some point to make mounts fly in the Old World. That’s more of a production reason because it would take a tremendous amount of time going back and re-doing areas that were never created, because we knew you could never really see it. Brack: There are mountain ranges where you can only see one half of the mountain because you can’t get over it - there’s no back to the mountain. Chilton: Yeah, stuff like that. Then it becomes the best use of our time, making new zones or finishing the backs of these mountains. Just like with Northrend, we don’t mind if players who’ve experienced a vast majority of the content through the normal flow get around quickly. We wouldn’t mind if you got around Azeroth quickly now because you’ve been there before now. TVG: And can you confirm that in Lich King, players will be able to have a passenger on their mounts? Yes - if you buy the new mounts. It’s the new Northrend mounts that allow you to have a passenger. TVG: So you’ll be able to take the flying mount to Outland and still carry a passenger? Yup. TVG: What’s stopping players from flying their mounts over to Azeroth? Presumably there’s some kind of ‘magical barrier’… Yeah, you’ll hit a glass wall. If you’ve ever tried to fly out of Outland, there was actually a magical wall on the outside so eventually you’d stop. TVG: Aside from Northrend, the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor are both getting some additions, most notably the new harbour that’s being built for Stormwind City. Is one of the main reasons for the addition of the harbour to alleviate the Wetlands rush? Chilton: Exactly right. Brack: We call that the ‘Wetlands Corpse Drag’! Absolutely. I remember trying to get through the zone as a lower level character, dodging creatures and seeing how far I could get without being killed… Chilton: Yeah - not very far… Brack: I can’t count how many times I have finished the Maraudon ‘Kill the princess’ quest and felt compelled to turn it in to Moonglade. But at that level you’re Level 45 and all the Furbolgs in Moonglade are enemies to you - and they’re like Level 54. I died about fifteen times going through that tunnel only to get my one wow gold quest reward and spending three wow gold in repairs. Afterwards, I’m like ‘Why did I do that?’ but I keep doing it. TVG: The interaction between the player and the Lich King is something of a new gameplay twist for WoW; how much of that is a reward for players after seventy levels of gaming? We’re doing that because we wanted to expose Arthas, the Lich King, to more people than just the really hardcore players. That’s something that we feel we didn’t do well in The Burning Crusade, exposing Illadin to more of what was going on. So we have the Lich King giving you the first quest as a Death Knight, we also have an in-game cinematic moment that involves the Lich King and some other notable characters from Warcraft lore - nobody on the Beta has got to see that yet, but it’ll go in. It was very deliberate for us to expose him more; we wanted to expose him to the core storyline a lot more than we did in The Burning Crusade. TVG: Are spectators confirmed for arenas in Lich King? Well it’s been confirmed as a feature that we’d like to do at some point, but it’s not a Lich King shipping feature. TVG: But it’s not something that’s ruled out for a future patch? Chilton: It’s possible. No active work has been done on it yet so I couldn’t tell you on when it could get in. Brack: It’s a pretty significant technical challenge. There’s the spectator mode itself, but then there’s the harder problem of how do I know what I want to watch, and how do I know who I want to allow to watch my matches? Are there permissions, and all that kind of stuff. TVG: Lich King is the second expansion, but has the conceptualisation and production of expansion packs been harder than you’d anticipated when world of warcraft launched four years ago? Chilton: Ummm…I don’t know if we ever anticipated a level of hardness. Brack: I think actually quite the opposite. For any game, it’s really easy to come with many more ideas than you can actually implement. So we have ideas that people had for many years from even before World of Warcraft even shipped, and still haven’t made it into the game. So the problem is not coming up with new cool ideas, it’s the execution of those ideas. The hard part is figuring out what’s going to make a good feature set for the expansions. We have a laundry list of ideas. TVG: And how far ahead are you planning at the moment? You’re releasing an expansion ever year, so there must be some work going on for the third pack at this stage? Generally speaking, nearly the end of the development cycle for one expansion is when we start doing our serious conceptualising and determining the feature set for our next expansion. That said, we have a lot of content patches to do for Lich King that come after that, so it can take a while before the team’s focus becomes the next focus. TVG: So do you build the concept for an expansion around a particular character first? Yeah, very much so. When we concept it, we decide what the setting’s going to be, who the key characters are going to be in terms of the lore. Once we have that setting and the characters, we then identify the features we want to do for the expansion. We try to make sure that they all match up, making them all fit together. TVG: As for the achievements; do they track past events? Brack: The answer is complicated. We don’t record today [things] like, “You killed Ragnaros”, we do have quests that you completed and loot that you have. So if you have completed a quest, you’ll get the achievement. TVG: So it’s all based around the quests you’ve completed regardless of how long ago it was? Whether you’ve completed a quest never expires, it’s how the game knows you can’t do it again. TVG: Can you be specific on when in Q4 Wrath of the Lich King will be released? Brack: Yes…oh actually, we can’t [say]. Chilton: The first Tuesday it’s ready! TVG: So you’re planning on launching the title simultaneously in North America and Europe? Actually, I think for Burning Crusade it launched in Europe ahead of the US. It came out on a Tuesday, and because Europe is a few hours ahead, you got it first. We’ll follow that same model for Wrath of the Lich King. TVG: And has the theme of the next expansion pack been finalised yet? Obviously, I don’t expect you to reveal it because you’re going to be ‘NDA’ed’ to the hilt… Maybe, maybe not. It’s in the very early discussion phase. Brack: We’re still discussing a variety of ideas; we haven’t decided upon ‘this is what we’re going to do’. TVG: Thanks very much for that, I think WOW fans out there are getting very excited. So are we, we’re eager to get out there.
