Abigor
05-18-2008, 10:49 AM
IGN: In Wrath of the Lich King you can move through all of its dungeons in 10 or 25-man raid groups. How do the experiences between the two actually differ if you go through as a 10-man group versus a 25?
Jeffrey Kaplan: Naxxramas, for example, which is going to be the first raid zone players encounter, [will support] both 10 and 25; it's got like 14 bosses in there. It certainly is more work and more difficult to get 25 people organized than 10, but the encounters themselves--we're not going to tune anything so it's drastically harder with 25 than with 10. They'll be tuned for the correct number of people, but I think the level of complexity needs to stay at a very graspable level since it's the entry level of raiding. It can't be too insano-aggro as far as what people need to do.
A good example I like to give is we've got Gruul in Burning Crusade, which is a very accessible, easy-to-understand, not terribly complex raid. And that's a 25-person raid. And then we've got some of the encounters in Zul'Aman, which is a 10-person raid, which are very complex and very hard to execute on. So rather than make it feel like it's a difficulty choice, I like to think of it more as a play-style choice. I enjoy playing with 10 people more, or I enjoy playing with 25 people more, and then within those avenues we can have escalating levels of difficulty where players can prove themselves more skillful.
IGN: And how are you taking those play style differences into account with the new raid dungeons?
Jeffrey Kaplan: In a 10-person dungeon, at most we can expect you to have one full-time tank and maybe an off-tank as a role example. In a 25-person, we expect you to have three tanks, at least, so we can throw a lot more at you and expect a lot more from you.
IGN: You say Naxxramas is an entry level raid; won't most of the people who go there have raided already?
Jeffrey Kaplan: I think a good amount of them will and I think they'll move through it really quickly, which is a good thing. And then we'll have two smaller raid dungeons. The Malygos raid, which is more like an Onyxia or Gruul-type encounter, and we'll also have the Chamber of the Aspects raid, so I'm not too worried about super-experienced raiders moving through Naxxramas more quickly. What's more compelling is to get the hardcore, super-skilled, experienced raiders into the higher level of raiding content which we'll provide for them, but hopefully introducing players who've never raided before or never thought that they could into the system. That's kind of what the entry level of raiding is all about.
IGN: And then keeping them there with extra rewards?
Jeffrey Kaplan: Yes, we've really thought a lot about the reward structure. We've learned a lot of lessons in Burning Crusade about what worked and what didn't and how PvE and PvP itemization need to co-exist. [We're] trying to address what we consider missteps in Burning Crusade in itemization in Wrath of the Lich King.
IGN: What were the missteps?
Jeffrey Kaplan: Not having the complete balance between PvP and PvE itemization. In the sheer quality of items you could get. An example would be the barrier to entry to doing something like Zul'Aman and the skill required to kill a boss there versus the barrier to entry to getting a pair of boots out of the honor system that are very high quality. Just not having enough levity there to balance out between the two. I also don't think we rewarded PvE enough, meaning not enough items dropped in PvE instances.
IGN: Just in terms of numbers of drops per boss?
Jeffrey Kaplan: Numbers. Like kill a boss and he drops one thing, for example. It's just not enough with the amount of people there, not when competing with the other avenues of itemization in the game. Some good lessons [included] learning about badge[s] of justice as a currency and that was very successful. Players enjoyed being able to pick what items they wanted rather than the game telling them, "Here's the random thing we're going to give you." That was very successful and expanding more on that system, I think, will be good. We learned that we didn't itemize our heroic dungeons well enough; they were too similar to the normal mode of dungeon and it just didn't feel rewarding enough when you did those heroic modes. So making sure that loot feels awesome and stands on its own tier and is not compared to the tiers below it.
IGN: What about new raid mechanics, what sorts of different things should players expect when encountering bosses and the behaviors they have?
Jeffrey Kaplan: We want to do a mix of old stuff that they've come to know and love and also know how to react to. That way they don't feel like completely out of their class or incompetent when they're facing a boss. We'll give them enough stuff that they recognize, but we also want to do some completely new and pretty off-the-wall stuff. I'm really looking forward to it. The great example is in the Nexus dungeon where you kill a boss and get to free these drakes. Then you get to fly these drakes anywhere you want in the dungeon, it's pretty non-linear. And with all of the drakes, there are three different colors of dragon aspects that they can rescue. There's a green, a red, and the bronze. And so they can rescue any three of those and each has its own unique set of abilities that they can do. We're tuning the boss fight around the abilities on those drakes and players can pick any combination. If they want to have one red, three green, and one bronze, they can pick that. Just sort of giving them something they've never seen before. Like, here's a fight riding on the back of a dragon and doing that dragon's abilities.
IGN: Are players just by themselves on those [dragons] flying around?
Jeffrey Kaplan: There is coordination and the abilities on those guys actually complement each other really well. We didn't want you to just pick five bronze drakes, although you could if you wanted to. We more incentivized that there's a great co-dependency on each other by picking the colors that complement each other. You can always just pick an ability that sort of fires off the other guy's abilities.
IGN: What does that mean?
Jeffrey Kaplan: An example is one of them can put a buff. There's a boss fight that has lots of adds in it, and one of [the drakes] can apply this buff to a bunch of adds while another one can basically consume the buff and get health back from all of it and also assume a tanking role. So your tank is then healing himself based off of this debuff that another one is applying to everyone.
IGN: What about the overworld quest structure? We heard a little bit about the riding and the flying quests. But aside from that, has anything been significantly shifted in how quests are structured or is it still the basic go kill X number of Y things that are in Z field?
Jeffrey Kaplan: There's a certain amount of traditional questing that will still drive Northrend, but wherever possible we're trying to mix up as many areas as we can with new quest types. You mentioned a couple that we talked about [in a presentation], there are other great examples. There's this whole quest chain in Howling Fjord where you learn how to train falcons. You do a number of quests where you get a falcon pet and you send it out and it has to kill things and then come back to you; you learn the basic controls of the falcon. Then it has this great climax where you get to go to the edge of the cliff and actually control the falcon from his point of view and then you have to steal these eggs that are down on a cliff that are heavily protected. So just a real new flavor of quests there.
There's another quest where you get to assume the form of an iron golem and there are these huge jump pad runes all over a very vertical... it's in Howling Fjord, that zone with the huge cliff walls... there are these runes all over the cliff wall and you get to control this iron golem as he's doing these giant jumps up and down the cliff walls to give you a more visceral, gamey, platformey feel to it. And then there are just some flow and structure things with the quests. We're trying to have more dungeon quests than we had in Burning Crusade. Burning Crusade was very limited in terms of what kind of dungeon quests it had, and they were like "go kill the boss," [and,] "ok, good job." We're trying to do the deadmines thing a bit more, where the zone builds to the dungeon, the climax of the zone takes place in the dungeon at least in terms of lore and story.
IGN: The narrative elements always seemed more powerful in the starting zones. Like the Draenei starting zone had a great narrative arc. It seems that there is that opportunity when you're adding a limited bit of land that you can arc a more powerful narrative across the quest structure whereas you can't where you have a gigantic continent with 20-some zones on it?
Jeffrey Kaplan: That's very true and it's very much a goal--like in the zones that have dungeons in them-- to try to steer the arc toward the dungeon. Because we know we're going to have highly-scripted boss encounters, the encounters are cooler and better if there is a story behind them. Sure, players might say, "Oh, hey, it was fun, it gave good loot," or whatever, but when there's also that really cool story behind why you're doing it, it feels that much better. We're really trying to drive the story, and not just of a particular zone to a dungeon but the entire expansion has a story arc too, and we like to think of it as in acts. The first act culminates not at the end of the expansion and then acts two and three come in patches. The first act actually culminates in Dragonblight which is a mid-level zone, it's a level 71 to 74 zone, because we wanted players early on--it didn't matter how much or how little they played--to have this big story moment. And that actually takes place at that wrath gate in Dragonblight where Arthas comes out and Horde and Alliance are fighting... I think it's going to be a pretty cool moment.
IGN: Do you actually fight him or do you just see him?
Jeffrey Kaplan: You don't defeat Arthas at that point. That's as much as I'll say.
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SPOILER WARNING
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IGN: That is interesting that you will see the final target beforehand. Because I've played through, not all of, but parts of Burning Crusade and I didn't really know what was going on there.
Jeffrey Kaplan: I think Outland was important for us. We'd spent a lot of years creating the original world and I think Outland for us--especially for those of us who've been working on the game for so long--gave us a chance to push it as far to the limit as we could. And we really did with Outland, the Draenei, there was some pretty high-concept stuff going on, and it's very hard to communicate in a videogame some of those high-concept ideas in a brief period of time. I think with Northrend we're on much more familiar ground, we've gotten [Outlands] out of our system, and we're happy to be back on the main planet, we're happy to be back with the grounded storyline. The Arthas storyline will play out through the patches as well. So Arthas doesn't die in shipping Wrath of the Lich King. Arthas will die in a content patch.
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END SPOILERS
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IGN: Can you talk a bit about the Death Knight's abilities.
Jeffrey Kaplan: Yeah so he has three presences which are similar to Paladin auras in that it's an activated ability that is always up on him. The difference between a Death Knight presence and a Paladin aura is a presence only affects the Death Knight. Some of them are tailored more towards DPS, like the blood presence and the unholy presence, whereas the frost presence is really tailored around the Death Knight tanking. The Death Knight gets some super-cool abilities; I think army of the dead is my favorite, where it's an area of effect, moderate cooldown, rain down ghouls on everything around you. They really overwhelm the scene. I love the raise dead ability. And that one he can cast on a number of different targets, so if I'm out there fighting in Northrend and kill something, I can cast raise dead and bring a summoned ghoul out of the corpse to fight alongside with me. But if I'm out there adventuring with you I can cast raise dead on your corpse and then you don't get to come back as you but you do get to come back as this very fun ghoul who has a whole action bar of abilities.
IGN: What about the rune resource system the Death Knight uses?
Jeffrey Kaplan: So you have six runes total and you'll always have six runes. You'll get to pick, and there's actually a forging process where you put those in your blade, you'll get to pick how many of those you have within six. So if you wanted four blood runes, one unholy, and one frost and that's the six you're going to run with, you can totally do that. We want there to be some customization in how a Death Knight manages his resources and let him choose. The runes have their own separate, independent cooldown as you consume them. Right now it's feeling good at about 10 seconds per [rune]. And then there are also abilities and talents that can trigger an instant refresh or conversion that consumes your blood but puts it into frost. You get a lot of run resource gameplay that way.
IGN: You actually forge them into your sword?
Jeffrey Kaplan: It's a process we haven't completely defined yet but we're thinking it won't be as prohibitive as talent speccing or anything like that.
IGN: In terms of switching them around?
Jeffrey Kaplan: In terms of switching. But at the same time, it won't be so fluid so that you're doing it between fights. We're going to hit some sweet spot between those two.
IGN: Can Death Knights only use swords then?
Jeffrey Kaplan: No they can dual-wield, they can use axes, maces, just not a shield. That's the big thing. We really wanted this guy to feel like a different kind of tank, so no shield.
IGN: If you dual-wield do you get more rune slots?
Jeffrey Kaplan: No, it's six across the blades. Early on we were thinking the rune slots according to specific weapons, but in terms of balance it created some weird scenarios where dual-wielding was always better or always worse.
IGN: And that's set? It never expands through any special ability or armor piece?
Jeffrey Kaplan: No. What does expand is his runic power which is that blue bar by the portrait.
IGN: Which fills up as you use rune abilities, right?
Jeffrey Kaplan: Yeah as you use rune abilities you're runic power is building up and then you can just unleash that.
IGN: Where does the Death Knight actually start off at 55?
Jeffrey Kaplan: He starts off in a brand new area that people haven't seen yet. And what's really cool about it is that it ties right into the old world and helps further the story of the old world as well, but we're constructing a brand new starting area for the Death Knight.
IGN: And that builds to what, 60? And then you go to Outland and do the rest of the leveling content until you get to the expansion?
Jeffrey Kaplan: Exactly.
IGN: Thanks for your time.
Jeffrey Kaplan: Naxxramas, for example, which is going to be the first raid zone players encounter, [will support] both 10 and 25; it's got like 14 bosses in there. It certainly is more work and more difficult to get 25 people organized than 10, but the encounters themselves--we're not going to tune anything so it's drastically harder with 25 than with 10. They'll be tuned for the correct number of people, but I think the level of complexity needs to stay at a very graspable level since it's the entry level of raiding. It can't be too insano-aggro as far as what people need to do.
A good example I like to give is we've got Gruul in Burning Crusade, which is a very accessible, easy-to-understand, not terribly complex raid. And that's a 25-person raid. And then we've got some of the encounters in Zul'Aman, which is a 10-person raid, which are very complex and very hard to execute on. So rather than make it feel like it's a difficulty choice, I like to think of it more as a play-style choice. I enjoy playing with 10 people more, or I enjoy playing with 25 people more, and then within those avenues we can have escalating levels of difficulty where players can prove themselves more skillful.
IGN: And how are you taking those play style differences into account with the new raid dungeons?
Jeffrey Kaplan: In a 10-person dungeon, at most we can expect you to have one full-time tank and maybe an off-tank as a role example. In a 25-person, we expect you to have three tanks, at least, so we can throw a lot more at you and expect a lot more from you.
IGN: You say Naxxramas is an entry level raid; won't most of the people who go there have raided already?
Jeffrey Kaplan: I think a good amount of them will and I think they'll move through it really quickly, which is a good thing. And then we'll have two smaller raid dungeons. The Malygos raid, which is more like an Onyxia or Gruul-type encounter, and we'll also have the Chamber of the Aspects raid, so I'm not too worried about super-experienced raiders moving through Naxxramas more quickly. What's more compelling is to get the hardcore, super-skilled, experienced raiders into the higher level of raiding content which we'll provide for them, but hopefully introducing players who've never raided before or never thought that they could into the system. That's kind of what the entry level of raiding is all about.
IGN: And then keeping them there with extra rewards?
Jeffrey Kaplan: Yes, we've really thought a lot about the reward structure. We've learned a lot of lessons in Burning Crusade about what worked and what didn't and how PvE and PvP itemization need to co-exist. [We're] trying to address what we consider missteps in Burning Crusade in itemization in Wrath of the Lich King.
IGN: What were the missteps?
Jeffrey Kaplan: Not having the complete balance between PvP and PvE itemization. In the sheer quality of items you could get. An example would be the barrier to entry to doing something like Zul'Aman and the skill required to kill a boss there versus the barrier to entry to getting a pair of boots out of the honor system that are very high quality. Just not having enough levity there to balance out between the two. I also don't think we rewarded PvE enough, meaning not enough items dropped in PvE instances.
IGN: Just in terms of numbers of drops per boss?
Jeffrey Kaplan: Numbers. Like kill a boss and he drops one thing, for example. It's just not enough with the amount of people there, not when competing with the other avenues of itemization in the game. Some good lessons [included] learning about badge[s] of justice as a currency and that was very successful. Players enjoyed being able to pick what items they wanted rather than the game telling them, "Here's the random thing we're going to give you." That was very successful and expanding more on that system, I think, will be good. We learned that we didn't itemize our heroic dungeons well enough; they were too similar to the normal mode of dungeon and it just didn't feel rewarding enough when you did those heroic modes. So making sure that loot feels awesome and stands on its own tier and is not compared to the tiers below it.
IGN: What about new raid mechanics, what sorts of different things should players expect when encountering bosses and the behaviors they have?
Jeffrey Kaplan: We want to do a mix of old stuff that they've come to know and love and also know how to react to. That way they don't feel like completely out of their class or incompetent when they're facing a boss. We'll give them enough stuff that they recognize, but we also want to do some completely new and pretty off-the-wall stuff. I'm really looking forward to it. The great example is in the Nexus dungeon where you kill a boss and get to free these drakes. Then you get to fly these drakes anywhere you want in the dungeon, it's pretty non-linear. And with all of the drakes, there are three different colors of dragon aspects that they can rescue. There's a green, a red, and the bronze. And so they can rescue any three of those and each has its own unique set of abilities that they can do. We're tuning the boss fight around the abilities on those drakes and players can pick any combination. If they want to have one red, three green, and one bronze, they can pick that. Just sort of giving them something they've never seen before. Like, here's a fight riding on the back of a dragon and doing that dragon's abilities.
IGN: Are players just by themselves on those [dragons] flying around?
Jeffrey Kaplan: There is coordination and the abilities on those guys actually complement each other really well. We didn't want you to just pick five bronze drakes, although you could if you wanted to. We more incentivized that there's a great co-dependency on each other by picking the colors that complement each other. You can always just pick an ability that sort of fires off the other guy's abilities.
IGN: What does that mean?
Jeffrey Kaplan: An example is one of them can put a buff. There's a boss fight that has lots of adds in it, and one of [the drakes] can apply this buff to a bunch of adds while another one can basically consume the buff and get health back from all of it and also assume a tanking role. So your tank is then healing himself based off of this debuff that another one is applying to everyone.
IGN: What about the overworld quest structure? We heard a little bit about the riding and the flying quests. But aside from that, has anything been significantly shifted in how quests are structured or is it still the basic go kill X number of Y things that are in Z field?
Jeffrey Kaplan: There's a certain amount of traditional questing that will still drive Northrend, but wherever possible we're trying to mix up as many areas as we can with new quest types. You mentioned a couple that we talked about [in a presentation], there are other great examples. There's this whole quest chain in Howling Fjord where you learn how to train falcons. You do a number of quests where you get a falcon pet and you send it out and it has to kill things and then come back to you; you learn the basic controls of the falcon. Then it has this great climax where you get to go to the edge of the cliff and actually control the falcon from his point of view and then you have to steal these eggs that are down on a cliff that are heavily protected. So just a real new flavor of quests there.
There's another quest where you get to assume the form of an iron golem and there are these huge jump pad runes all over a very vertical... it's in Howling Fjord, that zone with the huge cliff walls... there are these runes all over the cliff wall and you get to control this iron golem as he's doing these giant jumps up and down the cliff walls to give you a more visceral, gamey, platformey feel to it. And then there are just some flow and structure things with the quests. We're trying to have more dungeon quests than we had in Burning Crusade. Burning Crusade was very limited in terms of what kind of dungeon quests it had, and they were like "go kill the boss," [and,] "ok, good job." We're trying to do the deadmines thing a bit more, where the zone builds to the dungeon, the climax of the zone takes place in the dungeon at least in terms of lore and story.
IGN: The narrative elements always seemed more powerful in the starting zones. Like the Draenei starting zone had a great narrative arc. It seems that there is that opportunity when you're adding a limited bit of land that you can arc a more powerful narrative across the quest structure whereas you can't where you have a gigantic continent with 20-some zones on it?
Jeffrey Kaplan: That's very true and it's very much a goal--like in the zones that have dungeons in them-- to try to steer the arc toward the dungeon. Because we know we're going to have highly-scripted boss encounters, the encounters are cooler and better if there is a story behind them. Sure, players might say, "Oh, hey, it was fun, it gave good loot," or whatever, but when there's also that really cool story behind why you're doing it, it feels that much better. We're really trying to drive the story, and not just of a particular zone to a dungeon but the entire expansion has a story arc too, and we like to think of it as in acts. The first act culminates not at the end of the expansion and then acts two and three come in patches. The first act actually culminates in Dragonblight which is a mid-level zone, it's a level 71 to 74 zone, because we wanted players early on--it didn't matter how much or how little they played--to have this big story moment. And that actually takes place at that wrath gate in Dragonblight where Arthas comes out and Horde and Alliance are fighting... I think it's going to be a pretty cool moment.
IGN: Do you actually fight him or do you just see him?
Jeffrey Kaplan: You don't defeat Arthas at that point. That's as much as I'll say.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SPOILER WARNING
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
IGN: That is interesting that you will see the final target beforehand. Because I've played through, not all of, but parts of Burning Crusade and I didn't really know what was going on there.
Jeffrey Kaplan: I think Outland was important for us. We'd spent a lot of years creating the original world and I think Outland for us--especially for those of us who've been working on the game for so long--gave us a chance to push it as far to the limit as we could. And we really did with Outland, the Draenei, there was some pretty high-concept stuff going on, and it's very hard to communicate in a videogame some of those high-concept ideas in a brief period of time. I think with Northrend we're on much more familiar ground, we've gotten [Outlands] out of our system, and we're happy to be back on the main planet, we're happy to be back with the grounded storyline. The Arthas storyline will play out through the patches as well. So Arthas doesn't die in shipping Wrath of the Lich King. Arthas will die in a content patch.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
END SPOILERS
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
IGN: Can you talk a bit about the Death Knight's abilities.
Jeffrey Kaplan: Yeah so he has three presences which are similar to Paladin auras in that it's an activated ability that is always up on him. The difference between a Death Knight presence and a Paladin aura is a presence only affects the Death Knight. Some of them are tailored more towards DPS, like the blood presence and the unholy presence, whereas the frost presence is really tailored around the Death Knight tanking. The Death Knight gets some super-cool abilities; I think army of the dead is my favorite, where it's an area of effect, moderate cooldown, rain down ghouls on everything around you. They really overwhelm the scene. I love the raise dead ability. And that one he can cast on a number of different targets, so if I'm out there fighting in Northrend and kill something, I can cast raise dead and bring a summoned ghoul out of the corpse to fight alongside with me. But if I'm out there adventuring with you I can cast raise dead on your corpse and then you don't get to come back as you but you do get to come back as this very fun ghoul who has a whole action bar of abilities.
IGN: What about the rune resource system the Death Knight uses?
Jeffrey Kaplan: So you have six runes total and you'll always have six runes. You'll get to pick, and there's actually a forging process where you put those in your blade, you'll get to pick how many of those you have within six. So if you wanted four blood runes, one unholy, and one frost and that's the six you're going to run with, you can totally do that. We want there to be some customization in how a Death Knight manages his resources and let him choose. The runes have their own separate, independent cooldown as you consume them. Right now it's feeling good at about 10 seconds per [rune]. And then there are also abilities and talents that can trigger an instant refresh or conversion that consumes your blood but puts it into frost. You get a lot of run resource gameplay that way.
IGN: You actually forge them into your sword?
Jeffrey Kaplan: It's a process we haven't completely defined yet but we're thinking it won't be as prohibitive as talent speccing or anything like that.
IGN: In terms of switching them around?
Jeffrey Kaplan: In terms of switching. But at the same time, it won't be so fluid so that you're doing it between fights. We're going to hit some sweet spot between those two.
IGN: Can Death Knights only use swords then?
Jeffrey Kaplan: No they can dual-wield, they can use axes, maces, just not a shield. That's the big thing. We really wanted this guy to feel like a different kind of tank, so no shield.
IGN: If you dual-wield do you get more rune slots?
Jeffrey Kaplan: No, it's six across the blades. Early on we were thinking the rune slots according to specific weapons, but in terms of balance it created some weird scenarios where dual-wielding was always better or always worse.
IGN: And that's set? It never expands through any special ability or armor piece?
Jeffrey Kaplan: No. What does expand is his runic power which is that blue bar by the portrait.
IGN: Which fills up as you use rune abilities, right?
Jeffrey Kaplan: Yeah as you use rune abilities you're runic power is building up and then you can just unleash that.
IGN: Where does the Death Knight actually start off at 55?
Jeffrey Kaplan: He starts off in a brand new area that people haven't seen yet. And what's really cool about it is that it ties right into the old world and helps further the story of the old world as well, but we're constructing a brand new starting area for the Death Knight.
IGN: And that builds to what, 60? And then you go to Outland and do the rest of the leveling content until you get to the expansion?
Jeffrey Kaplan: Exactly.
IGN: Thanks for your time.