Episode 15

Alex Afrasiabi: First, to address the Lich King thing, it definitely occurred to us that Arthas and the Lich King were huge, huge characters and it would be very difficult to come up with an equally or more compelling storyline, but we still have a stable, if you will, of amazing characters to kind of pull from. We've been working on the Deathwing story behind the scenes for a while and what he's been doing because we knew at some point we wanted to bring him out and it just so happened that this was the point. Something that we probably did really poorly actually in Lich King that didn't help our case for pushing this one out was the Obsidian Sanctum. That was kind of one of our initial tie-ins for this because we'd been in the process of doing this one since Lich King released, so we knew exactly what we were working on. We never really conveyed it properly through that storyline, and so it was more of a surprise, I think, than it should have been.

Alex Afrasiabi: It's way more streamlined. Again, we've learned so much from designing for World of Warcraft for so many years. We're all not just veteran designers, but veteran players. We've all been playing since the very beginning. From a player perspective, we know what we don't like, and we like to think we know what players don't like. I think we do a pretty decent job of that. Those things play a huge, huge role in our design process.

Cory Stockton: Yeah. When you're thinking about re-rolling that alt and you're working on this zone, the last thing you're going to want to do is put something in there that you're going to, in any way, think is crappy. Especially because we're going to be doing this exact same thing that the players are doing, so that's the last thing we want to see either. I think a lot of us here on the team have rerolled so many times with different characters and gone through the same 1 to 10 starting experience and then getting out into the world and going from there. At a certain point you run of out of options because you've done all of it. I think that one thing we wanted to do here. We really affected the flow is a big thing people are going to see is different. The level changes that you see across the board zones aren't the same from a level perspective anymore at all. You know, you get dumped out in Barrens and you're looking at this 15 level range zone and it's gigantic. Obviously, when we look at that the first thing is we want to do something to make that better, so we cut it in half, split it into Northern and Southern Barrens. Things like that we started of talking about at BlizzCon last year that we were really going to do selectively, some of this stuff, to zones. What ended up happening is that we got to a point where we didn't really want to leave anything out. We had broken up all the zones into red, yellow, and green and were only going to do this much. Somehow, being Blizzard, we thought we'd get away with that, which we didn't at all. We ended up, basically, touching everything. I think a lot of that is from exactly what Alex was saying. We didn't want to be in that situation where you hit level 45 and then your 45 to 50 zone is nowhere near the quality level of the 10 to 15 zone you were in. I think when we got to that point we were just like, "We've got to figure out a way to get to these zones."

Alex Afrasiabi: Yeah. We absolutely made the time. I think ultimately what you're going to get from a reroll or a new player perspective going through Azeroth from 1 to 60 is a highly enjoyable, highly immersive, fun, content driven experience where--I've seen this word thrown around a bit now on the forums and through fansites and what not, I think that it does come off as effortless. I think you'll start your questing experience, your player's journey, and before you know it you're 25 hours in and haven't had any sleep because they do carry you that well. The progression and flow is really, really tight.

Cory Stockton: We tried to get rid of the hills and valleys. You want it to feel smooth the whole way through, and I think that was definitely one of the biggest goals that we feel like we've achieved. I think effortless is a great way to describe it.

Alex Afrasiabi: Yeah, it does feel effortless. Even in those zones, one of the earlier complaints I heard is that the zones are too linear. It's kind of funny because I think back to when we were doing the Death Knight area. The players are always very concerned about, "What if it breaks?" and I have to keep going back to that as the millions and millions of people went through the Death Knight starting experience and that was the most linear experience you could ever imagine. That's exactly what you beta testers are here for, to make sure we're catching all these bugs and making sure that your experience is top notch that these things won't break and that when you get there on live you won't be stopped or hampered by any kind of weird bugs. They've been doing a great job on the forums. I think our beta testers are doing an amazing job with feedback we're receiving, the bugs, and all that good stuff.

Cory Stockton: Definitely we learned that we can't leave them out. You can't leave Azuremyst and Bloodmyst and head into Ashenvale and not see anything Draenei. It just feels a little foreign. Same thing with the Blood Elf. You walk out of Ghostlands and it's pretty much the last Blood Elf tower you're going to see until Hellfire Peninsula, I think. I think that affected a lot of players because it feels like that experience is separated. It doesn't feel like part of the world as a whole. The fact that we had a chance to redo the whole existing world definitely helped. You can take a look at something like Azshara for the Goblins is obviously a huge influence. The Worgen stuff that's happening in Silverpine, you can see things there. You can see it all throughout the world. A big thing is that we had all these assets because we built those two zones first. We did Lost Isles and we did Gilneas, so the level designers basically had all those assets while we were redoing the original world. Anywhere that we had the chance to use that stuff, they would work as close as they could to the quest guys and figure out a place that made sense. Where can we fit this in where it makes sense? It doesn't need to look like it's jammed in, but wherever we can do it where it feels right, let's go for it. I think you're going to see a lot more of that here than we ever did, specifically with Burning Crusade.

Alex Afrasiabi: Absolutely. I think Cory hit it. I think without the benefit of having to redo the entire world, it would have been a lot more difficult to get the Worgen/Goblin coverage that we did, but I think this expansion hit it right.

Alex Afrasiabi: Yeah, they're getting their asses kicked is what's happening.

Alex Afrasiabi: I think anytime a treaty or truce is mentioned in fiction, something goes wrong. Strangely enough, someone tries to assassinate somebody, a fight breaks out, and this is, I think, common in politics you see this type of thing happen. Probably not to this degree with magic and Orcs.

Cory Stockton: Possibly.

Alex Afrasiabi: I am implying that. I am implying that. But, yeah. I think that the factions, the Alliance and Horde, are in over their heads here and I think it's going to take some doing to defeat Deathwing. They've only just begun and they have a long road ahead of them.

Alex Afrasiabi: They'll be blown away. I think the average new player, you come into this one, you're going to be amazed. It's almost startling to look at it and just think that this game it's about six, six and a half years old now at this point, and you get into that world and the art style keeps up. It still looks amazing, it still looks fresh.

Cory Stockton: It's almost mind-boggling how it's able to do that. We see so many new MMOs--obviously we play stuff, we see things--and the majority come and go. We love a lot of the art we see in these other titles and get jealous. "Oh, why can't we have that feature? I want that. I want this." And then, somehow, we end up coming out with these zones that just look insane in this engine that we've been, basically, upgrading for this whole time. We're working off the same World of Warcraft engine. I think like Alex said, for the average player that comes in it's going to be pretty hard not to just be blown away. I think there are so many things that are new, actually, they're probably not even going to realize a lot of things that are different until they're pretty far in. There are a lot of things that if you're just picking up with a level 80 and going to 85, that's going to be a great experience, but at certain point they're going to want to reroll, and so many things are going to feel different at that point.

Alex Afrasiabi: But better.

Alex Afrasiabi: Mmhmm.

Alex Afrasiabi: Yeah, thank you.

Cory Stockton: No problem.

Russell Brower: Hello!

Derek Duke: Hi guys.

Russell Brower: The world is such a big place that if we provided too much of a constant hook or sound you would hear it so much it make actually get distracting that you'd hear it so much. So we've tried to be very judicious in how we are using these self references if you will. But some patterns were established pretty early on. For instance, before we started writing music for the game itself, all of us who were on the composition team sat down and did for the first time what we called "concept music". Without really any direction other than maybe looking at some concept art or reading Christie Golden's first draft of her novel The Shattering, each of us sat down and wrote a few minutes of music that said to us, this is the Cataclysm. This is what it means to me. And out of that came a lot of great ideas and one of them, Neal Acree who you may remember from having written the cinematic scores for both Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King he came up with a simple little 4, 5 note motif for Deathwing. So that little melodic idea starts seeping through in various locations. You'll hear it in the new login screen music, you'll hear it of course in the cinematic without giving too much away but you figure it'll have some Deathwing in it so you'll hear that music anywhere in Deepholm anywhere where the ground is still sizzling from where Deathwing just was there's potential to hear something like that. Twilight's Hammer theme came out of those efforts and many others so there's several bits of consistency or hooks or subthemes.

Derek Duke: One of the things you'll notice in this expansion is within a given zone or area there is a lot more diversity in the music. So depending upon where you are going in a given zone you might transition into some music that again is related to a race or a story theme you might hear it just in a small area when you are in a low level area, but then as you expand and get up to level 40 you might be in an area where you start to hear this music a lot more and you recall you've heard it once as you were progressing in the level. So there's all the different Cataclysm themes are spaced quite diversely throughout the various continents and zones.

Derek Duke: I certainly had the most fun working on my music for the goblins. Using the pitch percussion, the marimbas and xylophones and then incorporating the whistles because they are very, their workers are a little playful as well as being deviant and what not. It was a chance to go into a direction I don't normally go to in the Warcraft universe. So that was pretty satisfying for me.

Russell Brower: For me, one of the zones I ended up working on was Dun Morogh, all the snowy zones from around where Ironforge is and the regions beyond.

Russell Brower: (laughs) Something that plagued us on when we were working on wrath of lich king is how do you say 'cold' and 'snowy' and not just go to some cliché. So faced with that again, in a way, what did it for me was I ended up writing a piece called “Cold Mountain”, at least that's the working title of it and at the time that I was writing that a really beloved family pet, a cat who was 19 years old when she ultimately passed away, she was in her last days and I just took some of the emotion that I was feeling and put it into that space as I was writing the music and I think what came to pass then was people don't need to know how I came to write it but if they get a sense of the emotion in then it becomes a little more than a piece of background music so for that reason I'm really proud of that one.

Russell Brower: So this one is for your Trudy. The cat. (laughs)

Russell Brower: Well Speaking for myself the inspiration always comes from a combination of the gameplay and early on the concept art. For many weeks if not months the concept art and hallway conversations with the designers of the World of Warcraft team are all we have to go on and it's a lot and it really helps and the stuff gels for a long time in our minds and becomes the inspiration. And then ultimately when we get inside the game and start looking around these areas and events and the stories they just speak to you. I also, I mentioned earlier I read Christie Golden's The Shattering book, an early draft. . .

Russell Brower: Yeah, long time ago and it really helped ground me in the depth and breadth of what's going on and Azeroth and what's Thrall doing in seeking to commune with the elementals and figure out what's tearing Azeroth apart and what are the druids having to do, as we say in the soundtrack titles, restore the balance. All that informs our composition.

Derek Duke: From the concept art to the gameplay too, Russell mentioned the lore I know there's a balance between all of that and then what works in the context of the game. I know my gut reaction when I first started flying through, especially a lot of the older areas that had been torn up and hurt, there was a real sense of sadness because these are places, you know, I grew up questing in those places.

Russell Brower: (Laughs)

Derek Duke: All of five, six years ago when my wife was pregnant we were over there and this and that and I remember getting a screenshot of the two of us up on the dams of Loch Modan or whatever.

Derek Duke: Yeah, and a lot of these places are just completely destroyed or they are turned upside-down, they are not the same places anymore. So there was a real sadness, “Look what's happened to my world,” but then balancing that, there's a lot of new alliances and there's a lot of other things happening.

Derek Duke: You can't just make it all about personal feelings so yeah there's a lot of things for us to explore and to allow us to express ourselves and find the way to help the story along.

Derek Duke: Well I think one of the things that's different this time around, Jonas was working with a far bigger team then he'd ever have Brian, from the previous expansions helping out Chris Giampa, Michael Johnson, Paul Menichini, Jon Graves, Chris De La Pena, we had far more hands on the project than ever before because there was so much to do not just in the newer zones but also in the old world. With so many new things happening and they of course were pushing it to a new level trying to incorporate other concepts. Not just what the sound was but the fact that everything had to do with the elements so something was related somehow to one of the elements there were sonic elements of water into anything that had remotely anything to do with water or fire whether it was a lamp or a new campfire or something that drew from some sort of fire based recording or elemental source. So there's a lot of conceptual things that have found their way into all of the sonic landscape in the new expansion.

Russell Brower: We've all seen movies where in the case of say fire, the fire is so important to the plot of the movie it's almost a character in of itself so the sound design starts incorporating wispy almost like you are hearing whispering in the steam and the smoke and things like that so that kind of thinking started permeating our approach to the sound design so for the four elementals what can we do to not make it say "listen to me I'm a cool sound effect" but to just sublimely have the ear go well this is familiar and often the human vocal like a whisper is great for that because we instinctively on some level pay attention to a human vowel sound or vocalization.

Russell Brower: Right. So I mean there's no words it's all just kind of ethereal sounds but you'll hear that injected into our ambiences here and there just to add a sense that the elementals are sentient conscious beings, it isn't just physics. In Azeroth, everything is alive at some level.

Russell Brower: Because Cataclysm is all about moving forward and what's happening to Azeroth as a result of the Cataclysm there weren't the historical references opportunities as there was when Brian Far first did the Ruins of Lordaeron and paid homage to the coronation ceremony and to the big ringing bells and you walk in and the bell is ruined on the floor and you can hear the memory of it tolling for the great event and then in the next hallway you hear the ghostly voices of the cheering crowd and everything and we're more firmly in the present in Cataclysm so the references are more of what we've already spoken about in terms of referencing the elementals and that they're alive they're in torment and very strange things happening so that's kind of the sublanguage or subtext going on.

Derek Duke: There's certainly a lot of musical nuggets for people who noticed that or who speak that language. Some are more obvious than others references to past things but there's a lot hidden in there's and a lot in terms of what themes you hear at one point or one area of the game that link or are related to another theme but just in a different context. So there's certainly a lot of that going on musically.

Russell Brower: Neal Acree did a tremendous job of taking some of the Night Elf and other themes that you heard in Ashenvale or Teldrassil and he really didn't change the melodies at all but he added this subtle twist like things are not quite right and yet they still retain the beauty of the original themes from the 2004 release of the World of Warcraft and we also had the opportunity to record them with a live orchestra which brings this organic ear candy, it really is there's just something about it. The melodies are good enough to survive I mean they can play on a simple piano they can play with synthesizers, they can play with an orchestra and they still convey an awful lot but you add the live musicians into the mix and it just makes the whole experience feel more human and you can relate to it and maybe the word I'm looking for is 'timeless'.

Derek Duke: Yeah it brings a level of emotion to the music that's really something to be experienced

Russell Brower: It's a lot of fun to cut together the soundtrack album that's in the collector's edition because the goal there is to create a listening experience that stands outside the game so we tend to focus on the themes or the version of the themes where they're presented more as foreground or midground music where it's okay to say "hey listen to me" a lot of them may be the intro pieces you hear the first time you walk into a major city or a zone for the first time. After that in the game, after you hear that version it tends to recede a little bit in the background but those more triumphed and expansive versions are the ones that tend to end up on the album so the idea is to make it something you can listen to outside of the game have it resonate with all the memories of playing and take you back and be an experience of itself.

Russell Brower: (laughs) Absolutely. Well to support each other

Russell Brower: It's our pleasure. Thank you for having us.

Derek Duke: Thanks everyone.

Andrea Toyias: Hello there!

Andrea Toyias: I'm doing good, I'm excited to be here.

Andrea Toyias: Really hard to say, there are so many different kinds of characters and so many different scenarios. Our lead characters, let's say our player characters, we're introducing new worgens and goblins. Those sessions could be four, five, six hours. There was an eight hour session that we did for the male worgen. So obviously, the characters that you hear more in the game will take a lot longer because we're going to spend a lot more time making sure each read is right. Characters like our dungeon bosses probably are about an hour or so because they usually have a couple of lines, kill lines, spell lines and that, but what they really have to focus on are their sound effects, their attacking sounds, they're getting hit, they're killing, they're dying, so that really takes time. In essence, I would say the average World of Warcraft session, depending on the character, is about an hour to two hours, and our characters that are obviously much more involved in our overall game are probably four to five hours.

Andrea Toyias: Sometimes when people ask me this question, I get it frequently, I'm almost speechless because there are so many moments. When you work with an actor in the booth and you're there with your character specs and your script and they come in, and suddenly they're there with you and in front of you and you're guiding them, and they suddenly sound like this creature that you want, this mythical, other worldly creature, I feel like your tapping into a universal energy that's bigger than all of us. Suddenly you're in the room, and suddenly there is an orc in the room with you, it's just amazing.

There's so many great moments, one thing that was really exciting for this chapter which I'll throw in really quick, is the fact that before, all of our casting and recording was done here and Los Angeles, but for Cataclysm in particular, we really wanted to kick it up a notch and find new talent, new energies, new voices and we went to New York. I spent five weeks in New York casting and recording most of the voices you're going to hear in Cataclysm. So a lot of great moments for me, for example a lot of Broadway actors voiced characters in this game. A lot of the lead roles were epic, really talented Broadway actors. So there were very serious moments, for example, there is Prince Liam Greymane who is one of the worgen royal family and he has to do this Braveheart epic speech, and when he ended, half of us were in tears and half of us were silent. We did have the writers on the phone with us throughout the entire process and it was silent and the writer just said really quietly at the end of it, “I would follow you into battle any day of the week”, we were all so moved. Even though it is a fantasy, other worldly game, primary colored and fun, we have very serious acting happening in this game, very dark, heavy emotional moments. So there were so many moments where I just sat in silence and couldn't believe I was fortunate enough to witness this performance and fortunate enough to watch, for example, the worgen royal family appears in front of my eyes.

There are a couple of other really funny ones, we were lucky enough to bring in Garrosh Hellscream back in, leader of the orcs, and that was a funny moment. There's a line, he does this whole other Braveheart speech in his orcish tongue and at the very end he does this really big, “FOR THE HORDE!” Epic, loud and the writers were on the phone and it's silent. And then suddenly out of nowhere you just hear, “HELL YEAH!” You could just tell that everybody involved here at Blizzard, the writers were so geeked out because Garrosh was really on the phone with them and they just were delirious with hearing that voice on the speakers so it was pretty epic.

Andrea Toyias: Oh it's great! It's really magical.

Andrea Toyias: Totally, totally unparalleled, unbelievable. What I love so much about Blizzard, and not because I work here, but what I love about the team is that no matter who the character was, no matter what the voice was, no matter what the setup was, we took every single line of dialog very, very seriously. So, we might need to find a character that only has two lines. It was never thrown away. Every single line that was recorded was touched by myself, by the writers, and analyzed and really worked on until we got exactly what we wanted. So not only was the scope bigger, but I think we spent a lot more time on every single line that we recorded so in that way it was definitely more epic.

Andrea Toyias: Oh lord! Actors are a special breed of people. These are people that have to go into a room and how I explain actors to people who don't know, it's like they go into a room and basically have to get naked in front of you because they're really going to be vulnerable and expose themselves. And because of that you tend to find actors that are quite animated, friendly, goofy, extroverted. I say all that because if you can do a session and not laugh until your almost crying, it'll be rare. There's one outtake that I loved, there's a female orc named Aggra and this actress is so talented in so many ways. She was waiting for us to get water or get a coffee or something, and just started to do a seductive soliloquy, shall we say, for Garrosh Hellscream in an orc voice. So to hear a flirtatious and very aggressive female orc talk to Garrosh in an adult manner was quite funny and there's just so many things that if only we could put that in the game, but alas we can't.

Andrea Toyias: It's so amazing in every way, but I think again to what I was alluding to earlier. You're trying to get these other worldly creatures, orcs, especially the dungeon bosses, they're monsters of every style, but then you've got scenarios that are other worldly as well. We're operating in the realm of fantasy, the challenge can sometimes be getting myself and getting the actor in that headspace. It was funny, recording for Cataclysm was so intense that I felt that I was living more in the World of Warcraft, talking about orcs and dragons as if they were totally real because you get so immersed in it, that it feels more real than my real life at some point. But the challenge is to communicate to the actors and get them in the headspace whereby they are, I keep using a dragon, but even though they are a dragon and to take it seriously, which they do, but to get them in the headspace of you are a dragon being chased or fighting or struggling at this point and to get everybody involved in the process in that headspace. It's easier if you're recording human characters and human scenarios, one to one human conversations, that's one thing. But when you're in a completely fantastical realm it's another thing so I think the challenge is that we hit the notes just right, get the energies just right and really make it a believable scene for all involved.

Andrea Toyias: Yeah we do, absolutely. Diablo was starting to creep in on me when I was doing Cataclysm and this might sound weird, but I'm a huge music fan, so even in New York, when our player characters who really lead the game in a lot of ways, before they would start recording, I would play on huge speakers at full volume some of the music from the Wrath of the Lich King soundtrack. I think it's called Arthas my Son, which I think is track three, I play my card because I'm that much of a nerd. But I would play that for them to get them in the headspace and I would watch them and we would be chatting and laughing and this transformation would happen. They would just sit differently, I'm getting chills talking about that now, but they would sit differently and you could see what affected them. So my point is that sometimes I find that with our projects even listening to the music associated with each project really helps me get into that headspace as well, because the music itself sets the tone for what we're going to do and what kind of voice we need to have. Diablo is very haunting and mysterious so we need those performances, so when I need to listen to those auditions I'll try to get into that Diablo headspace with that music.

Andrea Toyias: Absolutely, absolutely. I myself if I'm going to lead the charge to find our actors, I really need to make sure that in order to get other people in that headspace, I have to be in that headspace. So even listening to auditions for example can be quite daunting because we'll get 150 auditions for one role, I've got to make sure that I in my head know what I want, not just “La la la la la, going to do some casting”, I have to put my head in the Diablo sphere if I'm going to get it right.

Greg Street: So this won't affect super high level characters a lot but the biggest change, we think, is the low level experience. Particularly the magic moment at level 10 now where you get to be an arms warrior versus just a warrior, you get to get your special ability, you get passive bonuses that help you really define your character early on. It is a pretty big deal when you experience it; you get these abilities that you didn't have before, your playstyle varies quite dramatically at low level, characters are a lot more powerful than they used to be because of that and I think it is one of the biggest changes the level up experience ever had.

Greg Street: I can give you two examples, something that worked well and then something that didn't work well. The talent trees worked really well. We were really nervous about it but as we got into it, it got to be really exciting. It was finally easy to look at a talent tree and decide how to build your character without necessarily having to go online or trying to figure out the math. "Hey is that haste talent good or is that not good compared to this other talent I have to give up to get it?" I think that was something we all rallied behind really quickly and understood how it worked. It was still a lot of work to get it done but we could see the light at the end of the tunnel.

On the other hand, something that we had not yet come to a great solution on were the relic slot or even the ranged slot for a lot of characters. We basically have: Hunters care a great deal about their ranged weapon but not as much for their main hand, then you have rogues and warriors who don't care about that weapon a whole lot, it's like some nice stats or whatever. It used to be back in the day they would use ranged attacks but now warriors have heroic throw and rogues have deadly throw and fan of knives and things like that so they care a little about the ranged weapon but it's not as nearly as big a deal as it used to be. Then we have wands; which back in the day you would use your wand to level up and that was like the pro thing to do, never cast a spell just use your wand instead, which we thought was terrible so we basically don't ask casters to use their wands anymore so they are also kind of pointless.

Then we had these relics which were like okay everyone gets one according to their spec, they get a relic that when you cast rejuvenation it gives you a bonus or when you cast Bloodstrike it gives you a bonus. I think the grand dream of those is that you would tailor your playstyle to like -Oh I'm a Rejuve casting druid, I'll take that one as opposed to the life bloom one- but in reality you pretty much get one per tier for your character. If it's a spell you like to cast you're in good shape, if it's a spell you don't like to cast it's terrible. So it got to a point where those relics were just pretty much a passive stat buff up on you almost all the time.

The relics we ended up with for Cataclysm aren't even class/spell specific anymore. It's just kind of like, the healer relic has a nice gem socket and gives you some stats you want. I think ultimately were not happy with that whole slot. If we had acted a little earlier perhaps the right call would be to pull it and say that everyone has a weapon slot, for hunters it's a ranged weapon, for paladins it's a melee weapon and just design there. We struggled with that for years and I am not sure we have a good solution to it, just one of those annoying rough edges we would like to smooth over for players.

Greg Street: I don't know, that is a big change at this point because we would have to yank existing items from players, that may be more of a 5.0 level thing. It is definitely one of those long term goals that we'd' like eventually to find a better solution for cause the one we have just feels a little weird.

Greg Street: Icky is the word we use a lot.

Greg Street: So a couple of different things. World of Warcraft has been around a long time now. We went back and looked at the number of bosses in the game and the number is gigantic, it's over 100. I took a guess once at how many bosses we have and I was under by like half. Players constantly want to see new things they don't want to see the same encounters over and over again so encounters get quite complicated and at the same time the classes are getting more and more abilities. Every time you gain a couple of levels you get a new ability, to where a lot of the classes can't fit all of their abilities on the standard action bars we give you.

So we have this sort of ability bloat on the one hand with fights that get more and more complicated on the other hand and we thought that something has to give here. We can't just keep amping up both of those things. We ultimately decided it was more fun to do it on the encounter side because we thought it would be more engaging and keep players around longer if every encounter they approached felt a little different rather than once I master my rotation it's going to work the same over and over and over again.

Originally I don't think a great deal of thought went into the rotations of a class. I mean in Molten Core a lot of classes didn't even have rotations, for the Warlock cast Shadowbolt. Nowadays we design classes to have certain abilities that have synergies so that you do them in a certain order. Definitely on like the traditionally long PVE boss fight but even in PVP even when solo even when handling packs of trash or whatever the players are expected to manage a lot of abilities. If they want to do completive DPS or whatever they need to know how all that stuff works together. We took a step back and tried to decide does this really make sense or not? Do players really need this mechanic and/or are we getting anything out of that? Can we really find a niche for this spell or ability? I think in Cataclysm the classes that got a little simpler were the ones that kind of needed to. Feral druid to some extent. On the other hand we took some rotations and added a little bit of complication to them, fury warrior and melee paladins come to mind.

So I am not sure that it is totally fair that we have just been dumb'ing the game down, I think players say that sometimes when they see that a lot of players are in heroic dungeons and raiding nowadays. That doesn't necessarily mean that they are successful at it. That doesn't mean they are successful as you are or that they got to the content as quickly as you did or that they have got all the achievements or that they were able to see all the fights on heroic. We want to bring up the bottom end where we think a lot different types of players can experience the content. We also want to make sure for that players who want to show their stuff and test themselves have fights like that out there and players are probably discovering that is the case for Synestra today.

So the customization issue is also interesting. Originally the vision for World of Warcraft was that there were lots of different types of armor and only the best players get the best looking armor. We've kind of relaxed that as time has gone on because getting set bonuses is one of the big defining moments of a particular tier of gear, whether you are talking about a dungeon or a raid. That's one of the things that is really what's going to change what you do otherwise the stats are just oh look more spell power, more int, more crit the kind of stuff you have on your gear now. So we really like for players to get their set bonuses. Getting set bonuses changes up the way they play a little bit. We did not want to deny that to the great unwashed and only keep it for the super elite raiders so we make sure that players have an avenue to get their set bonuses. It used to be back in the day you would see the guy that could raid in Black Wing Lair and Naxxramus he was decked out in this crazy stuff that you could only imagine that someday you would be that cool and have that gear. We are going to try and recapture that a little bit in Cataclysm by making sure that shoulders and helmets can only be gained through raiding and therefore you can only gain your 4 piece set bonus by raiding you can get your 2 piece bonus your cool gear off badges or running heroic dungeons but you actually have to see the content to be ultimately tricked out.

The look of World of Warcraft is still really important to us, I think a lot of MMO's decide we'll just let the players do whatever and the players know what's best and if they want to look like a clown then they can look like a clown and were ok with that. I think our approach sometimes comes off as more heavy handed, players want more freedom then we are often willing to give them because we are trying to control the experience to some extent. It is important to us that characters look cool and while we occasionally give you items that let you turn into a furbolg or let you turn yourself different colors and things like that we ultimately want to preserve the look and make sure that players look cool and can't make themselves look ridiculous. If we had a way to examine the way players look then we could say "no you can't use that color dye with that color dye because you look silly".

Greg Street: Yeah. That is just kind of beyond the scope of what we can do given the size of our audience. So we understand it is important for players to be able to distinguish themselves we try to do that a lot through the companion pets you can get. We're increasingly offering more non combat toys with things like archeology and a lot of the trade skills and some of our world events. We would like to get even more creative with minor glyphs. I think minor glyphs still haven't quite delivered on the initial promise of "oh your fireball can be green". Some of that requires tech that we don't have yet. Some of it requires asking an artist for not only a new spell for a level 83 Death Knight ability but for 4 versions of it so I can change the colors and stuff too. It is still something we really want to do and it is in the long term plan. That will allow players a little more freedom to be a unique individual inside all of the Shaman wearing all the same armor sets.

Greg Street: Oh constantly, we do that all the time. A couple of recent examples are in Cataclysm. We introduced new resource mechanics for a lot of different classes and specs. Focus was a very easy one, basically we already had that working for Hunter pets and we just added it to the hunter and it was no big deal. The warlocks required a completely new system and initially we were handling that just through spells. We can do a lot just through different spell effects, almost everything in World of Warcraft is driven by spells whether its quest or item procs or set bonuses and we can do a lot that way but we found as we were trying to get fancier and fancier with soul shards. Also with paladin Holy Power and with the druid Eclipse bar and even with the Shadow priest orbs, we found that we needed an actual robust system. We had to input and build this new power bar concept for the game and now different classes can have different power bars and it will be easy for us to tweak those but we had to actually like, build a system.

Another example is the way mounts work, we changed the way mounts work a lot for Cataclysm. It used to be that a blue mount had a certain movement speed and a purple mount had a faster movement speed. You basically gave up your blue mounts once you reached or found a faster mount. It was very data driven which meant it was super buggy. You had a lot of special cases like the sparkle pony and other scaling mounts that required us to write scripts that basically looked at what a player was capable of moving at and adjusted the mount to that and they always fell apart and broke. We finally decided that we needed a mount system in the game. We need to specify the kind of mount, like a land mount that can fly or it's a flying mount that can go underwater or whatever. The programmers actually built us a new mount system and it's actually now pretty trivial for us to add new mounts once we get awesome art.

Greg Street: It's funny, our job is never done. I think there is an expectation that once it's done it's locked in and your talent tree is not going to change for 12 months or however long it takes us to make another expansion. The fact is if we see something is not working we will be quick to change it. Now we know that too much of that leaves players with what I call the whiplash experience, we screwed up a little bit with the Hunter balance and we immediately drove all the Beast Mastery hunters to Survival or whatever it was at the time and we did a little bit of that with mages too. We have to be super careful. We don't want players to be chasing our ever changing design but we do want to fix things that are broken.

It's easier to make sweeping changes in an expansion. Players almost expect it and kind of get a little disappointed if they don't see any change for their class, so expansion is the best time to do it. Sometimes we get the sense that players are dreading the patch coming because that's the end of their changes and no more work will ever be done. We have a pretty good capacity to hot fix things (which means changing them on the server without having to change the client patch). We also can make fast patches and we are having to patch things all the time. That doesn't mean that we are sloppy and don't know how to program, that just means something didn't work the way we expected or in the meantime we thought of a better way to do it. It is one of the beauties of working on a Massive Multiplayer Online Game and my previous career we would come up with an idea and it might be a year before we'd see it implemented and on World of Warcraft literally sometimes you can think of a change and it will be in game by that afternoon.

I think when I first started I viewed a class as a perfect form out there and you eventually iterate your way towards it. Kind of like the artist carving away marble to get at the sculpture underneath, eventually the perfect form with emerge but I don't think that's a destination anymore, it's a journey. We will constantly be tweaking things until we are happy with them. As an example we might tweak the talent in the 5th tier and after a while the one in the 3rd tier will start to look stale and old so maybe it's time to update that one too. We don't look at things as finished. It is more about how it feels that day since the game evolves and there are new types of encounters out there. There's going to be a huge emphasis on battlegrounds in Cataclysm so were going to have to look at some abilities perhaps we didn't look at before because they didn't have a role in smaller scale pvp. Yeah that's the long winded way of saying it's a product that just keeps on going and we don't view milestones as anything is particularly locked down its just the next step. Players are going to see something new and then the next day we will go in and change something else.