Episode 2

Chris Metzen: That's right.

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…

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?

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.

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.

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.

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 pull or something that makes it challenging right out of 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.

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…

Geoff Goodman: Yeah, totally.

Geoff Goodman: Thank you very much!

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!'

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.

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.

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.