WoW's Lead System Designer Interview

Atomic meets up with Greg Street, Lead Systems Designer, World of Warcraft, to talk about Cataclysm, new in-game effects, and changing Azeroth forever.

We got to sit down with the ever-affable Greg Street, the Lead System's Designer on World of Warcraft. With such a big announcement just made, all we had to do was get him started on Cataclysm...

Reworking the game:
We just upped our game a lot, we were able to make much more beautiful zones, we learned alot about the right way to make quests and we just thought we were getting to offer much more epic experience. Yet when players would go to start World of Warcraft; a new character or brand new players to the game they would see, really, five year old content now. And we thought it was time to update that. But we thought that just redoing the old stuff wouldn't be as exciting as really changing it. You know, give players a reason to go back and see it happen and make it feel like the world had evolved.

I think we've gotten a lot better with story-telling we started out with very simple quests, and now we've tried to sell it a lot more in terms of why are we doing this, what's going on, how does the players role fit in. We've really tried to make players feel a lot more heroic, like they're really doing something that's important for the world

Developing depth:
One of the things that I think we did really well on Lich King, was have a villain that we could really focus on from the very beginning. Burning Crusade kind of had that, the original World of Warcraft didn't have that at all, we tried to add a little bit of that later, but players knew going in that they were focused on the Lich King - that was the end game. So we're trying to do the same thing with Cataclysm with setting up Deathwing the Dragon very early. This is the bad guy that you're going to be facing and everything that's gone wrong is because of him.

On Deathwing:
We've had a lot of Dragons now, so we knew he couldn't just be another dragon. We had to do something really special with him, he's a really epic character the way his body is being torn apart by all his fury and his power and having to bolt this metal on to hold himself together. It's a new twist on an old idea.

We're going to have a new dragon in an Icecrown patch coming up too.

Why did they go with Worgen and Goblins over other races?
One of the explanations I really like is that they fit the silhouette of the races really well. The Horde has monstrous races, they have the really big Tauren, but they didn't have someone small. Goblins are small, they're already part of the world and people were used to the idea of them working with Horde.

So, is that kind of faction balance important?
Yeah, just to attract different players or players who are looking for a break - the Horde feel can be oppressive at times; the Forsaken have become pretty dark over time and we wanted a way that players could look at a more light-hearted race or some comic relief even through the Goblins.

And the opposite was true of the Worgen, we thought the Alliance had some pretty races, but they didn't have a real monstrous, ferocious race. And the Worgen are just perfect for that - they look great and they're going to be acting that way too. The Worgen NPCs are going to be untamed and out of control. We think the Alliance really needed that edge.

On the new races' starting zones:
Well, anyone who's played World of Warcraft is familiar with that big wall and they know that Gilneas is behind it, even if they don't know what's going on or what happened there. And the people who lived there basically tried to wall themselves off to protect themselves from all the troubles going on in the rest of the continent. But despite all of that they weren't successful, and a terrible curse that basically turned humans into Worgen still transpired and to save themselves they decided they would just go ahead and embrace the wolf part and try to keep it contained and try to get rid of it altogether.

It's going to be a really good story; anyone who played the Death Knight starting zone will recognise aspects. It's going to be like that but on steroids. There'll be phasing; time will pass, it takes five years of 'world' time to go though. It starts a little bit in the past and catches players up and we do a lot of phasing.

One of the most epic parts that we've hinted at a little bit is when Gilneas actually floods - what starts out as land, has the sea comes in a few steps till eventually the place you were questing becomes covered with water.