WoW's Lead System Designer Interview

How much phasing will be utilised for Cataclysm?
What we were able to do in Wrath of the Lich King was mostly phasing NPCs and now we can actually phase terrain as well. We can move mountains, we can create rivers where there weren't before. And we're gonna do that in a lot of the zones, some of the old zones and definitely the new zones. In the Sunken City of Vashy'jr, we've talked about having the domes crack open and fill with water, we've talked about Mount Hyjal starting on fire and the players gradually putting out the fires.

On finally getting Mount Hyjal into the game.
We knew we had to do it in an epic way, we didn't want to just open it up and have like 'here are some bears, go kill them'. We knew it had to be a really big story - like Ragnaros. This was a great opportunity to bring him back. Anyone who's played WoW knows who he is and is looking forward to seeing him again.

What about some of those new game features?:
We're letting people upgrade their guilds with a guild levelling system. And as you level you get to make progress down a talent tree much like a character talent tree. We thought it would help guilds customise so, if your guild is really about PvP you can get talents that assist with that. But we don't really want to add to character power, we want it to be more about standard of living and guild functionality. So we've talked about a mass resurrection spell, but we want to have a variety so that guilds who aren't focused on end-game raiding still feel like they have talents that are useful.

How will the new zones work?
The old Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms are just going away - they're just going to be replaced by the Cataclysm versions, so even new players or players who don't upgrade right away are still going to get those changed zones. We'll probably do a world event just before we launch just to explain it's happening now - and those are fun things to do. The main focus of the story is that people are so focused on Northrend that they didn't notice what was going on right under their own feet. And there's definitely a big link between Deathwing and the Old Gods that we've seen in Wrath, it's part of the main story.

Will we be seeing more Titan action, then?
Yeah, we're unveiling a little, more and more, of the Titans.

Timeframes for Cataclysm:
We're through a lot of the conceptual phases; we've got some features locked down. We know the new races, we know there's going to be five levels. We haven't finished all the content creation yet, we don't have the new zones designed and we haven't got the abilities for the new classes yet.

How will these new features and design affect the minimum specifications?
This is always a challenge because we don't want to eliminate any potential players with lower end systems, but at the same time people are buying better and better computers and we kind of want to show it off. For example a big change in Wrath of the Lich King was the real time shadows and we're doing something similar in Cataclysm with real-time water. Our water is starting to look a little dated, but the new water we're getting in, it casts reflections, there's distortion when you see a character under the surface. It looks really cool and of course there's a lot of water in the Cataclysm expansion.

The last word...
We are trying to look at every aspect of the game and improve it so that in addition to all this stuff we're doing to the zones we're changing a lot of the user interface, we're overhauling a lot of the class talent trees to make them more streamlined and interesting. This is a big expansion it's going to offer a lot more than even Wrath of the Lich King did. It's just a tremendous amount of work, Stormwind for example was never designed with flying in mind - if you flew over the existing one it would totally break; things would disappear and things would look weird because it was never designed to do that. So the artists have had to totally rebuild the city.

We're redesigning everything, but some things might only get a road where there wasn't a road before, or we might add a new quest hub, but other zones are almost unrecognisable because the Cataclysm has affected it so much.