Liz Skuthorpe chats about the big changes coming to Azeroth with two World of Warcraft veteran developers.
Atomic: All of Azeroth is changing; will level cap characters have quests to let them explore the remade zones?
TC: I would say that a lot of what's going to be bringing people back is the new race/class combinations. You know a lot of people may not currently have that reason to reroll, there are people out there that may have always wished they could be a blood elf warrior or a dwarf mage or whatever. And so once that opportunity becomes available it makes sense to do that again.
CS: I think heirloom items also bring that up and that's one of the reasons we wanted to push the concept of the guild progression heirlooms. So, if someone wants to re-roll and come back they can feel like they've got a really cool bonus - those three or four slots will be full and they'll get a bonus all the way while they're leveling up. So that will help them and maybe encourage them to try something new.
A: And there'll be more heirloom items coming?
CS: Yeah, we'd like to fill out a couple more slots than we have now, but we've kept the heirlooms pretty small, it's a system we want to be careful with. You don't want to get too many in ‘cause then people won't take any other items.
TC: Yeah, characters would be set for the entire time!
CS: Yeah! There are still some things we want you guys to do, but we're definitely going to expand on it.
A: Levelling has sped up recently, how will that affect the new zones?
TC: I wouldn't say so. If you take for example the Recruit a Friend program that allows you to level up at triple speed... we already know that while that is really fast the game-play experience doesn't totally break down. So we feel like there is a lot of room for play in there without having a break.
CS: Because the maximum you can get now without Recruit a Friend is a 20 per cent bonus if you're wearing the two heirloom items. We're looking at that right now as being the maximum, as we're re-flowing the zones. If we feel like an area is slow we can add in more quests or they give more XP, so you know, we can change things up and we have that opportunity now that we're re flowing everything to make sure.
And also I think you have to take into account that they'll have to go through Outland and Northrend as well. With each expansion we'll be adding more and I think we'll be okay with that as we slowly make that experience a little quicker. But I think the key issue is that it doesn't feel broken. We still want quests to be ‘yellow' and if you get a ‘red' quest think ‘No, I should wait'. So I think the mount changes in patch 3.2 were a cool way to make things feel quicker but didn't change the XP curve at all.
TC: Some places where I would expect a change to the XP curve would be in 70 to 80 areas.
A: Moving onto instances, what can you tell us about the new heroics like Deadmines?
CS: Well the concept behind this is that we want to keep the locations the same, the art will remain the way it is now. But we'll change the fights and we'll change the encounters that you do in between - so the pulls and the flow will feel a little different. Deadmines is a pretty long instance and there's the non-instanced section at the beginning, so our goal is to make it feel more like a level 80 dungeon.
A: So, whittled down to about 45 minutes?
CS: Yeah, we shoot for about 45 minutes. We'll update the loot and we'll add new achievements. So it should really feel like one of the new Cataclysm dungeons, but something that people are used to, have some nostalgia for it.
TC: So much of the speed of going through instances is based on the different pulls and encounters and the way that we spawn it. It actually has less to do with the actual physical size of it.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012