Blizzcon 2010: During the madness that is BlizzCon Atomic had a chat to World of Warcraft's Senior Game Producer John Lagrave. We learn a little bit about what's in store for players in the lead up to the game's expansion, Cataclysm.
John Lagrave: I'm the Senior Engineering Producer on World of Warcraft. And what I do is manage the 32 programmers that make the game. I heard some very intelligent cats, as I like to say.
Atomic: When will we start seeing more world events to reflect the incoming cataclysm?
Indeed! Well, you've already seen a couple, there's the activity in Gnomeregan, and we've seen the activity in the southern part of Kalimdor in the Troll areas as well. So we've seen little hints of that. We certainly are going to be putting out another patch and we'll be seeing more of those kinds of world events.
So we'll be having at least one more patch before release?
Yes, we are... though I don't think we've announced that - we've certainly teased it - in the beta we went from a version 4.0.1 to version 4.0.3, so I'm not really leaking anything I guess! When that comes out I can't say but certainly it will come out soon because we've got to get the game out! [Laughs]
Will we be seeing world events on scale with the Scourge Invasion or the Ahn' Qiraj events for Cataclysm?
Yes, absolutely. Well, when Deathwing erupts... you'll notice. I don't want to reveal too much, but what you're seeing in the beta is the aftermath of that effect. So Deathwing, who's been in Deepholm in the Elemental Plane of Earth, his eruption out of that place fundamentally changes the two huge continents. It will leave the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor fundamentally changed. So, players will be able to see that no matter what. And how we do that... well I'll let everyone see that when they see it!
You mentioned the changes in the world, there's obviously a lot of phasing used in quests. Will there be phasing used to implement those world changes for high level players returning to the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor?
Not so much. Primarily we did a lot of phasing both with the Goblin and Worgen areas moving from state to state. And literally in Gilneas what you'll see is the sea encroaching upon the land and when Deathwing is done and has shattered the world, and then the water comes in... the ocean literally swamps out most of Gilneas. So, as you play you get to watch what you had of the world change for you. The same thing is true with Echo Isles.
For players in the later stage of the game, they're just going to see the changed world. You're going to go through Stranglethorn Vale and see so much difference; you'll see The Barrens, which is now split into two sections with a huge volcanic rift through the middle. We're not phasing that, for a couple of reasons; one is that phasing is a little tricky. It's pretty technologically challenging and pretty taxing for the equipment that we run the game on. And, two, it's also very confusing for players!
We've worked on cluing you in to when you and a party member are in different phases - there are now icons to indicate that to you. We didn't have that in Lich King and people got really frustrated, me included! So now we have an easy-to-see indication if your party member is in a different phase from you.
We don't want to do phasing everywhere as there could be a tendency for people to say 'I can't help you with that quest since you're in that stage and I'm in this stage of progress. I can't even see what you're doing'. So, we dialled back on that for the upper level experience. But for the lower levels, boy there's a lot of phases, especially in those two starting areas.
Even in the old racial starting areas, human and so on, there seems to be a lot of changes and some phasing too.
Yes, we did a lot in the starting areas for every one of the races; we've basically cleaned that up and made it a lot friendlier. We've redone the entire tutorial system, it's pretty amazing. We wanted to make it very friendly and easy for people to get into the game and we found that people who weren't familiar with PC gaming really had no concept of how to interact in the world.
We redid the tutorials, cleaned them up, got rid of a lot of junk and walked you through interacting with an NPC and getting your first quest. Now quest mobs are always highlighted for you, especially when you start out - we tell you when you've killed one and that you need to kill more, things like that.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012