John Lagrave on World of Warcraft: Cataclysm

Tags : cataclysm interview, cataclysm question, cataclysm news     

Gameplanet: What are the key difficulties in launching a new World of Warcraft expansion?

John Lagrave: There are many! First off you have to get the work done, that’s the first challenge, getting everyone to meet their goals, our artists, designers and programmers. On top of that you’ve got to make sure that your equipment is ready. So, the servers that we run the game on, the databases, the storage arrays, the backplanes to support the traffic, the connections to the data centre, all that kind of stuff. Major upgrades through all of our regions, all of our infrastructure went through for preparation for the Cataclysm.

Then we have to figure out a good date to launch and then we have to make sure that we’re rock stable. So we get the work done, now is the game actually ready for somebody to play?

Gameplanet: Speaking of picking launch dates, are they ever strategically based around other games?

Lagrave: Not at all. They’re based on us feeling very good about the quality of the game at launch. So we choose dates that say, ‘we’re going to be at a level where we’re very robust in terms of game stability, we’ve hit all the features that we want to hit, we’re comfortable with what we’re going to give the player, that they’re going to enjoy it.’

So, the market isn’t the impact, it’s whether we think it’s good enough to go.

Gameplanet: There’s a lot of cross-pollination across Blizzard’s games. Arenas have been announced for Diablo III: Has the World of Warcraft team had any input in that at all?

Lagrave: You know, one of the great core values of our company is “every voice matters” and they certainly consulted us. It’s their own, and they have great designers doing their work there, but we’ve certainly done strike team work with them and talked about what they’re doing. So yeah, absolutely, but the majority of that work is their own baby.

Gameplanet: When can we expect to see content for Caverns of Time?

Lagrave: We put content into the Caverns of Time when we feel like it’s an awesome thing that really fits that genre, right? That playstyle. So when we do want to go back in time, actually even if we want to go forward in time, that’s where it’s perfect!

What we’re doing right now with Cataclysm, it really is all about the here and now – the world is changing now. Deathwing has risen from Deepholm, so [to release content for] the Caverns of Time didn’t seem relevant – it doesn’t make sense right at this point.

Now, that’s not to say we couldn’t revisit the notion of when the humans, the elves and the dwarfs took out Deathwing and put that into Caverns of Time, that certainly is an interesting possibility!

But right now, it’s all about the now, the world has shattered and everyone needs to deal with that.

Gameplanet: Blackwing Descent is a raid we haven’t heard a whole lot about, can you elaborate on what we might expect to see?

Lagrave: Umm... No! [laughs] Unfortunately we haven’t released the details on that just yet, so I’m going to have to keep tight-lipped! Sorry!

Gameplanet: No problem.

Lagrave: It’s cool, I’ll say that! I’ve seen it, the mock-ups are awesome, the first layouts are very cool, but that’s about all I can say!

Gameplanet: And you’ll be going for that “bite-sized raiding” philosophy? We can expect it to be smaller?

Lagrave: Yeah, certainly. In the past with things like Naxxaramas back in patch 1.12 – way, way back then – we were all about making enormous dungeons, right? And the idea was to spend a lot of time going through it, and we “winged” them so that it would be easier to do. You could go through one after the other. Now we want to acknowledge – and we recognise the fact – that raiding styles have changed. People want to go through about three hours of content in a night, maybe even call it quits for the week. So yes, definitely, it is more “bite sized” and that’s just the way the MMO genre has changed.

Gameplanet: Moving on to the game’s economy, are you comfortable with where that’s at?

Lagrave: Professions swing around and come in and out of favour, but the economy itself is pretty robust. There’s the side-market of buying and selling gold that’s quite messy but you don’t see rampant inflation and for a game that’s six years old. That’s sort of amazing and it really speaks to the groundwork that the designers did in the beginning: Bind on Pickup is a huge deal, it means that you can’t have this huge after-market that inflates the economy. That was a huge, brilliant move by the early designers.

Gameplanet: One thing that does inflate the market is the illegal purchasing of gold and I know that you’ve made many steps over many years to try and curtail it –

Lagrave: Yes we have!

Gameplanet: And yet it seems as prolific as ever?

Lagrave: Well I can’t tell you too much because we don’t want the gold sellers to know too much! But we have a group known as the Active Hacks Team doing all sorts of stuff. First off we monitor the money transactions, we look for certain limits, we look for known IPs that trigger-off alarms and we filter out the gold. In each region we’re pulling, I think, approximately a million a week in illegal gold.

Gameplanet: Wow.

Lagrave: Yeah. So we’re doing that kind of stuff and that thwarts them in certain ways. We’re also dealing with the fake accounts that they set up, the captured accounts that they grab as well, there’s certainly a lot of that, and then we have a lot of stuff that, again, I can’t really talk about. We’re moving forward on two different directions right now to further capture and pull that gold out.

For new players who might feel [economically] disadvantaged, they should consider playing as a Goblin. Goblins have exalted reputation with whatever vendor they’re dealing with, so they’re not paying top dollar for repairs or reagents. Goblins are a primo starting race just for that reason. You’re worried about money? Not with the goblins!

Gameplanet: Speaking of low-level characters, are you planning on bringing in any new heirloom items?

Lagrave: I imagine we are, but I don’t know what they are.

Gameplanet: How do you deal with redundancy in battlegrounds? Do they simply become useless code?

Lagrave: We re-do them. Alterac Valley has seen three major revisions so yeah, we throw away a lot of code. We throw away a lot of programming scripts that say “do this” and “do that”, there’s a lot of stuff that gets tossed. We look at all that stuff to see whether there’s degenerative behaviour or if nobody is playing it and look to change those things. That’s the nature of an MMO, it’s what’s of interest today – and something could become popular again later or it could never be popular again.

Gameplanet: Cataclysm’s two new battlegrounds, Twin Peaks and the Battle for Gilneas, are much more similar in design to “vanilla” World of Warcraft’s Warsong Gulch and Arathi Basin. What have you learned about battleground design over the course of the expansions to bring you full circle?

Lagrave: First off: Don’t make them so huge it takes five minutes to race across them! Next: Don’t make them pretty but pointless!

Gameplanet: Could you give examples from the two you have in mind?

Lagrave: Sure: Alterac Valley saw opposing players literally running beside each other to get to the objectives. That’s not ideal, but that’s what it devolved into. So since then we’ve shrunk the size and we’ve forced actual conflict. There are choke points for a reason, so that two opposing sides will actually meet, do battle and move forward, rather than bypassing everybody, grabbing it and going, turning it into a battle against the AI when what we really want to do which is a battle against human intelligence. So that’s a biggie, that’s a huge one.

Sometime’s we’ve made things that are very pretty to play, Warsong Gulch is certainly one of those, it’s a beautiful battleground – but there could be better ways to funnel players through and around that space. So those are some of the things we’ve learned and hopefully we’ll keep learning in order to keep them engaging.

Gameplanet: On Alterac Valley, do you ever intend to put PvE elements back into battlegrounds in the future?

Lagrave: You know we really want to focus the PvE side for the raiding and the five man dungeons, that sort of stuff – where PvE has been and should be. We really want to focus battlegrounds on PvP, especially now with rated battlegrounds where essentially you’re getting arena points.

Gameplanet: There’s a lot of work going into overhauling classic instances: Ulduman and Maraudon were featured in the dungeons and raids panel and Cory Stockton hinted to us in June that Diremaul, Scholomance and Stratholme could be revisited. Have any further plans been made in that regard?

Lagrave: Yeah absolutely, there are some really beautiful dungeons – Shadowfang Keep, I love that place! And I’m really happy that we’re giving players who never really experienced it the opportunity to do so. That’s a big part of our focus: We made some amazing dungeons and we want people to see them. We’ve also made some amazing mistakes in some of those dungeons. You’ve got Uldaman which is really cool, you’ve got the whole Indiana Jones thing going that some people have never seen, and then there’s the really boring gameplay through it! [laughs] So you can expect the three that they mentioned and others absolutely to be revisited.

Gameplanet: Thanks very much, for your time!

Lagrave: No problem!

Source: gameplanet.co.nz

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