BlizzCon: Dungeoncraft
Although there were no announcements of new single-group dungeons, other than references to those in the forthcoming Burning Crusade expansion, Blizzard Entertainment’s Jeff “Tigole” Kaplan and Corey Stockton talked about the art and science of making a World of Warcraft dungeon Saturday at BlizzCon in Anaheim.
In the course of developing dungeons during alpha and beta for the game, the team came to regard the Scarlet Monastery as an early pinnacle of the craft, notably for its modular “winged” structure. But the realization that this worked so well came too late in the process for the next wave of dungeons, and adding back doors and/or quested keys to allow access to later portions of Uldaman, Gnomeregan and Stratholme failed to produce a similar wing-style experience. But later dungeons, such as Maraudon and Dire Maul were designed that way from the ground up, as will many of the dungeons added in the Burning Crusade expansion: Tempest Keep, the fortress of Prince Kael’thas of the Blood Elves, will be divided into the Factory, Arcane Prison and Atrium wings, for instance. (Names and design details subject to change between now and release, of course.)
Although Hakkar’s plague spreading uncontrollably across servers is the most famous example of dungeon design going awry due to a skipped line of code, another boss in the troll city of Zul’Gurub also was a menace early on: The Bloodlord, who levels up every time he kills a player character, hit Tigole’s character for a 12,000 point Mortal Strike during in-house testing. It turns out the designers had forgotten to limit how many times the Bloodlord could level up, and he was level 74 by the time he wiped out the Blizzard testers entirely.
Zul’Gurub, with its modular approach — which shares the ability for groups to choose what content to deal with, similar to what wings provide — is a template for future dungeons. Look for less linear dungeons with lower raid caps: Zul’Gurub has a cap of 20 players, Medivh’s tower of Kharazan is likely to have a cap of 10 people in its raid wing.
“At a certain place, adding more people to a raid doesn’t make it more fun,” Kaplan said, “It just devalues the contributions of the people there.”
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