Blizzard’s dungeon, raid and encounter designers shared some of their tricks of the trade Friday at Blizzcon.
The first, and perhaps biggest, was to plan more than they end up building. Zones are planned out, discussed, changed and discarded.
Jeff “Tigole” Kaplan showed an early list of the original dungeons for the basic World of Warcraft game, which had at the time was to run from levels 1-70 and featured the Caverns of Time, other expansion dungeons and something called the Dragon Isles as a raid zone.
Prior to the release of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, Kaplan promised a new 25-man raid dungeons with six bosses, harder than the Black Temple. (Probably the Sunwell, although he said he wasn’t allowed to say so.)
A new five-person dungeon is also a possibility before the expansion.
Zul’Aman will feature more heroic badge loot, including lots of gear for atypical class builds.
The excessive amount of trash NPCs in Gnomeregan was a mistake, the team acknowledges, and at some point, they’ll get the chance to go back and thin things out.
In an upcoming patch, the Mount Hyjal Caverns of Time zone will have its trash changed to drop loot and give faction (3 points per kill). Likewise, the monstrous kaliri of Skettis will drop loot and grant faction in the near future.
There are eight single-group instances planned for Northrend, although, “I can almost guarantee this is going to change,” he said.
Given the overwhelming popularity of Kharazan in The Burning Crusade, look for many more 10-person raid zones in the new expansion, as well as dungeons and raids set in the “old world.”
Instead of keying or attunement, some dungeons will be unlocked as the Ahn’Qiraj dungeons were, “minus the linen.”
To further make keying and back-flagging less painful, the team is considering guild flags or having whole accounts flagged once a single character completes a flagging quest.
Naxxramas, which few players got to experience prior to the release of Burning Crusade, fits into Northrend so well that the team is considering flying it over to the new continent and retuning it so it is roughly comparable to Molten Core in difficulty, but for level 80 characters.
Although nothing has been done yet, Kaplan hopes to see the siege engines and destructible buildings featured in PvE raid content.
And all that resistance and specialized gear used on raids? The core UI will soon make dealing with it easier, as the functionality of Item Rack and Outfitter is incorporated into the basic system, but with a twist, since being part of the official UI means it can have “real space to store the extra junk.”
A threat meter also might be incorporated into the core UI.
Class discussion at Blizzcon was the subject of two separate panels, Friday and Saturday, with different questions answered each day.
From Friday’s panel:
Designer Tom Chilton said the team is committed to doing more for the less-popular specializations, including with better gear in upcoming content. Look for improvements to retribution paladins in the 2.3 and 2.4 patches.
For priests, Light Well and Improved Death are also being worked on, as is the entire discipline tree. To improve holy priests, there will be lots of little changes made to the spells and abilities of several healing classes.
Shamans do not scale well in melee combat after the early 50s, which will be addressed this year.
Druids will soon be able to cast more spells while in tree from.
All gear had too many offensive stats and not enough defensive stats, which made PvP too often a matter of who attacked first, and little more – part of the reason gear was rethought prior to the release of The Burning Crusade expansion.
Abilities do not function differently in PvE and PvP, for the most part, because “we really wanted the world to feel cohesive,� Chilton said.
On the damage front, developer Kevin Jordan said, mages are intended to be the kings of AoE damage, while rogues are intended to be the kings of single-target damage.
The second panel held Friday at Blizzcon was all-WoW, all the time, and was the first in-depth preview of the second World of Warcraft expansion, Wrath of the Lich King.
“Our goal is not to have an expansion that just takes place in the snow,” Jeff “Tigole” Kaplan said, showing images of the arctic continent of Northrend, including grassy fjords, snowy forests and glacial canyons.
Since the new expansion won’t require starting zones for new races, Wrath of the Lich King will feature more high-level zones than The Burning Crusade had. And while The Burning Crusade’s final boss, Illidan Stormrage, made his presence felt periodically from the beginning of the expansion, Wrath of the Lich King will make Arthas Menethil a much more prominent part of the experience for all players.
“It’s not just an endgame raid,� Kaplan said. “Everyone will have a chance to interact with Arthas.
“He’s really bad about breaking [crowd control], so you won’t want to group with him.�
The new profession, inscriptions, will allow players to customize their spells and abilities instead of just their gear. And new haircuts will also be offered, with the option of changing haircuts on existing characters. Characters faces and skin tones, however, players are stuck with.
“Plastic surgery will probably be the next expansion,� Kaplan joked.
Designer Cory Stockton walked attendees through the first few zones in Northrend.
Unlike Outland’s single entry point of the Hellfire Peninsula, Northrend will feature two: The Borean Tundra in the west and the Howling Fjord in the southeast, both of a comparable level, allowing the player base to spread out.
The Howling Fjord is the home to the giant Viking-like warriors known as the Vrykul, whom Stockton described as “13-foot tall badasses.�
The first single-group dungeon instance, Utgarde Keep, is filled with angry Vrykul.
In the west, the Borean Tundra is the home of the gentle Tuskarr, whom Stockton described as “transient, walrus-looking fishermen.�
But the Tuskarr are not alone: The naga are melting the tundra’s snow, exposing sickly yellowish grassland in the western end of the zone.
The zone also features Easter Island-like walrus-head statues, the Horde outpost of Warsong Hold, a gnome town with airstrips and more.
West of the Howling Fjord are the Grizzly Hills, home of the furbolgs, who live in the city of Grizzlemaw. The dwarf city of Thormadan is also found in the Grizzly Hills. And much of the zone is covered with a forest of redwood trees.
“We’ve never done anything that looks exactly like this,� Stockton said.
In the southern central portion of the continent is the frozen zone of Dragonblight, where dragons go to die and home of the Wyrmrest Temple, where the various dragonflights meet. The zone, one of the largest in Northrend, is also the entrance to the ancient city of Azul-Nerub, home of the villainous spider-folk. The zone features a massive ice canyon riddled with ice caverns in each wall. The subtle blues and whites of the canyon and caves are created using new shading software.
North of Dragonblight is the expansion’s capital city, which is a familiar one: The Kirin-Tor wizards have flown the wizarding city of Dalaran to Northrend, to take the fight against the blue dragonflight to them on their own territory. The city hovers over the continent.
Designer Tom Chilton outlined another new zone, Lake Wintergrasp, which will be an outdoor PvP-only zone, even on PvE servers. The outdoor zone will feature siege weaponry and destructible buildings, as will a new instanced battleground that will feature 15-on-15 play.
The death knight hero class will be a DPS/tanking class, similar to the warrior. Unlike the warrior, he’ll do it with a two-handed weapon or a weapon in each hand, not a shield. (But they will still wear plate.)
Knights may carry runeblades, but others could carry runeaxes. The runes are significant: Instead of using mana or focus or rage, death knights will carve up to six runes on their blade while out of combat, and their abilities in combat will work based on what mix of blood, frost and unholy runes are carved there.
Although the class will use spells, they’ll feel less like warrior abilities or paladin spells, and more like a traditional spellcaster, other than the method in which they’re cast.
The game’s first– but definitely not the last – hero class will also not be starting at level 1. The starting level has not been set yet, but Chilton said the developers are considering level 55, 60 or 70 as a starting point.
“We felt it would be silly to be running around Elwynn Forest as a level 1 death knight,� Chilton said.
Players will need to get a character to level 80 and complete a quest chain comparable to the warlock epic mount quest to gain the ability to make a new death knight character. Any race can be a death knight.
But even without starting the death knight at a higher level, creating alternate characters will be less painful in the future: Even prior to the release of Wrath of the Lich King, Chilton said leveling from 1-60 (and perhaps higher) will be made faster.
There will also be another Caverns of Time instance before Wrath comes out, more daily quests in the next patch (including a dungeon, a battleground and a cooking quest).
Old raid content is unlikely to get revised any time soon.
“It had its time,� Chilton said, “We’re OK with moving on.�
Likewise, the development team doesn’t want to spend the time necessary to revise the old world so that flying mounts will work there.
As for a release date … well, it’s Blizzard.
“It’ll come out when it’s ready,� Chilton said.
Friday morning, Blizzard President Mike Morhaime and company Vice-President Frank Pierce welcomed a sea of gamers to Blizzcon 2007 at the Anaheim Convention Center, where they were greeted like heroes.
“Since we were last together at Blizzcon 2005,� Morhaime told the audience, “The population of World of Warcraft has more than doubled. With 9 million players, that’s larger than the population of half the countries in the world.�
The game’s first expansion, The Burning Crusade, sold 2.4 million copies the first day it went on sale, he said, more copies than any game had previously sold in a single month.
But while WoW was a major part of the weekend – taking up the lion’s share of panels – it wasn’t the only thing the company had to show over the weekend.
“While Korean gamers may have been the first to see StarCraft II, you all will be among the first to actually play it,� Morhaime said, and was greeted with thunderous applause. Terran and Protoss units were available for skirmish play over the weekend, and new Terran units were introduced.
Pierce then took center stage, to talk about World of Warcraft.
“Holy crap,� he breathed, “Look at all the people.�
Pierce started with some previously announced news about upcoming patches, including guild banks.
“The guildmaster will know who made deposits to the guild bank. More importantly, the guildmaster will know who made withdrawals. So no ninja-looting the guildbank.�
And then it was onto the news everyone was waiting for: WoW Expansion #2.
“Hands up, who thinks you know what I’m going to announce,� he called out. “OK, your accounts are all banned.�
As Internet rumors had suggested all this week, it was Wrath of the Lich King, featuring the (mostly) frozen continent of Northrend, the level cap going up to 80, the death knight hero class, the inscriptions profession and more.
“It’s a good story line,� Pierce said. “It’s an exciting story line.�
The new expansion will bring with it new PvP arenas, new battlegrounds, siege weapons and destructible buildings.
He then showed a short film of two Warcraft characters – a human made and paladin – arriving in Howling Fjord and exploring Northrend. When the mage is killed by a gigantic yeti-type creature, the paladin runs, and is eventually ambushed by the Scourge in a snowy forest, where he arises as a death knight, all while Arthas Menethil taunts him via voiceover.
“So come,� Arthas says, “Because, in the end, all must serve the one, true lich king.�
Howling Fjord and the first five-man instance of the expansion, Utgarde Keep, were both available for hands-on previews during Blizzcon.
“Thanks for sharing the weekend with us in Anaheim,� Pierce concluded. “Go have fun.�
Yep, as expected, it’s Wrath of the Lich King. At least, that’s what all the t-shirts and banners say. (The actual announcement isn’t until 11.)
The first zone from WotLK is apparently playable here. I’ll try to check it out when not at a panel.
But for those not in attendance, the recently leaked list of expansion features looks to be 100 percent true, according to the convention program: the death knight class, siege weapons and destructible buildings, level 80, restyled hair, all of it. So Google that and you’ll have heard the probable expansion highlights.
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