World of Warcraft: Current Year
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I guess this was a Forbes interview where they talk a bit about classic but really don't answer anything. Then they talk about BfA which turns into battle pets and shit... Basically we get zero real insight into classic other than "SOON". And BfA sounds like the daily grind is gonna be in full effect.
The World of Warcraft Battle for Azeroth expansion will bring island dungeons that change every time you enter them -- and a host of cute things to collect, capture and tame. We talk with the game's executive producer, J. Allen Brack, and senior game designer Jeremy Feasel about these features as well as more Warcraft news (classic servers!)
Battle for Azeroth goes on pre-sale today, and players who preorder get some in-game features immediately. Don't miss our news story on the pre-sale and our other interview with game director Ion Hazzikostas and creative director Alex Afrasiabi.
Blizzard Entertainment
J. Allen Brack (right) and Jeremy Feasel at BlizzCon 2017.
Heather Newman: Let’s talk classic servers.
J. Allen Brack: I’m shocked to hear that’s going to be a conversation point for us. [He laughs.]
Newman: So, timetable? Is this still a “Soon™” kind of situation? Soon with a capital S? "We think it’s a good idea, but there are no humans involved in the project yet?"
Brack: There are humans involved.
Newman: People will be glad to hear it.
Brack: But it is a larger endeavor than I think people imagine. It’s a huge technical challenge.
Newman: Can you talk about the reasons for that?
Brack: Sure. If you imagine—the biggest one is the way that the database works today, and the way that it worked in 2004, are extremely different. The way the servers are laid out and work today is very different than in 2004. The game doesn’t even—the old code doesn’t even build, right? The compiler—hardware has changed. Computers have moved on. There are new operating systems, new things. A lot of the old database and operating system versions aren’t even supported anymore. Those are 13 years old at this point.
Newman: Oracle isn’t standing in line to rebuild them for you?
Brack: Ah, they have this modern version that they’re eager for us to use, but the old one, not so much.
Blizzard Entertainment
The World of Warcraft Classic logo.
Newman: So talk about, then, the process that you guys are having to go through for actually making that happen. You’re essentially resurrecting dead tech and dead data.
Brack: Yep.
Newman: Trying to put it back together. Clearly there were discussions, at least at one point, with some of the folks in the player community--
Brack: Totally.
Newman: --that had attempted to or had done the same thing. Was there assistance there? Are there things that you’re able to do in-house now where you have the task list to say, these are the things we have to walk through to get this done?
Brack: We’re beginning that. There’s a lot of different things we can do, in terms of how we get from where we are to where we want to be. We haven’t made all of the decisions by any stretch of the imagination. There are lots of decisions to make. One of the reasons to announce probably maybe a little bit earlier to the community—we actually want to partner with them a bit. We want to hear their feedback in terms of the direction this should go.
If you think about—there were two years in between the launch of World of Warcraft and the release of [the expansion] Burning Crusade. A lot of things changed in there. What should we shoot for?
My favorite example for this is Upper Blackrock Spire. There was a 10-person version and a five-person version for most of that two-year period, but toward the end we decided, nope, UBRS is going to be a five-person and we’re going to retune it to be appropriate for that. Is that the right decision? I don’t know. These are the types of questions. There’s lots of questions like that that we’ll be talking with the community about.
Newman: Let’s talk about some of the bigger decisions, which may or may not have been made. Are we talking about WoW in its original pristine pixelly glory? Are we talking remastered, something that’s built for the modern engines that Legion and Battle for Azeroth are using?
Brack: That’s a decision that is in front of us. I think my starting place is, the compass heading should be to try to re-create the original 2004, 2005 experience. That’s the compass heading we should be following. But there’s a lot of nuance there. Should we be using the high definition character models? That’s an interesting question, I think, that the community will help us decide.
Newman: That would essentially require you to rebuild them, right? Because we don’t necessarily have high-def character models that aren’t the revamped versions of the characters.
Brack: Correct. What I mean is, would we allow those to work in the old--
Newman: Okay, as opposed to somehow trying to re-create the blockier look, but with the--
Brack: Correct.
Blizzard Entertainment
This dwarf from the original World of Warcraft trailer: high resolution. The actual player characters: not so much.
Newman: What are some of the other decision-making challenges you’re facing for the classic servers?
Brack: I think we want to make sure that it’s very maintainable. I think the challenge of us being able to resurrect classic WoW in its original form is—it has a certain amount of complexity. But that game was very difficult to manage. It would be effectively like us managing two MMOs, which is not something we want to do. The world has moved on. If you think about the infrastructure—if you think about anything, there’s a really good cooking analogy. There is no way to remove the oregano from the spaghetti sauce. You just put the oregano in, and now how do we deal with that?
Newman: Given all of the technical challenges, and the fact that, as you point out, the world has moved on—this is now, potentially, a static game in an industry where you’ve created this dynamically evolving monster. Why do it? You’ve been on the fence for a long time.
Brack: I think there’s three big reasons. We’ve talked about this for many years. One is, the community has spoken very clearly that there’s a certain percentage, some number of people, that are really interested in what this is going to be.
Internally, I have my job because of classic WoW. There’s a lot of people who have a lot of love for that, a lot of employees who love classic WoW. There’s an internal group of people who are interested as well.
And I think the third thing is, this is a game that has had a lot of people play it, and a lot of commentary around it, and you can’t actually play it at a Blizzard quality today. That’s kind of disappointing. That’s kind of sad. If you take all that, that’s all the reasons to kind of do it. Now we have an idea for how we can minimize the technical complexity. We have a path that we think we can be successful with.
Newman: What led to that decision? Was it a brainstorming session where somebody said, we could do this? Was it chatting with some of the classic player communities?
Brack: It was internal discussions, and it was kind of a thought about how we can move forward technically in a way that is not us managing two MMOs. And so—the thing that we’re going to try to do is to run the classic WoW on what we think of as the modern WoW infrastructure. That’s completely transparent to the user. The user doesn’t see how the server’s organized. The user doesn’t see how the database works. But that’s a huge part of the—of how we think we can actually do this now.
Above: Blizzard joked about releasing an 8-bit version of its Molten Core dungeon in an April Fools video in 2008.
Newman: I always joke with folks that the anniversary celebration for Warcraft, where the large raid dungeon Molten Core reopened and folks got the chance to run through that dungeon again—that that was the ultimate Blizzard developer revenge for all the players who said vanilla, original WoW was the best. And then you show up and it takes 500 hours and everybody’s killing the raid by doing really stupid things. There are mechanics that drive people insane. That was without having to buff people every five minutes.
Jeremy Feasel: Gotta melt those core hounds.
Newman: Exactly. The question I have is, clearly in that case, you had players who may have at one point in time said, WoW was better in vanilla and it was the best content ever, and then they got back into the raid again and went, oh, holy crap, this is terrible. Do you worry that there’s a subset of folks who want classic servers, and then they get back on a classic server and realize, wait, this is not the way I remember it? Because that fresh, new, this was the first time I ever saw WoW kind of excitement, or the joy of meeting new friends in a game for the first time, or whatever it was that made them excited about WoW to begin with when it originally launched—that may or may not be there when they go back to the remastered servers.
Brack: I got into trouble a few years ago. I said, this is something that you think you want, but you don’t. And what I was trying to say with that is sort of exactly what you’re encapsulating, which is, nostalgia is a thing. Rose-colored glasses are a thing. Human brains are not designed to remember pain. And so you remember the good things. You don’t remember the pain. I didn’t do a great job of communicating that sentiment, right? Clearly.
Newman: People didn’t embrace that? [Brack laughs.]
Brack: It’s weird. I do think that there will be those people exactly like you’re talking about. That’s okay. And I also think that there is this group of people for whom—that is the game to them. That’s their refuge. That’s their time that they want to return to, and that’s the game that reminds them of that time. That’s the community experience they want to have.
How big is it? I have no idea. I have no idea. There’s no way to know. But we’re convinced, through the desire of those folks, the desire of our internal folks, and the desire to preserve what WoW was, that this is the right decision.
Blizzard Entertainment
Nazmir is one of the zones in Zandalar, which is an island in Battle for Azeroth, but not an island-style dungeon. It'll make sense later.
Newman: Talk to me a bit about islands as a system in Battle for Azeroth; they're dungeon encounters that change every time you enter them. One thing I had started to ask Ion Hazzikostas, was just how dynamic that landscape and the population of that landscape were going to be. Was more or less a framework in terms of, there’s usually buildings here, but they could be different kinds of buildings with different kinds of people in them? Or was it more purely random roguelike constructed the moment you walked in?
Brack: She said the R-word. Rogue.
Feasel: There’s a fine line between pure random generation procedural generation, and feeling like you can gain mastery over your space. Every time you come into the same island, it’s going to have a very similar layout. You might start from a different location. There might be a different high level story being told.
That’s a mogu takeover, a saurok takeover of a particular point. Maybe one day it’s pygmies. Maybe it day it’s ogres. We can bring back a lot of our awesome characters, especially on that tropical island. It was specifically designed to be a primitive culture space, and that means any primitive culture can show up on that island, which we think is super awesome.
We can tell different stories every time you come here. But you can still gain mastery over the space. You will know where the concentration of huts is. You can always be assured that something interesting is going to happen there. The level of interest is going to be different. How that changes up how you play the rest of the island is going to be different.
One day you might walk up to the top of a hill and find a rare spawn [monster] that has a bunch of azurite on them, and another day you might find a capture point that lets you take charge of two cannons on the top of that hill that give you an extra action button that lets you do a cannon bombardment and make the rest of your island easier.
The World of Warcraft Battle for Azeroth expansion will bring island dungeons that change every time you enter them -- and a host of cute things to collect, capture and tame. We talk with the game's executive producer, J. Allen Brack, and senior game designer Jeremy Feasel about these features as well as more Warcraft news (classic servers!)
Battle for Azeroth goes on pre-sale today, and players who preorder get some in-game features immediately. Don't miss our news story on the pre-sale and our other interview with game director Ion Hazzikostas and creative director Alex Afrasiabi.
Blizzard EntertainmentJ. Allen Brack (right) and Jeremy Feasel at BlizzCon 2017.
Heather Newman: Let’s talk classic servers.
J. Allen Brack: I’m shocked to hear that’s going to be a conversation point for us. [He laughs.]
Newman: So, timetable? Is this still a “Soon™” kind of situation? Soon with a capital S? "We think it’s a good idea, but there are no humans involved in the project yet?"
Brack: There are humans involved.
Newman: People will be glad to hear it.
Brack: But it is a larger endeavor than I think people imagine. It’s a huge technical challenge.
Newman: Can you talk about the reasons for that?
Brack: Sure. If you imagine—the biggest one is the way that the database works today, and the way that it worked in 2004, are extremely different. The way the servers are laid out and work today is very different than in 2004. The game doesn’t even—the old code doesn’t even build, right? The compiler—hardware has changed. Computers have moved on. There are new operating systems, new things. A lot of the old database and operating system versions aren’t even supported anymore. Those are 13 years old at this point.
Newman: Oracle isn’t standing in line to rebuild them for you?
Brack: Ah, they have this modern version that they’re eager for us to use, but the old one, not so much.
Blizzard EntertainmentThe World of Warcraft Classic logo.
Newman: So talk about, then, the process that you guys are having to go through for actually making that happen. You’re essentially resurrecting dead tech and dead data.
Brack: Yep.
Newman: Trying to put it back together. Clearly there were discussions, at least at one point, with some of the folks in the player community--
Brack: Totally.
Newman: --that had attempted to or had done the same thing. Was there assistance there? Are there things that you’re able to do in-house now where you have the task list to say, these are the things we have to walk through to get this done?
Brack: We’re beginning that. There’s a lot of different things we can do, in terms of how we get from where we are to where we want to be. We haven’t made all of the decisions by any stretch of the imagination. There are lots of decisions to make. One of the reasons to announce probably maybe a little bit earlier to the community—we actually want to partner with them a bit. We want to hear their feedback in terms of the direction this should go.
If you think about—there were two years in between the launch of World of Warcraft and the release of [the expansion] Burning Crusade. A lot of things changed in there. What should we shoot for?
My favorite example for this is Upper Blackrock Spire. There was a 10-person version and a five-person version for most of that two-year period, but toward the end we decided, nope, UBRS is going to be a five-person and we’re going to retune it to be appropriate for that. Is that the right decision? I don’t know. These are the types of questions. There’s lots of questions like that that we’ll be talking with the community about.
Newman: Let’s talk about some of the bigger decisions, which may or may not have been made. Are we talking about WoW in its original pristine pixelly glory? Are we talking remastered, something that’s built for the modern engines that Legion and Battle for Azeroth are using?
Brack: That’s a decision that is in front of us. I think my starting place is, the compass heading should be to try to re-create the original 2004, 2005 experience. That’s the compass heading we should be following. But there’s a lot of nuance there. Should we be using the high definition character models? That’s an interesting question, I think, that the community will help us decide.
Newman: That would essentially require you to rebuild them, right? Because we don’t necessarily have high-def character models that aren’t the revamped versions of the characters.
Brack: Correct. What I mean is, would we allow those to work in the old--
Newman: Okay, as opposed to somehow trying to re-create the blockier look, but with the--
Brack: Correct.
Blizzard EntertainmentThis dwarf from the original World of Warcraft trailer: high resolution. The actual player characters: not so much.
Newman: What are some of the other decision-making challenges you’re facing for the classic servers?
Brack: I think we want to make sure that it’s very maintainable. I think the challenge of us being able to resurrect classic WoW in its original form is—it has a certain amount of complexity. But that game was very difficult to manage. It would be effectively like us managing two MMOs, which is not something we want to do. The world has moved on. If you think about the infrastructure—if you think about anything, there’s a really good cooking analogy. There is no way to remove the oregano from the spaghetti sauce. You just put the oregano in, and now how do we deal with that?
Newman: Given all of the technical challenges, and the fact that, as you point out, the world has moved on—this is now, potentially, a static game in an industry where you’ve created this dynamically evolving monster. Why do it? You’ve been on the fence for a long time.
Brack: I think there’s three big reasons. We’ve talked about this for many years. One is, the community has spoken very clearly that there’s a certain percentage, some number of people, that are really interested in what this is going to be.
Internally, I have my job because of classic WoW. There’s a lot of people who have a lot of love for that, a lot of employees who love classic WoW. There’s an internal group of people who are interested as well.
And I think the third thing is, this is a game that has had a lot of people play it, and a lot of commentary around it, and you can’t actually play it at a Blizzard quality today. That’s kind of disappointing. That’s kind of sad. If you take all that, that’s all the reasons to kind of do it. Now we have an idea for how we can minimize the technical complexity. We have a path that we think we can be successful with.
Newman: What led to that decision? Was it a brainstorming session where somebody said, we could do this? Was it chatting with some of the classic player communities?
Brack: It was internal discussions, and it was kind of a thought about how we can move forward technically in a way that is not us managing two MMOs. And so—the thing that we’re going to try to do is to run the classic WoW on what we think of as the modern WoW infrastructure. That’s completely transparent to the user. The user doesn’t see how the server’s organized. The user doesn’t see how the database works. But that’s a huge part of the—of how we think we can actually do this now.
Above: Blizzard joked about releasing an 8-bit version of its Molten Core dungeon in an April Fools video in 2008.
Newman: I always joke with folks that the anniversary celebration for Warcraft, where the large raid dungeon Molten Core reopened and folks got the chance to run through that dungeon again—that that was the ultimate Blizzard developer revenge for all the players who said vanilla, original WoW was the best. And then you show up and it takes 500 hours and everybody’s killing the raid by doing really stupid things. There are mechanics that drive people insane. That was without having to buff people every five minutes.
Jeremy Feasel: Gotta melt those core hounds.
Newman: Exactly. The question I have is, clearly in that case, you had players who may have at one point in time said, WoW was better in vanilla and it was the best content ever, and then they got back into the raid again and went, oh, holy crap, this is terrible. Do you worry that there’s a subset of folks who want classic servers, and then they get back on a classic server and realize, wait, this is not the way I remember it? Because that fresh, new, this was the first time I ever saw WoW kind of excitement, or the joy of meeting new friends in a game for the first time, or whatever it was that made them excited about WoW to begin with when it originally launched—that may or may not be there when they go back to the remastered servers.
Brack: I got into trouble a few years ago. I said, this is something that you think you want, but you don’t. And what I was trying to say with that is sort of exactly what you’re encapsulating, which is, nostalgia is a thing. Rose-colored glasses are a thing. Human brains are not designed to remember pain. And so you remember the good things. You don’t remember the pain. I didn’t do a great job of communicating that sentiment, right? Clearly.
Newman: People didn’t embrace that? [Brack laughs.]
Brack: It’s weird. I do think that there will be those people exactly like you’re talking about. That’s okay. And I also think that there is this group of people for whom—that is the game to them. That’s their refuge. That’s their time that they want to return to, and that’s the game that reminds them of that time. That’s the community experience they want to have.
How big is it? I have no idea. I have no idea. There’s no way to know. But we’re convinced, through the desire of those folks, the desire of our internal folks, and the desire to preserve what WoW was, that this is the right decision.
Blizzard EntertainmentNazmir is one of the zones in Zandalar, which is an island in Battle for Azeroth, but not an island-style dungeon. It'll make sense later.
Newman: Talk to me a bit about islands as a system in Battle for Azeroth; they're dungeon encounters that change every time you enter them. One thing I had started to ask Ion Hazzikostas, was just how dynamic that landscape and the population of that landscape were going to be. Was more or less a framework in terms of, there’s usually buildings here, but they could be different kinds of buildings with different kinds of people in them? Or was it more purely random roguelike constructed the moment you walked in?
Brack: She said the R-word. Rogue.
Feasel: There’s a fine line between pure random generation procedural generation, and feeling like you can gain mastery over your space. Every time you come into the same island, it’s going to have a very similar layout. You might start from a different location. There might be a different high level story being told.
That’s a mogu takeover, a saurok takeover of a particular point. Maybe one day it’s pygmies. Maybe it day it’s ogres. We can bring back a lot of our awesome characters, especially on that tropical island. It was specifically designed to be a primitive culture space, and that means any primitive culture can show up on that island, which we think is super awesome.
We can tell different stories every time you come here. But you can still gain mastery over the space. You will know where the concentration of huts is. You can always be assured that something interesting is going to happen there. The level of interest is going to be different. How that changes up how you play the rest of the island is going to be different.
One day you might walk up to the top of a hill and find a rare spawn [monster] that has a bunch of azurite on them, and another day you might find a capture point that lets you take charge of two cannons on the top of that hill that give you an extra action button that lets you do a cannon bombardment and make the rest of your island easier.
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Had to split the post in 1/2
That’s where the whole explore, plunder, loot, and escape in victory comes from. We want your character story, as you play through that space, to be a different thing every time, but still an awesome story.
Newman: What are some of the potential character rewards going to be, moving through it? Clearly azurite is a thing. There’s certainly going to be that artifact power equivalent from Legion, going through and powering up your amulet and becoming an even more mighty hero when you leave. But are we talking item rewards as well? Is it currency? What’s going to keep people coming back over and over besides that challenge of, hey, this is something a bit different when I come back in?
Feasel: We feel like we learned a lot with a lot of our systems in Legion. We were able to craft reward systems—and usually the rewards specifications come in closer to the end of the expansion pack, once we know everything that everybody’s doing, how much fun everything is, how much time certain groups are spending in each thing.
Blizzard Entertainment
The World of Warcraft Battle for Azeroth dungeon Freehold.
Newman: I hear mythic dungeons were a thing.
Feasel: Yeah. We made a concerted effort to make sure that players, throughout the life of the expansion pack, could do world quests, mythic dungeons, raids, everything. We wanted everything to consistently be applicable. We crafted different reward axes to make sure that was the case.
During the same thing with Battle for Azeroth, we want you to always have reasons to go into war fronts and to go into islands. We feel like islands especially feel like our attempt at an infinitely replayable feature. We really want to get you in there throughout the lifetime of the expansion pack and continue adding to that system. As such, islands are going to be one of your main sources for azurite acquisition.
Not your only source, but definitely one of the ways—that’s the whole lore behind these islands, these hemorrhages of Azeroth’s blood that are showing up on the islands of the Great Sea. So it’s going to be one of your main sources for acquiring that, and we’ll of course have a couple of unique pets and mounts and stuff that are going to show up there to give you a little extra incentive.
But I don’t think we’ve quite nailed down exactly what the itemization for everything is. Although it’s a system we want to be evergreen throughout the expansion.
Newman: I’m expecting that there are going to be scaling rewards in terms of people who are going back in over and over again. The first time you go in, are you likely to receive, for instance, a higher azurite bonus--
Feasel: First of the day bonus, that kind of thing?
Newman: Exactly.
Feasel: We loved how emissaries played out with regards to world quests. I feel like that was a major thing we learned about daily questing systems. Giving you a bite-sized chunk that felt really good to complete at the beginning of the day. Not saying that anything like that will necessarily be applied to islands, but we love that philosophy, and it’s definitely something we want to continue evolving moving forward.
Brack: Also want to mention that there’s three PvE difficulties of islands as well. There’s also a PvP difficulty. The itemization will change based on that.
Feasel: Right. You’ll be able to get both PvE and PvP rewards from doing the PvP version of islands. We think it’s a really fun way to play the islands. We know it’s not necessarily for everyone. Some people will enjoy progressing through normal, heroic, and mythic. You’ll get larger amounts of azurite as you progress through those.
And it’s also important to note that you can lose an island. The other team can get to their azurite, fill their hull with azurite, and ship out and start bombarding your ship and you’re forced to escape. You want to grab as much azurite as you can. But especially on PvP maps, we don’t want this to feel like a black and white concept. We don’t want you to leave with nothing in your hands.
So depending on how much azurite you gain during the course of the islands, you’ll get a graduated reward based on that. We want to make sure you always leave with something that feels positive.
Blizzard Entertainment
World of Warcraft Battle for Azeroth duneon Atal'Dazar.
Newman: Talk to me a bit about the non player characters. I chatted with Ion a bit about the concept that they had some strategy, some higher level AI, but can you give me some examples of how they might behave in a way that would be different from a traditional Warcraft mob, where they stand around and then go, you don’t belong here! versus playing against another player?
Feasel: They operate on a completely separate set of rules. They don’t go into combat as traditional creatures do. They never leash. They don’t evade. They can make their way across any tactical space in any configuration that we can spawn, from any starting location. These are just some of the fundamental features we felt were necessary to get this feature to the finish line.
As such, as soon as we started developing the system from the ground up, completely separately from WoW creatures, we were able to start investigating things that we’ve always wanted to do, like having creatures that could understand how to go into a defensive position and, for example, run out of line of sight of you if they know you’re going to shoot them. They understand how to do that.
They know where their allies are on the map, so if they get in trouble, they can choose to escape. That’s something you’ve never seen. If you fireball a murloc, it runs at you and hits you until it dies or you die. It doesn’t have this concept of, I have a greater objective, or I have friends, and so on. Those are all things that, because we started with a brand new system, we could incorporate right from the ground up.
Newman: Obviously you mentioned that there would be pets and mounts as potential rewards from islands. Talk to me about some of the cute things we have coming up in Battle for Azeroth. We’ve been so serious talking about faction conflict. Let’s get down to the real stuff here.
Brack: Why are you here? Cute things! Okay, good.
Feasel: You’re going to be seeing a ton of new creatures, of course, coming in patch 8.0. One of the awesome things you’ll be seeing, we’ve done some real work to uprez, increase the resolution of a lot of our older creatures.
Newman: You’re not uprezzing my Murky pet, are you?
Feasel: You already saw in my presentation, we’ve uprezzed crabs. They’re really cute. They’re awesome. Lots of cool hunter pets.
Blizzard Entertainment
We couldn't find you a screen shot of cute new cats. So here, have this bird.
Brack: Wait, wait, wait. She wants to see cute things, talk about cute things, and you lead with crabs?
Feasel: Directly to crabs. Or the quilboar, the uprezzed quilboar. That’s awesome, right?
Brack: I don’t know if you know what cute means.
Feasel: Okay, let’s start over. Let’s go with cats. We uprezzed the cats. Not only have we uprezzed the cats, we’ve added new types of cats. Especially with a seafaring expansion pack, it felt like a lost opportunity not to have some big fat fish-eating cats hanging out at the docks.
We not only have the regular cats that have new uprezzed individual whiskers--they look super cute. They have little toes now, if you look. We have big fat cats. We have a separate kind of cat that’s a big floofy cat with a big fat face that looks a bit like Maru, if you’ve seen that cat that likes to go into the boxes. And then we can mix and match to create a cat with a floofy face and a small cat body to make a variety of cats.
Brack: Cat technology.
Feasel: New cat technology.
Newman: So you’re saying that if the last expansion was the corgi expansion, this is the kitty expansion.
Feasel: Not only the cat expansion. Like I said, a lot of work has been going in—you’ll see uprezzed chickens. You’ll see, I’m not kidding, new chicken hairstyles. You will see uprezzed baby turtles. There’s a lot of fun coming for pet battle people in Battle for Azeroth. You saw the gila monster-looking lizards in Vol’dun. They have babies. Everybody has babies in Battle for Azeroth. That’s the tagline.
Brack: We should have you write marketing copy.
Feasel: Babies for Azeroth.
Newman: This sounds like a new video.
Brack: That’s actually a very good idea. I’m completely serious.
Newman: In addition to the amazingly cute models, are there new pet battle mechanics? For folks who are the collectors, the mount gatherers, the pet battlers, the obsessive crowd—there’s nobody like that in Warcraft, right?
Feasel: They’re all on my Twitter feed. So yes, we’re planning on expanding the pet battle world quests again. We thought that was an awesome system. We’ll be doing a bunch more of those.
You can expect to see another version of Family Familiar, probably more along the lines of Family Fighter again, where they’re available most of the time, so you can play it your way and do it on your own time. We thought that was a cool achievement. Some awesome pet rewards for that.
Let’s see. What else do we have coming down the pipeline? We loved the idea of pet battle dungeons. That’s come up a couple of times. We don’t have anything to announce today necessarily, but you certainly haven’t seen the end of the mysterious figures and the story they’re telling with the seedy underbelly of pet battles, which we’ve always wanted to tell for all of these years. You knew there was something seedy going on there in pet battles.
Newman: Pet accessories? Because you know the moment I could take a little tiny raptor and give it a flower and a hat and a backpack and fake Dracula teeth—I think I even tweeted at you with a little screenshot that said, I’m pretty sure Jeremy’s involved in this somewhere.
Feasel: Yes. The Falcosaur quest line was me. That was fun.
Newman: Are we seeing more things like—actually, like the Falcosaur quest line itself? Do you feel that was reasonably successful?
Feasel: I thought that was awesomely successful. This was a passion project from one of our artists who really wanted to make the raptor falcon creature. He had his opportunity. He was able to get it in the game. He made the pet version of it, and we saw it and said, that’s the cutest thing. We need to make a whole story about these things. It was a huge amount of fun for us to put together.
And that feels like the right content for those X.1 patches, or X.1.5. Just a little offshoot. It’s something fun for players to knock out. We love that philosophy. We love going down that direction. I’m not necessarily going to tell you we’re going to put hats on cats, but it’s not off the table.
Newman: I’m totally writing down “hats on cats.” So the big overarching question now to wrap this up: Legion is the biggest expansion for ongoing content releases. Do you think that, in any way, is going to increase the cynicism for Battle for Azeroth? We expect, now, expansions to be way up here, because we’re used to getting the intermediate chunks along the way as we go.
Brack: Philosophically, I think we’re really happy with the increased level of content and the different amount of things we’re adding to the game on a pretty predictable basis. We’re starting to put together the patch plan for Battle for Azeroth. We like the way that the Legion plan worked together.
One thing we would say is, if we’re going to go big, be critical of the patch plan, the patch cadences. 7.1, Karazhan came out too soon. Some of that was about a promise that we had made to the community about how we wanted to do that and fulfilling that promise, but I do think that Karazhan, which is one of my all time favorite dungeon experiences, was sort of lost in everyone still doing the Legion stuff.
So don’t expect an 8.1 quite so soon, as a lesson from that, but in terms of the amount and number, we’re happy with how that worked on Legion.
Newman: Do you think folks will embrace this expansion, which doesn’t necessarily have the major gameplay changes that we saw moving into Legion?
Brack: I think anyone who’s happy with the way things are going is going to be happy with what we’re going to do with Battle for Azeroth. We’re going to take all the lessons we learned from all those various systems. We’ll carry forward the ones that worked and make them even better.
For the ones that didn’t work -- legendaries comes to mind as being one of the more controversial systems – we’re not going to carry that forward, and we’ll make good decisions. The key question that I think you’re touching on is, how do we maintain the same level of player excitement about Battle for Azeroth as we did for Legion?
I think we’re certainly as excited about Battle for Azeroth as we were with Legion, even despite the fact that we’re not doing the third invasion of Azeroth by the Legion this time around. And so us being excited about it is going to translate into great systems and great content for players.
Feasel: I think it’s important to note that we do have plenty of content planned to help bridge the gap between now and Battle for Azeroth. That’s one of those things that’s going to keep players hooked. We want to make sure that we continue keeping those players fat and happy. We’re all players of World of Warcraft. That’s what we like to be doing.
Brack: It’s for us as much as anyone else.
That’s where the whole explore, plunder, loot, and escape in victory comes from. We want your character story, as you play through that space, to be a different thing every time, but still an awesome story.
Newman: What are some of the potential character rewards going to be, moving through it? Clearly azurite is a thing. There’s certainly going to be that artifact power equivalent from Legion, going through and powering up your amulet and becoming an even more mighty hero when you leave. But are we talking item rewards as well? Is it currency? What’s going to keep people coming back over and over besides that challenge of, hey, this is something a bit different when I come back in?
Feasel: We feel like we learned a lot with a lot of our systems in Legion. We were able to craft reward systems—and usually the rewards specifications come in closer to the end of the expansion pack, once we know everything that everybody’s doing, how much fun everything is, how much time certain groups are spending in each thing.
Blizzard EntertainmentThe World of Warcraft Battle for Azeroth dungeon Freehold.
Newman: I hear mythic dungeons were a thing.
Feasel: Yeah. We made a concerted effort to make sure that players, throughout the life of the expansion pack, could do world quests, mythic dungeons, raids, everything. We wanted everything to consistently be applicable. We crafted different reward axes to make sure that was the case.
During the same thing with Battle for Azeroth, we want you to always have reasons to go into war fronts and to go into islands. We feel like islands especially feel like our attempt at an infinitely replayable feature. We really want to get you in there throughout the lifetime of the expansion pack and continue adding to that system. As such, islands are going to be one of your main sources for azurite acquisition.
Not your only source, but definitely one of the ways—that’s the whole lore behind these islands, these hemorrhages of Azeroth’s blood that are showing up on the islands of the Great Sea. So it’s going to be one of your main sources for acquiring that, and we’ll of course have a couple of unique pets and mounts and stuff that are going to show up there to give you a little extra incentive.
But I don’t think we’ve quite nailed down exactly what the itemization for everything is. Although it’s a system we want to be evergreen throughout the expansion.
Newman: I’m expecting that there are going to be scaling rewards in terms of people who are going back in over and over again. The first time you go in, are you likely to receive, for instance, a higher azurite bonus--
Feasel: First of the day bonus, that kind of thing?
Newman: Exactly.
Feasel: We loved how emissaries played out with regards to world quests. I feel like that was a major thing we learned about daily questing systems. Giving you a bite-sized chunk that felt really good to complete at the beginning of the day. Not saying that anything like that will necessarily be applied to islands, but we love that philosophy, and it’s definitely something we want to continue evolving moving forward.
Brack: Also want to mention that there’s three PvE difficulties of islands as well. There’s also a PvP difficulty. The itemization will change based on that.
Feasel: Right. You’ll be able to get both PvE and PvP rewards from doing the PvP version of islands. We think it’s a really fun way to play the islands. We know it’s not necessarily for everyone. Some people will enjoy progressing through normal, heroic, and mythic. You’ll get larger amounts of azurite as you progress through those.
And it’s also important to note that you can lose an island. The other team can get to their azurite, fill their hull with azurite, and ship out and start bombarding your ship and you’re forced to escape. You want to grab as much azurite as you can. But especially on PvP maps, we don’t want this to feel like a black and white concept. We don’t want you to leave with nothing in your hands.
So depending on how much azurite you gain during the course of the islands, you’ll get a graduated reward based on that. We want to make sure you always leave with something that feels positive.
Blizzard EntertainmentWorld of Warcraft Battle for Azeroth duneon Atal'Dazar.
Newman: Talk to me a bit about the non player characters. I chatted with Ion a bit about the concept that they had some strategy, some higher level AI, but can you give me some examples of how they might behave in a way that would be different from a traditional Warcraft mob, where they stand around and then go, you don’t belong here! versus playing against another player?
Feasel: They operate on a completely separate set of rules. They don’t go into combat as traditional creatures do. They never leash. They don’t evade. They can make their way across any tactical space in any configuration that we can spawn, from any starting location. These are just some of the fundamental features we felt were necessary to get this feature to the finish line.
As such, as soon as we started developing the system from the ground up, completely separately from WoW creatures, we were able to start investigating things that we’ve always wanted to do, like having creatures that could understand how to go into a defensive position and, for example, run out of line of sight of you if they know you’re going to shoot them. They understand how to do that.
They know where their allies are on the map, so if they get in trouble, they can choose to escape. That’s something you’ve never seen. If you fireball a murloc, it runs at you and hits you until it dies or you die. It doesn’t have this concept of, I have a greater objective, or I have friends, and so on. Those are all things that, because we started with a brand new system, we could incorporate right from the ground up.
Newman: Obviously you mentioned that there would be pets and mounts as potential rewards from islands. Talk to me about some of the cute things we have coming up in Battle for Azeroth. We’ve been so serious talking about faction conflict. Let’s get down to the real stuff here.
Brack: Why are you here? Cute things! Okay, good.
Feasel: You’re going to be seeing a ton of new creatures, of course, coming in patch 8.0. One of the awesome things you’ll be seeing, we’ve done some real work to uprez, increase the resolution of a lot of our older creatures.
Newman: You’re not uprezzing my Murky pet, are you?
Feasel: You already saw in my presentation, we’ve uprezzed crabs. They’re really cute. They’re awesome. Lots of cool hunter pets.
Blizzard EntertainmentWe couldn't find you a screen shot of cute new cats. So here, have this bird.
Brack: Wait, wait, wait. She wants to see cute things, talk about cute things, and you lead with crabs?
Feasel: Directly to crabs. Or the quilboar, the uprezzed quilboar. That’s awesome, right?
Brack: I don’t know if you know what cute means.
Feasel: Okay, let’s start over. Let’s go with cats. We uprezzed the cats. Not only have we uprezzed the cats, we’ve added new types of cats. Especially with a seafaring expansion pack, it felt like a lost opportunity not to have some big fat fish-eating cats hanging out at the docks.
We not only have the regular cats that have new uprezzed individual whiskers--they look super cute. They have little toes now, if you look. We have big fat cats. We have a separate kind of cat that’s a big floofy cat with a big fat face that looks a bit like Maru, if you’ve seen that cat that likes to go into the boxes. And then we can mix and match to create a cat with a floofy face and a small cat body to make a variety of cats.
Brack: Cat technology.
Feasel: New cat technology.
Newman: So you’re saying that if the last expansion was the corgi expansion, this is the kitty expansion.
Feasel: Not only the cat expansion. Like I said, a lot of work has been going in—you’ll see uprezzed chickens. You’ll see, I’m not kidding, new chicken hairstyles. You will see uprezzed baby turtles. There’s a lot of fun coming for pet battle people in Battle for Azeroth. You saw the gila monster-looking lizards in Vol’dun. They have babies. Everybody has babies in Battle for Azeroth. That’s the tagline.
Brack: We should have you write marketing copy.
Feasel: Babies for Azeroth.
Newman: This sounds like a new video.
Brack: That’s actually a very good idea. I’m completely serious.
Newman: In addition to the amazingly cute models, are there new pet battle mechanics? For folks who are the collectors, the mount gatherers, the pet battlers, the obsessive crowd—there’s nobody like that in Warcraft, right?
Feasel: They’re all on my Twitter feed. So yes, we’re planning on expanding the pet battle world quests again. We thought that was an awesome system. We’ll be doing a bunch more of those.
You can expect to see another version of Family Familiar, probably more along the lines of Family Fighter again, where they’re available most of the time, so you can play it your way and do it on your own time. We thought that was a cool achievement. Some awesome pet rewards for that.
Let’s see. What else do we have coming down the pipeline? We loved the idea of pet battle dungeons. That’s come up a couple of times. We don’t have anything to announce today necessarily, but you certainly haven’t seen the end of the mysterious figures and the story they’re telling with the seedy underbelly of pet battles, which we’ve always wanted to tell for all of these years. You knew there was something seedy going on there in pet battles.
Newman: Pet accessories? Because you know the moment I could take a little tiny raptor and give it a flower and a hat and a backpack and fake Dracula teeth—I think I even tweeted at you with a little screenshot that said, I’m pretty sure Jeremy’s involved in this somewhere.
Feasel: Yes. The Falcosaur quest line was me. That was fun.
Newman: Are we seeing more things like—actually, like the Falcosaur quest line itself? Do you feel that was reasonably successful?
Feasel: I thought that was awesomely successful. This was a passion project from one of our artists who really wanted to make the raptor falcon creature. He had his opportunity. He was able to get it in the game. He made the pet version of it, and we saw it and said, that’s the cutest thing. We need to make a whole story about these things. It was a huge amount of fun for us to put together.
And that feels like the right content for those X.1 patches, or X.1.5. Just a little offshoot. It’s something fun for players to knock out. We love that philosophy. We love going down that direction. I’m not necessarily going to tell you we’re going to put hats on cats, but it’s not off the table.
Newman: I’m totally writing down “hats on cats.” So the big overarching question now to wrap this up: Legion is the biggest expansion for ongoing content releases. Do you think that, in any way, is going to increase the cynicism for Battle for Azeroth? We expect, now, expansions to be way up here, because we’re used to getting the intermediate chunks along the way as we go.
Brack: Philosophically, I think we’re really happy with the increased level of content and the different amount of things we’re adding to the game on a pretty predictable basis. We’re starting to put together the patch plan for Battle for Azeroth. We like the way that the Legion plan worked together.
One thing we would say is, if we’re going to go big, be critical of the patch plan, the patch cadences. 7.1, Karazhan came out too soon. Some of that was about a promise that we had made to the community about how we wanted to do that and fulfilling that promise, but I do think that Karazhan, which is one of my all time favorite dungeon experiences, was sort of lost in everyone still doing the Legion stuff.
So don’t expect an 8.1 quite so soon, as a lesson from that, but in terms of the amount and number, we’re happy with how that worked on Legion.
Newman: Do you think folks will embrace this expansion, which doesn’t necessarily have the major gameplay changes that we saw moving into Legion?
Brack: I think anyone who’s happy with the way things are going is going to be happy with what we’re going to do with Battle for Azeroth. We’re going to take all the lessons we learned from all those various systems. We’ll carry forward the ones that worked and make them even better.
For the ones that didn’t work -- legendaries comes to mind as being one of the more controversial systems – we’re not going to carry that forward, and we’ll make good decisions. The key question that I think you’re touching on is, how do we maintain the same level of player excitement about Battle for Azeroth as we did for Legion?
I think we’re certainly as excited about Battle for Azeroth as we were with Legion, even despite the fact that we’re not doing the third invasion of Azeroth by the Legion this time around. And so us being excited about it is going to translate into great systems and great content for players.
Feasel: I think it’s important to note that we do have plenty of content planned to help bridge the gap between now and Battle for Azeroth. That’s one of those things that’s going to keep players hooked. We want to make sure that we continue keeping those players fat and happy. We’re all players of World of Warcraft. That’s what we like to be doing.
Brack: It’s for us as much as anyone else.
a c i d.f l y
ಠ_ಠ
- 20,065
- 99,471
Ukerric
Bearded Ape
- 8,524
- 10,769
I do remember this old story about Oracle trying to push a large client into upgrading the database system they had a - very large - support contract. Basically, they were trying to push the last clients having that version to move, so they were offering to do everything, and even send their technicians at their own charge to do the migration in case there were problems on the DB server.
Finally, the client said "ok, if you really want to. So, first, it's probably 6 months of training at Baikonur, then it's around 40 to 50 million$ for travel expenses..." "WHAT?" "Well, the database is on our telecom satellite in GEO, so that's where your technician will need to operate if it needs on-site ops"
I think the next question from Oracle was how long until they retired that particular satellite...
- 2
Foggy
Bronze Baronet of the Realm
- 6,408
- 5,031
Now you are experiencing the true end game, self loathing and masochism.
- 2
Noodleface
A Mod Real Quick
- 38,838
- 16,980
Noodleface
A Mod Real Quick
- 38,838
- 16,980
Dalien
Registered Hodor
- 2,208
- 2,070
My guess would be they have a decimal value or more that aren't showing up in the UI, you were probably at 199.6% or something retarded like that.
edit: assuming you're talking about failing the bonus, if you are failing the main at "200%" then yeah that's messed up heh.
edit: assuming you're talking about failing the bonus, if you are failing the main at "200%" then yeah that's messed up heh.
moonarchia
The Scientific Shitlord
- 25,491
- 47,239
Wait, are you just trolling us here, or are you trolling us hard? Zandalari trolls are BfA only.
Noodleface
A Mod Real Quick
- 38,838
- 16,980
Anyone know approx how long insurrection takes from scratch ? Apparently I did not do that part of suramar