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General Questions

Question - Are you concerned that, with no content updates planned between now and the launch of Wrath of the Lich King, that players will be starving for content for the next 6+ months?

Cory Stockton, Lead Level Designer - Yea, that’s something we had to deal on Burning Crusade as well, where we had a little bit of a gap between our last patch and when we actually shipped. We typically tend to do small, incremental patches We had 2.4.2 and we have 2.4.3 where we can do small balance changes, but we’re just not doing anything as far as new content. And mainly that’s just so we can focus on getting the expansion done as quickly as possible. We’d love to be able to deliver more content during that space, but that’d just make it take longer to get done, so we feel it’s just better that we focus on getting done what we need to get done, and getting the expansion out as soon as possible.

Question - What have you learned in terms of zone layout, class design, etc. between Burning Crusade and Lich King?

Stockton - Probably the biggest thing that we’ve learned is... variety. I think what we did really well transitioning from the core game to Burning Crusade was giving players more quests - players never even got through some of our zones before they hit 70. A lot of players hadn’t even started Shadowmoon Valley before they hit 70, so I think we had quantity covered. What we’re trying to do with Lich King is up the variety. We’ve really been able to use a lot of features we didn’t think we’d be able to use for quests, we’re implementing things like vehicles - that’s a really, really big one. The siege vehicles were always planned to be something for the PvP game, but they have just assaulted the quest game. I mean, we’ve got a lot of quests that end up using the vehicles, and not in ways that you’d think. You’re not necessarily getting in a car with these quests and doing things; you might be riding on a horse or you might be riding on a drake for a quest and that drake can be controlled and have his own spells. It’s really opened up the possibilities.

Kind of summarizing that - it’s all about giving players something different to do. Not just changing up the storyline or giving them more. But making sure there’s something memorable about a quest, something that makes it cool. What did I like about that quest? And that’s when they tell their friend the next day. I think that’s our goal - to leave that lasting memory.

Question - What about PvE to PvP server transfers with race and faction changes, or is that asking too much?

Stockton - Currently we don’t have any of that planned. Definitely, people have wanted to change faction from Alliance to Horde. It’s another task that’s just ginormous in terms of how much work it would take to get that to work, because it’s not just changing your look, it’s going through your quest book and making sure all the quests you did on this side are available on this side. And there are a lot of items that are only available on this side or the other. It’s a task that can be put in, but priority-wise it doesn’t seem like it’s massively important to get in right now.

Question - Any more news about the WoW movie?

Stockton - Oh, not from me. I can’t wait to hear more about the movie, but I think I’m in the same boat as you guys on that.

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Raiding

Question - How happy are you with the high difficulty of the endgame raid encounters in WoW, especially in light of how long we have to wait before WotLK arrives?

Stockton - Well, Kil’Jaedon - as far as his difficulty level goes - we feel comfortable with that because he’s set up to be the end boss for that reason. As time goes by, people are going to learn the encounter and get better at it, so I don’t think that means that we want to go in and change it, not right off the bat, just because it’s causing some issues. And it’s also a very small number of guilds that that’s affecting right now. We have the numbers, we know people are playing the Sunwell and learning it. I mean, anything at that level of difficulty... we expect there to be a little bit of a fight against that level of difficulty. But I don’t think it’s anything that’s causing an issue; that we’re looking at to have an emergency patch within the next 6 months to deal with it.

So I think we’re just trying to focus on getting done what we need to get done and getting the expansion out as soon as possible.

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Social & Appearance Options

Question - With the introduction of the barber shop in Wrath, are we going to see more options in the character creation process?

Stockton - That’s going to remain the same. You’ll actually go to the barber shop to do any of the new stuff. We’re actually calling the barber shop a little bit of a plastic surgery shop too, because you’ll be able to change any of your initial choices like, say, a Tauren’s horns. When you go to the barber shop, you could pay to change those horns to look different, but they’d still be the same options...

Question - Will we see new options, like tattoos, or is it just morphing what we chose at the outset?

Stockton - Right now, we have hair styles and we’re also looking into doing more things, like possibly different horns, different types of goatees, that sort of stuff. But it’s all just a matter of time; of how much we can squeeze in there before the expansion has to get out.

But those are definitely on the board. The goal of the barber shop is to give players as much customization as is possible, so that they can feel unique. I think it’s just a matter of the balance between adding just new hairstyles and changing up things like you mentioned, like tattoos and stuff.

Question - Can you tell us any more about the dance studio concept?

Stockton - The dance studio is something that, from our standpoint on implementation, is a gigantic amount of work as far as the number of custom animations that are required to do that. And it would definitely be something that would work per race, because we would have to do custom animations for each individual race so that they look right. But we haven’t really gotten into the details of how many we would do per race and how exactly you would learn them. We’ve talked about doing a dance studio where you’d go and be learning these new dances from someone, but we havent’ gotten into the final details of how much time it’s going to take. How much time it’s going to take is dictated by the animations you would get per race.

Question - What’s the word on guild halls and housing, and is it possible to provide interest for money deposited in banks?

Stockton - First off, you won’t get any interest on your deposits but I think that would be great. I don’t have much money on any of my characters though, so it probably wouldn’t do me much good. As far as the other question, all of us want housing, but on the scale of projects, that one goes off the chart. If we were going to do housing, it would need to be almost it’s own separate thing - the way that we would want to do housing. To put the Blizzard twist on what we would want it to be, it’s a huge undertaking. That doesn’t meant that it wouldn’t get done, it just means that there’s a lot of other things that we could get in quicker before it. That said, there’s no definite plans for it coming in the future. And if we were able to ever get housing out to players, I think it would include some type of guild hall - some place where guilds could show off their achievements. But it’s in the same boat as housing.

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