Wowhead J. Allen Brack Interview Pt.1
From Wowhead:
Question: So a lot of the stuff we’ve seen so far with Mists of Pandaria, with the focus on “getting the War back into Warcraft” etc, it seems like PvP is becoming a major focus. Is that accurate, or is that just the storyline that the game is taking?
J. Allen Brack: I don’t think it’s accurate that we’re focusing more on PvP as to exclude PvE. I think there are definitely PvP elements that we’re introducing, but I think it’s much more about the story and the tone that we’re gonna have with the expansion as opposed to any kind of specific content or system decision.
Q: The Annual Pass was extremely successful. Are there any plans for a future Annual Pass after the 1-year term is up on the current one?
We haven’t talked about that. I think the WoW Annual Pass came out of just sort of thinking about the opportunity for Diablo coming out, and thinking there’s gonna be a lot of loyal WoW players who want to play Diablo and thinking about how to make that a compelling offer. Will we do something like that in the future? I’m sure we will. What is it? I have no idea. We haven’t really even started thinking about what that would be like.
I think people might say “Hey, we need to do a Starcraft and WoW [annual pass]”. I don’t know that that makes too much sense. I think the venn diagram of overlap between Starcraft players and WoW players may be a little bit smaller than Diablo.
Q: World of Warcraft has been out for 7 ½ years now, and obviously in development even before that, but still extremely successful. How does the game having been around for so long, and so established at this point, affect the sort of design changes and direction you need to take the game?
I think that kind of goes back to how we ended up with Mists of Pandaria as this expansion. We’ve done three expansions in a row where there’s been a focus on a huge, malevolent evil -- a huge bad guy who wants to do terrible, terrible things to the player. We wanted to change the tone of that, and say “Hey, we’re not gonna focus on this bad guy as the ‘big uber’”. We’re going to focus on a new land, and it’s about exploration, and it’s about adventuring in this new land. It’s about “what’s over the next hill, in this new continent I’ve never seen before?” with the background story of “we need to claim this territory, and we need to harvest resources from it, because we need to fuel our war machine back in Stormwind or Orgrimmar.” So that’s kind of going back to your first question about the PvP aspect of the storyline. It’s much more about the land grab, and if you sort of think back to colonial times with the discovery of the new world and what happened there, that’s the kind of pieces we’re thinking about.
Q: One of the things that was mentioned during the presentation earlier, Chris Metzen was talking about how the “box product” was going to basically be the theme that’s been talked about so far with the voyage to Pandaria, and then content patches would be furthering the story beyond that. What kind of release timeline do you think that would be along the lines of? One of the things that had been talked about around patch 4.1 was the idea of “smaller patches, more frequently” and that kind of fell by the wayside with Dragon Soul and so on. Is that something you guys want to get back into?
It’s definitely something that we’re interested in. I would love for us to be doing patches significantly more often. Right now we’re averaging about every 4 months. I would love for us to do more frequent patches than that. I think it’s kind of hard for a number of reasons, the biggest one being that we’ve got a lot of history of WoW, and there’s a player expectation and a community expectation of “What does it mean to release a patch?”, but I’m very interested in changing that dynamic and changing that expectation so that we can have big patches, we can have small patches, and we can have medium sized patches which we don’t really do right now.
Q: And then obviously when you have a smaller patch people go “Is this all that was in this patch?” and then you have a big patch and they’re like “Why did you wait so long?” I’ve been around the community a couple times myself, I know exactly what they do.
Yeah, that’s exactly the kind of feedback we get.
Q: So PvE scenarios were talked about a little bit. I’m still a little unclear on the idea. When they were originally announced it sounded almost like a public quest sort of thing, like out in the world you’d come across these and have to do something, but from the presentation it sounds like they’re going to be instanced.
Yeah, they’re going to be queued. You’ll queue up for them and they’ll be instanced. The difference is, when you think about dungeons, sometimes we’ll have a dungeon that’s just a very small hole in the ground, and then you go in and you’re in the dungeon. Our thought right now is that you won’t have very many dungeon-type things -- you’ll actually have this area in the world that you’ll learn and have a quest from and maybe it becomes a scenario for you later on, or something in that area becomes a scenario for you later on. But you will queue and you will be matchmade with various players in order to complete scenarios.
The idea is that it’s a very small, kind of 20-minute little adventure that happens irrespective of role. So there’s no real consideration for tank, or dps, or healer. It’s just “are there 3 people who want to do this? Great!” and they’re on their way to the scenario.
Q: So it’s more of a drop in/drop out, sort of instant “I’ve just logged in to World of Warcraft and would like to play” sort of thing.
Yeah, exactly.
Q: Along those same lines it was mentioned that there was going to be a relationship between the scenarios and the Brewmasters, like finding Brewmasters out in the world.
So that’s an example of a specific scenario, where you have that Brewmaster who’s trying to make the special ale. That’s just one specific scenario. But there’s a lot of different ideas that we have for scenarios. The thing that we talked about back in the day was like “What if there’s an invasion of Goldshire, and the gnolls are invading and you have to save the children while the gnolls invade” in this little Goldshire scenario. That’s something we could definitely do. That doesn’t really have anything to do necessarily with... like, whatever comes up that makes sense from a story perspective for a scenario and is going to be a fun adventure for players, we can do that with that system.
Q: It does seem like something that you guys can put together a lot quicker and easier in certain situations, so you guys can put them out more often. That’s the impression I got.
Yeah, I think that’s something that we’d love to do, is to figure out how to release scenarios a lot more frequently.
Q: It was mentioned in the presentation earlier that there would be 3 raid instances and 14 bosses, which is a very nice number I’m personally very happy with as a raider. Is there anything more you can tell us about that? It seemed like it kind of got glossed over in the presentation.
Yeah, that’s because we haven’t done a lot of the work yet, and so we’re reluctant to commit to a whole bunch because things may change for us, but we’re working on spawning out the dungeons, we’re working on spawning out the various raids, and building those out. Those take many, many, many months to be built out from an artist’s perspective. Then we’ve got all the itemization, and all the character art that has to happen, from weapons, and armor, and bosses, and trash mobs that we have to make and dress up in order to make that happen.
We also have a new raiding philosophy that we haven’t finished designing yet and haven’t really talked about. How lockouts are gonna work, how are valor point caps going to work, that type of stuff. We haven’t really spent all the time we need to really figure out what that’s going to be for this expansion yet.
Q: So you are in discussions about possibly changing how the raid lockouts work?
Sure. I think we’re gonna look at how the 10/25 person lockout worked as a shared cooldown. Was that the right decision, or do we want to do something different? I don’t really know what the right answer is yet. We haven’t decided.
Q: You also mentioned that you’re doing LFR right out of the gate.
Yeah, so that was something that we thought would be really successful with 4.3. We’re really happy with the performance of it. We’re really happy with the idea of having this easier mode that you can just kind of get in, and be matchmade automatically, and go on and be successful with. And then having the normal mode for players to do and then the ultra heroic for the hardcore guys, and have special rewards for those and those type of achievements.
Q: Awesome. Yeah, just as a side note, tier 11 was one of my favorite tiers of raiding ever, and I actually think that it would have been completely perfect if there had been that LFR mode also because that would have given the more casual players a lot more to do.
Totally.
From Wowhead:
Question: So a lot of the stuff we’ve seen so far with Mists of Pandaria, with the focus on “getting the War back into Warcraft” etc, it seems like PvP is becoming a major focus. Is that accurate, or is that just the storyline that the game is taking?
J. Allen Brack: I don’t think it’s accurate that we’re focusing more on PvP as to exclude PvE. I think there are definitely PvP elements that we’re introducing, but I think it’s much more about the story and the tone that we’re gonna have with the expansion as opposed to any kind of specific content or system decision.
Q: The Annual Pass was extremely successful. Are there any plans for a future Annual Pass after the 1-year term is up on the current one?
We haven’t talked about that. I think the WoW Annual Pass came out of just sort of thinking about the opportunity for Diablo coming out, and thinking there’s gonna be a lot of loyal WoW players who want to play Diablo and thinking about how to make that a compelling offer. Will we do something like that in the future? I’m sure we will. What is it? I have no idea. We haven’t really even started thinking about what that would be like.
I think people might say “Hey, we need to do a Starcraft and WoW [annual pass]”. I don’t know that that makes too much sense. I think the venn diagram of overlap between Starcraft players and WoW players may be a little bit smaller than Diablo.
Q: World of Warcraft has been out for 7 ½ years now, and obviously in development even before that, but still extremely successful. How does the game having been around for so long, and so established at this point, affect the sort of design changes and direction you need to take the game?
I think that kind of goes back to how we ended up with Mists of Pandaria as this expansion. We’ve done three expansions in a row where there’s been a focus on a huge, malevolent evil -- a huge bad guy who wants to do terrible, terrible things to the player. We wanted to change the tone of that, and say “Hey, we’re not gonna focus on this bad guy as the ‘big uber’”. We’re going to focus on a new land, and it’s about exploration, and it’s about adventuring in this new land. It’s about “what’s over the next hill, in this new continent I’ve never seen before?” with the background story of “we need to claim this territory, and we need to harvest resources from it, because we need to fuel our war machine back in Stormwind or Orgrimmar.” So that’s kind of going back to your first question about the PvP aspect of the storyline. It’s much more about the land grab, and if you sort of think back to colonial times with the discovery of the new world and what happened there, that’s the kind of pieces we’re thinking about.
Q: One of the things that was mentioned during the presentation earlier, Chris Metzen was talking about how the “box product” was going to basically be the theme that’s been talked about so far with the voyage to Pandaria, and then content patches would be furthering the story beyond that. What kind of release timeline do you think that would be along the lines of? One of the things that had been talked about around patch 4.1 was the idea of “smaller patches, more frequently” and that kind of fell by the wayside with Dragon Soul and so on. Is that something you guys want to get back into?
It’s definitely something that we’re interested in. I would love for us to be doing patches significantly more often. Right now we’re averaging about every 4 months. I would love for us to do more frequent patches than that. I think it’s kind of hard for a number of reasons, the biggest one being that we’ve got a lot of history of WoW, and there’s a player expectation and a community expectation of “What does it mean to release a patch?”, but I’m very interested in changing that dynamic and changing that expectation so that we can have big patches, we can have small patches, and we can have medium sized patches which we don’t really do right now.
Q: And then obviously when you have a smaller patch people go “Is this all that was in this patch?” and then you have a big patch and they’re like “Why did you wait so long?” I’ve been around the community a couple times myself, I know exactly what they do.
Yeah, that’s exactly the kind of feedback we get.
Q: So PvE scenarios were talked about a little bit. I’m still a little unclear on the idea. When they were originally announced it sounded almost like a public quest sort of thing, like out in the world you’d come across these and have to do something, but from the presentation it sounds like they’re going to be instanced.
Yeah, they’re going to be queued. You’ll queue up for them and they’ll be instanced. The difference is, when you think about dungeons, sometimes we’ll have a dungeon that’s just a very small hole in the ground, and then you go in and you’re in the dungeon. Our thought right now is that you won’t have very many dungeon-type things -- you’ll actually have this area in the world that you’ll learn and have a quest from and maybe it becomes a scenario for you later on, or something in that area becomes a scenario for you later on. But you will queue and you will be matchmade with various players in order to complete scenarios.
The idea is that it’s a very small, kind of 20-minute little adventure that happens irrespective of role. So there’s no real consideration for tank, or dps, or healer. It’s just “are there 3 people who want to do this? Great!” and they’re on their way to the scenario.
Q: So it’s more of a drop in/drop out, sort of instant “I’ve just logged in to World of Warcraft and would like to play” sort of thing.
Yeah, exactly.
Q: Along those same lines it was mentioned that there was going to be a relationship between the scenarios and the Brewmasters, like finding Brewmasters out in the world.
So that’s an example of a specific scenario, where you have that Brewmaster who’s trying to make the special ale. That’s just one specific scenario. But there’s a lot of different ideas that we have for scenarios. The thing that we talked about back in the day was like “What if there’s an invasion of Goldshire, and the gnolls are invading and you have to save the children while the gnolls invade” in this little Goldshire scenario. That’s something we could definitely do. That doesn’t really have anything to do necessarily with... like, whatever comes up that makes sense from a story perspective for a scenario and is going to be a fun adventure for players, we can do that with that system.
Q: It does seem like something that you guys can put together a lot quicker and easier in certain situations, so you guys can put them out more often. That’s the impression I got.
Yeah, I think that’s something that we’d love to do, is to figure out how to release scenarios a lot more frequently.
Q: It was mentioned in the presentation earlier that there would be 3 raid instances and 14 bosses, which is a very nice number I’m personally very happy with as a raider. Is there anything more you can tell us about that? It seemed like it kind of got glossed over in the presentation.
Yeah, that’s because we haven’t done a lot of the work yet, and so we’re reluctant to commit to a whole bunch because things may change for us, but we’re working on spawning out the dungeons, we’re working on spawning out the various raids, and building those out. Those take many, many, many months to be built out from an artist’s perspective. Then we’ve got all the itemization, and all the character art that has to happen, from weapons, and armor, and bosses, and trash mobs that we have to make and dress up in order to make that happen.
We also have a new raiding philosophy that we haven’t finished designing yet and haven’t really talked about. How lockouts are gonna work, how are valor point caps going to work, that type of stuff. We haven’t really spent all the time we need to really figure out what that’s going to be for this expansion yet.
Q: So you are in discussions about possibly changing how the raid lockouts work?
Sure. I think we’re gonna look at how the 10/25 person lockout worked as a shared cooldown. Was that the right decision, or do we want to do something different? I don’t really know what the right answer is yet. We haven’t decided.
Q: You also mentioned that you’re doing LFR right out of the gate.
Yeah, so that was something that we thought would be really successful with 4.3. We’re really happy with the performance of it. We’re really happy with the idea of having this easier mode that you can just kind of get in, and be matchmade automatically, and go on and be successful with. And then having the normal mode for players to do and then the ultra heroic for the hardcore guys, and have special rewards for those and those type of achievements.
Q: Awesome. Yeah, just as a side note, tier 11 was one of my favorite tiers of raiding ever, and I actually think that it would have been completely perfect if there had been that LFR mode also because that would have given the more casual players a lot more to do.
Totally.
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