Earlier this week at Blizzcon, Gaming Instincts had the chance to attend a group Q&A meeting with WoW Classic dev team who were able to answer a variety of questions in regards to World of Warcraft Classic and the upcoming Cataclysm Classic and Season of Discovery. We got the chance to speak to the Assistant Lead Classic Designer Tim Jones and Game Producer Linny Cooke-Saverline.
Answer #1: I think we continue to evaluate what expansion or what people want to do on progression servers on a case by case basis. We’ve had some special moments with attendees here today. Some of us have been playing World of Warcraft when Classic was what was out at the time. We’ve been playing WoW for 20 years at this point. But just like Chris Metzen talked about, there’s different generations who’ve played World of Warcraft [and] started at different points in time. For some, Cataclysm was the very first World of Warcraft that they ever got to experience. So to them, that’s sort of like their vanilla. And I think it’s our responsibility and our duty on the Classic team to sort of allow people to relive those moments in the best way that we can. Recreate that nostalgia. We talked with the community. We sent out polls and surveys, and there [were] a fair amount of people who desired Cataclysm and really wanted to play. And there’s so much amazing content in Cataclysm. There are some rough edges at the time because the old world got destroyed. I think that was one of the biggest points of contention. But now we’re in a world where people still have access to era. There’s a version of the game where you can go back and you can play through all the original story, so there’s not that moment of friction that people have now. We will continue to ask our community. So much of what we do on the Classic team is community-driven. Hardcore, case in point. There’s just the pure passion and excitement, and nagging, of our community. Classic itself is born of community, just directly from them. So, yeah, nothing’s off the table. We’ll continue to look at Mists of Pandaria and beyond to see what’s appropriate. What do players want? (Tim)
Clarification:Are you referring to some of the philosophy changes in the mainline World of Warcraft and if that’s applicable to Classic? (Tim)
Answer #2: I think there’s constant lessons to be learned between the modern World of Warcraft team and Classic. We’re learning from each other. There’s aspects of Classic WoW that influence [players]. People love the old talent system in World of Warcraft. There’s definitely influence from the old World of Warcraft talent system in the new talent system that was built in Dragonflight. Are there things that we can learn from the accessibility that modern World of Warcraft is incorporating in terms of transmog accessibility? I think that there’s definitely lessons from that. We’ve gone to great strides to incorporate account wide toy collections, mount collections, transmog going into Cataclysm. A lot of that’s already available in Wrath. So, we’re definitely open to lessons learned and changes in philosophy that aim to respect players’ time as we grow older. I’m a much different gamer than I was when I was 10, 15, 20 years ago. I got a two-year-old and a five-year-old now, so most of my gaming time is playing Mario Kart and Kirby with my girls. But yeah, we mature as gamers. And as developers, we have to take into consideration our entire audience and make sure that our philosophy is aligned with respecting players’ time. There’s definitely stuff to learn. (Tim)We definitely want to make sure we’re preserving that nostalgic feel that you go into the game and it feels like Classic. But if there are quality of life things that will make your life a little bit easier and not disrupt that classic feel, like having a new collections UI, that’s the thing where we love to bring it in. You don’t have to cart all your items over to the transmog guy. Instead, you can just have it in collections. (Linny)
Answer #3: We were just interviewing with Rockman earlier and just talking about how seasons are such an exciting sandbox for us on the Classic team. We get the chance to take risks and we get the chance to experiment with different gameplay features that might have a really positive reception with players or a negative reception with players. But the goal is to take risks and learn from those lessons and use that to continue to make better decisions for the future of WoW Classic. And we were super excited to be like, “How do we build on the old world?” There’s so much content. There’s an insane amount of content in vanilla. Where the heck do you start? And really keying in on the artificial level bands that were in the original Vanilla beta or the WoW Classic beta, and how people created their own end game, their own meta, their own best in slot lists. How do we give them more to do? Putting those level bands in Season of Discovery let us focus on smaller portions of Classic to look at at a time. That’s where we’re like, “Well, what’s the end game of Level 25? What are some of the end game zones? Can we transform a Dungeon into a raid? Can we add more outdoor content?” Whether that’s PvP content, whether that’s new world bosses, whether there’s new discoveries that you can find that aren’t necessarily tied to the new Rune engraving system. The level banded system allows us to focus and to compartmentalize Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms to an extent, and allow us to just build upon the existing world and all its richness. We’re excited where Season of Discovery will take us. We have some plans that we’re not ready to announce yet in terms of like, “What are the next level upgrades?” There will be more level upgrades. And I think that there’s definitely a desire on my part and our team’s part to build truly new content, whether that’s some of the stuff that we hinted at on accident or on purpose in our What’s Next panel. You’ll have to wait and see, but that’s part of the excitement. We want every phase, [every] release, every patch of Season of Discovery to be an epic moment for players to have the opportunity to not know things together. That’s really special. And to share in [those] few days or weeks of finding new stuff together, sharing information, whether it’s in Guild chat or forums or YouTube videos, really give people a chance to discover things together. And that’s the spirit of the season. (Tim)And we also want it to feel natural in the Classic WoW world. We really like the concept of “You’re running around and you see a mob and you’re like, ‘Wait, was he there in the original? I don’t remember.’” And literally have little arguments of, “‘No, wait, I’m pretty sure he was here before,’” and just have everything fit that well into the world. It’s a concept that we’ve talked about: the found photograph. You’re at your parents’ place and you find an old photograph of them in Italy and you’re like, “Never knew they went to Italy!” It doesn’t change how you see them or how you view them, but it gives you more in-depth background to their world. And we want to do the same thing in WoW. (Linny)
Answer #4: The Classic team has evolved a lot since the announcement of Classic to where we are now. There’s been huge philosophy changes and a lot of that has been just in response to what the community wants and what the community needs. I think a lot of people originally wanted the no changes version of Vanilla and they got that and a lot of people were really satisfied with that. Is that what we want to continue doing? I think we’ve experimented with some no changes and, like I said, we’re all about learning lessons and trying different things. We’ve tried through Burning Crusade Classic and Wrath Classic. We started experimenting with the pre-nerf systems. With no changes, can we provide the original challenge that people had to face in these raids? There’s some people that that really resonates with. But then at the same time, Ulduar is a great example of this, we went to great lengths to make pre-nerf Ulduar true to its ridiculous difficulty levels. And some people really enjoyed it. But then the lessons from that is like, “Okay, well, now we have divergent difficulty paths.” The Raids originally in Classic WoW were a place for everyone, like 40-player Raids. There are no alternate difficulties in original Vanilla. So your most hardcore players who wanted to get their Orange parses could potentially co-exist with a dad who’s trying to help his baby fall asleep, and he’s literally clicking to move and no hotkeys, doing his rotation, and they could kill those bosses together. They can both fulfill what objectives and goals that those players set for themselves. But in the case of Ulduar is like, “Okay, we’re making something that’s incredibly difficult, and this version of the game is splitting the player base in two. The casual player and the competitive player, their communities are diverging. Is that healthy?” That’s something that we definitely see. We have data and analytics that show us this player behavior and we’re learning from that and we’re making sure that we try to make the correct choices when it comes to preserving and nurturing our communities as best as possible. Whether that is some changes, a lot of changes, sometimes it’s appropriate for a lot of changes too. I think the Titan Roon Dungeon system is a great example of that. Dungeons are an incredible piece of content, and for them to become completely irrelevant once you’re in a specific raid tier, is that a good use of content? There’s your question, what lessons can we learn and adopt from modern WoW? They do a fantastic job of maintaining their relevance and excitement of being able to participate through dungeons through the Mythic Plus system. Now is Mythic Plus the system that we want in Classic? Not necessarily, but is there a version of that philosophy that we can apply to our content? Definitely. I think what Mike was saying in the opening ceremonies is incredibly relevant to how we’ve changed on the Classic team, going from a hardcore, no changes philosophy to like, “What’s best for players? How do we respect players’ time? And how can we make something that’s fun and exciting?” (Tim)Honestly, Cataclysm and the upcoming season of Discovery has given us the chance to be creative and playful with things. And it’s really exciting going forward. (Linny)
Answer #5: Hardcore is so interesting because it’s a community-driven force of nature. It’s the participation of people, the creation of the hardcore add-on; it’s an amazing add-on. How it allowed people to just create a new way to play World of Warcraft that was completely driven and controlled and run by the community. We’re so impressed and we applaud everyone who’s involved in that. Where did they create that community? They didn’t create it in modern WoW. They didn’t create it in Wrath of the Lich King. They created it in Vanilla. There’s something special about the classic World of Warcraft experience, the leveling experience in Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms that really resonates with the hardcore player base. Does that mean that we’ll never incorporate the hardcore ruleset into progression servers or seasonal servers or modern WoW if they want to do that? I don’t think that those things are off the table, but I think what’s important for us to do is [consider] what the community is passionate about right now. There are some classic communities or some hardcore communities on different aspects of the game, but they’re definitely not as big as the Classic one. We want to make sure that we put our effort and support into what players are most passionate about right now. And seeing the reception to that Mak’gora tournament that OTK put on. It was so exciting for everyone to see all these players put in so much effort in doing level 60 duels in Mak’gora. It’s insane, but it was super exciting and I think people want more of that. So we’re excited about putting our effort into having those key moments available to people in hardcore and finding new ways for people to [do that]. Hardcore is very special to us. We want to find more ways of making hardcore exciting and continuing to support the communities who want to play hardcore and run these tournaments. Nothing’s off the table, but we want to pay attention to the community as much as possible. (Tim)
Answer #6: We’re definitely planning on [including those features] there. Honestly, the panel and opening ceremonies, we wanted to highlight some of the high-level stuff in there. But we definitely plan on keeping those systems. One of the things that we talked about was with the raids speeding up the cadence. We know sometimes patches may be gone a little bit longer than we want them to go on. And so we want to make sure that we’re putting out Cataclysm at a cadence that makes it fun to go through the raid tiers. But yeah, Dragon Soul were definitely going to be included in that. (Linny)
Answer #7: Classic Plus is interesting. It means so many different things to so many different people. Whether or not that’s just keep Vanilla, keep Classic WoW the way it is, but just make slight tweaks to certain underrepresented classes to make sure that Red Paladin and Balance Druid are more viable. “But don’t make any changes to Molten Core,” and then there’s some people who want like, “I want completely new Dungeons. I want a new zone. Brand new content, please.” There’s no one thing that we can do to satisfy all players. I will say that seasonal content is the opportunity for us to explore the things that people might be interested in that exists in whatever they’re pitching for their ideal Classic Plus. And we hope to learn what resonates with players and maybe the things that people are really attached to that they’re like, “Oh, my gosh, this is an amazing change. This is amazing or Dungeon, raid, the zone, quest,” whatever it is. Maybe there’s a new Forever Home for those types of mechanics that is a type of era server that those changes can live in that isn’t purely seasonal. But we definitely want to use seasons as the vessel to take those risks, add content, and see how players respond to it. I will say the response to the Blackfathom Deeps raid on the show floor and the demo area has been astounding. It’s really humbling to see so many people come in and play that raid and enjoy it and give feedback on it. I feel like we’re on the right path initially with Season of Discovery so far. (Tim)
Answer #8: There’s definitely going to be a mix. There’s going to be some that are simple discoveries like, maybe there’s a chest in a location that maybe you’ve overlooked before. We really want people who are going through zones and leveling through, let’s say, Elwyn Forest, to really take the time. It’s like “I’ve been to Stone Cairn Lake before. I’ve seen the rock monument. Maybe there’s something around the perimeter where the Knoll camps are that I’ve never really explored before.” “Is there something that I can click on?” But there’s also on the flip side of that, there’s definitely going to be discoveries that are more sort of epic quest related where Marquee Spells will have a good amount of ceremony, and exploration and traversing the world and going between continents required to either find NPCs or materials, and stuff like that. So there’s going to be a good mix of small scale to epic scale for these discoveries. It’s going to be exciting for players to see. (Tim)
Answer #9: There was a fair amount of work by one of our engineers to make sure that the 40 band version of Onyxia could exist in RAF classic. This is the same problem that Naxramus ran into when going from classic to Wrath Lich King. When designers in the past built the new thing, there was no intention of like, “Oh, well, we need 15 years from now, we’re going to rerelease this.” No one knew that. And so a lot of that data was completely cannibalized. So like the creature records it’s not as easy as just saying, “Oh, well, we’ll make a copy of the old thing and just have that exist alongside the new thing.” It’s definitely not that simple. It is an enormous engineering mountain to climb to make sure, and I’m sure that they considered that when making the original choice for Cataclysm. But a lot of those creatures were just like, “Oh, well, this creature will never exist again.” And the designer making that quest said, “I’m just going to reuse this creature.” So now this creature exists in a different place, it provides a different quest, it says something different or it drops different loot. You can no longer copy that creature and say, “Oh, well, let’s set up the old world to do that.” That’s not to say it’s impossible; it would just take an enormous amount of work, and I think it’s a better use of our resources to let Cataclysm be Cataclysm. It’s still one subscription, right? You can play Cataclysm Classic on the same subscription as you can era. I would say that we’re okay with that. (Tim)And also a big shout out to our amazing engineers for all of the work they have done in restoring things. (Linny)
Answer #10: I think Season of Mastery is a great example here. There were definitely faults with Season of Mastery in terms of the emphasis being on endgame and us probably not doing enough to make that accessible to people. I think the absence of world buffs also sort of hurt participation because we were simultaneously making things more difficult and taking away a lot of the tools that made things a little bit easier. So players really had to put in an enormous amount of effort to be able to even participate in that content. But it was fun. Like the people who did take the time to participate in the Raid content, the changes that we made in Molten Core and Blackwing Lair and AQ and Naxx, I think people really enjoyed those. So is there a world where some of that content gets to live again in Season of Discovery? Quite possibly. Again, nothing’s off the table. If people were passionate and excited about something and they want that in a new season because that would be fun and it fits within the theme and the context and the fantasy of the season, then for sure. We’re not going to put something in when it doesn’t make sense. I think we’re definitely open to making those changes and incorporating features and things that people thought were really cool from previous seasons into future projects. (Tim)
Answer #12: I think in Warlords, actually, when the new player models originally launched, there was a UI toggleable thing where you could toggle in between. And that made life difficult for artists because they simultaneously had to make sure that new armor that they were building worked for the old models and the new models. And so there’s a reason why they took that UI option out. If that’s what players want, right. I think that there’s even players now who would say, “I want the high fidelity character models in era WoW” just because there’s some people who like higher fidelity art. But does that make sense when everything else is super low fidelity? There’s some people who love the super pixelated aspects. They love the chipmunks or rabbits that are literally like core polygons. So we have to make sure and work with our art directors. This is where cross collaboration between modern [WoW] is really important because we don’t have an art director on Classic. So we talked to Ely Cannon and the other art leadership on modern WoW to make sure that, whatever changes that we make to art, that all of it [fits thematically] and the context of all the other art. That’s not to say, like, if we do future progression servers that we won’t also incorporate the higher fidelity models. (Tim)
Answer #13: It’s actually been really interesting recently with hardcore and how popular hardcore has been both for playing and for streaming. That’s something that’s actually gotten new players interested because they’re like, “Oh hey, I’m on YouTube or I’m on Twitch. Oh wow, this is really fun to watch. I’m going to go do this.” So that’s something that’s actually been really neat for bringing in players. (Linny)Yeah, it was super interesting to see data that showed us that there were actually a lot of people who had never played any version of World of Warcraft before come and try hardcore out. And that might be counterintuitive because you’re like, “Oh well, hardcore is only for the most dedicated and craziest of the World Warcraft players.” But it’s interesting that it’s the exact opposite. Because [in] hardcore, you’re encouraged to play the game more slowly, take your time, emphasis on leveling up your professions, and really take the time to analyze combat. There’s no rush to endgame. That’s not the purpose of hardcore. The hardcore is the leveling journey, and also everyone’s dying all the time. So the low level zones are constantly populated with new players. So the Capital Cities and the low level zones feel alive and so you really get that MMO community feel in hardcore. It’s just like Phil Spencer and Mike were talking about. Just making games accessible to everyone and however they want to play. I think the future of Classic WoW is going to be super exciting because hardcore makes it really interesting for new players. I think Cataclysm Classic is actually an excellent way for new players to start. There’s a lot of the changes in the questing zones and the starting zones are actually incredibly player-friendly. We have our quest POI system that helps people out without the use of add-ons to find where quest objectives are. There’s the new talent and spell system in Cataclysm Classic where you lock yourself into a specific specialization and you get key abilities super early on so you have access to mortal strike as a warrior at level ten and having a complete class where you don’t have to wand 40 levels as a priest in order to actually feel like your class is semi-complete. There’s going to be a lot of opportunities for new players to jump in and have a really great time in the Classicverse. (Tim)
Answer #14: Well, as far as what we have to pull from, we do literally have older builds so that we can actually pull up a client and be like, “What was happening in here?” So we actually have those pieces preserved and we do have a lot of the old data and we are able to do like a big data conversion project at the beginning, which the amazing engineers I’ve been working with have been streamlining and working super hard on it. So our overall process on it has been really cool to watch. (Linny)Another example there is like the pre-nerf content for the Burning Crusade raids and the Crusade heroics and the Pre-Nerf Ulduar. We had access to old data. Something that I did was build SQL queries that sort of reconstructed data change logs that we could see like, “Okay, this is how this creature’s health changed over every single patch of its life cycle.” And how do we, in the context of pre-nerf, make the most difficult version of certain bosses for the sake of recreating those nostalgic experiences.? [We are] finding the best way to use our historical data to do that. And again, super props to our engineers who take that on. (Tim)
Answer #15: I think there was something announced, but the level bands have been announced. So the first level band will be 25 and the level up rate will be Blackfathom Deeps. The second level band will be 40. So there’s some marquee stuff that happens at 40. You get your major talent points, so you have access to [in the context of Warrior] Bloodthirst Mortal, Strike, Shield Slam. You get that special talent. You have enough talents to go down into your talent tree that deep. You get your mount. And so there’s just a lot of special moments that happen at 40. There’s a good amount of dungeon content. There will be a new level up raid. Can’t talk about what that is just yet. And then after that, there will be level 50 and the level bands sort of shrink but remember the amount of XP that it takes to get to higher level bands is higher. So we just want to continue to be respectful of players’ time and make sure that the level bands make sense. And then after 50 is 60, and we feel like there is just the amount of zones that people will have relevant content in and each phase is a healthy amount, that the amount of dungeon content that they have access to is a healthy amount along their journey to 60. And then there will be another sort of exploration of existing Raid content. What does that mean within the context of Season of Discovery? Do we look to make new tier sets for the new classes and specializations that we’ve sort of manifested with the Rune system? Are there different rewards or challenges within the raids themselves? Do the raids appear in the same order? Is there new content that appears in between certain raids? There’s a lot of things to explore at max level and we’re super excited for that. (Tim)I would say on the topic of just preserving and respecting people’s time, we are planning on having an boosted XP when we go into the new phase or the new end level. So when the 40 comes out, the one to 25 will be a speedier version, kind of like we do with Joyous Journeys. (Linny)
Answer #16: We want there to be a healthy amount of time. It’s definitely not going to be as long as content patches. I’m not going to give you an exact amount, but it’ll probably be more than a month at the very least. Just so people have time to level up characters, make some alts, experiment with the new Runes and Discoveries, run the Raid a couple of times. And it’s not our goal to make you feel like you have to play Season of Discovery and that can be your only game. We have a menu of options if you want to play Season of Discovery casually, make a character, get to the next level, find your Runes, do the Raid a couple of times. That’s totally fine. I think the goal is for there to be a lot of fun things to discover but also extremely approachable with every phase in Season of Discovery. but it, for, for it to be extremely approachable with, with every phase in Season of Discovery. The one thing that’s been so special to hear is people who aren’t even classic players coming up to me and saying like, “I could level to 25, that seems reasonable. I could try that out,” and that is what we’re going for. We really want people to be like, “Yeah, I could, I could jump into that.” We definitely want the season to be approachable and people to be able to jump in at any time. (Tim)
Answer #17: That’s the magic of Classic, right? Why did the quest line for the shade of Eranikus end abruptly in, in winter spring? Where do the Gates of Timbermaw Hold lead to? Why are the gates to Karazhan Crypts locked? There’s so many mysteries and that’s one of the funnest things about Classic WoW. I personally would love to be able to solve all those mysteries. My producers would kill me if I tried to do that. So within reason we want to find maybe a few of those unfinished bits of Classic WoW and see where we can explore with them. We’re excited to look into those places just as much as you are. (Tim)
Answer #18: I’m really, really excited about it on mainline [WoW]. But, as far as classic, we have to make sure we’re kind of staying true to the feelings, the nostalgia, the setting, everything that is Classic. So, if there’s a feature that we’re like, “Oh yeah, that seems like that would fit.” Okay, cool, we’ll analyze that. But if there’s stuff we’re not so sure really fits with where we’re going, then [we’ll have to reconsider]. (Linny)
Answer #19: We’re just so jazzed. We’ve been working hard on Season of Discovery for the past year. We really are excited to see people’s response and speculation from hearing the news of the convention. We’re so happy that there weren’t any major leaks before the convention. We’re so proud of the work that we get to do. We have a really special team on the Classic team, and we’re all so supportive of each other. So just seeing everyone’s response and excitement at BlizzCon has been just a joy, and we’re so excited to just see the new things that we create, given to players’ hands. If there’s something that we’ve been really appreciative about BlizzCon, that’s what that is. (Tim)We have a lot of exciting new stuff coming up, especially with Season of Discovery, and we really love people’s feedback.We really want to hear how everybody feels about it, what they think. Once they jump into the season, what’s your favorite discoveries? What spells are you like, “Yo, I can’t believe I’ve been playing without this.” Which ones are you like, “You know what would be really neat?” So we really want to hear from players, what they’re passionate about and what they think. (Linny)
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