BlizzCast #3: SC2 Lead Designer, WoW Lead Designer, More

In this very special third episode, Lead Designer Dustin Browder delves into the Zerg's evolution from StarCraft to StarCraft 2. World of Warcraft Lead Designer Jeff Kaplan returns to the podcast speaking of raid and dungeon design. We also get a peek into the work of Blizzard Entertainment's Video Production unit, plus community questions.

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Episode 3 of BlizzCast will take us deeper into the development of both StarCraft II and Wrath of the Lich King. We start out interviewing Dustin Browder, Lead Designer of StarCraft II, in our 'Zerg Evolution into StarCraft II' interview. Next, we interview Lead Designer of World of Warcraft, Jeff Kaplan, about dungeon and raid design for both World of Warcraft and its upcoming expansion, Wrath of the Lich King. Following, we bring on Joeyray Hall, Manager of Video Production, to chat with us about the magic that goes into the development of Machinima for World of Warcraft. To finish up, we have various insightful questions from the community answered by the Blizzard devs.

INTERVIEW 1
Dustin Browder (Lead Designer on StarCraft II)
Zerg Evolution – StarCraft to StarCraft II

Karune: What's up everyone. Welcome back to our third episode of BlizzCast, where we take you behind the scenes into the world of Blizzard. I am your host, known to you guys as Karune on the boards. Today we have an exciting line up of Blizzard developers including Dustin Browder, our lead designer of StarCraft 2, who will give you details of the evolution of Zerg from the original StarCraft to StarCraft II. Following, Jeff Kaplan, our lead designer of World of Warcraft.will be giving you insight on how designing raids and dungeons have changed from the original World of Warcraft to the Burning Crusade, and even better, how these changes may unveil into the Wrath of the Lich King. Next, we'll be talking to Joeyray Hall, our Manager of Video Production, who will be sharing a glimpse into the machinima magic at Blizzard Entertainment. Last, but definitely not least, as introduced in our last series, we'll be having our community Q&A section, where we'll be asking devs questions submitted directly from the community.

Karune: First up, we have Dustin browder. Welcome to the show Dustin!

Dustin Browder: Hey!

Karune: Dustin is our Lead Designer for StarCraft II, which can definitely not be an easy job, creating one of the most anticipated video game sequels ever. Recently, we've just announced the Zerg faction for StarCraft II, and everyone has just been dying to know more. So, to jump into it...

Karune: About the Zerg evolution from StarCraft to StarCraft II in terms of gameplay, how would you say that has gone so far?

Dustin Browder: Well, I think we're still playing a lot like the original StarCraft in a lot of places. I think we still have some room to innovate and reimagine the race a little bit more, but so far I think it is coming along pretty well. They are a pretty fun race to play. I don't think they are quite as exciting to play as the Protoss are, and is definitely the weakest of our three races at the moment, but that is to be expected, as it is the race we started to work on the most recently. We're still working on it really hard to get it done, but it is coming along pretty well.

Karune: What elements of the original Zerg did you feel were crucial to maintain for StarCraft II?

Dustin Browder: So a lot of the things we really want to make sure we maintain is the feel in a lot of ways of the race. So the Zerg were very fast, very aggressive, very mean, very flexible, and strategically able to rapidly change their technologies on the fly, on the battlefield. All of these things, the speed, the aggression, the feeling of constant fear when you are facing them, that these things are hunting you, is really important to us for the Zerg. So a lot of it, is the feel stuff. There isn't a specific thing that we felt you had to have, but we do have a lot of things from the original game. We feel like we have that feeling of aggression, speed, and adaptability. We also have some stuff in there that you have already seen already in some of the units are themes that we want to carry over more from StarCraft, which the original StarCraft had- A lot of infestation for the Zerg, we wanted to highlight that and use that a little bit more than it had been used in the original StarCraft.

Karune: Sounds very exciting.

Karune: So with the Queen unit being one of the new units that have been changed significantly from StarCraft one, could you tell us a little bit about where you are going with the Queen and how that has changed?

Dustin Browder: Sure, so the queen is a unit that the team wanted to do ever since original StarCraft. They have been talking about it for years and years and they really wanted to make more out of that unit. They felt that the original Queen didn't really meet the name“Queen.”It didn't really say this is the leader and creator of the Swarm in a lot of ways. And obviously, in the story evolved, the Queen of Blades became a big part of the experience and the side changed a bit, but the team still wanted to explore this idea of a classic 'insect-like' Queen that rules over her whole hive. So that was the original creative idea for the Queen, to see if we could create that kind of unit. It felt like it fit the kit for the race pretty well, but could we find some cool mechanics to make it work.

Right now with the Queen, she is sort of a mobile buff that you can move around your base that you apply it to your base defenses making your base defenses stronger, better, possible, wherever she goes. So, she has got a lot of gameplay to her right now in the sense that she is pretty mobile and can get to where she needs to be, but she can only be at one place at once. So you got to kind of chose what is the most important place for her to be right at that moment and I suppose more interestingly, from the enemy's point of view, the Queen can be killed.

So, enemy players will often be hunting for the Queen, to remove the threat of this defensive buff, before they invade the base, which really makes for some interesting cat and mouse gameplay, between enemy players hunting for the Queen, and the Queen trying to find a good place in her base to hide out while she is preparing for the inevitable enemy attack.

So it feels like the queen as the owner of the hive and master of that space is fitting pretty well to the story idea of a Queen. We'll see what people think when people get a chance to play with it in beta, and obviously we have more testing to do internally before we're even ready for that step.

Karune: Is that always what you were going for, for the Queen, as far as being the mother of the whole entire hive?

Dustin Browder: The Queen has gone through a lot of different iterations as we looked for some way to make this concept of this character work.

You think of the Queen as a character which is a classic monster from science-fiction that we really wanted to try and include. She has been a more aggressive unit in the past. She has been a unit that makes other units, which was another one of the original ideas we tried a lot of, where the Queen would lay eggs and create a wide variety of different specialist types of units in which only the Queen could create and that was a pretty cool hit.

But the problem we had with it, is when you play the game, there is only one Queen, and even if you upgrade her quite a bit, having a Queen that was so critical to your tech tree, so core. I know base defenses are pretty important, but even only to have some units that only she could build was even worse, and even harder to balance, harder to make it work, and ultimately didn't turn out to be that much fun.

Karune: So the next new unit, actually an old unit with new abilities and new attributes to their attack is the Ultralisk. So about the new cleave attack, I know it is something that a lot of people wanted to see since the original StarCraft – how do you guys go about designing that and what has the Ultralisk been up to since StarCraft one?

Dustin Browder: We've tried a lot with the Ultralisk. This is one of our favorite units. There are a lot of opportunities to do some interesting with this unit. The same time we are really concerned about complexity. We want to make sure all of these units are as simple as we can really make them and fit that original StarCraft game design which was so clean and so crisp, where everything had such focused abilities. The cleave attacks seemed like an obvious thing for it to do, just by the shape of its blades. We haven't really done a lot of testing on it as you can imagine.

Anything like an Ultralisk that is at the very end of the tech tree, is something that just inherently gets less play time, as opposed to something like a Zergling or Hydralisk. So we're really still looking at that to see how balanced it is and it gives the Ultralisk a little more teeth and it makes it feel a little less gimped against tier 1 units which is kind of nice and a bit of a fun thing that is not huge strategy thing yet, just because the Ultralisk has a lot of trouble getting into the middle of enemy forces right now.

I mean you can kind of use the burrow and unburrow and that has been kind of fun, so the people can know, having seen our Zerg announcement videos that the Ultralisk can burrow and unburrow like the rest of the Zerg army. So that is a little bit useful, but we're still trying to work out, is this as useful as we want it to be? Is there something else we should be doing with this unit to see if that is a good hit for that unit or not?

Karune: We'll you guys have definitely done a great job of instilling that fear from the Ultralisk when you see him burrowing out of the ground.

Dustin Browder: He is terrifying. If you walk into an enemy base and suddenly there were three Ultralisk that you didn't expect to see there, it can be quite a shock!

Karune: So some of the other concepts that have been brought up were about multiple building selection and increased macro management for StarCraft II- How are you dealing with that issue that is coming up on the boards?

Dustin Browder: As soon as I have an answer for ya, I will roll it out to you. We have been looking at a lot of different solutions for that problem and obviously we want to have a modern RTS that has a lot of the interface that people are used to playing with, especially the mid-range players who are really relying a lot on this interface to be remotely competitively. At the same time, we are very aware that we have lost some macro and to a lesser extent, micro in StarCraft II, so we're still working on it.

One of the things we did recently is that we made 'warp-in' a lot more effective than it was before, in which you are almost required to use 'warp-in' to be as effective as a high level Protoss player. Mid-level to low-level players probably still won't use it but that is okay, but if you are a high-level player, you really have to use 'warp-in' because we have given you a discount on the build time for units that are warping in. This means now that you have to go back to your base to 'warp-in', you have to go back to 'warp-in' even in the middle of a battle, and it gives you a little bit more of that macro feel, but early testing still indicates that it is not enough.

We have had some of our ex-pro gamer play and at first they were really enjoying the extra challenge and about a week they had learned to handle it and it was still far too easy for them to macro, so this is still something we're looking into to tackle. We've got different ideas that we want to try with the interface, we're going to look at different mechanics, but it is a real issue and it is something that we're taking really seriously.

Karune: What are some of the other ways you are increasing macromanagement for the other sides, maybe for Zerg?

Dustin Browder: If I had a good answer, I'd give it to you, though I really don't have one.

Karune: No problem.

Dustin Browder: Like I said, we've got a bunch of bad solutions we've been talking about for quite a while- well not quite a while. We have different bad idea every week, but we're trying lots of different ideas to do it.

The simplest way to do it would be to roll back the interface to StarCraft one, the original StarCraft, which is definitely an option for us, but we really want to pursue and see if there is a way to make it work with the interface improvement that has become standard both for our games and our competitors titles. But we know right now that our hardcore guys are really worried about this, but at the same time if we roll back the interface that is like the original StarCraft, a whole bunch of other people that we aren't hearing from right now will be very angry with us.

We're looking to make everybody happy with this, and it is a hard problem and we will keep working at it.

Karune: Good stuff, well we definitely appreciate the honest answers from you.

Karune: With the Zerg's expansionistic strategy that you touched upon before – How is that going to play in StarCraft II and are there new tactics that will be able to contain that type of Zerg expansionistic strategy?

Dustin Browder: So now the Zerg are even more able to expand more quickly than they ever had before, partly because of some of the balance numbers that have changed and the speed in which they can get into play. Other advantages the Zerg has of course is their ability to spread creep anywhere they want on the map with their Overlords, allowing them to offensively tower into enemy bases sometimes, but certainly important places on the battlefield.

We've been recently experimenting with Zerg having the ability to move their base defenses and have removed that ability from the Protoss's phase cannons and so the Zerg defense buildings can sort of pick up and scuttle around with crab like legs and it has been a pretty interesting test, as it has been a lot more successful of a mechanic on Zerg than it has for the Protoss. It makes the Zerg feel a lot more aggressive and a lot more dangerous. It feels like sometimes their base is invading your base, which is very Zerg and feels very, very cool.

So the Zerg is definitely really able to get around the map and the other thing to remember too that a lot of players looking at it on the boards, which haven't had the chance to play is that we have a lot of additional mobility in this game, between Reapers, Vikings, Stalkers, and Nydus Worms – these races are more mobile than they have ever been, which really means that enemy players have a lot opportunities to spot these potential expansions and deal with them in a very real way that previously might have involved moving a much larger or even more dangerous force to engage these expansions. Now they can a smaller more agile force, threaten, feint, and attack from another direction.

The whole board has now become a very threatening place as everyone has additional mobility and you really never know where you will encounter an enemy and you can't rely on the map alone to wall off and protect you. It can protect you from some forces, as I know your Siege Tanks aren't going to jump up a cliff and tear me apart, but your Reapers will. So it really pushes you to watch the whole map and always be on your guard on almost every point of the map at all times. It really is a more dynamic experience in that respect.

Karune: Nice, I'm excited to see that in the gameplay for sure. So overall, the Zerg compared to the other two sides, what do you think has been the most challenging to design and why do you think that is?

Dustin Browder: That's a really tough question. I guess all the races are really challenging in the sense that we're really trying to walk the line between the greatness of the original StarCraft and at the same time, trying to give new strategies and tactics to players. So I would say, just like the other races, that has been one of the most challenging aspects of the Zerg and I think we're not quite there yet. I think a lot of the old tactics and strategies yet remain, and we're not offering enough new for players to learn and master and really figure out and really enjoy. So I would say that is probably the biggest challenge.

I would say if you pick the single unit that has been the biggest pain to deal with would have to be the Queen. We have worked on the Queen for probably two years straight, trying variations from one to the other. I don't want to say we're even done yet, because I don't think we necessarily are but she has probably been the single most challenging unit, much is something like the Mothership was probably and remains one of the most challenging units to work on for the Protoss.

Karune: Lastly, so, the direction of the Zerg overall – Are you pretty happy with how it's going right now? Do you still expect a lot of changes before beta happens?

Dustin Browder: I'm pretty happy with the progress on Zerg, but I would say it is the race right now that needs the most work. Having a chance to play some, the Protoss are easily the most enjoyable race right now. They feel the crispest, the sharpest, and feel the meanest in a lot of ways, and have the best counters, and the most interesting new strategies. Terrans are second, not far behind, and I would say the Zerg is definitely trailing as the third right now that we are really trying to double down on this race and add more stuff, and tune then, and polish them up, to make them feel really interesting and really different, and still try to maintain that same mean and feral, hungry, Zerg quality.

Karune: Well thanks a lot for your time Dustin

Dustin Browder: Well, sure, thank you very much!

INTERVIEW 2
Jeff Kaplan (Lead Designer on World of Warcraft)

Bornakk: Hello everybody - this is Bornakk from the World of Warcraft Community Team.

For our next segment we have our Lead Designer Jeff Kaplan returning to talk us about designing raids and dungeons. We will cover how they have evolved from the beginning of World of Warcraft up to some of the latest developments for what people will experience in our upcoming expansion, Wrath of the Lich King.

Welcome back to the show Jeff!

Jeff Kaplan: Well it's great to be back.

Bornakk: To start us off, how did raid dungeon design evolve from the original World of Warcraft to The Burning Cruade?

Jeff Kaplan: I think we learned a lot of really good lessons from the original game. I think we were a little bit too hardcore early on. We didn't introduce people into the raid content in a smooth enough curve. We tried to fix some of those issues in The Burning Crusade.

We also looked at things like the raid size and switched over from a 40 person raid cap to a 25 person raid cap. We introduced the concept of Heroic Dungeons which were extremely successful and we also introduced full blown 10 person raiding in the form of Karazhan and Zul'Aman.

So hopefully with Wrath of the Lich King we can take some of those ideas that we sort of evolved with Burning Crusade from the original game and continue them into the next expansion.

Bornakk: What are the most important lessons after seeing how The Burning Crusade has played out along with the feedback from the community?

Jeff Kaplan: There were a lot of really good lessons we learned in The Burning Crusade. To start with, I'll start talking a little bit about the Heroic dungeons. We definitely learned that the loot needed to be better in Heroic instances. We have to work a bit on our attunement process not only for Heroics but for raiding in general.

We need to make sure that our introductory raids are a little bit more friendly; I don't want to say to casual players, but a little bit more accessible to people in general. While I think High King Maulgar was a great encounter and Magtheridon was a great encounter, they weren't necessarily tuned to the point of welcoming 25 person groups with open arms. It often took longer to explain to people how to do the High King Maulgar fight than it did to actually do the fight itself so I consider that a slight problem.

But all in all I think we learned a lot of really great lessons not only in how to tune the encounters, how to make the attunements a little bit more accessible and understandable, and then also just some lessons in how to itemize the raid content versus the other content in the game.

Bornakk: We recently announced that all raid dungeons in Wrath of the Lich King will have both a 10 person and 25 person version available for players. Some players are seeing this as just an easy mode and a hard mode for each dungeon. Could you explain the philosophy on how the dungeons are being designed around these two versions?

Jeff Kaplan: Sure thing. The idea behind 10 and 25 person raiding isn't to make one easy mode and one hard mode. We want to have progression in both the 10 and 25 person raid format. So for example Naxxramas is supposed to be an accessible early tier raid which will actually be pretty easy for both 10 and 25 person groups. Those groups will however graduate in the next tier in a zone like Ulduar to a more difficult set of raid encounters and then the raid zones that will exist past Ulduar will ramp up in difficulty.

Bornakk: Do we know how the trash mobs and bosses differ between the two versions? Would it mainly be health and damage or would we see a different set of abilities as well?

Jeff Kaplan: I think we're going to have to take that on a case by case basis. We use trash to sort of tune the pacing behind a dungeon and we don't ever want it to ever feel like it takes too long to get to a boss. So sometimes we'll just affect that with the number of creatures other times we'll look at things like clear times or health modifiers on those creatures.

In terms of the bosses, we want each boss fight to have a specific spirit to it and to really make sense in terms of what we want the strategy to be and the core sort of neat gimmick of the boss fight and that might have to change from 10 to 25.

Bornakk: What can players who have cleared only the 10 person version expect when they try to do the 25 person version?

Jeff Kaplan: They should be able to expect having at least 15 more people there with them. In all seriousness, the fights will change anytime that you raise the number of people or just introduce different people to a raiding environment or change up class composition it changes the general vibe of that raid so I think it will always feel different, not just from 10 to 25 but whenever you switch up raid composition.

Bornakk: Players had some complaints in The Burning Crusade over the length of time between dungeons being released in the content patches. Do you expect this change to allow the release of new dungeons to be more consistent throughout the cycle of Wrath of the Lich King?

Jeff Kaplan: We try to get new content out to players as quickly as we can but we're also committed to a very high level of quality. So we always have to balance those two things, we never want to rush a dungeon out or put something out unfinished or unpolished. We'll do our best to get things out and we feel like we're working faster than we have in the past to produce better content.

Bornakk: Will gear sets differ in look or bonuses between the two dungeon versions?

Jeff Kaplan: The art will probably look a little bit different between the two dungeon sets, meaning the 10 and the 25 person version. It might be things like a different color version of the same armor or the higher level, the 25 person content, might have more particle effects, so something along those lines.

Something that I am excited to talk about is that the PvP armor will be different from the PvE armor entirely in looks and colors this time.

Bornakk: Is it possible that we would we do something like include a timed event in one version and not the other?

Jeff Kaplan: Not sure if we would include a timed event in one version but not the other but we are certainly thinking about including things like timed events so that skilled players can really show off that little extra emphasis that they put on raiding.

Bornakk: Gear is always an important topic for our players. Do we have any specifics of the gear gap between the two dungeon versions?

Jeff Kaplan: Right now we're going with the concept that 25 person raiding would be a full tier in item progression above the 10 person raiding so it's quite a jump once you get the extra 15 people together.

Bornakk: Will the dungeon reset timers always match for both versions: 3 day or 7 day?

Jeff Kaplan: We're hoping right now to keep as many of the raid reset timers on a 7 day reset and they will always match between 10 and 25.

Bornakk: You've talked in the past about how the raid dungeon Naxxramas will be returning in Wrath of the Lich King as a level 80 raid dungeon. Will we see the same stories of the Atiesh and the Corrupted Ashbringer return?

Jeff Kaplan: We definitely want to continue the story of Ashbringer, it's one of our favorite things and we actually have a lot of fun with Ashbringer internally so we want to continue that storyline. Whether or not Atiesh exists in its current form or a new form that's a great question, it's still undecided.

We really want to keep doing Legendary items though, we love the Legendary items we've done so far they're really important to the story of Warcraft as a whole. So I think we'd like to bring back Atiesh at some point but Naxxramas is going to be really exiting. It's moved over Nothrend now, it's over a zone called Dragonblight, it's currently laying siege to one of the Alliance towns there so I think fans are going to be really excited by sort of the return of Naxxramas, one of our best dungeons ever.

Bornakk: Sounds really exciting.

Bornakk: For Naxxramas, what bosses would you say are going through the most changes from the previous 40 person version that people know?

Jeff Kaplan: There's a lot of bosses that will need serious consideration for when we make the change to the new style of raiding. In particular I think is the Four Horsemen, we've joked that the Four Horsemen are going to go from the Four Horsemen to the One Gnome on a Mule or something like that but no we're not actually going to do that. We're going to come up with ways to keep the spirits of those encounters the same.

For example with the Four Horsemen what I think was really cool about it was the stacking auras and the need to rotate different groups in and out of those auras and sort of be aware of all four of the enemies at one time so as long as we can keep the spirit of that in the encounter I think we're in good shape. Gothik the Harvester is going to be a challenging fight to rebalance for a different raid composition.

The Kel'thuzad encounter is going to be a little bit challenging and I think the Gluth encounter will also pose some challenges because in smaller raid sizes we can only except so many of each different role whether it be crowd control, tanking, or healing. We're really looking forward to it though, that's the kind of design challenge that we look forward to as designers more than anything else.

Bornakk: What has been the most difficult part in updating a particularly well-liked dungeon like Naxxramas?

Jeff Kaplan: Probably the most difficult part is going to be overcoming peoples' nostalgia for what was cool and what wasn't cool in the dungeon. I think keeping the spirit of the dungeon while not forcing ourselves to do everything exactly the way it was done originally. We want to change as little as possible, we want to keep the dungeon, you know, it's Naxxramas, we want the bosses to be who they were doing the abilities that they were doing.

While we get a lot of credit for Naxxramas being a great dungeon I do think there are things we could have done better, I do think there were some flawed encounters in there that we could actually improve upon. I'll say the Four Horsemen is one of those encounters because I think part of the reason it's such a highly regarded encounter is that so few people actually did it and experienced it, it got placed in its own legendary status without a lot of people having ever tried it knowing what the fight entailed.

Obviously we can do a better job with the Loatheb encounter, we can get the tuning on Grobbulus correct this time, but Naxxramas is going to be an introductory dungeon so we need to make it a lot more accessible to new raiders, so that's going to be a challenge. Where it sat before was the end of regular WoW, the raiding tiers there, so we need to move to the front of the line and be an introductory raid.

Continue to Part 2