World of Warcraft: Cataclysm Community Interview

WoW: Cataclysm Interview

BG: Ok, it’s time for the really specific questions then. First one is; why do the Horde get one more race/class combo and why are there so few Druid races? (Question from Sp4nky)

Greg: <laughs> Well, for the Druids there are a couple of reasons. Firstly, there’s the lore. Traditionally, the lore says that only Night Elves – and only male Night Elves – can become Druids. We already had to tweak the lore to change that, so that the Horde could have a Druid and so that there couple be female Druids too.

Secondly, Druids are technically hard to do! Every time you make one you have to make a new cat form, a new bear form, a new flying form. We’ve added two new ones though, we now have Troll and Worgen Druids, so there’s four now. If it makes sense we’ll add more, but I’m not sure we’ll ever see a Gnome or Goblin Druid. That’d be pretty funny though.

As for the race and class stuff, we just went through the list and asked ourselves what made sense. A Draenei Rogue doesn’t really make sense, for example. Gnome Paladins don’t make sense. Most races got one new class, while Trolls and Dwarves got one or two more.


BG: You said that was drawn out of the lore, which is a huge part of the franchise now –

Dave: There’s some great sites out there, fan-run wikis and so on, which collate all of it in one place too.

BG: I imagine those are important references for you when making the game?

Greg: We actually have an archivist at Blizzard and the job of her team is just to make sure that we don’t screw up by using Dwarf names for Trolls and stuff. Occasionally we get caught out though, like at Blizzcon this year.

BG: Do you think that the lore can be a problem? If it’s so big aren’t you always obsessing over the nitty-gritty?

Greg: Not really, because we will change it if it’s good for gameplay – like with the Night Elves. Our motto is ‘Gameplay first’. We’d never shackle the gameplay to fit the lore.

BG: Ok, what about trading skills? One person wanted to know if you’d thought of revamping them since – quote; ‘many of the trade skills do not produce anything useful until the top tier’. (Question from Kiytan)


Greg: Ha, well we’ve put some changes to that into Cataclysm. As an example, you know sometimes get multiple points for making difficult-to-create items. We’ve made sure that the items you make, particularly blue items, are pretty good and will stick with you for a while. The challenge is to not make these systems mandatory, because the moment you make it so that all cloth-wearers have to be tailors then you’re taking a choice away from the player.

BG: What about the bosses in WoW? It feels like in a lot of games all they do is up the HP and Strength and make the boss a bit bigger. Do you worry that that’s the way WoW is going?

Greg: We spend an immense amount of effort making sure that the boss fights are memorable for players. The one we just did for Wrath of the Lich King? The final boss is the Lich King and you fight him when on this platform and he collapses the edges of that, forcing players to the middle. When you get to the middle he sends out these blasts of ice, so you have to dodge these. Then he summons these Valkyrie-like creatures, called Valkyr, and they try to pick players up and drop them off the platform. At the end of the fight he uses his sword, Frostmourne, to suck the souls out of the players – so they are transported inside the sword and have to escape.

So, yeah, that’s an immensely complicated fight and it took months and months to build and required lots of new technology. I don’t think there’s much danger of our bosses getting dull.