Blizzard interviews itself on Sunwell, Wrath
Published by adminon August 4, 2008in Uncategorized. Closed
“In a piece called “”Fury of the Sunwell and Beyond: an Insider Interview”" (were they thinking of us when they named that. ), Blizzard Europe sat down with J. Allen Brack, WoW lead producer, as well as art director Chris Robinson. They talked about the recent patch 2.4, as well as a bit about my favorite topic, the upcoming expansion Wrath of the Lich King. As usual in these interviews, there isn’t a ton of solid, new information, but it’s still a good read. Here are the parts I found the most interesting: Sunwell Plateau is the evolution of what Naxxramas was for the original game. They learned some lessons from Naxx; for instance, Naxx was just too big for many guilds to be able to get through it before The Burning Crusade hit. Northrend will have “”a very Nordic, gothic fantasy feel”" — sounds cool! To set the scene, players will be rewarded with “”Northrendy”" items early in Wrath: “”for example, say, a two-handed axe that’s made of a dragon jaw, covered with spikes, leather, and other traditional materials. We want players to see the new gear and think, ‘Yeah, that guy’s been to Northrend.’”"

　　　　 I want my dragon jaw axe now please. Er…you can make that with +heal, right. And give priests axe skill. As the player treks through the zones of Northrend, the landscape bleaker and players get more spread out, escaping the hyper-population of the starting zones. Blizzard wants to invoke a “”growing sense of isolation and dread”" as players get closer to Arthas. The two starting zones are at opposite tips of crescent-shaped Northrend. They wanted to give us an easy way to travel between them, so we get boats. But not just any boats — turtle boats! Brack talks about “”a giant turtle with a deck mounted on top of its shell.”" Best form of transportation since Captain Placeholder, if you ask me.” “It’s an odd feeling walking into Blizzard’s studio to see new World of Warcraft content.

　　 or special badges from same, to get the T9-equivalent badge gear, it would be completely inaccessible to players on the lower rungs of raiding, no matter how long they kept at it. BitterCupOJoe and darian, in comments on the Blizzcast post, neatly addressed this issue through a simple mechanism: exchange rates. Let’s say there are four types of badges; we’ll call them A, B, C, and D for simplicity. We know (from this same Blizzcast interview) that they want the 10-man and the 25-man versions of the same raids to be separated by about a tier in terms of item quality. wow gold Therefore, it would make sense if: Naxxramas, the tier 7 raid, drops A-Badges on 10-man and B-Badges on 25-man. Ulduar, the t8 raid, drops B-Badges on 10-man and C-Badges on 25-man. Whatever the t9 raid turns out to be drops C-Badges on 10-man and D-Badges on 25-man. mp3 player And so on, if they add more raids. Then, you just allow players to exchange badges up at a rate of two-to-one: two As get you a B, and so forth. This allows Blizzard to make it clear that certain gear is “”meant for”" certain levels of play, and to make it easier to get the appropriate gear at the appropriate levels, while still making it possible for the dedicated t7 raider to get top-quality gear eventually. Now you may be asking at this point: if you can easily exchange badges, why bother having multiple kinds. Instead of one D-Badge, just give players eight A-Badges. wow gold There are two problems with this. First, the number of badges could quickly become intimidatingly large; 150 BoJs for a weapon already is in my opinion.