Your place is with our people. Lok'tar Most players may or may not recognize major franchise characters, you know Thrall and Arthas and King Varian. Depending on the faction you’re on you may not have ever interacted with those very popular characters.
But the one thing that unites all players is the land. The world itself is probably the key character. My favorite WoW zone has got to be Nagrand. My favorite zone ever. So many things to kill, twelve of this, eight of that. It’s just like a Warcraft twelve days of Christmas. It’s got to be Karazhan. -Karazhan. Winterspring. Molten Core. -Icecrown Citadel. Australia, where I was filming Superman Returns the time WoW first came out... and we played a lot. I have fond memories of Westfall for sure. Stormwind City Casinoslots New Zealand. I remember walking through those gates. My jaw just fell to the floor. I couldn't believe how big the place was. That moment has stuck with me right through this day. Ironforge. I would always dance on top of the mailbox. Gilneas. -Frozen Throne. Hellfire Peninsula for sure. -Thousand Needles. This canyon of endless red rock reminds me of when I was growing up seeing these majestic rock formations. It’s got to be Azshara. It’s the feeling, the red leaves, they’re just really beautiful to look at. And I’m talking old school Azshara, before Deathwing did what he did. The craziest thing about this franchise is that the world itself is probably the most key character. That’s crazy, right? It’s very, very cool. So the powerful idea with Cataclysm was: What if we imperil the world you know? Chris was: “I wanna break everything”. I remember thinking: “Dude, like, what? Is this the end of Warcraft? Right?" He’s pitching the idea and everyone’s like, got this like: “Really? The game is doing really good. You wanna break it?” And they said: “We want to have this big moment, this big event where the players log out and log back in and the world’s all different.” That was probably the scariest thing I’ve ever heard. We didn’t quite know the extent of our madness. Then we realized: “Holy shit. What are we gonna do? How are we gonna do this?” My team and I sat down and we did forty-eight hours of analysis of our data and tried to figure out if we could make this effect happen. And we came back with a definite maybe. That was one of the more complicated things that we’ve done in the history of WoW. Incredibly complicated from an engineering perspective from a patch delivery perspective. We figured out a way to deliver two versions of the world. You’re standing somewhere in Kalimdor, you log out you log back in and the world was destroyed. Now it’s covered in water and a different place that it used to be but I’ll never forget my first time in there. Players seem to really become so invested in the time they’ve spent what it means to them, their friendships. It's interesting to watch the emotional ways people engage. It’s always that way. All of these expansion sets, all of these games. I think with any product like this both the creators and the players mature and grow together. And you see that in the stories that they like to tell to one another. When he was three years old, I put him on WoW and he played an undead, remember that? -Yeah, I got to level ten or eleven. His favorite part was making the campfire, remember? I don’t remember how to make the campfire We have to go back there. What’s your favorite part, Connor, about playing a warlock? So many demons. -That’s what I need to teach my son. The whole family plays, except for my daughter. We haven’t let her summon demons. We’re waiting on that one. Thanks so much, guys. We might do that tomorrow -Tomorrow! I think with Mists of Pandaria they took a slightly different approach where it wasn’t just about defeating one big bad guy. It was about really exploring a whole new culture. The Asian themes, very different. The story-telling was more philosophical. Why do we fight? For my kind, the true question is: What is worth fighting for? And maybe that reflected the fact that the people who make these games were getting older and more mature. Maybe there’s a more sophisticated storytelling that you engage as a person and player. I was heavy into the martial arts movies China, Japan. My daughter was born so I made an Asian inspired panda. So there’s a little kid there’s me, big fat guy on the hill. People really started enjoying these guys and they ended up becoming a race. And it’s just a Christmas picture to start with. I might have printed it out and gave it to someone they said:” Oh, this would a cool race to do” we’re like: “It seems weird for Warcraft” and they go: “We’ve got April Fool. Let’s make this an April Fool thing”. We put a bit of history added pictures and: “April Fools, the new race in Warcraft 3, the Pandaren.” And everyone’s like: “Oh, that’s so cool! This is gonna be so awesome!” and we’re like: “They actually like it. What do we do now?” Mists of Pandaria, I think shows how much we can continue to drive the visual look of our expansions. What’s really been awesome is seeing what Chris Robinson, the Art Director and what that art team is able to accomplish. And they’re just given the time to craft, you know, art. Everything has to be about the idea, so what we’re trying to support here is: “Don’t focus on finished, don’t focus on rendering perfectly make sure every pixel is in the right place. Focus on this first part and make sure that if the idea is amazing the structure and foundation is amazing we’ll get to the rendering part.” As a Technical Director, it’s a lot of collaboration with the arts team. When we were thinking for actually doing the Pandaren for Mists of Pandaria, they wanted to make a character that is much more alive and need to emote better, which required facial animation technology. We actually had to build kind of custom technology to make sure that the actual face shape can change. With the technology you provide you give artists and designers the tools they can use to bring the world to life. Engine tries to enable creative people to do very creative things. Our bond is iron, our will unbreakable who will stand against us? Every new expansion, we try to push our storyline forward. We try to offer new types of experiences that you never had before. In Warlords of Draenor we’re saying: “You wanted to build a base in the world? You’re interested in Blizzard franchises back twenty years ago.” Now you can have a bit of that in your World of Warcraft also. Wouldn’t it be cool if we went back to Draenor before it was Outland? What if we were able to encounter the warlords that we heard about in Warcraft 1 and 2 and these stories in Warcraft 3 but I’ve never played with in WoW? A thing I love about Warlords of Draenor is that it gives us the chance to kind of go back to a place and an era in the history that no one’s seen. And what comes with that is, all the super nerdy layerings of like: “You’re gonna break the timeline. We can’t go back. It’s like Marty and Doc and the time machine. We’re gonna break it all. What about the space-time continuity?” We had to think through all the fiction and all the consequences of what happens if we screw it all up. So today we open up our first raid bosses for testing on the beta servers. One thing that I think is a hallmark of World of Warcraft betas is that players are getting a chance to be invited into the creative process and to see things not finished. Well, Midwinter has ten people here so, that’s enough to test. For something like we’re doing right now, where we have the new Warlords of Draenor it’s a closed beta test, where we send out waves of invites. The two designers here today are Jason, who made the Butcher fight in Highmaul and Candace, who worked on Gruul in Blackrock Foundry. Are we expecting this, in terms of their positioning? The first step is putting RaidBot soft for testing. We also open a thread, for feedback. It’s just too much for three, I think. We often err on the side of making things a bit harder because when something is tuned to be more difficult than we want it to we can then see how far people make it. If something is too easy, they just go on and win and we don’t know how much harder we need to make it to actually get it to the right place. Remind me what that mechanic is... I though you want your ranged to soak it because your melees are usually soaking this other thing that has the stack...
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