Warcraft's Lead Encounter Designer talks Mists of Pandaria, 5.4 and more.

Qelric: I've been playing WoW since The Burning Crusade, and one aspect of the game that has always been at the heart of my enjoyment has been group content, from 5mans, to raids, to group quests. While scenarios originally sounded to me like an exciting new feature, in reality they replaced LFD at max level. Would you agree with this statement, and do you think scenarios have achieved what you hoped they would? 

Ion Hazzikostas: I think 2 separate parts to that question. 

I think that in many ways scenarios have achieved what we hoped that they would, particularly once we've advanced it to the heroic form of the scenario, where there really is a lot more co-operation, and the mechanics are a bit more meaningful, and we're very happy to see how players have embraced heroic scenarios just by the requirement to have a premade group of friends when you go in. The point of scenarios was to have role agnostic type of game play that meant essentially instant queues, since you don't have to worry about needing to have the right mix of tank, DPS, healer; you can just drop in, experience a piece of the story. The feel of combat in scenarios is inherently very different because you don't have the so called holy trinity. There’s no tank holding all the things in place necessarily, suddenly you do have to use some of your CC abilities, or as a warlock you Death Coil this thing off you that’s hitting you and so on, which you would never do in a dungeon. So we're pleased with that. 

I wouldn't say there was any sort of conscious effort or attempt on our side to replace dungeons with scenarios. I think it’s more that we're trying to figure out (still), and continuing to discuss what the right place for dungeons in the non-level up context in a post expansion patch cycle is. We had a number of them in Cataclysm and, while they were definitely well received by the players, they also had a lot of very significant downsides. First and foremost, when we introduced a couple of new dungeons the expectation was they were going to award better items than previous ones did. If we had released Zul’Aman and Zul’Gurub, but they still gave the same item level 333 stuff that Cataclysm heroics did at launch that wouldn't have been exciting to players. Players would've wondered what’s even the point? But then the second we made them award a higher item level that actually completely replaced all the launch dungeons, and so players in patches 4.1 and 4.2 found themselves just repeatedly running two troll dungeons over and over again, to the point that no matter how much fun they were in the first place, once you’ve done them 25 times in a row you’re sick of them. 

And yet that was the right way to play the game if you wanted to make your character powerful. So….not super thrilled with how that worked out, plus there’s the reality that those dungeons have the advantage of being largely updated, reused environments from Zul’Aman and Zul’Gurub raids earlier in the game. Or as the new Dragon Soul dungeons in 4.3, again excellent dungeons, but the reality is they directly competed with the Dragon Soul raid for resources that, you know, a fair criticism that many players had on the Dragon Soul raid is that there weren’t any new environments other than Deathwing's back. Other than that, you were fighting through pretty much places you'd seen before. The same artists, the same resources, that would go into making those new environments went into making things like Azshara’s Palace and the Well of Eternity dungeon, which was awesome in its own right, but again we're trying to strike a balance so….I realise this isn't the satisfactory answer for many players who really love dungeon content—and so do we—some of the core content, at the heart of the MMO genre and the game play that really drew most of us into the game from the start, but, we're also excited to be able to offer diverse environments as we've seen in places like Throne of Thunder and Siege of Orgrimmar. Moving forward into the future we are committed to continuing to making awesome dungeons, we are excited about dungeons—they're not going anywhere. We just want to find and strike a better balance. And our hope is we can find a way to make dungeons work as not just a release thing, but also as part of the patch cycle.

Qelric: In a recent interview it was suggested by you that removing the cap on dailies made them feel mandatory, but I also think it's important to consider just how many players will do content they don't particularly enjoy just because it's the fastest way to progress their characters. How will the current daily model change moving forward in to the next expansion? 

Ion Hazzikostas: I think we have a lot of thoughts there. Certainly we're well aware that many players who want to min/max, particularly those who are in any sort of competitive environment, whether they’re part of a guild that has social pressures, or they just personally themselves, the way they enjoy to play the game is to do whatever they can to make their character as powerful as possible, we recognise that those players will do pretty much anything we put out in front of them that’s going to lead to more power, even if it’s not particularly pleasant. I think the past history of people with 200 troll discoveries trying to make a Zin’rokh in archaeology last expansion, was another lesson in that regard. And so I think we needed to be careful and some of the comments in the WoW Insider interview with regard to raising the daily cap, it changed and shifted the expectation for what the most you could do was. Suddenly the player in October 2012, who wanted to optimize their character, felt like the right thing to do was to log on and do Golden Lotus dailies, then do Klaxxi dailies, then do Shado-Pan dailies, then do August Celestials dailies, and that’s a pretty hefty chunk of time. I think, in retrospect I think there are different systems that we could have gone with. Such as imagine in Vale of Eternal Blossoms you would’ve picked a single faction to work on for that day, and once you picked the initial branch, you either Shado Pan or Golden Lotus, or whatever else, then you could proceed with that faction’s dailies for the day, but you are making some choice that kind of more organically limited it, than just the arbitrary cap of 20 or 25 or whatever number we chose. But I think you saw some of that in the Molten Front actually back in 4.2, where at the start you could chose to help one camp or the other and, once you made that choice, that dictated what the rest of the quests that were going to be available to you that day were.

Qelric: I have a question for you regarding a quote that came out of a Gamescom interview: 

"Adding Pandaren was more controversial that expected, but players that actually played the expansion really liked it and felt it really had a soul." 

How did Blizzard reach this conclusion? 

Ion Hazzikostas: That quote isn’t from me personally, but I think in general the Pandaren race is one that was very well known to people who followed the Warcraft franchise for 10 years all the way back to Warcraft 3, and remembered them from there. For people who came to the genre, and who came to the franchise in the past few years just before the World of Warcraft it seemed like it was kind of left field, they thought of World of Warcraft as this world of humans and orcs and tauren and goblin and trolls, and then suddenly there are these Pandaren—and where does this fit in? What’s up with the Asian theme? I think there are a lot of understandable questions, but the feedback we've been getting back consistently from our players, both subjective and objective, in terms of data we have in how the players are enjoying the content, is that they’re actually very engaged. And once they actually get into the story and see what it's all about, it something they generally tended to embrace. We understand there are some people who are still waiting on the side lines, shaking their heads at his whole panda bear thing trying to figure out where it all fits together, but frankly I think they’re missing out on pretty cool story and some pretty cool content. 

Qelric: Some questions now that were submitted by my audience, the first being: "Are there any ideas you wished you'd put in to the game but got scrapped? If so, which one do you regret not implementing the most?" 

Ion Hazzikostas: Honestly, that’s one of those things where it's very hard just to pick one; it’s very hard to pick any specific thing at all really. I think that all of these things…..there are very few ideas we thought were good I would say there are no ideas were good that were scrapped, in the sense of they’re not happening. I think the reality of working on a live game with regular content releases, there's constant prioritization, and if we tried to put everything that we wanted to put into a specific patch, it would be pushed back and delayed forever. So at some point we have to say “okay, we're going to take what we have now, give it to players so they can enjoy it and have fun with it, and these other things we're going to keep working on for a later date”. So I think one thing I can hint at, is that we've talked about in the past, as players have seen particularly those who have tested on PTR, we have increasing ability to scale players and their gear and their abilities, we scale players item level down to challenge modes on live, we scale their abilities down to test a specific normalised level, that’s certainly a thing that can be applied to older content, or making more use of the rich array of content that we have in WoW, we're just not 100 per cent there yet. But it's something that we still talk about and are working through.

Qelric: I've seen the discussions on the WoW forums regarding players wanting to be able to go back and re-run old school raids and to have them scaled. Not sure what I think of that, although I do miss the older raids. 

Ion Hazzikostas: I think one of the important things there, is that I don’t think anyone seriously wants to go back and do Serpentshrine Cavern scaled down as part of your core progression. Its old content people do for transmog runs, but I still think there are other things that could be done with that content. I think a lot of that is nostalgia; it is old when people have already done it. It may be a novelty to do it once or twice, but I don’t think any version of this system involves us taking old content and saying “ok for the next month and a half you’re going to spend time learning Black Temple again and trying to beat Illidan for some reward that’s going to be relevant at max level. That’s not the direction we would take. But there is still a lot of cool stuff we could do with that content; because a lot of it, maybe players never got to experience it at the intended level. While it may be fun to duo your way through tempest keep or black temple for transmog gear, there’s something to be said for being able to experience some of those encounters in more of their intended setting. 

Qelric: Next question: "When it comes to designing a new dungeon, why don't we see any more large dungeon-crawl style dungeons on the scale of Blackrock Depths, Blackrock Spire, or Maraudon anymore? Is it because they are too long for the streamlined, casual experience, or is it just more of a challenge to design something with that many bosses in one area now?" 

Ion Hazzikostas: I think it's a little bit of a leading question, in terms of the streamlined casual experience, but I think part of it is honestly yes, they are a little bit too long for our target for dungeons these days. There’s an expectation I think, that when you sit down at a dungeon, this may be a 30 minute experience. A scenario is probably closer to 15 minutes; an LFR wing 45-60, a raid is probably a couple of hours. We try to fit content into all those different buckets for different types of players and different amounts of available time. We certainly could take a larger dungeon and carve it up into multiple wings, the way we deal with our raids and looking for raid. The existence of raid finder doesn’t stop us from creating a 14 boss raid zone like the Siege of Orgrimmar; we just carve it up appropriately. It’s certainly something we could do, but I think what we tended to do more recently, was break the dungeon into wings. If you look into something like the Dragon Soul 5 player dungeons, theoretically that’s all one continuous story arc, it could’ve been one zone but there is no functional difference from breaking it up into wings. Kind of like Dire Maul all the way back in vanilla, was dire maul north, east, west, that’s how you experienced it whereas Black Rock Depths just kind of put that all together, but it still had separate sections, so it’s just a question of really almost the semantics of how it can construct it. We still want to deliver on epic experiences regardless of how you slice it. I think one of the things that we do want to do is to bring back some more non-linear payouts particularly to our raids, but also more dungeons. There’s certainly a tendency for some of our layouts to feel like it’s a bit of a s*** line with twists and turns but there is something attractive about feeling like your exploring a more organic place.

Qelric: Something I miss with regard to raiding is the old Icecrown Citadel-type layout, where raiding guilds would have a choice to head to a different boss if they get stuck. Any plans to bring that type of raid layout back? 

Ion Hazzikostas: Yes. Absolutely. You see a tiny, tiny, tiny bit of it in the 3rd section of the Siege of Orgrimmar raid. Once you’re in Garrosh’s compound, there’s actually a large intersection and you can go left to face Siegecrafter Blackfuse, or right to fight Spoils of Pandaria, and the Thok the Bloodthirsty encounter, and once you've defeated all 3 you can continue on to the Klaxxi and Garrosh. But that’s only a small proportion of the raid. We would definitely like to bring back some more older Icecrown style layout. Some of it though is a also a factor or function of what we're trying to do with the raid, and with the Siege of Orgrimmar the story arc in terms of the covering ground from the Vale to the outside of the Orgrimmar, to the interior of Orgrimmar, it lends itself to a more linear progression, which is why we ended up with that I mean you’re always driving forward toward Garrosh’s sanctum, the essence of a siege is you have to breach the walls before you can go inside, it’s hard to imagine letting you do that out of order. So we'd possibly like to do it more, but we can't guarantee it's going to be that way. 

Qelric: "Instances/Scenarios are designed to be smaller and quicker now to keep players interested, but can get repetitive quickly. With the recent comments about the reduction of daily quests in the next expansion, what do you expect players to do if they log on daily?" 

Ion Hazzikostas: I think a wide variety of things. I think that’s part of our drive with Mists of Pandaria that we’re going to continue into the future, is to have more diverse content than ever. And whether you want to do PvP, whether you do scenario’s, dungeons, raid finder, flexible raid, play with guild, do daily quests, outdoor content in the style and manner of Timeless Isle, all of those things should be available options. And depending on where you are in terms of your overall progression curve, there should be multiple sources of upgrades for your character and things that you feel you could do to advance, or you may just want to engage in entirely separate activities like playing the auction house, doing pet battles or whatever else.

Qelric: "If Blizzard is looking to support micro-transactions, would it consider paying to level? I already have several characters at lvl 90...could I boost an alt to 90 with cash, or even in-game gold?" 

Ion Hazzikostas: I think right now what we're doing with the blizzard store is mostly being able to offer a convenient interface in the game client, in 5.3 we introduced some limited web browser functionality into the game which we realised was a way to get some of this stuff into the game instead of having to alt-tab and go to battle net if you want to buy a pet or a mount, or something along those lines. We are experimenting with some other types of items for other markets so nothing specific to announce on that front at the time, but it’s certainly an interesting idea.

Special thanks go out to Ion Hazzikostas for allowing me to bombard him with questions, and also to ThrendenJenkins for transcribing the interview.  

You can listen to the entire interview here. 

Penny for your thoughts, 

Qelric.

Follow me on Twitter: @QelricDK