The dark portal has opened! Yes, if you've missed the news - if you did miss it, we can only imagine you've just returned from another solar system - Blizzard's hotly anticipated World of Warcraft expansion The Burning Crusade has released.
The add-on includes new races, new zones, a trip through WarCraft past in the Caverns of Time, new high level content, a raise in the level cap to 70, new tradeskill Jewelcrafting - phewee. For the game's millions of fans, it's a serious pack of WoW goodness.
On the eve of The Burning Crusade's release, we spoke with WoW game designer Jon LeCraft and Blizzard vice president of business development Itzik Ben Bassat about the expansion, what the future holds for massively successful MMORPG and Blizzard's plans outside the world of Warcraft.
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How disappointed were you that the expansion didn't make Christmas 2006?
Itzik Ben Bassat: I think we have experience with that (laughs). We were not disappointed. We know that as a company... It's in our philosophy not to compromise on quality, and we knew we needed another month and a half in order to make it a really good game, a Blizzard-quality game.
While I understand other companies might compromise and say 'Well we need to make it for Christmas', we think it doesn't matter when we're going to release our game. If it's going to be good it's going to sell.
World of Warcraft's been massively successful. How difficult has it been coming up with content that tops what you've already done with the game?
Itzik Ben Bassat: We do things from passion. We have this large list of features that we want to get into World of Warcraft, and we pick the features we can get into one expansion.
It's not like looking for features that will get into the expansion, it's deciding which features will not get to this expansion... we'll get to them in the next one. As long as we have stories to tell, and we feel we can create great entertainment, we'll do it.
One of the things that surprised us was that there aren't any new classes in the expansion. Are they something you're looking to add to the game?
Jon LeCraft: It's something we'll eventually do. I can't say when but... you know, we did add the paladins to the Horde side and the shaman to the Alliance side.
We're not trying to pass that off as a new class but it did add some new dynamics to each side. We thought that was pretty cool. But really it's about the new races and the new zones.
Itzik Ben Bassat: But it is in the list of features and it's a question of when we're going to decide to do it.
Jon LeCraft: Oh yeah, that's definitely in our big list.
Any idea when they're going to be added?
Jon LeCraft: Um, in the future probably. (Everybody laughs).
How long will it take the real hardcore players to beat everything that's in the new high-level area?
Itzik Ben Bassat: We didn't build the game from scratch to be a grinding levelling-up game. For us it was more about what experiences do we give to players after they get to level 60.
We think we've opened a whole new world for people when they get to level 60. It's not part of our core design to level-up people and to have that as the main feature of the game.
The second thing is that you can play this game with one character and then play this game with a different character. Your experiences will be different because each time you do it with a different group of people.
Yes, the quests are all the same, but the quests are also defined by the people that play them and the experiences are being defined by the people that play them. You can do Molten Core five times and every time it will be a different experience.
The original game's very good in that you can drop in for an hour and drop out again or play for ages. Have you taken this design route with TBC, particularly with the high-level content?
Jon LeCraft: Absolutely. That's a core design philosophy of Blizzard. We wouldn't ever step away from that. In fact we've embraced it a bit more because we've gone with more of the winged dungeons, so you'll do this wing and complete everything there is to do - you know, it's a third of a dungeon, or a fourth or whatever. Very accessible.
What's going to happen to patch updates once Burning Crusade is out? Are you going to take an extended breather, or continue as you have been doing with those?
Jon LeCraft: We're already working on the next patch. We're going to be releasing content for The Burning Crusade and for the rest of the game too, more global stuff.
Can you say what's in the next content update?
Jon LeCraft: No, I can't. Not if I want to keep my job.
Towards the end of last year there was talk from Blizzard about releasing a WoW expansion every year. Is that still the plan?
Itzik Ben Bassat: Absolutely. This one took us a bit longer because we had to stabilise a lot of things. World of Warcraft is a massive game. The infrastructure and operation behind World of Warcraft is enormous, so it took us time to get back into the groove and release the first expansion.
But we think we definitely put ourselves in the situation where we're going to put a goal to ourselves to release an expansion every year.
If you asked me to commit to you that the next expansion will come next January, I probably won't do it.
What about the Caverns of Time. What percentage of the expansion does that constitute?
Jon LeCraft: I don't know what percentage. Actually that's unfortunately one of the aspects of the game that I'm not super familiar with. I know part of it you go back to Durnholde when it's still intact, and you have to rescue Thrall. And then of course there's another part with Mount Hyjal. But I'm not sure of the total scope of that. I know they're very detailed, very...
Itzik Ben Bassat: Challenging.
Jon LeCraft: Challenging events, yeah.
At what level can players access the Caverns of Time?
Jon LeCraft: I want to say 67.
There's a number of big MMORPGs releasing this year - such as Lord of the Rings Online. Are you looking at ways to 'protect' World of Warcraft from those competitors?
Itzik Ben Bassat: I think as a company we position ourselves as a unique experience, a unique offering. So what we're focussing on is continuing to provide great entertainment to users.
If our players think they can get better entertainment in some other place, then that's fine but we hope we'll be able to meet our expectations and continue providing them the best experience and the best entertainment experience so they'll stay.
Has World of Warcraft's success encouraged Blizzard to expand it's MMORPG portfolio?
Itzik Ben Bassat: We're an online game company, we've been an online company since the mid-90s - it's not something new to us since we launched Battle.net - and MMORPG is one section of online gaming.
In addition to that, if you look at the history of our company, you'll see that we launched Battle.net in the mid-90s because it was meant to give us a solution for narrowband users, an exciting entertainment experience to narrowband users.
World of Warcraft came to give an exciting experience to broadband users, but since then broadband became huge. There are so many opportunities and possibilities that we see in online gaming and that's what we're going to focus on - how do we take Battle.net, and convert that from the great narrowband experience to an absolutely unbelievable broadband experience that it will be?
So that's something you're looking to incorporate into your next project?
Itzik Ben Bassat: Absolutely.
Last year it was mentioned you guys has a big announcement to make this year...?
Itzik Ben Bassat: We'll make an announcement when we're ready to make announcements. But the main thing to remember is that we have two other franchises, Diablo and StarCraft, and there's a lot of people at Blizzard who really like these franchises and are very passionate about them.
As long as we're passionate about a certain franchise, we will not desert it, we will continue developing that. It's been a while since we released the last Diablo game and even more since the last StarCraft game.
StarCraft is my favourite Blizzard game - I really hope it wouldn't go a decade from the time that we released StarCraft until we see the next one.
So you're saying that's something we might see announced this year?
Itzik Ben Bassat: I say that when we have something to announce we're going to announce it, but as a player I hope that it'll be as soon as possible.
Is class-balancing in WoW still an ongoing issue?
Jon LeCraft: Oh yeah. Absolutely. We don't have a lot of issues with it right now but it's always something we always keep our eye on. It's very important to keep those classes where they're supposed to be - in DPS and survivability and all that.
Our internal benchmarks we try to keep track of... But there's a lot of intangibles, you know. It's not always pen and paper balance. We just have to watch people play and play ourselves sometimes to get to the point we want to get to.
Do you see that getting to a stage where they're perfectly balanced and you don't have to fiddle with those any more?
Jon LeCraft: We can add new content then, all of a sudden, 'Oh this one class ability makes this trivial'. Or you have to have this class or whatever, or a new type of Battleground. For example, when we added Warsong Gulch it was 'Oh look Druids are really powerful in this area' and they weren't really looked at as a powerful class outside that Battleground.
Is Battlegrounds something you're looking to build on or add to in the future?
Jon LeCraft: Yeah, as we come up with new, innovative, cool designs for other Battlegrounds we'll try to add them. Right now we've got a good set of different ones. We won't necessarily add another Battleground with a different map that's the same gameplay.
As a game designer, do you see the PC as being the only platform where you can play MMORPGs, or do you think they're viable on console?
Itzik Ben Bassat: I think we see a few things happening. We see online becoming more and more predominant, and we're lucky to be in the situation where we've been doing online games since the mid-90s and have the experience and the leadership in this market, and our goal there is maintain our leadership. We see consoles becoming more and more like PCs - Xbox 360 is a sophisticated computer.
The third trend that we see is that your PC is becoming your entertainment hub, so you play music from your computer, you play movies from your computer, you watch TV from your computer - and therefore it becomes a more natural selection for you as an entertainment device and device to play games on.
So a) I think the PC market is going to continue growing - for Blizzard it never stopped growing - and the online market is going to continue growing. So those are two areas that we're going to focus on. If there would be a console opportunity combined into that, if online will develop enough on console and it will be connected easily enough to PC, then there is definitely an opportunity there.
