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On Monday, to celebrate the 5-year anniversary of World of Warcraft, we had a chance to interview both Greg Street and Cory Stockton about how the game and its development has progressed throughout the years.
Many of you will no doubt recognize Greg Street as Ghostcrawler on the forums, but you may not know who Cory Stockton is, so hopefully this interview is a good introduction for him to players and how involved in the game's development he is. It doesn't hurt that he created one of my all-time favorite encounters either!
Kody: First of all, could you please introduce yourselves to our readers and what your role is on the World of Warcraft development team?
Cory Stockton: My name is Cory Stockton and I'm the Lead Content Designer on WoW, so I basically oversee the design and implementation of the zones, the dungeons, the cities, battlegrounds. Any kind of content that makes it in.
Greg Street: I'm Greg Street, I'm the Lead Systems Designer on WoW. My team oversees anything, pretty much with numbers in the game, so class designers, tradeskills, we also own the user interface, things like that.
Kody: Obviously not everyone has been on the team since the beginning. At what point in the development process did you two join?
CS: I joined the WoW team right about three months after WoW shipped. When I came in, the first thing I started working on was Blackwing Lair. The Vaelastrasz encounter, the gate door... all of that was happening when I came in.
GS: I think just after Black Temple shipped, but before Sunwell.
Kody: Cory, from a level design perspective what's your favorite area in World of Warcraft, dungeon or otherwise, and why?
CS: Oh wow, that's pretty good. Um, let's see... as far as dungeons go, to this day my favorite dungeon is Stratholme. And I think it's, the layout of that dungeon is great... it's got a front entrance, a back entrance. It's got the bastion so you're inside, outside areas where you're out on the streets. Wide variety of bosses, and beyond that it's just got an awesome story that fits in well with the universe. It's one of those dungeons I never really minded running over and over because it felt really great.
From a zone perspective it's really hard to choose a single favorite zone that I like. I'm pretty partial to the undead; I like a lot of the undead zones. Tirisfal Glades is one of my favorite starting zones in the game because it gives you an awesome sense of feeling about what it is, how the Forsaken came to be, what's happening. We really display it well there. It's definitely one of my favorite zones.
Kody: Greg, feel free to answer as well if you want to.
GS: Oh gosh, it's hard to... I was trying to think as Cory went through. There's so many. Upper Blackrock Spire always had a soft spot in my heart. Feels like a raid, plays like a dungeon, some really cool fights in there. Zone-wise, I always liked Zangarmarsh in Burning Crusade because it felt like it was a really well contained story.
In classic I guess, probably, the Plaguelands. Possibly something like Searing Gorge because I always liked having Blackrock Mountain hanging over the top there. Lich King, probably Storm Peaks which is such a really vertical zone with tons of story and lore, and just a lot of cool points of interest.
Kody: What would you say has been the greatest design challenge for each of your teams since you joined?
CS: Probably the biggest thing is trying to create enough variety of content that pleases everyone. I think that's probably the biggest thing because we're always looking to make sure that we've got raids for our high end players, you know, our capped players but we also want to make sure that we try to introduce something for people that maybe aren't raiding, like five mans.
And at the same point, when we look at the expansions we want to have something for new players as well. We want to have a new race that gets them going, or a reason to re-roll. That's the thing we're always challenged with, is how can we come up with enough things in one patch where we can have something for everyone. That's definitely always our goal, we don't necessarily hit it, but it's something we're always striving for is to try to deliver content for all the players. Definitely the thing we struggle with the most I would say.
Kody: Greg how about you? What about class design, or item design, or what have you.
GS: I think a similar answer is, we keep wanting to add new things to the game without it becoming too overwhelming. I mean we're looking now at Cataclysm, and thinking about... we want to add new spells to all the classes, but all the classes have a lot of spells already and they don't have a lot of free space on the action bar. So we think about, how do we keep adding new stuff to the game without overwhelming people, and kind of carving off a niche for each individual ability so we don't have a lot of like... oh, this is the ability that the class never uses.
Kody: I think you did a good job with that with the death knight talents, where certain abilities would replace your base abilities.
GS: Yeah that's not a bad way to go. We initially tried to avoid it, but the more I think about it, it kind of helps make an ability cooler without having another ability on your bar. It's kind of the same thing with the cat druid getting mangle instead of claw and things like that.
Kody: What are you most proud of seeing added to the game, or changed, since you joined the team?
CS: I would think that the biggest thing has been 10 man raiding. The changing from 40, to 25, and going all the way down to 10. As far as having a changing impact on the game overall, it's pretty huge about... it really reached the goal of that, which was to allow everyone to experience raid content in the game. That's a goal we've had for a long time, and we just finally started to see it come to fruition a lot more in Northrend. We saw a little bit of it in Burning Crusade, but in Northrend it's starting to happen, and we're really pushing for a ton of it in Cataclysm.
And it's huge for us, because we spend a ton of time on the raid zones and evolving the stories and doing, you know, custom events and stuff. And that's content that everyone should be able to see, so it feels great seeing that a lot more people are able to hit that content.
Kody: If you could name one feature or change made since you joined the team that you never expected to be done, what would you say it is?
GS: Looking for group is a big one, equipment manager, and dual spec. I thought all three of those were a real uphill battle, and they ended up working out really well.
CS: Yeah, dual spec was one that I had wanted forever. And we always talked about it, and we always questioned how we would do it. I think another thing that came through is the mount changes that recently went through. Finally getting mounts down to level 20, you know when you think about what a mount used to mean to the game, how big it was, how expensive, and then you didn't get your first one until 40.
Getting that change through was actually a pretty huge deal... it seems really easy to get into the game, we just like changed a number. But there's actually a ton of design behind that about when the carrots show up, and getting a mount is one of our biggest carrots to the players. So I think that change was definitely huge.
Kody: Going through Stranglethorn on a mount is definitely better than on foot.
CS: Ohh yeah. I mean you look back and wonder, how did I do this before a mount?
GS: Or the Barrens.
CS: Yeah, Barrens especially. Now people are going to be used to it, and people will be like "Oh, well I was oldschool and did this on foot."
Kody: If there's one thing you'd like to go back and change before it could be implemented, what would it be?
GS: This is not necessarily a decision I made, but if we could do it all over again I think we would structure the talent trees a little differently. So like, maybe you would actually have to get 5 points in one tier before you could advance to the second one. They're designed to be so flexible that it's really easy for players to pick and choose, at the expense of where they can just skip over a talent that's not appealing and kind of tier through the best DPS talents in the tree. Part of the changes with Cataclysm should get at that a little bit.
CS: I think one of the changes I would do, and we're not doing anymore, is never make one single entrance zone for an expansion. The lessons we learned from Hellfire were many. As great an experience as it was, from a technical standpoint having that many players hit that zone at one time did not equal the experience that we were hoping. *laughter* Splitting that out with Northrend we thought worked extremely well, and it's what we're doing again with Cataclysm. So there were definitely a lot of lessons learned there.
Kody: Greg, what is it like interacting with so many players on a daily basis, all of whom seem to have their own opinions on the direction of the game? Is that taxing at all on you to go so in-depth into the philosophies of WoW's development?
GS: It's only taxing when I get into like Q&A mode because I feel like... things might be taken out of context or people misunderstand. Therefore something I could ideally write in three to five minutes takes a lot longer because you look at this word and see how they might possibly misinterpret that. I don't mind at all interacting with people, it's awesome to get so many passionate guys out there. You know... they love the game, they want to see it improved, they get confused over things and have questions. All that is awesome.
Kody: Looking back at the evolution of the hybrid classes, how happy are you with where they are now, given recent changes to discourage multi-role playstyles in a given spec? Do you think it's about time to get rid of the hybrid classification entirely?
GS: I'm not sure. I think there's different ways you can design it from the ground up. We really don't see a way that makes sense, to say make mages able to heal or rogues able to tank. Given that, we have some classes that can only do one thing and so they feel like they should be able to do it really well, or why have those classes exist at all?
I think people are pretty happy with the way it is overall, we're certainly thrilled that we've been able to kind of bring to life some of those specs that were not taken seriously for a long time. We're not there yet, but we're a lot closer than we have been previously, and we're trying to get a good direction. I'd love to see in Cataclysm where there's like 30 specs and you can pretty much pick any one you want.
Kody: WoW's anniversary as a whole isn't the only thing this month; Friday (November 13th) marked a year since Wrath of the Lich King's launch. What are you most happy with in the expansion, and what do you feel could be improved upon?
GS: Let's see, improved upon... I don't think our badge system, in the end, really worked out as well as we wanted it to. It became kind of complicated with all the costs and like, upgrading and downgrading kind of thing. Another problem I think is the health pools are a little low across the board, which has created some problems with the relative power of damage versus healing and things like that. If I could go back I'd love to see health larger overall.
As far as stuff that worked out well, heroic dungeons are back which is really cool. They were kind of skipped over on the way to Naxxramas but now people are really running them again for badges. That's really cool. And like Cory said earlier, even fairly casual players feel comfortable raiding and talking about Kel'thuzad and Yogg. Things like that are really cool and they feel like they're part of the story.
CS: Things that I liked that turned out really well, the whole concept behind Dalaran... something I was intricately close with and connected with... Dalaran was kind of my baby the whole time, and we really learned a lot from the Exodar and Silvermoon in Burning Crusade. We really thought that we needed a new capitol city and we pushed it, but it turned out in the long run that they didn't work out anywhere near what we'd hoped. So we kind of put all our efforts into one central place where everyone could do everything and really feel like a thriving spot. So I think that was a huge success.
Another thing we've really worked a lot on, and you've seen the changes over the entire year has been Wintergrasp. Wintergrasp was a crazy expedition into designing a pvp zone that's non-instanced, and at the time the popularity of Wintergrasp. Obviously the rewards there are great for players, the pvp is there, there's a lot of things we've changed and we feel like we've improved upon. We're planning to do a lot more with that concept in Cataclysm with Tol Barad, the next kind of evolution of that. But that's something that I think Wintergrasp overall has been a success with players, that they really liked it. Seeing that work is something that definitely feels good.
As far as things that didn't work, I think that the biggest thing for us was having kind of two endgame zones, having two level 80 zones. From a story perspective it was awesome... Icecrown had some of the best questing in the game, but sadly not enough players make it there because they hit 80 before they started doing it and went straight into Naxx. So that's something we've learned from also that we want to move forward with knowing that when we build a zone and spend all that time, we want to make sure it ends up being in the level flow so that players go and get a chance to experience that content. There's too much good stuff in Icecrown for players to miss it. So there's definitely some lessons to be learned there.
Kody: Yeah I agree, the whole Arthas quest chain where you actually play as him is awesome.
CS: Yeah, some of the best phasing in the game is done there in Icecrown.
GS: The whole Shadow Vault, stuff like that.
Kody: Content gating has evolved quite a bit over the years, from the early attunements for Molten Core and Blackwing Lair to the more involved Black Temple version, and finally the Sunwell Plateau and Crusaders' Coliseum systems. What were the advantages of these systems, and which would you say worked best?
GS: In terms of what we're talking about for Cataclysm, since we're doing it over again we'll get a chance to, I think players got into Naxx a little too quickly... it let them skip over a couple of tiers of dungeons and kind of set the expectation that every time you go to a raid zone you're gonna get these gigantic upgrades.
We would like to see players ultimately spend a little more time in dungeons, I don't think that means going all the way to a Karazhan style attunement. You could do something a lot simpler and you'll see a little of that in Icecrown, kind of related to what we did with the coliseum.
While this is the end of the article, it's not the end of the interview! Stay tuned later this week for a walkthrough of the creation of a raid instance like Ulduar by Cory Stockton!
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