Episode 1

Samwise: I saw an ad in, it was either like the Orange County Register or the Penny Saver, something like that that was saying, it was a little tiny ad -- two sentences -- you know: “Make Art For Video Games.” And, at the time, I had the glorious job of being head usher at a movie theater.

Samwise: And, I’m like “You know what? I could stop drawing on all the bathroom log sheets and the time sheets at the movie theater and I could actually draw art for video games.” I’m like, “Well, it’s in kind of a cheesy little paper; it’s probably not going to be anything really cool.”

And, so I went there and, I showed up and the first person I see is Frank Pearce, who’s actually kind of the receptionist by default because his desk was right by the door and I walk in and he’s kinda, he’s got a gruff voice and he’s like “Can I help you?” and I’m like “Yeah, I’m here to see Allen Adham.” And he’s like “He’s busy. Do you want to see Mike?” and I’m like “Uh, sure.” And so that’s when I met Mike Morhaime and my portfolio basically consisted of a couple of sketchbooks and then a bunch of framed pieces of art that I didn’t have time to take the art out. I just brought in the frames and everything. You know, it was like ready to hang art.

Samwise: And so I met them and they seemed like they dug my art and they offered me a job that day and that was back in the early Jurassic Period. 1991? I think, yeah.

CROSSTALK

Samwise: Well, I don’t know exactly what the story guys are doing, but whenever I do a picture, I have my own kind of story in my head, to start off with. So, basically, what I thought is, the Zerg, or, sorry, the Dark Templar were on Shakuras, and there are Zerg on it now. So now these Dark Templar after the Protoss came, some of the Zerg came with them and now they’re like, “We’ve got to defend our homes.” So, this is actually where you get to see some of the Dark Templar people besides the Zeratul guy. Zeratul is like a secret-agent-type-ninja guy. He’s got the face mask and the one long lethal blade and all that. He’s like kind of a special character.

Well, in StarCraft, all of our Dark Templar were like that because we didn’t have time to make another character for that so we just went “Yep. Everybody’s this guy.” So, in this one, the idea was to show a little, like another version of the Dark Templar, like the Dark Templar aren’t necessarily that one ninja guy: they’re a race. So that’s why we tried to incorporate units like the Stalker and the Dark Templar here are more like hardened soldiers that’ve been battling Zerg on their home world. That’s why they have these, kind of the Zerg bones on their body. They’re kind of like trophies they have. Where the Protoss have kind of the gold armor, the Dark Templar have a more like a bluish silver and instead of the blue crystals like the regular Protoss have, the Dark Templar have like these Zerg bones and banners and stuff like that. And that was just like the idea for coming up with the Dark Templar and then I kind of wanted to give them a different weapon type, just to make them not so much like they’re Protoss guys.

The Protoss guys, you know, have the two-hand blades, the Zealots. Well, let’s make this guy, you know, a little different. We’ll keep Zeratul with the hand blade because he’s cool like that, you know. You don’t want to change Darth Vader. But for the Dark Templar themselves let’s make them look like they’re a little bit more, they just have a different weapon kit, they have different armors than their Protoss brothers.

Samwise: Yeah.

Samwise: Right. I know, again, some people are really, really in to the new Dark Templar. Some people don’t like it. You know, I’m like that too, when I see movies and they change something about a character I was really into; it ticks me off, too, so I mean…We’re still working on it, and if it turns out that the idea doesn’t pan out, we have no problems redoing art here. We do it constantly, I mean, not one piece of art that we have in the game is final until the game ships. So, if you love a character, awesome. If you hate a character, don’t worry: we’ll probably change it.

Jeff: There’s a reputation associated with the whole Sunwell Isle. So the Isle has not just the raid dungeon, which is the Sunwell Plateau, but it also has a five person instance which is the Magister’s Terrace, which can be normal or heroic, and there’s also a whole hub of quests that are going to be daily quests and that hub actually gets built up by the players over time. And there’s a reputation associated with all of these things called the Shattered Sun Offensive. And what that is, is the culmination of the Scryer and Aldor storyline. The two groups have finally banded together, a continuation of that scene that was playing out in the inn in Area 52. They’re now banded together to drive out the Burning Legion who are inhabiting the Sunwell which has been re-ignited. So we think it will be really exciting – Shattrath, a lot of the NPCS will be changed that were previously either Scryer or Aldor specific to Shattered Sun Offensive NPCs, so blood elves and draenei like those soldiers out front by the flight masters – you’ll actually see them change. So it should be pretty cool.

Jeff: There’s going to be a lot of little things in 2.4. Right now 2.3 went live recently, so we’re evaluating class balance. We don’t want to do any drastic changes in 2.4 until we see how some of our 2.3 balance changes played out. So you can expect changes there. We’re doing other small things like raising the daily quest limit. Right now it’s at ten quests per day. We’re blowing that out to twenty five quests per day. It was never a design limitation, it was more of a technical limitation on how many things that we could track on the server at any one time. So that will open up a lot of content for players, just being able to do more daily quests per day.

And then we’re also looking into many small but really beneficial user interface improvements – to give a very tiny, small example, we’re improving the ready check, so when a raid leader clicks on the ready check button, everybody who has raid leader or assistant raid leader privileges will be able to see who’s responded ready and who’s afk and who’s not ready. A little bit more responsiveness and feedback and assist them. A lot of things like that going into 2.4.