Episode 4

Russell: When World of Warcraft shipped in 2004, it had, I would say, just shy of about 2 hours of music. And today, with the recent release of patch 2.4, Fury of the Sunwell, we’re just shy of 16 hours of music in the game. I’m also proud to say that probably two thirds of that feature live players at least in part if not all the way up to full orchestra for many many tracks.

Russell: Well one thing I really appreciate here on all our projects is the backstory and the lore which is behind it all. I mean it’s gameplay first, but it all has context. It all has a reason for being there. So when we first introduced blood elves as a playable race, I went through their backstory and tried to understand what they were all about. What was compelling to me was they were a beautiful race to look at and yet they have just about the most tragic backstory of any of the races. Certainly, they’re right up there.

So, that led to a couple of concepts early on and again, this is pre-release of Burning Crusade. One concept was, I featured a lot of solo cello because that instrument, at least when it’s played a certain way to me can achieve this amazing duality of both gorgeous and melancholy at the same time. So with that in mind, I employed another device, there’s an interval in music known as the tri-tone where if you play a C natural on the piano, the F sharp above would be a tri-tone, and it’s been referred to in history as many things including the devil’s interval and things like that, it’s even been controversial in times. The reason is, it’s not quite consonant and it’s certainly not terribly dissonant and it makes people feel kind of uneasy without being harsh or jarring. So I wrote all around that interval and you’ll hear it in Sunstrider Isle. You’ll hear it in Lament of the Highborne. I’m playing a lot of games with that interval.

So those two devices, that interval and the cello together with kind of tying into the choir ideas that were started with the night elves being a related race, in the original release of the game, that palette of choir and harp and whatnot just all blended together and formed the basis, or vocabulary if you will, for the blood elves. When Fury of the Sunwell came along, this seemed like a great opportunity to sort of bookend that experience. I figure if you happened to have rolled a blood elf and reached the Isle of Quel’Danas as a blood elf, sixty-something levels ago, you last heard this music. And as this music and related new pieces that have evolved start coming back, there’s kind of this connection that I hope players will feel to the original material. There’s a consistency there. I employed a lot of the same singers and whatnot to increase the sense of continuity to the stuff that you may not have heard for weeks or months since you first rolled your character.

Russell: Well first off the decision to add more live players and more orchestras and choirs in to a great extent is because I want this stuff to be timeless much like everything else of what we do is timeless, the gameplay, and the backstory, and everything. And the more that we have organic human performances doing this music, I think the longer that it will last and the more that it will resonate with people.

So that’s part of the reason, but another thing we do is want to expand the vocabulary. So, while you think of having a lot of French Horns for instance as the quote unquote Warcraft sound, in Wrath of the Lich King we’re experimenting with some other things to convey the harshness of Northrend. The whole continent isn’t covered with snow by any means but it is a cold, challenging environment, and we’re looking for ways to express even more about the environment around you through the music.

One of the things we’re experimenting with is something called prepared piano. This is where you play a piano but not with the keys, you open it up, you take the lid off and you rub the strings or hit the strings with various objects and things like that and you get tonal unique sounds that are at once kinda creepy and unnerving and yet strangely musical and that’s one of the many things that we’re playing with.

There’s also some pretty cool ways to use a choir as a special effect, not just singing out loud with big vowel sounds or singing in Thalassian or whatnot. There are things that the choir can do with their voices with little dissonances and special effects and gliding chords… And you’ll hear a little bit of that in the login screen music as well. All of these things can convey a sense of cold and foreboding and adventures yet to come.

Jon LeCraft: It’s actually going really well. We’re getting happier and happier with the design every day, I mean to the point where I can certainly talk about it. So the whole “enchanting your spells” or whatever, we’re still going forward with that. We want it to feel different than Enchanting, so a lot of the effects are pretty epic. We’re not adding knockback to Fireball, like the example we gave. But not only do they have a lot more punch to them, one inscription is probably worth like one to two talent points, and they’re not all just increasing power, sometime they’re a big power increase but they’ll change something else about the spell. Like, going back to Pyroblast because it’s so easy, is we might reduce the cast time down to 3sec but add a 25sec cooldown. You know, the guy that uses that is like “Oh, well I use Pyroblast a lot for soloing, so it’s really handy there” or you know, that’s just a good example of the whole, either increase the power or decrease the cooldown, or even the opposite. Like Last Stand, we might decrease the effect from 30% to 20% of your max health, but give it like a 2min cooldown instead of an 8min cooldown. So those are some of the swings, and it’ll change how you use a spell effectively. And we will be affecting… obviously I gave the Pyroblast example but we’re going to be doing talents, you know it’ll affect talents and stuff. Probably not effecting passive talents very often.

Jeff Kaplan: It takes a really long time. So, the question sort of asks from concept, if the question is from concept it takes years. To put it in perspective the Black Temple, the Sunwell Plateau, and Zul’Aman were all conceived as part of The Burning Crusade. We knew that we were going to have to do content patches for The Burning Crusade and we came up with a list of places that we thought would be acceptable to be patches to The Burning Crusade. So even in the initial concept of The Burning Crusade zone list we had Sunwell on there as you know, Patch 2.4 we’re going to do Sunwell and we’ll get to it eventually. So the idea is around for a long time, that doesn’t mean that the zone is in production for all that time though. Usually for a zone to get in production it takes multiple months of art time simply to construct the art around the asset in the case of the Sunwell, but it also takes anywhere from one to three months to actually do a lot of the design work as well and that ranges from placing the creatures, scripting the abilities, designing the boss fights, itemizing the dungeon, tuning the abilities.

And as far as PTR goes it sort of depends on the level of content. The more hardcore the content is, like if it’s a 25 person raid dungeon, we like to have somewhere in the range of four to six weeks on the PTR. And that gives us enough time to iterate and tune around the most hardcore raiding guilds who show up on the PTR. We watch them, we follow them, we watch everybody on the PTR and go through iteration cycles. On something that’s smaller like a 10 person dungeon or a five person dungeon, we can iterate more quickly internally and have to rely on the PTR much less. So we don’t really demand four to six weeks for a 10 person dungeon although if we need that time on the PTR for other reasons we are more than happy to take it. It’s usually a multi-month project but from concept it’s actually years.

To give an example for Wrath of the Lich King, we already know what the patches are going to be, we’ve already come up with them, and have complete plans for how all the patches are going to play out. Really Wrath of the Lich King ends with the final patch that’s where the final culmination, interaction with Arthas, that’s when Icecrown comes in, it’s not the day that Wrath of the Lich King ships, it’s part of that subscription cycle and getting people new content over time.

Jeff Kaplan: Yeah definitely, my analysis of that question would be that first of all there was a change from 40 to 25 and we’re not doing a drastic change like that going from The Burning Crusade to Wrath of the Lich King, there will still be 25 person content. It’s not like we’re adding a new number in there like 15 or 35 or something like that to mess with players. So I think that’s sort of the first part of the question, there’s nothing like that happening so that shouldn’t be jarring to guilds.

The second part of the question in my interpretation of it could refer to what guilds had to do to get into 25 person content which was go through the Karazhan dungeon to get attuned to eventually do the 25 person content. I think we definitely learned from that one and we’re going to make it so that if you’re a 25 person raiding guild right now in Burning Crusade and you go into Wrath of the Lich King, short of leveling up and doing whatever 5 person content you do with your group to level up and get geared up, we’re going to let you go right away into the 25 person content - we’re not forcing you through the 10 person content. Now with that said I think it’s a player misconception that there is this thing that exists only a 25 person raider and that person has no interest in 10 person raiding. I have a feeling many of the 25 person raiders will be engaging in the 10 person content and they’ll actually really enjoy it but they’ll be relieved to know we’re not going to force them through it by no means.

Jeff Kaplan: Great, thanks for having me here.

David Kim: Okay the pathing is actually pretty interesting because a lot of the tier 1 units, especially the zerglings and the zealots perform a lot better because they can get into places easier.

Mike Heiberg: We have tried to tweak some of the interaction of some of the earlier units with respect to pathing and create a lot of interesting gameplay with not just the types of units that you’re mashing together but the ways that they’re meeting each other on the battlefield. Where in classic Starcraft you could throw a couple zealots on your choke and zerglings coming in would have a hard time getting past them just because you can only fit so many zerglings up against the zealots right? Now you have a similar thing but at the same time out in the field if you have zealots versus zerglings the zealots have trouble because the zerglings wrap around them, start devouring them. Sometimes it helps to even back up your zealots against a wall or a cliff edge and reduce the amount of wrap around that the zerglings can pull off.

David Kim: Yeah and the wrap around itself is a little easier to pull off I guess because the A.I. takes care of some of that for you but you do still need the micro if you want to get the maximum out of your melee units.

Mike Heiberg: Yeah the pathing of zerglings, will instead of just going around and finding some place they can fit on the other side of the zealot they’ll actually try and nudge up a little closer to the other zerglings so they can fit more of them in which is just kind of something that we got with the updated pathing.

David Kim: We also have the difference in deceleration. In our game the unit knows when it’s going to stop so it starts decelerating at the exact right moment so that it stops at the exact spot that it’s ordered to go to. Whereas in the original it didn’t check as frequently so even if you told it to go somewhere it might stop a half an inch past it or a half an inch before it.

Mike Heiberg: Right, a lot of times you’d be floating your guardians in to take out some spore colony or something and they’d float a little too close and you’d be like “Whoa!” and you’d have to back a couple of them out. They’re a little more intelligent now about not floating directly into danger when they don’t have to.

David Kim: So all in all you can give more precise orders and the units will do exactly what you want to instead of just doing whatever they wanted.

David Kim: Yeah it will be more consistent.

Mike Heiberg: Yeah for a game like Starcraft we really want a lot of consistency in how units behave when you tell them to do something because you know this is a game that we hope to be played at a very pro level where people want very precise control over everything that their units are doing. I tell a guy to go there he should go exactly there, I tell a guy to attack over there, he should attack to exactly that point and not roughly what I was telling him to do. So basically trying to fine tune the behavior that you get what you expect out of the unit when you tell him to do something is definitely one of our goals.

Mike Heiberg: Well when we were doing the classic Starcraft mind control we were finding that it actually resulted in some pretty big swings in balance where basically you mind control a large unit, say a Battlecruiser, and now the difference in power from the two different armies is like two Battlecruisers because he lost one and you gained one. So seeing as in Starcraft II we have a few more of those high impact units, we have Colossi, we have Motherships, and Queens, that’s a very scary type of spell to be still bringing into the game, I mean we have more opportunities for those large swings in balance.

David Kim: Okay so in Starcraft I the mind control was pretty high tech and difficult to get to so you rarely saw it in actual games.

Mike Heiberg: It was also pretty difficult to pull off for most people.

David Kim: So if we were to make it so that it is more accessible in SC2, there would definitely have to be restrictions such as “can’t mind control the Queen.”

Mike Heiberg: Right and Motherships, you can’t be taking out some of the unique units to each race.

David Kim: Yeah and if that’s the case then we’re kind of diverting away from the original Starcraft mind control mechanic which had no restrictions like that.

Mike Heiberg: What about infestation? The question actually was talking about...

Mike Heiberg: Right, in classic Starcraft infesting someone’s command center was really more of an insult.

David Kim: I guess it’s sort of the same thing because it’s tier 3 right now, and you need the infestor pit as well as the infestation research, which means it won’t be that easy to pull off considering at that point of the game.

Mike Heiberg: It’s actually a little higher tech but it ends up being a bit easier to pull off than classic Starcraft infestation - off the Queen. You got to get it down to burning then bring in a Queen and at that point it’s like half the time the building dies anyway before you get it off.

David Kim: But the difference is you don’t actually take over the building it just infests it until it’s cleared out or the duration fades, whichever mechanic we decide to go with.

Mike Heiberg: Right and at the same time you’re not feeding money into it when it’s infested to produce infested marines you’re actually just getting them for free.

David Kim: So it’s definitely more usable and...

Mike Heiberg: It’s one of those spells that basically wasn’t seeing much play at all in classic Starcraft except in the weird cases where you were just trying to make someone feel bad for how much you’re owning them.

Mike Heiberg: Yeah, like the, “Oh, I’m going to triple nuke you!” type stuff.

David Kim: Yeah and for the Corrupter, I guess we decided on what we decided on was because we get the same feel for the mind control but minus all the balance problems that we have to face.

Mike Heiberg: Right. You get that unit sort of on your side but at the same time you’re not grabbing them and moving them around, performing assaults with them.

David Kim: We also like the interaction between the two players. The guy that’s doing the corrupting can actually focus target the low health units to kill them first whereas the opponent can react by either pulling his troops away or just killing the corrupted unit fast depending on how much health the unit is at.

Mike Heiberg: Right we want to allow those types of little micro decisions where in the middle of the battle: “Should I focus on his guys, his Corrupters? Should I focus on my own corrupted units because I’m not getting them back? Or should I back off and make those basically invalid because there’s nobody nearby for them to be messing with?”.

David Kim: Whereas the original Starcraft mind control mechanic was more all or nothing that doesn’t have as much like immediate player interaction like corrupt does.

Mike Heiberg: Yeah it’s basically, “That unit’s mine, now I try and back my Dark Archon off before it dies.”