BlizzPro interviews Helen Cheng and Marco Koegler

BlizzPro has posted their BlizzCon interview with World of Warcraft Quest Designer Helen Cheng and Technical Director Marco Koegler about Warlords of Draenor and the future of WoW. The interview covers a variety of topics about the coming expansion, including why the team decided to return to a ten level expansion curve instead of sticking to the five it has been more recently (it makes for smoother leveling progression, plus level 100 is cool!), how (or if!) the time-travel aspect of Warlords will affect Azeroth itself (it shouldn't, provide we heroes rise to the occassion), and why there aren't any new playable classes or races for this expansion (new character models are resource-intensive).

But those are far from the only topics discussed during the interview. Cheng and Koegler also go into whether or not Garrisons will be character-based or account-wide, and what the different challenges are within either approach. Cheng also talks in depth about daily quests and their history in the game, the shortcomings of that particular design, and how Blizzard hopes to create a more balanced questing experience going forward so as to avoid some of the problems with quests in Mists of Pandaria.

In addition, one particularly interesting tidbit that BlizzPro didn't highlight in their bullet points is Koegler's discussion of animation in relation to the new player character models, and how Blizzard is looking into ways to reduce clipping of models, armor, and weapons--particularly in cloaks. If that becomes possible, I personally think it would make a huge difference to the aesthetic value of WoW's models. To be sure, I've always very much enjoyed WoW's particular brand of game styling--I prefer the cartoony direction to an attempt at hyper-realism in gaming. That being said, I would not at all be sad to see some updates to older animations, such as for cloaks!

Thanks to Helen Cheng, Marco Koegler, and BlizzPro for a great interview!