John-Lagrave
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World of Warcraft won't raise free-to-play above level 20
If you're holding your breath in hopes that Blizzard will relent and open up World of Warcraft's free trial to the post-level 20 experience, please, please take another breath. You'll die otherwise. The studio confirmed that it has no plans to expand its free-to-play offering past the initial 20 levels. Producer John Lagrave said in an interview with CVG that the studio is content with the way things are. "[The free trial gives] a good sense of what our game is," he said. "You know, we looked at it lots, we looked at whether level 20 would give you a good sense of what our game is, and we think it does. There's also a lot of things in the game that are special that we want to reserve for our paying customers." Lagrave pointed out that Blizzard has been beefing up the trial experience by including additional features that were previously reserved for subscribers only.
Gamescom Raid Q&A with the Devs: Nerfs, the raid finder and more
You may have spotted Monday's post on how to design a raid, which was the first half of the Gamescom 2012 Raids and Dungeons round table with Ion Hazzikostas and John Lagrave. The second half of the Round Table was a Q&A session in which many interesting questions were asked, shedding light on some hot issues as well as simply providing a little more insight into the Blizzard Encounter Design Team's creative processes. Again, these aren't verbatim quotations from Ion and John, as I simply can't write that fast, but the overall statements are accurate representations of their responses. Are there any encounters Blizzard have had to alter or leave out due to technical constraints? There was a boss leading up to the Lich King who you had to heal (Valithria Dreamwalker), and that was a huge challenge for their existing technology. If you think about it, Ion explained, up to that point, every healing spell in the game was designed to be cast on a friendly target, that is to say, a player. So the devs were faced with the task of reworking every healing spell in the game. They didn't want players to only be able to use certain spells on her, as that would have been bad, so they redid every healing spell. The technical team changed the game's design so that the boss basically became a raid team member. Ion and John explained that it's all about working out creative ways to implement the designers' ideas.
How do you make a raid?
Over at this year's Gamescom, I was lucky enough to be among a small group invited to a Blizzard round table on Raids and Dungeons, where we sat down with Blizzard's Lead Encounter Designer Ion Hazzikostas and Lead Game Producer John Lagrave. These two high-end content creators opened the round table by talking the audience through the process of how the Blizzard team goes about making a raid and the trials and tribulations they encounter along the way. This was fascinating to listen to, so I thought I'd share the insights with WoW Insider readers. This is not verbatim quoting throughout, as I simply can't write that fast, but it covers the raid-making process as they described it. How do you make a raid? You start with the lore. Ion and John talked us through the process of making the Firelands raid, so they began from a set of conditions. As Ion put it, "We consider what the idea is. What is this raid going to be about?" So they sit down with the encounter design team as well as the game producers in a meeting room and talk it out.
Blizzard acknowledges TOR's impact on WoW
Is Star Wars: The Old Republic affecting World of Warcraft's subscriber numbers? Well duh, according to Blizzard producer John Lagrave. "Of course people are trying Star Wars -- our development team are trying Star Wars! I'm one of the few people who's still playing it actually, but yeah we've seen a dip in subs. It certainly has to at least be attributable to The Old Republic, but it's also attributable to people who want to wait and get Mists of Pandaria, so it's not surprising," Lagrave tells Eurogamer. He goes on to say that Blizzard is exploring its options when it comes to extending WoW's trial (which currently tops out at level 20), and he also reiterates the fact that free-to-play isn't in the cards for Azeroth.
