J. Allen Brack - Page 3
The new archaeology skill sounds interesting. What went into creating that? Where did that come from?
Well the actual origin of it is what ended up becoming the Path of the Titans. We experimented with a couple of different ideas. We talked about doing another talent pane that would be kind of a fourth talent tree and discarded that and eventually ended up going the Path of the Titans route. So there was a desire to kind of do that and have a way for those things to be tied together. And also, we like the idea of adding new professions. We liked the idea of adding a new secondary profession in particular. I am trying to figure out what the right one is. It is simplification of the talent trees and going through and making a pass at that and a combination is sort of what it was.
You know how each race sort of has its one sort of class that gets associated with or is the one that people love. Do you think Goblins and Worgen are sort of already predisposed towards any certain class?
I think a lot of that comes out once you have launched based on what the racials end up being. And we have some ideas for what the racials are, and so who is to say what it will actually end up being? But I think the goblin rogue is something that jumps immediately into a lot of peoples' minds. We have got the gnome rogue, which is very popular. So I think the goblin rogue is something that comes up very naturally. I don't know whether that is what it will be. It is really kind of hard to guess, because the players make that decision. We don't really make that decision. In terms of the Worgen, that is a good question. I don't really know what my guess is on that.
I may be wrong about this, but with each expansion the level cap has been raised 10 levels. This one is only five, right? Why did you guys decide to go that route?
Well the level cap is really determined by the amount of content that we want to create, and it is not determined by any kind of amount of time. The motivator behind that was mostly because of how long we wanted to work on the expansion and to figure out what the right amount of time is between expansion, because players have a need or desire to consume just vast amounts of content. We also don't want the players to feel like we are going to do the same thing every time. We are going to do the right thing that makes sense for the game and the right thing for them, even if they don't necessarily quite understand it.
So this will be somewhat less content than Lich King because you're only raising it five levels?
I actually think quite the opposite. I think this is the ... this is the largest expansion we have ever made. So there is a little less level up content for the people who are already at max level and only play one character. But we are going to have more dungeons. We are going to have more in game rating content. There is a huge amount of level up content, it is just not max level up.
What was the time to 80 for Lich King? Like when it went live, how fast was the fastest person to get to 80? Do you guys know internally?
I am going to not remember correctly, but I am going to say in the 32-36 hour range.
[Note: it was actually 27 hours]
And what do you think the time to 85 will be?
Oh, wow. We haven't really made all of that content, so it is really hard to say. So I really think that it will depend on ... the guy who did that in 30 hours or whatever, he is certainly not a normal player of the game.
He might not even be human at all. The last thing I wanted to ask was: for the fifth anniversary you guys are going to be doing some revamping and changing and stuff. What sort of are the plans? We know about Onyxia. What else is happening?
Onyxia is the big thing we have talked about so far. So it will be the five year anniversary of WoW and the 15 year anniversary of Warcraft. We are real excited to have that. Onyxia is some peoples' very first raid that they ever did; so we are going through the achievements and doing all that. So we are pretty excited to get people to come back to that and see how that goes. For players who have done that before, they will get a chance to see it totally different. And for players who have never done it, they will get their chance as well.
And maybe we'll get a new Leeroy Jenkins video as well to go along with it.