Behind the Blue Curtain: Discussing Wrath of the Lich King with Jeffrey “Tigole” Kaplan

By Steven Crews | May 9, 2008 | | Filed under: Events, Interviews

Ten Ton Hammer: How are you handling item inflation, and that sort of thing in the expansion?

I know with each expansion you have to increase the power level and make players want to get it, but, is there a certain point where it just becomes ridiculous, and the shoulder pads can’t get any bigger, and the swords can’t get any wider?

Jeffrey Kaplan: Our artists have assured us that we haven’t even seen the beginning of how big shoulder pads can get. [Laughing]

We always say that to them, we’re looking at something and we’re like, “Man, that’s awesome! But that’s the shoulder pads you get when you get off the boat and do the first quest!” and they say, “Dude, don’t worry about it, we can go bigger than that!”

In terms of the item statistics, we’ve planned out World of Warcraft from the very beginning with the inflation in mind, knowing that we’d have to inflate the item curve, and the power curve of players as the game went on.

What we didn’t do was just plan 1-60, we planned it out very far. It’s always shocking to players, and they sometimes look at it as a mistake of the game, where they say, “What’s going on? The items are inflating?” It’s next to impossible to just come up with items that are exactly equal in power, but for whatever reason you’d want them for X rather than Y.

We don’t look at the item inflation as a shocking surprise that it happens, it’s no different than us giving ten new levels to a character, which is character inflation at that point.

We’ve planned for it, and we hope we can do a better job of smoothing out some of the bumps. Examples are making sure the green items, as you’re questing up, or the random world green items aren’t over-optimized, or split too many ways.

Making sure the dungeon blues are better than the quest blues, so that when you go into a dungeon which has more risk involved you feel rewarded for it. Making sure that heroic dungeons exist on a complete separate tier, we’re also obviously going to make the 25 person raids far more rewarding than the 10 person raids to keep the prestige to that.

And then, in the PvP spectrum, season four is a good example, where really the top gear all has rating requirements on it, and you really need to earn that prestigious gear. There will be lesser gear that you can earn out of that system that won’t have rating requirements, but it won’t be at the insane power level as the current arena gear.

The same goes for the honor gear, which will be brought much more in line with the other tiers of content and other things you’re experiencing. So there won’t be these crazy jumps of, “Should I do Black Temple, or should I hang out in Alterac Valley and get a pair of boots?”

Curse: Isle of Quel’Danas was, honestly, probably the best introduction to the game patch-wise… the event, Magister’s Terrace, Sunwell Plateau, all of that. Can players expect events similar to that in Wrath of the Lich King?

Jeffrey Kaplan: I hope so. We do want to do an event to kick off Wrath of the Lich King, but it will be different than Isle of Quel’Danas. I think why Isle of Quel’Danas feels really good to players right now is we’ve sort of embraced the philosophy of—and we’ve always thought along these lines, but we’re really trying to prove it through what we deliver in patches—that there’s not a right or a wrong way to play WoW.

It’s not that WoW is about the hardcore 25 person raiders, or WoW is about the guys who like to do dungeons, or WoW is about the guys who like to solo and do quests… all of those players exist in WoW, and none of them is right or wrong, and it’s our job to make sure that they’re all getting content, and they feel like their way of playing is right and supported. I really hope that’s what Isle of Quel’Danas represents.

It really proves that there’s something for everyone out there. I think that philosophy is going to translate directly into Lich King with how we’re itemizing and how we’re building content, and then in terms of the event, we also want to do a kickoff Northrend event, too. And then more events where areas build up, I think that’s cool, players feel like they’re contributing.

We always wrestle with the dynamic event idea, players in MMOs always go, “I want to go into the village and burn it down, and from that day forward the village is always burned down!” and then I’m the guy who comes a week later, “Dude, where’s the village?” You know? “Oh, it was epic, we burned it down, it’s not there any more!” Well, I wasn’t there for it!

An event like this you feel like everybody, even if you miss the event, you gained from it having happened, rather than you feel like something was taken away from you.

The MMO Gamer: Probably the number one complaint I hear when speaking to the “average” WoW player, someone who logs in an hour or two a night, maybe raids with their guild on the weekend, is that once they hit 70, their day to day existence in the game consists of either farming for primals, grinding reputation, or doing daily quests. They seem to feel that’s slightly monotonous.

Do you personally believe that’s a problem in the game, and, if you do, do you have any plans to address it in Northrend?

Jeffrey Kaplan: I do think that’s a problem, and I think it’s a very true statement, what you said. What I really hope is that hitting level 80 is not the end, but just a milestone, a very momentous milestone.

I think some of the issues with Burning Crusade is that the barrier to entry to some of the end-game content is very high, and it made it very hard for players who were doing this nice leveling segue through the game, once they hit the end of the line, they didn’t feel like they could make a nice smooth progression through anything, everything felt like a brick wall to them.

I want to try to smooth out that progression that takes place when players hit the end-game. Even in the daily quest example, which I think is a great example for players who don’t want to go and PvP, or they don’t want to do 5, or 10, or 25 person content, they just want to play by themselves and do quests, I think we can do a better job with the daily quests.

The daily quests that I’ve really enjoyed lately are things like the fishing daily, the cooking, the battleground, the dungeon dailies, because they have randomization in it. So you don’t feel like you’re in a set pattern of activity every time you log in. I would rather players do daily quests for money than farm primals, which is a very repetitive sort of behavior.

So, I think we can do things to smooth out what feels like a grind, and make it not the same every day that you log in. I think that’s when it becomes an issue, when you log in and do the same activity every time, because certainly when you’re leveling up that’s not your experience.