Behind the Blue Curtain: Further Discussion on Wrath of the Lich King with Tom “Kalgan” Chilton
Ten Ton Hammer: With the Death Knight’s DPS, and tanking ability, how will Warriors and Paladins continue to have presence in groups and raids, since there are going to be so many Death Knights when the expansion comes out? There’s going to be like eight million of them running around…
Tom Chilton: Eight million level 55 Death Knights. I don’t know if there are going to be eight million level 80 Death Knights.
Jeffrey Kaplan: Not according to the guy from THQ, though. The number’s plummeting.
Ten Ton Hammer: There’ll be four million, instead of eight million, then.
Tom Chilton: I think in a lot of ways you can actually make the same comparison with the Warrior. The Warrior is also a hybrid tanking DPS class, but that doesn’t mean the Paladin has no role in tanking.
I think it’s in terms of how we set up their “tanking niches.” We’re kind of designing the Paladin tank to be the best AE tank, and we’re designing the Warrior to be the best sheer mitigation tank, and we’re designing the Death Knight to be the anti-spellcaster tank.
At the same time, we want those lines to be blurred enough to where in a 5 man run you won’t notice the difference, all of them should be viable for a heroic run, for example. But, at the cutting-edge of the competitive end-game, when you come across that spellcasting boss, you probably want the Death Knight to tank it.
Ten Ton Hammer: Just to follow-up: Why did you decide to make another tank class, in particular?
Tom Chilton: We felt that’s where the greatest need was, in terms of general looking for group activity. We felt like the Death Knight both fits the kit of the Northrend expansion extremely well, and then also it fills the biggest need that we have right now. It seems that people are most often looking for a tank, and then possibly a healer, after that.
Curse: Going back to daily quests for a little bit, you said that you want to introduce a lot more for the expansion, and have them there at launch. Is this for leveling as well as max level, or only for max level?
Jeffrey Kaplan: We actually experimented in the build—I don’t know if you guys got to any of them—but we’re trying it out having some daily quests in the level-up experience, which is something that we never had before.
We want to make sure it plays out as a cool bonus if you happen to be in the area, but not a driving force to keep you in an area. So, we’re going to keep a real close eye on that in the alpha and the beta to make sure that you aren’t hovering around one area just because there are dailies there. But, we are going to try and do things with the dailies.
[At this point Jeffrey Kaplan excused himself from the room.]
The MMO Gamer: I remember that [hero] classes are something that were first mentioned back in beta, and have been on the upcoming features page since it was launched.
So, to be blunt: What took so long? And is it going to take four more years to see the next one?
Tom Chilton: It could, I don’t know. We’ll have to see how the Death Knight goes in terms of how well it slots in with the overall scheme of classes.
Really, what’s taken so long is that one of our core values is that we have very distinct character classes. I think on some level the original idea of hero classes and having forking hero stuff that would go on, with each class able to become one of multiple different possible hero classes, that was kind of what our imagination was before we even shipped the game.
But, the realities of, “Ok, we’re not looking to ship, we have to maintain the integrity of the game, and make sure we don’t screw it all over overnight by tripling the number of character classes in the game all of a sudden… or even adding two or three of them at a time.”
Really looking, now that we’ve had a couple year’s experience, at how WoW character classes play out, we don’t feel comfortable adding several classes to the game at once. With the Death Knight there’s a very specific role we wanted to fill, and we feel that it fits the kit of the expansion very well, so we’re doing that, and we’ll watch and see how it plays out.
If it doesn’t cause huge problems for us, and if in the future if it feels like, “Hey, there’s a need for some other kind of character class to fill this particular role,” or we just have a really cool idea for this hero class… and we do. There are several hero classes that we have different ideas for. Then, the time might be right again to introduce another one.
The MMO Gamer: I don’t suppose you can give an example? Something you’ve got on paper on the backburner somewhere?
Tom Chilton: [Laughing] No see, if I do that, it’ll be exactly as you described. “It’s been on these fansites for years, now! When?!”
