Behind the Blue Curtain: Further Discussion on Wrath of the Lich King with Tom “Kalgan” Chilton
Ten Ton Hammer: Can you tell us a little more about the PvP vehicle system, or the vehicle system in general?
I saw a little bit of it when we were playing in there, and it’s pretty neat, but how is that going to work in PvP, how is that going to work just in the general world, that sort of thing?
Tom Chilton: The vehicle system, we’re in the process of integrating physics into it. We’ll have a variety of different vehicles, and they’ll have different handling characteristics.
You have one-man fast moving Forsaken catapult sort of things, or the lumbering demolisher that packs more of a punch but doesn’t move as quickly or turn as quickly.
We have different dynamics like that, we have flying vehicles, kind of like a flying machine that’s light and fast and a bomber aircraft where one guy can drop bombs and the other is flying around
What we do is to integrate those into both the Wintergrasp zone and the new battleground—what we’d like to achieve is that everyone feels they have a chance to use vehicles, but not everybody is in a vehicle all the time.
We want it to be pretty fast paced, we want players to be in vehicles, blow each other up, be out of a vehicle and fight normally, go back to using a vehicle, etc. We want players to mix it up quite a bit.
We’re hoping to keep the action pretty fast paced, trying to keep it pretty simple to get the vehicle and pretty accessible because it can also help equalize the playing field a little between, you know, if a player doesn’t have good PvP gear. Once he’s in a vehicle, his class and his gear don’t matter anymore so that kind of gives him a shot to have fun and participate on a meaningful level without, you know, having all that.
Curse: Death Grip being able to pull mobs and players to you… you also mentioned that knock back effects can affect mobs in the expansion. Is that hinting that other classes can do it, too?
Tom Chilton: Indeed. It’s quite likely that somewhere for a couple different classes we’ll probably make use of the knock back mechanic. So yeah, you can probably expect that.
The MMO Gamer: With Naxxramas moving into Northrend, do you have any plans to makeover any of the older pre-expansion dungeons and move them up to level 80?
I wouldn’t mind doing Blackwing Lair again.
Tom Chilton: Doing heroic versions of them, etc? We do have ideas for doing that, it’s just a question of when the time is right. We’ve definitely thought of it as a way that we can potentially add end-game five person content in subsequent patches.
So, the idea is definitely possible, but we don’t have any specific, concrete, “Yes, this one, in this patch, will happen.”
The MMO Gamer: Five manning BWL?
Tom Chilton: People will be able to do that, I’m sure, at level 80. [Laughing]
Ten Ton Hammer: In this expansion you seem to place a lot of emphasis on your environments like making them different elevations making them sloping, putting a lot of different environments in a small space, etc . It was obviously a conscious decision, why did you decide to go down that route, instead of having an expansive zone?
Tom Chilton: It all comes down to our original WoW level design philosophy of varying the environments, keeping it interesting for players…
Ten Ton Hammer: This seems even more extreme than Burning Crusade was.
Tom Chilton: Yeah, we actually are trying to push it more.
The landscape has to feel cohesive. You have to look around and not feel like it was just a kid with a paintbrush going “Waaaah!”
But, at the same time, within that we really want to vary the environments as much as we can get away with. Otherwise, the environments can feel oppressive and monotonous. It just gets kind of boring to see the same things over and over, and it gives the world a better feeling of being alive and dense.
A lot of games out there kind of have these big open landscapes. It always kind of felt like there just wasn’t anything going on in the world. So we feel it’s important to make sure every little nook and cranny where possible feels like it’s been carefully detailed.
