The Remaking of World of Warcraft

You know, we've talked a lot about that. He's a very different type of creature than the Lich King – I mean, he's gigantic, for one. What does it really mean to have a character down here attacking his big toe? We've talked about different ways to handle that encounter and make it still feel epic.

We do still want to make sure that it's approachable to lots of players, we don't want to shut out more casual raiders by saying, "No, you can't see Deathwing, sorry, you're not hardcore enough," while still delivering a really epic fight for the hardcore raiders.

We do try and have appearances from Deathwing throughout the game, but again, it's a very different character from the Lich King, so he's not kind of over-exposed like the Lich King. He does fly over zones destroying everything in his path which is pretty scary if you get hit by him. And there's a couple of key story moments where he will appear and you will get to interact with him during the level-up questing.

Well, it can start in a number of different ways. If it's, say, when we make a dungeon, a raid or a PVP area, we go through and we need to make sure, here is the mail caster bracer, here is the Rogue dagger – make sure there's a piece for everyone.

Then we allocate it, which is a little bit of art and a little bit of science... You want to make sure that the [first boss] doesn't drop all bracers, because that's boring, and you want to make sure that he doesn't drop all Warrior gear because then the Mages in the group are sad. You try to spread it all around and make sure it's all accessible.

Then we work with the artists to come up with what the art's going to look like, because that sometimes informs the name and the lore of the piece. A lot of the items, we put a few hours of thought into the name – but sometimes we go farther than that, we say what is the history of this boss, or a few times we've tried to acknowledge famous players in the community or things like that.

As far as approval goes, it's something that my team ultimately owns. And then we will respond to internal feedback – this item's stats are terrible, or I don't understand who's supposed to use this, or even the name is awkward. We had one not too long ago: "That name reminds me of a Pokemon character. We should change that. Let's add a couple more accents or something."

As players, we're excited about it, because we like MMO games and that looks like it's going to be a good one. So we're excited to be able to play it and get our hands on it. I don't think we're super worried about competition. Our game's been around for six years now, we've added a lot of features and a lot of polish and it's going to be really hard for someone new to come in and immediately challenge that.

Overall, having more MMO games tends to be good for MMO games. It draws attention, it builds mindshare in the public, and makes it more acceptable, understandable as a form of entertainment.

Yeah... If I was making an MMO game from scratch, I would start to list the features you need. Well, you have to have a good level-up experience, and then you have to have a good endgame, the PVP and raid experience, you have to have probably some type of rated battleground... And all of a sudden you have this really long list of features that... World of Warcraft couldn't deliver that at launch, we had to slowly build on it over time.

So any game that comes out now, their feature set is going to be compared to ours, which is now gigantic. They may excel in one or two areas and do really well, and we've seen some MMO games recently that tried to do that. "We're not going to focus on PVP, we'll have a really good dungeon experience," for example, or the opposite. But I think it's going to be really hard to compete with World of Warcraft in every single area.

Yeah, which would be very hard to do now.