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JACE HALL!

So Jace Hall’s one of those internet superstar types that also has a sense of humor, plays the role of executive producer for great games and great TV alike. You want to be Jace Hall. JACE HALL.

Jace Hall had the chance to interview Tom Chilton (Kalgan), J. Allen Brack, and Jeffrey Kaplan (Tigole) and got a bunch of new details about the upcoming expansion and a few other things. Apparently the video is slightly old but was sent to official fansites only recently, it’s still worth watching.

This video honestly, is kind of why I like the Blizzard developers. I’ve shaken their hands at Blizzcon, I’ve enjoyed their games over the years, and they still have a sense of humor.

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Tom Chilton ESL Interview

The majority of content in the interview is PvP related (obviously since its an eSports channel doing the interview) but here are some key notes:

• The resilience change in 3.2 is meant to slow the game down. This should hopefully make PvP more about strategy and skill (assuming equal gear) and less about crazy burst and 2 second kills.
• PvP was designed for group combat with a lot of different classes playing nice together. 2v2 Arena bracket doesn’t really embody this and makes keeping classes in balance a nightmare so that explains the removal of 2v2 from official rewarded brackets.
• The new emblem system’s purpose is to make older gear and content obsolete. This drives players to see new content over farming older/easier content.
• Blizzard is incentivizing being a good player by giving better rewards for not wiping on boss attempts.

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Tom Chilton on the next WoW expansion…

I wish I could say I’m more excited, but honestly I’m not. Patch 3.2 is coming and oh yay we have more little vanity pets that look retarded and a new kind of horse. About the only thing I find personally appealing in the next content patch would be buffs to my tanking stats (about fucking time) and a new flying mount that doesn’t look like so much butt.

But hey – you know, there’s another expansion coming already! Videogamer recently interviewed Tom Chilton (he’s Kalgan and the lead developer for Blizz) about the new expansion:

Videogamer: So when’s it coming out?
Tom Chilton: We’d like to hit each calendar year somehow. Whether or not that actually happens in the near term I don’t know yet. It’s safe to say there will be more expansions for WoW. And it’s safe to say that we have long term things that we’re working on right now. They get players excited and give players a lot of new stuff to do all at once so it’s really cool. Whether or not that actually happens a year from when Wrath of the Lich King came out, not likely! But we’ll see. We’re still trying to get it to the point where we’re able to deliver them more quickly than we were before.

Videogamer: On where the next expansion will be set
Tom Chilton: I don’t think it has to be anywhere completely foreign yet. There are parts of the map that we have left ambiguous and unexplored. There are parts of Eastern Kingdoms and Azeroth that haven’t been filled out yet. Out there in the South Seas there are islands, there’s out where the Maelstrom is. There’s still quite a bit of land mass. We keep referring to the Emerald Dream, which is maybe not exactly in Azeroth but is sort of tied to it in some way or another. But there are definitely places in Azeroth itself that are close to home that haven’t been filled out yet so there’s more room for that sort of thing.

Videogamer: On new classes
Tom Chilton: It’s a design driven approach as to whether or not we do a new class, because we don’t feel that we can support the pace of adding a new class with every single expansion. We feel like we will dilute the classes too much if we do that. It will only be a couple of expansions before, I would say three, four expansions down the road, I would worry that our classes would become less distinct and interesting and the new stuff may not feel as cool. Or the classes would start to become more and more alike as we start to hybridise things more and more. I do think there are a limited number of classes the game can support with its level complexity. So we want to make sure that we choose wisely what the class is going to be and when it’s introduced, and not kid ourselves into thinking that we can just keep shoving them into the game without making a mess of the game.

Videogamer: We saw the implementation of a new class with Wrath of the Lich King. Given what you’ve said that would make it unlikely that we’ll see a new class in the next expansion?
Tom Chilton: I would say that it makes it less likely. Not impossible – there may be a time that we do two classes back to back and maybe we’ll do that. Maybe we won’t. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Videogamer: On the possibility of making playable races that currently exist in Azeroth
Tom Chilton: There are a lot of them we already know about that are creatures that are out there. I don’t want to give away too many of the things that we have going on in our minds for different possibilities. But there are certainly possibilities that don’t necessarily limit us to coming with completely new things that players will never have seen before. In fact one of the things that we learned from doing the draenei is that it’s important to seed the race in the world. It was harder for players to get the draenei thing because they kind of came out of nowhere. They’d been referred to in previous Warcraft games, but nobody had really ever seen or dealt with them. So it was a little harder to do, whereas with Blood Elves it was a lot easier.

What we learned from that is we do, wherever possible, want to seed that potential, even if it’s in a small way. An example I could throw out there would be, in Blackwing Lair we had the drakonid race. We always looked at those and said, oh that would be a pretty cool player race, it would be cool to play as one of those guys. There’s not a lot there as far as, where did they come from and what are they? But they are in the world and it wouldn’t be completely inconceivable that a player would end up being able to play that, and we could continue to expand on the depth of that race.

Videogamer: So it would be fair to say that there won’t be any more aliens arriving in a spaceship?
Tom Chilton: Yeah! It certainly could happen, but wherever possible we’re going to try to make sure we introduce and pre-seed the races before we actually use them as player races.

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