Interview With Cory Stockton, Luis Barriga, and Eric Maloof (Part 1)
by JR Cook - 8 years ago
Blizzard made a big splash at PAX West earlier today at their Legion – The Invasion panel. The panel included details on future Legion content including Patch 7.1 and beyond. If you weren’t able to watch the panel live, you can catch up on all the news here.
I was fortunate enough to be able to sit down with Cory Stockton (Lead Game Designer), Luis Barriga (Lead Game Designer), and Eric Maloof (Senior Game Designer) shortly after the panel.
Here is part one of that interview, where we talk concurrency, the upcoming companion app, and the new scaling tech and much more.
In the panel you used the term ‘concurrency’ in reference to player activity. Can you expand on that a bit more?
Luis: We are a game that is live in many different regions, in many different time zones, so every zone has a different peak concurrency. When there are the most North American players on it is actually a weird time in China or in EU, so we have a lower concurrency there. However global concurrency, that means all the players that are on WoW at the same time, we are seeing really high numbers. Numbers we haven’t seen in years. This is the most in recent memory, certainly the last few years for sure.
Cory: It’s awesome. It’s super exciting just to see that kind of response after working on the expansion for so long. Going thru Beta, and us feeling good about it, you never know until you actually launch it and get that reception and see that people are log on and that they are really enjoying their time with it.
Eric: We’re thrilled that the fans are so happy with it.
The Companion App sounds awesome. That is something that people have been asking for since we first got our Farm in Pandaria. Assuming all goes well, could we expect to see content added to the app outside of Legion content?
Cory: For sure. I think the doors are wide open to do stuff. Number one, we want to make it feel great with Legion and make sure that the experience is really good for players. For us, that wasn’t just picking the features that were going to be available on the app, but it was also making sure that those features felt great. There are so many IOS and Android apps and it’s really key for us that if we make something, and it’s from Blizzard, it’s just like a game. It has to be at that same level of Blizzard quality across the board. The log in process has to be smooth and feel really good. When you get a reward in the game for finishing a mission, it has to feel awesome. Stuff like that, so we really put a ton of time into all of the polish and the little bits like that. I’m super hyped to see people’s reactions. I think, obviously, they love hearing they can do a mission on their phone when they aren’t at their desk, but we want to take it one step farther and make sure the experience is really good. We’ll take that feedback and as we continue to move forward and add features that make sense, the doors are wide open to do more stuff with it.
Obviously Invasions were a huge hit, in part because of the leveling opportunity that they provided to players. How much of that was intended, and is that a dynamic that you are happy with?
Cory: We utilized the new level scaling tech during the invasions so that everyone could feel like they were contributing. And they were, so we definitely intended for that and it went off really well.
Luis: There was definitely some edge cases that weren’t intended, like the whole “if you’re between one and sixty log off at phase two” for whatever, but in general terms we did want people to take their low level characters and level them up.
Cory: It’s a really cool experience to be able to have players that are level 100 fighting a huge demon next to a player who is level 12, and they can actually do that experience together and both get rewards that matter to them. I think that part alone has really resonated with people, because they really felt that kind of sense of community when the invasions were running. It was exciting to see that because that core technology is the same technology that we use to build World Quests. Seeing it work for invasions and it being so positive makes us feel great about people getting to the end game and they are hopefully going to see a lot of that continue to play thru the expansion.
Eric: That social aspect, the community coming together no matter what level they were can’t be underscored more. Just in terms of engagement, I think it’s everyone’s world that is under invasion, not just the high level characters.
You mentioned at the panel the possibility of the scaling technology being added to old zones. Do you think is a project that might be a part of Legion, or is it more of a long term goal?
Luis: I think we’re considering where it fits. It’s the sort of thing where fans are like, “Why didn’t you put this everywhere?”, but there are a lot of layered design questions that we still don’t have answers to. Do we bucket all of classic 1o-60? Do we bucket Burning Crusade parralel to Lich King or do sequence them? Do overlap some of the expansions part way thru to provide some parralel choices? It’s also the sort of thing that we want to be a little bit cautious with because take something like Garrisons. Early on, we really liked a lot about them but there were certain aspects about them that we would have designed slightly different that didn’t manifest themselves until later. We want to make sure that…just like we discovered spending a lot of time in Garrisons makes you feel a little bit lonely and disconnected, but they’re awesome otherwise, and we could have remedied that, so certainly there might be other things that we might discover. Like healing, for example doesn’t quite work with scaling the way we intended it too, so we should fix it before we go live. There might also be many exploits. You mentioned the Legion invasion, and had that been a permanent fixture in the game we would have had to address those exploits for perpetual leveling.
I know this might be a little bit hard to answer, since you are still working out the details, but certain players like the feeling of being overpowered, of out gearing a zone or a raid and being able to just blow thru it. Any chance to allow players to toggle the scaling on or off?
Luis: That is the trade off right? It’s a huge RPG standby in design. This is your go to thing. Oh you can’t beat this boss? Go grind a bunch and then you can beat him. There is a still a little bit of that with ilevel. Once you are completely decked out in raid gear, or high end PVE or PVP gear, you can go and kick that five man boss’s ass in the outdoor world right? And you also have the whole, I out level the whole expansion entirely thing, so if you go back to Warlords or Pandaria you will still destroy those mobs even with bucketed scaling. That is one of those things that we are well aware of, and we decided that trade off of me being able to group with my buddy who’s five levels lower is worth it.
Cory: What is interesting when you think about what Luis was saying about applying it to older areas, is some people just love playing in Northrend. It’s their favorite place and they would love to play there and be able to raise an alt all the way thru just by doing that. It’s something that is different that we have to make that call on. Is letting a player do that worth it for the changes that that will have for the game long term? It’s balancing that player choice versus what is the right decision for how like Luis was saying, to layer the content together.
Check back soon for part two of our Developer interview where we discuss the upcoming Karazhan dungeon, character customization options, and whether or not there will ever be a Warcraft 4.
