Exclusive Interview with Lead Designer Jeffrey Kaplan

We're back with another exclusive Q&A with the people behind World of Warcraft. Lead Designer Jeffrey Kaplan drops in for this latest Q&A where our own Whitney Butts quizzes him on the latest things from the world of Azeroth.

WarCry: Can we expect to find a Heroic Karazhan sometime in the future?

Jeffrey Kaplan: Creating a Heroic version of Karazhan is certainly a cool idea. However, we don't have any plans to do so at the moment.

WarCry: The complication and difficulty of getting keyed and attuned for many instances has risen quite a bit. What is the reason for increasing the complication for attunements and keys?

Jeffrey Kaplan: I'm actually a big fan of how the Heroic keying process worked out. We want there to be a sense of progression and something to look forward to, but at the same time we don't want the process to get so complicated that it becomes too daunting. When you group with people in a Heroic instance, you know that they have a certain level of understanding when it comes to that particular dungeon because they needed to do it a few times. As time goes on, we'll continue to tweak and balance the attunement processes in response to player feedback and our own observations.

WarCry: In many ways, Karazhan mirrors instances like Zul'Gurub or the Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj in terms of raid size compared to the 40-person raids. How did the development of Karazhan compare to the development of these previous raids? Are there any plans for future 10-person raid dungeons?

Jeffrey Kaplan: While there are definitely philosophical tuning differences between 5-, 10-, 20-, 25-, and 40-person instances, we don't have a vastly different approach in our dungeon-creation process. The same basic elements that make a 5-person instance great -- pacing, story, varied creatures, varied abilities, punctuating boss fights, good itemization, accessibility, and understandability -- will also make for a great 25-person experience.

Karazhan was a lot of fun to work on, and we really took our time developing and polishing it. Karazhan, more so than Zul'Gurub or the Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj, had a very storied history in existing Warcraft lore, and we wanted to deliver on the high expectations. There are definitely plans for more 10-person content.

WarCry: Starting with Zul'farrak and the Sunken Temple of Atal'Hakkar and continuing with Zul'Gurub and the mysteriously labeled (and troll-themed) Zul'Aman instance portal in the Ghostlands, there has been a real focus on those zany trolls in terms of PVE content. Why the troll love?

Jeffrey Kaplan: Trolls are a core part of Warcraft lore and are one of the oldest races in Warcraft history. They have a lot of rich and exciting material to draw from, so naturally, this is reflected when we create dungeons and other content for the game.

WarCry: The last two big "dungeon-introducing" content patches included massive world-events that introduced their companion dungeons. Have you learned any lessons from managing and designing events on such a massive scale? Any future plans for more world events?

Jeffrey Kaplan: We're always learning here. We definitely have plans to do more world event content, and we'll keep evolving our philosophy on them. With each new event, we become even more comfortable with what works best, and we certainly have plenty more exciting ideas yet to be implemented.

WarCry: Other than the Netherdrakes and starting flying mounts, will any more mounts be added? Will rare flying mounts be rare drops like epic mounts could have been previously?

Jeffrey Kaplan: We'll keep introducing more mounts -- both on the ground and in the air. We'll be considering various options for how they will be made available.

WarCry: Having leveled both a blood elf and draenei character, I've found the leveling process in both the new starting zones to be much smoother than in the launch starting zones. Was this a specific concern in designing them? Were there any lessons you learned after launch that you applied to these new races?

Jeffrey Kaplan: The more time you spend doing anything, the better you get at it. We've been continually developing World of Warcraft for a number of years now, and over that time we've learned quite a few lessons about how to make a better game. Since the launch of World of Warcraft, we have been able to see our theories in action. Certain elements worked well, others didn't. We realize that we need to constantly strive to evolve as a development team. The content we make today needs to be better than the content we made five years ago.

Also, new technology and systems within the game have opened the doors for us to do new and different kinds of content. When we created quests for the first two World of Warcraft zones (Elwynn and Westfall), we only had the ability to do two types of quests: "Kill X number of monsters" or "Bring me X number of items." Since then, our programmers have provided us with a ton of new options, such as escort quests and bombing runs, to name just a few. With each patch and expansion, we have more tools in our toolbox. More importantly, we've got years and years of lessons learned =).

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Jeff Kaplan is an idiot. He is a huge reason droves of people are quitting WoW

The fact that he enjoys long drawn out boring quests for attunement speaks volumes.

I originally liked this game because all things considered there were not a lot of timesinks.

That is changing now.

Thanks Jeff...

QFT, i hole heartidly agree with u guys.

I used 2 PWN n00bs so HARD when i was lvl 60. Now teh game isnt fun anymore, besides pwnin noobs, teh game is a total waste.
GG

It's more than a little ironic, because wasn't Jeff Kaplan the one who designed the Defias questlines in the human newb areas? Storylines like that are what captured the imaginations of so many people who tried out the game and drew them into the lore. And it was done without fancy escort quests, without bombing runs, without even quests as simple as "explore X area". Tigole and Furor have gotten so caught up with introducing new "features" and "content", that they've forgotten what it takes to make a fun game.

I lol'd so hard at the implication that the game is better now than it was in 2005 after launch. SANDLOL? LORELOL? Illidan is dead for the sake of a few shiny epics that will be obsolete two weeks into the next expansion, world PvP is dead these past two years and is never coming back, hybrids have absolutely NO resemblance to their original class descriptions and roles, and Jeff Kaplan thinks he and the rest of the devs are doing a good job?

Get a clue, Tigole Bitties: no one cares how fantastic your "content" is, if the game isn't fun to play.

Well, I don't know about it not being fun anymore. I'm having about the same amount of fun as I did when the game started. They have improved the starting areas, and I'm impressed with how the instances have evolved from tank and spank to more complicated or technical boss fights as soon as you hit outlands. I'm not talking about raids btw, just the normal 5-mans. ANYway, the reason I felt compelled to post is that this interview doesn't really say anything. I could have answered those questions, guessing what they would say, and it would probably look like that. I was very disappointed at the answers, and not that impressed with the questions too. A multitude of other things could have been asked than "Are you better than before?" which is asked several times in different ways, or the question turns into an answer along the lines of "we're better now".

Taemojitsu:
Tigole and Furor have gotten so caught up with introducing new "features" and "content", that they've forgotten what it takes to make a fun game.

Get a clue, Tigole Bitties: no one cares how fantastic your "content" is, if the game isn't fun to play.

Tigole and Furor never knew what fun was in the first place. Their claim to fame is expletive laced rants about stupid stuff. And raiding. They think the game should be about work. Not fun. For professionals. Not the rest of us poor stiffs.

For what it is worth, I'm still enjoying myself, but I refuse to do these idiot timesink faction quests, or the attunement quests. When that gets in the way. I'll quit and move on to something else. It is only a game, and I refuse to lose any sleep over it.

When a video game is MOSTLY revolved around grinding for reputation and skills in order to progress within an already FAULTY storyline, the FUN factor is definitely waning.

It's not really about getting keyed or attuned to a raid instance that bothers me. That actually CAN work. It CAN help the storyline behind the raid instance itself, and how it applies to the Warcraft lore. BUT... somethings are just way too excessive to NOT say, "Hey this is not fun at all. You're making me grind for 100 Badges of Justice just so I can get Fire Resistance gear and tank Leotheras the Blind in demon phase." Or, "Wow, look at all the crap I have to do just to be able to get a flying mount, or access Black Temple." Even way back then, the Horde's version of getting attuned to Onyxia...

PVP is TERRIBLE. Classes are broken. It's terrible to know that a certain class can't do anything against another specific class. There should always be fairness and equality among classes for PVP. This is why FPS games are more successful when it comes to competitive gaming. WoW is a joke to have Arena Team competitions, especially considering how the map designs aren't well done either.

Wonder why people already really want to look into Starcraft 2 and Warhammer...

So I know these forums are just as pointless and ineffectual as the official WoW forums. But.. I got myself banned from the WoW forums after Tseric left, and my account's run out in any case =p.. so I'm posting this here, with the deluded hope that perhaps just one person will read it and be enlightened.

WoW's design focus, ever since the first raid instance, has been to cater towards those who define their success in the game and the amount of "fun" they're having by the number and quality of epics in their possession. This has inevitably led to a reduction in fun by those who don't see that as the point in the game, including casuals, roleplayers, and (imo most importantly) PvPers who didn't want to see huge gear gaps destroying the "pure" spirit of the game, reducing the size of the effective opposition, and turning PvP from something that was about fun into something that was about getting epics as efficiently as possible.

In the U.S., this means that the design focus of WoW is mostly catering only to the relatively small number of raiders in this game, and more specifically, those who are only motivated to raid and continue paying their subscription fees when the equipment upgrades from one raid tier to another are large.

But in China, as I learned recently, raiding is for everyone, as are epics... and with gold and account selling being ubiquitous and accepted, there is much more potential for "in-game" successes to be translated to "real-life" successes, which breeds exactly the same kind of mentality as is shared by the top raiders in the US and EU. See these threads for an examination of the attitudes present in China WoW:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=116252979&sid=1&pageNo=1
http://64.233.179.104/translate_c?hl=en&langpair=zh%7Cen&u=http://bbs.ngacn.com/read.php%3Ftid%3D1054236%26fpage%3D1%26toread%3D%26page%3D1

So just remember that! Whenever the devs introduce anything "grindy" and "unfun", keep in mind that they are aiming the game not only at the predominantly casual US and EU playerbases... but also at the mindbogglingly hardcore Chinese playerbase, for whom 3 million honor caps were the norm with the old honor system, an epic flying mount would cost less than $13 in RL funds, and a T2.5 character could be obtained for less than the cost of trip to the movie theatre here in the US.

And that, more than anything else, is why WoW is never going to change.

(Which is actually silly, because the problems caused by the gear emphasis of the game are NOT problems that couldn't be addressed with clever design. It's just that the devs have no incentive to even try... why worry about trying to make the game even better, when it's already the most successful MMO in history? :/ )

Yes theres a lot of grinding in the newer WoW content (Outlands) and that works well to a great extent, as many of the items needed for progression (in terms of better armour, recipes, spells and yes reputation) are gained from hitting those instances on more than one occasion. Let's face it, you need to prove to the quest givers you're not some schmuk who's going to blow it. 'They' need to know you are capable of those feats before entrusting you with the hard chores and rewarding you appropriately.

I am inpressed with the design and content of this long awaited expansion, the graphical appearence is exceptional. As part of a small 'Guild' of friends that group up very regularly, we love finding strategies to beat new areas we explore..making the frustrating failures that much sweeter when we conquor a section of content. My (our) only issue was with the raid instances requiring 25 keyed, equipped, experienced members to stand any chance, and only One solitary instance of 10. It sems that is due to be adressed over the coming (months / year / sometime soon?) so maybe I can group with more than my regular 5-some soon(~ish). That seemed to be the one notable area I felt the ball had been dropped as Old World content had several instances that could be grouped as a 5-person, or raided as a 10+. Maybe there's a way to scale content and rewards by the number of characters entering the instance? Just a thought.

Thanks for the great new content which while occasionally frustrating, is worth the time exploring.

Lmao at all the haters. It's just a game!!! If it affects you that much to write in and bash the creators, you really need to get a life. Move on to the "better" mmorpg. Is there one? Nahh... Still lmao....

I agree that he is a stupid developer. He just came in when the original Developer of WoW separated blizzard. He Claims that they are doing good because lots of subscriber subscribe wow. The Hell of those subscriber are all Gold Farmers. Destroying every class just to bring their Idea from EQ you idiot jeff kaplan. Now World of Warcraft is now World of Grindcraft. Im not enjoying anmore. I can kill everyone with my mage or Warlock and the Hell my paladin is destroyed buy their idea to be healer. They are stupid be name is as Holy Warrior, a warrior that stand at the back and Heal. No Class Balance and PVP is broken.

Just Mark on your Calendar Jeff Kaplan when Warhammer:Age of Reckoning releases. Mythic will suck in all your subscriber to their Database. the only thing that will remain are those Chinese Farmers and Botters. Goodbye WoW, nice knowing you way back 2003.