BlizzCon: The shape of raids to come
Blizzard Entertainment’s Jeff “Tigole” Kaplan walked BlizzCon attendees through the design process for raids in the World of Warcraft, starting some of the basic design philosophy.
“Players are only going to level up, and we want to have something for them to do.”
He also took issue with the belief that many players don’t raid.
On an average weeknight, he said, citing statistics collected by Blizzard software, 250 instances are running of Blackwing Lair, 700 instances are running of Zul’Gurub, 500 instances of Molten Core are running and 150 instances are running of Onyxia’s Lair. And given that all of those zones lock players out from visiting on consecutive days if they successfully kill a boss in the zone, the numbers of people using each is even higher.
Other things Blizzard designers take into account are what each class should expect to be doing on a raid to contribute — and it’s not always the same tasks: Druids were consciously given a chance to use their crowd control abilities in Zul’Gurub, for instance. Designers also like to design with a set duration for an average instance session in mind, which varies with each dungeon.
He also answered the common question of why non-player characters aren’t “smart” and behave like players, say, by killing characters who can heal others first.
“OK, we can kill you at any point we want,” Kaplan said. “That doesn’t make for a fun fight.”
How many healers would be interested in coming to fight Onyxia, he said, if the first thing the black dragon did was to target and pick them off?
Going back to results from Blizzard’s software, he ran through a list of the deadliest raid opponents in the game: Since the game went live, Vaelastrasz has killed more than 24,000 player characters, the Bloodlord had killed more than 11,000 and Firemaw has killed more than 10,000.
The software is used as part of an overall system of testing after content is released. In-house testing, he said, could never be as good as having players hammer on content, because despite having many highly skilled players on the team, a cohesive guild that raids together regularly will always be better at handling challenges than a group of competent people who rarely play together. (Quality Assurance has a new in-house raiding guild that is working their way up through the content, however, to help improve the testing of raid content.)
The panel also previewed the next raid content to be added to World of Warcraft: The Ruins of Ahn’Qiraj (an outdoor 20-person dungeon comparable to Zul’Gurub in difficulty) and The Temple of Ahn’Qiraj (a mostly indoor 40-person dungeon slightly harder than Blackwing Lair).
The zone will open with a war between the Horde and the Alliance (and presumably the Cenarian Circle) and the returning Ahn’Qiraj menace. The war begins in Silithus, but takes place all over the world. Before the new dungeons are opened up, players of all levels will help fuel the war effort by gathering materials and achieving certain military objectives. Meanwhile, the uber guild types will be assembling a four-part scepter, which is used to ring the gong outside the Scarab Gate. And at which point, all hell breaks loose, and Silithus is consumed in a massive war. When the dust settles, two new dungeons are available on the server forever more.
The expectation is that most servers will accomplish the tasks within three weeks of the dungeons being patched in with the 1.9 patch later this year. On the off-chance the players on a given server have no particular interest in advancing the war effort, non-player characters will eventually get the job done on their own.
A brief run-down of the Ruins of Ahn’Qiraj was given, including a glance at General Rajaxx, the first boss reachable in the dungeon. Players will fight him with the help of NPC allies, and the more allies that survive, the better the resulting loot will be, similar to how the tribute run in North Dire Maul works. (The Temple of Ahn’Qiraj will have a similar event.)
Even more so than Zul’Gurub, the ruins will be a non-linear dungeon, allowing raids to pick where they want to go and who they want to fight to a certain extent: “All roads lead to phat lewt.”
The peek at the Temple of Ahn’Qiraj showed obsidian destroyers, and the first boss, the Prophet Skeram. The dungeon is huge — the map of the Scarlet Monestary library wing was showed beside the temple layout to scale.
“Scarlet Monestary can, like, fit in the boss room” of the temple.
They also briefly talked about Naxxramas, Kel’Thuzad’s necropolis floating above the undead-controlled city of Stratholme. The final fight will include a massive frostwyrm and the necromancer Kel’Thuzad himself.
The tower of Medivh, Karazhan, which will be part of the Burning Crusade expansion, will be a 10-person raid zone, probably, and one of Blizzard’s biggest dungeons to date.
“It will definitely be bigger than Blackrock Spire, upper and lower combined.”
Among the highlights: A fight in an opera house within the tower, including a battle on stage with a boss.
Also in the Burning Crusade will be the Caverns of Time, a dungeon with four wings, including at least one five-person dungeon and a full-blown battleground.
The Outland fortress of Kael’Thas Sunstrider, Tempest Keep, will also be designed with wings, and include a Molten Core-sized raiding instance.
In contrast, Hellfire Citadel, the prison where Magtheradon is kept, will be similar to Onyxia’s Lair, where players only need to dispense with a few “trash” enemies before getting to the showdown with Magtheradon himself.
And, of course, Illidan Stormrage will be the ultimate goal in the Black Temple.
Look for smaller raids in future rather than larger.
“We feel that even a hardcore raiding guild enjoys a smaller raid zone,” Kaplan said.
There will also be a change in the raid lockout system in the 1.9 patch, changing to a calendar-based system, but the details of what that meant were not clear.
As for the people concerned about the statistics, it’s important to understand that those numbers are from a single night of the week, during a *three hour period* that we call primetime. Over the course of a week, a huge number of raids are done. Also, keep in mind, most guilds don’t do Onyxia every night of the week. They do her once. Most guilds do MC two nights a week. Those numbers I quoted — remember a 3 hour window — are repeated nightly, by new, *DIFFERENT* guilds and raids.
Trust me, if no one (or a very low percentage of our playerbase) wanted to engage in this content, wbe wouldn’t be creating it. It is *FAR* more difficult to generate raid content than any other content in the game.
To put the above numbers in perspective, Dire Maul comes in with 800 instances. But a Dire Maul instance only requires 5 people to complete. If that. Not counting a single person “instance flipping” to farm etc…
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