AusGamers: When looking back at the previous expansion sets for World of Warcraft, Cataclysm is one that really stands out for me because it had some huge changes that completely shifted that world. With Warlords of Draenor, I’m getting that same feeling because you seem to be playing with time travel elements which could end up having big ramifications. In terms of this story, is it something that could play out over a number of expansion sets moving forward or is it more of its own contained story?

Ion Hazzikostas: We definitely want to start, and have started, thinking ahead already to what the next expansion act is going to be. We are trying to set up our story lines and our villains a little bit better because it’s important more now than ever, now that we’ve run through the core of the Warcraft 3 lore. So we got rid of Illidan and Arthas – the villains that already had fully established backstories. I think seeing how the story of Garrosh played out was interesting over the course of Mists of Pandaria because that’s a character created in World of Warcraft that had a story arc that began in The Burning Crusade, he became the commander of the Northrend offensive for the Horde in Wrath of the Lich King, a war chief in Cataclysm, there is this kind of rise and then this torturous fall.



In regards to the specific setting in Draenor, for us the most important thing there was the world itself and the setting which we wanted to bring players back to, to show them the birthplace of the orcs; a world where heroes and villains from the RTS games were alive -- living, breathing and walking around. It’s not a time travel expansion though we very much tried to stay away from a lot of those tropes, there’s no “oh you’re changing the course of the future, what about this continuity”, there is none of that because it’s an alternate universe. Really there is a potential threat to our world where they are going to march the Iiron Horde army through the dark portal and kill all of us, in Azeroth. Today. Now. Right here unless we go back and stop them. And it just so happens to be that there is a really cool world over there which we want to explore.

AusGamers: Garrisons are one of the new features being introduced to Warlords of Draenor and we know that they play an important part of the quest storyline, but what about once those quests are completed will there be any content past that? For example, in the dailies or in future patches?

Ion: As you level up in the outdoor zones you’ll be building up in each zone a small garrison outpost where you make a building decision. So you can decide if you want to build the stables, or maybe a workshop in this zone. If you build the stables in that zone then you can fight while mounted everywhere in that particular zone. If you build the workshop you can use a siege vehicle to help you with your questing in that zone. Things are transformative and also in some cases unlock specific quest lines for people who chose to build that building out in that zone. Now your central garrison -- which is separate from that – is really more about the development of your character and your end game pursuits. We don’t have anything that’s grindy or that’s in the same format of Mists of Pandaria’s dailies, but rather each building unlocks its own series of side-quests that you can progress your character through at your own pace.



To use a couple of examples if you build a stable in your garrison you will now have a series of side-quests [where] you can go out and tame these legendary beasts in Draenor from each zone and get them as your mounts when you bring them back to your stable. You can also get some combat perks, like your mount speed might be 5% faster because you have the stables. But there is content there, if you are into PvP and you build a gladiator sanctum you’re given a series of quests where you initially accrue yourself by killing a certain number of members of the opposite faction. From here you are given a follow up where you declare a racial nemesis – “ok I hate Gnomes, I really want to slay Gnomes”, and so you declare them as your nemesis. You can go out and collect gnome trophies, earn titles from doing that, and eventually you’ll get invited to this secret fight club where you and other players from around the region who have completed the same prerequisites can engage in a periodic 25-person free-for-all last man standing. And that is just from one building, each has something like that for you to discover and explore.

We have standard systems like outdoor content and, garrison invasions that will happen periodically based on your actions, there’s also crafting, dungeons, raids -- all of that great stuff. But a lot of the rewards from the garrison system in terms of exploring the different building options we’ve positioned as more flavour and more of a way to customise your character to show what you enjoy about the game.

AusGamers: From the gear, you’ve removed the secondary stats like Hit and Expertise, also Dodge and Parry. I know when it was Hit and Expertise it would be something where you would have a certain amount of points needed for each one to work and then anything more was kind of redundant. Was this the reason behind removing them -- were these too confusing for players and you wanted to streamline the stats a bit more?



Ion: That was exactly it. It wasn’t just confusing but hit and expertise were actively anti-fun. We want our stats to feel good about making you more powerful. When you get lots of haste you should feel your spells actually casting faster, so that should make you feel more powerful. When you didn’t have enough hit a lot of our core combat mechanics just broke down. You have a rotation that you use on a target but, “oh no my flame shot missed and that has a cool down, well now my whole rotation is broken because ‘A’ isn’t there so I can’t do ‘B’”. So really you needed to get a certain amount of hit and expertise for the game to feel right, but once you had that unlocked anything over that also felt bad. It was this bizarre constraint, it was this penalty if you didn’t have it but never actually made your life better – so we are happy to get rid of it.

Dodge and Parry was a little bit of a different story. Players were more actively avoiding those stats over the course of Mists of Pandaria. They used to be core tank stats just because there was nothing better out there. Once we added in active mitigation, where other stats could give you a more active, visceral and, more perceptible role in keeping yourself alive, because it allowed you to push your defensive cool downs more frequently. Those stats were more attractive than, “Well I’m 2% more likely to dodge”. So we moved in the direction of armour as a tank stat which is less random, much more predictable and, much more discernible. “Ok my armour is 3% higher now because I’ve stacked some of this on my jewellery, and so now I’m just taking less damage from all melee attacks across the board and I can immediately see the benefit that it’s doing for me”.

AusGamers: Looking back at the quest system and the way that has evolved since the original release what would you say is the biggest change you are bringing in this expansion set?

Ion: With regards to outdoor questing in particular I think striking a somewhat different balance between the core storyline for a given zone, and the optional side-quests which you can explore. In the past in a lot of our zones doing a full completion of a zone, just seeing all of the story in the main plot line – let’s say, using the example of during Mists of Pandaria in Valley of the Four Winds and Krasarang Wilds, if you wanted to complete a zone and see the culminating event at the end of it, you basically had to do every single quest from the zones, covering the entirety of both of them, and if you missed something along the way then the finale event wouldn’t trigger and you would have to go back and figure out what you skipped. Now we are calling out much more clearly this core series of quests in your tracker for a given zone that lets you know that this is the main path that you are going to follow. But off the path are side-quests where you can go, they are completely optional and not mandatory to progress the main story but if you want to do stuff there you can. Furthermore there are other areas on the map where there are just bonus objectives, creatures to kill like rare spawns, and little events like those on Timeless Isle which you may come across.



We wanted to encourage that feeling of exploration, and getting away from following this linear quest line through the entire zone where players now have more of a feeling of choice. If you want to just see the main quest line and go to the next zone then feel free, if you want to take the time to explore everything then there is going to be cool stuff there for you to find.

AusGamers: World of Warcraft has evolved quite a lot and the community has played a part in that with the add-ons they are creating for the game. We’ve seen that with some of the popular tools that Blizzard looks at, with those core ideas and tries to implement them in for everyone. Has there been anything with this expansion set that has been borrowed to help improve the way the game plays?

Ion: One big thing that I think is certainly an evolution that started within the community, is an integrated group finder tool. This is so you don’t have to look outside the game and use add-ons anymore. If you want to find people from other servers who are looking to form a premade group to do a raid, battlegrounds, arena skirmishes etc, then you can go sort by item levels, search for classes, and find people who are doing that activity just on the fly. We definitely pay very close attention to what our add-on community as a whole is doing, and certainly when there are specific areas that are persistently things that are seen as mandatory which everyone wants, that gets those items higher upon our list for what we want to evolve on our UI next.

At the same time one of the great strengths is being able to customise your experience, there are completely different approaches to the game which you may like. If we took your UI that you find perfect, and imposed it on someone else – then it might not be ideal. That’s the issue that comes up every time when we think about integrating something, when we put something and make it part of the base UI we are basically saying this is going to be for everyone now. Even if there is an option to toggle it off, our expectations are if people are going to toggle it off then why are we even putting it in there to begin with. We are very conservative when it comes to that.



AusGamers: World of Warcraft has been around for 10 years and you’re working with an older engine now. Are you running into limitations with things that you would like to try and do but can’t because of the way the engine is structured, or do you find ways to work around those limitations?

Ion: There are some things there, but ultimately our engine team and our artists do a great job on each expansion trying to see what graphical advances and new features of the hardware we can provide support for without coming at the expense of people who are still on lower-end computers. We want to offer the best looking game for the person who has a brand new video card – the enthusiast person. But at the same time, it’s important that a new expansion doesn’t mean that for someone they can’t play the game anymore because the specs are out of reach.

AusGamers: World of Warcraft has become this enormous game in terms of the amount of content it has to offer, and it can take quite a lot of time to get through all of it. Has there been much tweaks to the way you progress through levels for the older content or has it primarily been left alone?

Ion: From 0 to 90 things are relatively the same. I think in the past we would kick in a number of stats to accelerate that experience because you could get agonised. While having 10 years of content is a great strength in many ways, the game has a lot of depth; there is a lot to see and it also increasingly becomes a barrier for someone who just wants to play with their friends who are already established. Or for the person who wants to check out the new thing they saw a commercial for. But at the same time doing that also had a detrimental effect onto the pacing of the experience. It was originally designed for a very different speed of levelling. There are issues that we still need to go back and correct when we get the chance.



In our classic game from 1 to 60 in particular, where you might start a zone at level 21 but before you know it you’re halfway through the zone, you’re now 26 and the quests are starting to turn grey for you. Originally that was designed to only cover three or four levels but now you’re getting twice as many levels in that time, so I don’t think we’re likely to speed things up anymore. Our solution at this point is the free character boost that we offer for people who purchase Warlords of Draenor so that you can take a character, whether it be a brand new one or an existing one and boost them straight to 90. It’s guaranteed that you can play with your friends and play the new content if that is what you want to do, and then if you want to go back and make an alternate character to see the story, to see all the elements of the world that you have missed, then you can do that at your own pace without feeling pressure.

AusGamers: What do you think is the reason why World of Warcraft is still one of the most popular games people are playing 10 years on?

Ion: I think two reasons. There’s probably far more than that but to me there are two that stand out. First thing is the people themselves are a big reason. One of the magical things about the game is the bonds and the friendships that it [has] formed. We have BlizzCon coming up in just a couple of weeks, and one of the most exciting things about BlizzCon is seeing these gatherings of people who are meeting, often for the first time -- these groups of guild mates that have spent hours talking on voice chat, finally putting faces to voices. In many cases forming friendships that will last a lifetime, spouses that have met through playing World of Warcraft, and that is an honour for us to have been a part of creating a game that creates these bonds that keep people together – the game-world is an integral part of that.



In terms of our actions, I think that one of the biggest things that has been consistent in our evolving approach over the years has been trying to broaden the game’s reach as much as possible. We are trying to make it more accessible in ways that don’t detract from its depth. Also trying to offer playstyles and ways to enjoy the game to an audience that [are] themselves evolving. The person that played the game in 2004 or 2005 might have been a student with tons of time then, and now is someone who has a career, a family and is trying to find precious minutes to stay connected to World of Warcraft. Those two people are the same person but the game they want is quite different. So over the years we’ve offered new ways of experiencing content like raids that used to be extremely exclusive – you don’t need to have a dedicated group or a fixed schedule if you want to see the end boss of an expansion anymore to see the story’s conclusion. If you are the person who wants to level multiple alts, if you are the collector who likes getting mounts and pets, if you just love doing battlegrounds all day and that is your gameplay style, then World of Warcraft has content for you and it has a meaningful chunk of content for you. If you want to branch out someday and try something else then that’s there for you also. I think that being constantly additive and expanding our reach wherever possible is one of the keys to this longevity.