AusGamers: We’ve heard that the team is already thinking about the next step after Warlords of Draenor. Can you elaborate on that at all?

Chris Robinson: Beside the fact that we’re thinking about the next step, there’s not much I can say at this point.

AusGamers: Is there a drive among the teams to start going back to that more traditional Warcraft lore in the future? Because this has resonated with everyone in a really, really major way.

Chris: Yeah it’s resonated with the team too, because I feel like we all… Mists of Pandaria was a bit of a chance right? It was our opportunity to do something a little more experimental; try a different theme. Certainly among the team members, when we started talking about Warlords, it was kind of a universal feeling, that yes, that feels like what Warcraft should be. Probably all of the people who heard ‘pandas’ and said ‘not for me’, hopefully that’s the same group of people who hear Warlords and go ‘that’s for me’.

So to answer your question, and not speaking too much to what we have planned for the future, I think we learn these kind of lessons from everything that we do, and definitely take a look at how these decisions impact our game and our community, and what resonates with people. Not even talking numbers, but just the feeling of what’s cool, and what keeps it fun and makes it new and exciting, and that will certainly be a large element of drives what’s coming next.



AusGamers: You guys must have been keeping your eyes on the general discussion. Was it surprising how many people were assuming that block of time in the opening ceremony of Blizzcon was for Warcraft 4?

Chris: No, because that kind of happens every year [laughs]. I was hoping it was for Warcraft 4! Actually, it was just kind of fun to hear… we did the Orange County Children’s Hospital benefit on the Thursday night, right before the thing started, and it was really interesting to go just across the street and hang out with a whole bunch of people who were speculating, and hear all of the theories of what it could possibly be. What did you think it was?

AusGamers: I thought it was going to be Warcraft 4; that’s what I was hoping. But I’m equally happy that it’s Overwatch. This happens a lot in the games industry, and as someone that analyses and critiques, we have a different vantage point than people building the games, but it’s really interesting to see that you guys have Overwatch, Bethesda has Battlecry, Splash Damage has Dirty Bomb, obviously TF2’s been out for a long time, but Gearbox has Battleborn. It’s like a perfect storm scenario, where four years ago, everyone sits together in a pub or something and overhears each other’s conversations and all of a sudden this stuff manifests.

Chris: We’re influenced by everything around us just like anybody, so if there are trends happening in movies, or books, or games, I’m sure that we’re influenced by that. But the weird thing is that, I don’t think there’s ever been a situation where we haven’t just started something because it’s a game that we’re passionate about wanting to make, or a genre that we’re passionate about exploring.

AusGamers: That’s a good point, because there’s a real level of transparency with Blizzard, that rather than saying ‘no, no, this is completely our own idea’, you guys are really open about being influenced by everything; ‘we take the best bits from everything, and we put them in our games to make them better’.

But in this stage in World of Warcraft’s life, there isn’t much left that seems like it could be influencing you guys. Is there anything that you can talk about that does influence the team, or has influenced the new content, gameplay-wise or peripherally?

Chris: It’s interesting in that, while there’s nothing necessarily new, or not a lot of perceived rocks left to be overturned, we’ve kind of reached that point where, as things are cyclical: the original vanilla stuff, the original Warcraft stuff, has been far enough removed from where we’re at currently, that it almost has that… it’s valuable to bring it back at this point, and to look at that almost like a… we were joking about this earlier, but we interview people now who come out of school, and the first thing they say is ‘I grew up playing World of Warcraft, through high school and into college’.

AusGamers: There’s no Tides of Darkness in their history.



Chris: Totally, and even to the point where they may not even… you say that and they say ‘Tides of? Is that an expansion that I missed?’, and it makes us all feel super-old, then we take them through the brief history of everything. But in a weird way, you get that human beings experience things so differently, how one event can be so different from one person to the next, that we’ve seen this interesting insurgence of these ideas that are perceived by the people who have grown up on this stuff, and things that they’ve always thought ‘hey, that was cool, because I feel like this is actually what was happening’, when it may not have been.

So when they come in, they come in with this attitude of ‘I love this one-off little hit that you guys had six years ago that was just a side...’ like Tuskarr or something like that, and I’ve built my own little world around RP’ing where they came from and what their deal is, and a lot of that, in a weird way, is almost like player-driven, fan-driven content. Because obviously, the community builds this game as much as we do, and the community that have been fans and players are now coming to work on the game.

I know that’s not an answer like ‘this book influences what we’re doing right now’, but it is sort of an organic weird development, how things are coming together at this point.

AusGamers: Is it strange then to think, that where will be people who grew up on Mists?

Chris: Yeah, that blows my mind. It’s crazy to think, because they perceive it in such a different way, and it means such a different thing to them.

AusGamers: Well it’s hard and fast lore to those people right? Where it was more kind of an expanded April Fools joke at its base level.

Chris: Well it wasn’t. We did the April Fools joke because internally we’d actually made, we had Pandaren mug holders, calendars and things. Something that Sammy drew for years. There was a Pandaren skin in Warcraft 2, I think it was on one of the upright bear mounts. So it’s always been there, it’s just been this whisper, and I don’t know how we ended up going so far with that, but once we decided ‘this is what we’re going to do’, it’s just one of those things where you don’t question it, you just start building it and make it what it is, and tell the story along the way.

AusGamers: Shifting gears, what’s been the overall feedback -- maybe not so much from the showfloor, because I know you’ve been doing interviews -- on the jump to level 90, has that been met with enthusiasm, or from the people that have truly put in the time to get there, are they pushing back against it?



Chris: I think there’s naturally a bit of that hesitation to it, is this really fair to all different types of players? It seems like we’ve gotten to a point where we have enough of a reward system built into other areas, that one character boost, typically for a person -- if you’re not going to go past and buy other character boosts -- isn’t enough to just say… I think a lot of people are excited to play with friends and family who may not necessarily be as experienced as they are, so they don’t want to drag them through instances for four months just to get them to the point where they can roll.

So it’s a mixed bag. I’m truthful to say that everybody is just core excited about it, because I think there’s a little hesitation, but if we find that right balance (which I think that we have done) of saying ‘we celebrate your achievements in those other areas, and we offer this as an opportunity’, it’s more of a community aspect, it’s not necessarily to be seen as something that focuses on player-reward. If we mix it in in that right way, and find that right balance, it’s not offensive to anyone, it actually just builds the game and makes it a better experience for everybody.

AusGamers: For me it sort of seems pretty cool. For me, I only reached level 47, and that was solo’ing as much as I could at the time. So the idea of going and experiencing level 90 content is exciting, and makes me want to jump back into the game after many years of not playing.

Chris: Well yeah, let’s face it. This is a game about community. It always has been, and we’ve always wanted it to be. It’s not a single-player game that’s all about personal glory. Certainly that’s a part of it, we want people to feel like their accomplishments matter, and that there’s a methodology for them to be able to celebrate those things. But if we add more ability to have more community involvement and more of your group that may have fallen off. I can’t even tell you how many friends and family I have, that typically, when we come out with an expansion, say ‘I’d love to play it, but I just don’t have time to get back in to the point where I can actually experience the new content’. To me at least, I feel like this is a really good avenue to support that community aspect of the game.

AusGamers: Is there any reason that the game remains on the same framework, albeit tinkered with. Is it purely at a stage where there’s so much content, that putting anything pre-existing on a new engine would just be impossible?

Chris: You’d break it in half, wouldn’t you. I think that we do enough that feels like we can keep it new. We’re happy within our team as to the things that we’re able to accomplish, but we always want to push things further. There’s always that ‘what would it look like if we built it in this new engine’, but at the cost of what you would break, it just doesn’t seem worth it.

I think if we felt, typically on a day-to-day basis, that we weren’t able to accomplish the things that we wanted to, or reach the level of fidelity that we were looking for, there would certainly be a larger push for that, but I look at where we’re at with Warlords, and personally I’m very happy. It feels timeless to me, and that’s always kind of been the goal, to not necessarily be cutting edge and the thing that everybody is looking to say what is the newest technique or the newest technology that’s coming out, but just be timeless and approachable, and something that if you come back to after four years of being gone, you don’t feel like you’re walking into a new world. Because that in itself can be a little intimidating.

If it’s so visually different from what I know and love originally, it can, to some extent, be off-putting to the point where it’s not even the same game. I want to come back into Stormwind, and I want to come back into Ogrimmar and maybe go, like, ‘wow, there have been some changes around here, this isn’t the old Ogrimmar that I remember from back in the day’, but there’s enough of it there that it still resonates and people will hopefully continue to want to get back into it.



AusGamers: In the interest of transparency, the game has a bit of an ebb and flow as far as subscribers and the number of people that are dropping off and coming back. Obviously that would generate discussion and testing into ways to boost those numbers again and get people in to play. This is a really roundabout way of asking probably a really common question, but is the console port idea still strictly a no-go, or has there been testing? Is there a whiteboard somewhere in the studio with ideas in that direction?

Chris: No. We’re just solely focussed on making it for PC at this point.

AusGamers: Ok, that’s a good answer.

Chris: I don’t think that we let… at least on the development level, I don’t think that we can let numbers influence our decisions, because that’s a dangerous road to go down. If you start playing against what is the easiest solution that’s going to bring in the most numbers…

AusGamers: ...and not that console would actually be a solution.

Chris: Right, there’s any number of things. Was Mists the right way to go? Was Warlords the right way to go? If you’re solely going ‘what are the largest number of people that want to play this content?’ I think you sacrifice really good ideas and opportunities to do something new and just take a chance here and there, that keeps it fresh and keeps people going ‘that isn’t just the same old thing that rehashes the same thing over and over again’. So we typically just try to go with, if we’re passionate about it and we sit down in a group and start talking about, like: those Warlord characters are so cool, and they’re so core to what we know as the Warcraft Universe, is there any way we could resurrect them? Or something that could just bring that to players who may have grown up with Mists and not know -- unless it’s fed to them, this is some of the roots of where this has come from.

Nowhere in that process do we go ‘I wonder if we can get another 20 people to sign up because of this idea’, it’s only ‘is this cool?’, and if it is, then hell yes, let’s do this thing; let’s go for it.

AusGamers: While we’re talking about the history of the game and the series, it seems like at this stage, given where technology is and what people can play on, it might be a fun experiment to bake in those old games in some capacity. I talked to the Hearthstone guys about this as well, that I really feel like Hearthstone needs to be baked into World of Warcraft. I feel like you should be able to go into an inn, sit down at the table and Hearthstone just comes up.

Chris: That would be super-cool.

AusGamers: Has that ever been a discussion?



Chris: I think all of those things have been discussions. A game like StarCraft was probably inherently more poised to have a stand-up arcade game in their bar where you could play an earlier StarCraft game. If we’re embedding them, in a way Hearthstone makes sense, so there’s probably been discussions of we could do it this way, or this solution.

AusGamers: Ok. Because it would be really cool.

Chris: I agree. It’s such a good vehicle to introduce those ideas to people who may not do it on their own. If I just happen to be hanging out somewhere and I want to check out Warcraft 3, that’s a great opportunity to do that. It’s an awesome idea, we just don’t have any plans.

AusGamers: Do you guys speak much with the Hearthstone team, in terms of the cards that they end up using, and what’s appropriate and what’s inappropriate?

Chris: Yeah, to the extent that we don’t ride them. We’re not nipping at their heels and constantly overriding decisions or having a huge impact. It’s more of a passion thing. There’s a lot of players on our team who love that game and have their own opinions about balance, and what’s coming next, and what the game needs.

Ben Thompson is their art director, and I think it’s more of that organic, wanting to see what other people are up to and just play games with other people, rather than a structured ‘we need to touch base every other week to see where you guys are at’. But yeah, with all those projects there’s a lot of crossover, and there’s a lot of community discussion with artists on the team going back and forth with each other and showing techniques and sharing ideas. It’s a really cool environment to be in, when you’re on one team, it feels like there’s six, seven, eight, nine or 10 (I don’t even know how many) talented teams. Not just game development teams, but web and all of these other sorts that have passionate artists and passionate developers who are willing to share their ideas, and you can just walk around the campus and walk into a different company and find out all of this awesome stuff they have going on.

AusGamers: Finally, with BlizzCon in and of itself, my favourite panel every year is the direct Q&A…

Chris: [laughs] That’s coming up!

AusGamers: I’m looking forward to it.

Chris: So am I [laughs].



AusGamers: How much of that direct input from the truly hardcore is reflected afterward and how much does that influence change?

Chris: Quite a bit actually. It’s weird, I’ll talk about this too if anyone asks in the Q&A, but right now we have these two groups: we have super-talented really passionate developers, and we’ve got super-passionate talented players, who both care very deeply for the new player character models, for class changes, and any number of things; list it and they care about it. Then we have this middle-man that we’ll call Twitter or the Internet, who is sort of the filter for the passionate player to get their ideas and opinions to the developers.

What our job has kind of become, as the leaders of the group as it relates to that setup, is boiling down the passionate comments that we get from the people who write in, who really care. They want to be heard, and they want to be heard in any way possible, and the best way to do that is to make statements that are really outlandish and maybe a little bit inappropriate at times, to get somebody to stand up and see that, wow this person is very angry about what they’re talking about, there must be something there.

We try to boil those comments down into what they’re really all about, and then kind of get that to the team in a way that they’re not exposed to passion [laughs] that in some cases might exist. So to answer your question, specifically with the player-character revamp, we started probably being a little more socially active than we have been before. That’s the first time I ever started a Twitter account and interacting with the fans, which was horrifying and entertaining all at the same time.

We generated, I think at this point it’s like a three page list, of things from Tyson, who’s the lead character artist, to myself, to design who gets comments from the community. And it’s not just Twitter, it’s through our internal forums, or any number of forums, we actually do have a list of all of the things that people have requested and talked about, and we go through it, and there’s a difference between things that affect what the goal of that program was, which was just to reenvision what currently exists in the game, and then there’s the stuff like: I’d love my dwarf to have a mohawk.

We separate those two, because we never wanted to introduce new ideas in this process, we want to do that later, but both of those things are lists that came from the community -- either things that we already knew about, or things that we were, like: we looked at the night elf male run in a room by ourselves, just that one animation by itself, and it looks awesome, but you plug it into the engine, it blends in with other animations and you stand behind them for four hours and watch it run and suddenly your head is bobbing up and down, and you’re like ‘this is way too bouncy for me, you’re driving me crazy’.

A lot of those things, none of us have the time to sit down and play every race and class combination possible to QA our own work, so we really do look to the community to raise that flag, and say ‘hey, this is terrible’ or ‘I’m really concerned about this’. I would say it has indelibly affected the direction of where we took a lot of the player character models, and what we do with most of the game too.

AusGamers: So you’ve got to take the good with the bad effectively, in order to get the right voice?

Chris: You do, yeah.



AusGamers: As a player, I often stop at times and watch the world, and I’ve always been curious about the creation process of building a living world, and what’s involved in that, whether it’s the little flecks of pollen in the air, or critters, or insects -- the seemingly banal stuff that makes static into living. I’ve always been fascinated by how that comes together.

Chris: Yeah, so am I. [The process] is never the same, sometimes it’s very smooth, and other times it’s just beating your head against a brick wall until you’re bloody, then coming out the other side in a better place for it. I think the key to all of that, at least for us as the art team, is that if you boil every, not just zone, but subzone area in the forest and POI, down to its most basic substance, it’s all about emotion.

I think that’s how we approach almost everything that we do artistically, whether it’s an armour set, and very much so with the environments. We know the storytelling we’re going to be doing, we know that this needs to be a spooky forest, because there’s this arch-druidic presence there that you’re going to try to vanquish or whatever. So we start talking, not about colours or tree types, or terrain of the shape of anything, it’s really about what is the emotional equivalent of this right here, and then how does everything that we do kind of flow out from that one paint stroke?

I think our team has interestingly broken down into groups that are inherently kind of able to use that spark, then say… I’m using a spooky forest as the most cliche easy example, but you might have minute emotional changes as you walk through a zone, that a lot of people probably don’t even notice, because it’s secondary to the action.

If you’re experiencing a quest, you may, in one quest zone, go from elation to terror, to content at the end or whatever, as you’re sent out to gather pelts, then you need to kill these two boss characters and come back and boil their teeth down, we know that you’re going to go and kill these two boss characters in this haunted glade, and that they’re evil Mogu warlords or something. Or to use a better example, you’re going to go into Bonechewer clan land, or you’ve got to go take out some Shattered Hand guys, and we know that Shattered Hand is all about self-mutilation; they’re just these evil mofos and its like sepsis if you get hit by them; it’s bad news.

So that for us, as an art team, is our cue to go ‘ok, we need to make sure that when you run into those guys, and when you walk into this glade, everything around you is supportive of that one goal’. Then you break it down into colour theme, colour theory, shape language in the trees, shape language in the plants. Something as simple as if you have grass on the ground, a prop grass that’s a secondary element you don’t think much of, you’d be shocked at how much… like, one day, somebody could just go in and be, like, ‘I wanted to try adding a tuft to the end of the grass’, and they put it in and the theme is broken, just like that.

Because even a sharp blade of grass in something that’s meant to feel threatening and scary and evoke that emotion, the second you put something fluffy, or too curved, or god-forbid a flower or something -- which happens more often that I’d like it too [laughs] -- it’s shocking how fast everybody in the room, whether you know art or not, is like ‘no, it doesn’t feel right anymore, something is off, I can’t put my finger on it; I don’t know what you guys changed, but it’s just not there anymore’.

It takes that whole team to go back and balance it and go like this, ‘let’s change the trees, let’s take the branches off it, let’s bring the lighting in, bring in the fog, use this purple here, and this green here’, and all of those things come together to the final what makes you feel like I’m actually in this environment kind of thing.



AusGamers: How long until someone can actually roll a murloc character?

Chris: It’s been shockingly close several times.

AusGamers: That would get me into the game, one hundred percent!

Chris: [laughs] You’re not the only one, there’s a lot of people.

AusGamers: Most of my decks in Hearthstone are murloc decks, I just love murlocs.

Chris: Murlocs are great. We’ve talked about it. There are no concrete plans at this point, but it’s definitely not something that we’ve taken off of the table.

AusGamers: Ok, that’s very tantalising. Thanks so much for your time.

Chris: Appreciate it. Great to meet you.

AusGamers: Enjoy the rest of the show and the upcoming panel. I’ll be watching it with vigour.