World of Warcraft Patch 5.2: Greg Street Interview

Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street, lead systems designer for World of Warcraft, wants to bring the eight-year-old MMORPG closer to its roots. Last week's Patch 5.2 marks yet another step in that direction, bringing with it a renewed emphasis on ground travel, a sense of server-wide progression, a new raid, and an under-the-radar island that pays homage to the gameplay of WoW's past. "This game’s been out for, gosh, eight years now and while we have millions of players, we also have a lot of players who’ve stopped playing for whatever reason," he said. "It's great to give those players a reason to come back and try it again, and appealing to their nostalgia is a good way of doing that. "
That nostalgia manifests itself most prominently in the new Isle of Thunder, a new hub with dozens of daily quests that unlock more content via server participation in an manner that recalls 2008's Isle of Quel'Danas from the Burning Crusade expansion. The process, Street hopes, will provide a more engaging daily questing experience than players have experienced in the Mists of Pandaria expansion to date. "One of the problems we had before with all our daily quests is that we just threw them all on players right away, so they burned out on the individual quests pretty quickly," he said, adding that unlocking a new tier will grant access to an entirely new set of quests and further progression in the story.
Some, I found, were simple kill and fetch quests; others transformed you into lizard-like Sauroks that can bound over huge stretches of terrain and traverse craggy hills as though they were speed bumps. I'd heard that this had resulted in some of the best world PvP players had seen in ages, and I asked if this was intentional. "We wanted to make world PvP a big deal on the new islands, but I think the Saurok thing is just a happy coincidence," he said, laughing, adding that later island unlocks will open PvP quests that will contribute to world PvP even more.

The island awaits...

Also contributing to this sense of faction struggle are the 11 massive rare elites that stalk the island, each of which drops goodies like valor points for spending on new gear and, occasionally, charms that allow you to risk another roll on bosses in the Raid Finder tool that didn't drop an item you were hoping for. They're not exactly pushovers, either, considering that their health increases depending on how many players surround them. "Rare," however, is used somewhat loosely here, and I pointed out that I'd seen many groups of players just hanging around in certain spots waiting for a respawns. For now, that doesn't bother Street. "So far we’re letting players have fun with the rare respawns," he said, adding that's sometimes a challenge to tweak spawn rates when new content comes out. "It’s frustrating when nothing respawns because there’s so many players around killing it, but it’s also frustrating when things respawn right on top of you immediately after you've killed it."

Saurok transformations make corpse watching fun!

The Isle of Thunder isn't the only island released with Patch 5.2; there's also the Isle of Giants, a zone so old school that no questlines lead to it and the only way to get there the first time is by swimming. On the island itself, massive elite devilsaurs mosey about, providing opportunities for dinosaur pets for hunters, and, if you have the patience to collect 9,999 bones, a new mount. However, what struck me most is how so few people had even heard of it. "We purposely didn’t make a big deal out of it," he said. "I think it’s the kind of thing where more people over time will say, 'What’s this dinosaur island everyone’s talking about?' It’s going to be fun to watch the community discover it."
When they do discover it, it'll likely be because that's where they'll find Oondasta, the tougher of the two new world bosses. Street hopes that Oondasta will provide a decent challenge for guild groups, particularly after his disappointments with the world boss Salyis' Warband, better known to players as Galleon. "Galleon was supposed to be like one of the old world bosses, where he really took your guild to get together to try to bring him down," he said, "but he spawned in a very populated area--right outside where players have their farms." As a result, many groups could down Galleon through sheer numbers alone. Oondasta, on the other hand, is more like classic WoW's Lord Kazzak, who used to spawn in an subzone of the Blasted Lands' Tainted Scar while surrounded by elites. "We wanted it to be a big deal if you could get your guild out there and beat other guilds to get it," he said. "And then to discourage people from just leaving a low level alt out there to constantly scan for it, we populated this island with elite dinosaurs."

Watch your step.

It's important to note that Street's last point actually matters with Patch 5.2. Thanks to flying mounts, World of Warcraft had largely become a game in which you could surmount such challenges simply by flying over them. In the Isles of Thunder and Giants, however, flying is disabled. "Somewhere along the way, we’d lost the sense that being outdoors in the world was kind of a dangerous thing," he said, adding that merely getting to some quest objectives used to be half the battle. "Walking around and fighting mobs is basically the heart of World of Warcraft, and we had lost a little bit of that and wanted to make it fun again."
Patch 5.2 also brought a new raid along with it, the Throne of Thunder, and this week marks the release of the first tier of that new raiding content for World of Warcraft's Raider Finder tool. I haven't had a chance to sample the content myself, but I did express my concerns that WoW's Raid Finder (which presents watered-down versions of current raids for casually minded players) were taking the place in the gearing process that heroics used to provide. This, I discovered, was one area where Street had little interest in looking toward the past for inspiration.

That's one tough grasshopper.

"We had very difficult heroic dungeons in Cataclysm at launch," he said, recalling that all of them required feats of coordination, crowd control, and interrupts that were largely absent in the heroics for the previous Wrath of the Lich King expansion. I personally was a big fan of the shift, but Street pointed out that it didn't work well with WoW's random dungeon finder. "It’s really hard, and probably unrealistic, to expect five strangers to suddenly gain this level of coordination," he said. "The nice thing about Raid Finder is that there’s 25 players together, so if there’s only a few people who know what’s going on, they can often explain or even carry the rest of the group. And because it’s a raid, it’s a really epic experience--these are gigantic bosses with a lot of unique visuals, so it delivers on feeling like an epic experience without requiring the really fine-tuned level of coordination that a dungeon does. We feel like they’ve been a huge success, and then for players who really like that hardcore five-player dungeons, we have the challenge modes to fill that niche."
Patch 5.2 also brings along a host of smaller changes as well, such as elite battle pets in the wild that can solo your whole team of three battle pets. It also unlocks the ability to fill "work orders" for rep at your personal farm, provided you've reached exalted with the Tillers. Street says he's not entirely opposed to using the work order concept to help players max out faction reputations from previous expansions. "It’s possible," he said. "We kind of want to see how it works."
Yet even with this wealth of content, I wanted more, such as a word on the release of Defense of the Alehouse, a planned PvP battleground based on MOBAs like League of Legends. Street didn't seem optimistic. "Recreating that kind of DoTA feeling in a WoW battleground is going to be a huge challenge. We think it’s really exciting and we know a lot of players do as well, but it’s going to take a lot of work to get that right," he said. "I don’t know if we’ll release it anytime soon."

With work orders, "farming rep" has never felt more literal.

Street also has his eyes on the next patch, which whisks players away from Pandaria and into Orgrimmar, where the Horde's new warchief Garrosh Hellscream refuses to play nice. Exciting stuff, sure, but I wondered if it ran the risk of abandoning Pandaria. "Even though Orgrimmar’s going to play a big role in that story, we don’t want to have players going, 'Oh, Pandaria’s over, now we're back to the old kingdoms we know,'" he said. "There’s going to be a mix, and we definitely want to wrap the whole story back and bring to a conclusion many of the threads we’ve been having through Pandaria. We’re looking forward to seeing how players respond to having a mix of new world and old world together."
Above all, Street wants Mists of Pandaria and patches like 5.2 to bring back the magic that World of Warcraft seemed to have lost with Cataclysm. "We felt like since then, we’d lost our way a little bit. We had some really epic quests and we’ve told some great stories, but the second-to-second combat out in the field wasn’t as interesting," he said. "So we made an effort with the launch of Pandaria and we redoubled it with this most recent patch to make a lot of cool stuff for players to do out in the world. We still have great dungeons and other instance content," he said, "but we also just have fun things to do out in the world with your friends." And for a game in a genre that relies on social interaction above all else, that can only be a good thing.