Tigole: Naxx in Northrend
by Eliah Hecht 
Aug 7th 2007 at 7:48PM
The MMO Gamer sat down for an interview with WoW lead developer Jeff "Tigole" Kaplan recently. You can hear the audio or read the transcript at their site, but for my money, here's the most interesting bit. In the middle of a rehashing of the debate over whether Blizzard should spend a lot of time developing raids that few people will see, he drops this great idea:So what I want to do in Northrend is to take Naxxramas in all of its glory, scale it down to the 25 man raid size, and then take the difficulty and retune it-obviously we'd tune for level 80, it would no longer be tuned for level 60, since that would be a little silly and it wouldn't be a lot of fun for people at that point-but I want to put rewards in there that are very exciting to level 80 players, but make it the entry-level raid, very accessible, tune the encounters so that there's something for everybody to do, and let the majority get a chance to see that content that they hadn't seen before.
Naxx as the Karazhan of Northrend. I like it. I am one of the many who never got a chance to try Naxx the first time around, and I hear it's a well-designed raid. I also like that the entry-level raid is planned to be 25-man, not 10-man; the transition from KZ to Gruul and SSC has caused problems for a lot of guilds. Apparently it's also a bit of a misconception that raiding is unpopular; Tigole says out of all the instances in the live game right now, Karazhan is the one that gets done by the most people each week.
The interview goes on to discuss the links between WoW raiding and EverQuest raiding (Tigole was a raid guild leader in EQ for some time before working on WoW), and what Tigole would have done differently if he could go back in time to when WoW was first being made. It's a good read, like most developer interviews, so go check it out. But Naxx in Northrend? Awesome!
Filed under: Raiding, Interviews, Wrath of the Lich King
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
amasen Aug 7th 2007 8:02PM
My favorite part... Is how terribly broken the interviewer believed the game to be... and how he has never come back... To bad it's true and the raid game is still broken.
“Ah. So, do you still play WoW?”
“No,” I admitted sheepishly. “I quit about a year and a half ago. I took one look at the patch notes with the requirements to open AQ and said to myself, ‘I’m getting the hell out of here.’”
To his credit, the smile that had been on his face from the moment we had been introduced didn’t so much as flicker at this as we went our separate ways.
Argent Aug 7th 2007 8:04PM
i guess the 4 horsemen will now become the 2 horsemen. well, either that, or the encounter will be 8 tanks, 10 healers and whatever dps they can cobble together.
loathed, thaddeus, patchwerk, the LoS buggyness of maexxna...blizz will have to do a lot of work to make that dog hunt, imo.
Baluki Aug 7th 2007 8:09PM
Ooo, sweet. Naxx is a great dungeon, and I'm glad that it'll finally get the traffic it deserves.
But don't think that it's "entry-level". It wasn't hard just because the bosses have a lot of hit points and do a lot of damage. It was hard because every fight required a perfectly-executed strategy. It required everyone to know exactly what they needed to do and to do it without fail.
Try running 40 lvl. 70's through it right now and you'll STILL have a hard time. Does everyone know how to do the Heigan dance? What happens when Thaddius gives you a negative charge? Can you keep your tank alive when the entire raid is immobilized for 8 seconds?
I was lucky enough to get through about half of Naxx the first time around, and I look forward to getting to the other half.
Keegan Aug 7th 2007 8:12PM
fucking casuals ruining the content as usual--glad I got out of the mess that WoW has become. WaR can't come soon enough
Valethas Aug 7th 2007 8:24PM
Ya Nax will tie into the next EXP FAR better then it was in the average WoW. Besides the next EXP is going to be about the lich king so makes sense Kel'thuzad and Naz should be back in there. I wonder what their going to change to make it a 25 man raid? Are they going to weaken the horseman so its better for a 25man or what?
IKT Aug 7th 2007 8:23PM
It's a great intstance and it's great to see it accessable by many.
@4 QQ moar.
dang Aug 7th 2007 8:39PM
I am so in love with this idea, oops I think I wet my pants.
Daniel Jackson Aug 7th 2007 8:40PM
There are a few quests and such that they will need to change, like the quest to obtain the Atiesh, Greatstaff of the Guardian. I wonder how that will all work out! :-)
Baluki Aug 7th 2007 8:49PM
@4: Nobody likes a whiner. If you hate the game so much, stop going to WoW sites and commenting in WoW forums. Go play your friggin' Warhammer when it comes out, and most of all...shut the hell up and go away.
Coherent Aug 7th 2007 8:52PM
Those were pretty good questions considering the interviewer no longer plays WoW.
The truth is that WoW is not the last word in MMO's. Not by a long shot. For all it's success, Blizzard has not built an ultimate game or found the ultimate business model. They've simply dramatically improved on what came before.
Tigole is still dodging the question. If Karazan is so insanely popular, why is Zul'Aman the ONLY new 10 man dungeon being announced? Why not two more, or even three?
Granted there needs to be high-end content to satisfy the hardcore, but the FOCUS should be on new accessible content like Kara.
There is plenty of room for improvement on the Blizz model. Hopefully someone will do exactly what Blizzard did: Steal the best ideas from WoW and build something even better on top of them.
Competition like that would be good for everybody.
Armath Aug 7th 2007 9:25PM
Regarding Karazan's popularity: Of course it's the most popular instance! That's because there's nothing else like it.
Kara is the only 10-person burning crusade instance. There are 15 5-person instances (plus heroic versions), a couple of 25-person raids, and then Kara. If Kara weren't the most popular instance, something would be very, very wrong.
I think more 10-person instances is a good thing - it's a nice transition between regular instances and big raids.
I'd like to find out what the #2 instance is, and why? And the stats I'm really interested in are (a) what percentage of active players are actually raiding in a given week, and (b) what percentage of time played by all players is spent in a raid. I suspect those numbers are gonna be moderately low and really low.
Glac13 Aug 7th 2007 10:00PM
Yeah, like what Armath says, the stat that Tigole cites is a classic red herring logical fallacy. The fact that Kara is the most popular instance and the fact that a low percentage of people can run endgame raids can both be true at the same time. Also, when people bring this issue up, I feel like they are talking about raids like MC, Naxx, AQ, BWL, Ony, NOT Kara.
Bill G Aug 7th 2007 10:33PM
11&12, I completely agree.
Tigole's answer sounds like a well rehearsed dodge to the question about the overemphasis on raiding development vs. player base activity.
By his definition a raid instance must be anything with a reset timer. So would UBRS have been a raid instance if it had a timer?
Andrew Aug 7th 2007 11:12PM
What happens to Tier 3 armor?
Argent Aug 8th 2007 12:33AM
i guess the 4 horsemen will now become the 2 horsemen. well, either that, or the encounter will be 8 tanks, 10 healers and whatever dps they can cobble together.
personally, i thought it was by far the worst raid dungeon they put out in the original WoW and can't say i'm happy to see it make a comeback (never mind the fact that it kinda signals that blizz is running out of ideas and thus we get retreads now.)
but who knows. maybe they will re-tune the fights to truly make the place more accessible, which actually would be kinda nice.
Dave Aug 8th 2007 12:59AM
for the most part, I think people are talking about two different things when it comes to 10-man raids (something that's been in the game since BRD was a 10-man back in the day) and 25-man raids.
It's just not fair to say that raiding is popular, when the majority of people are on a 10man instance that's really not much of a raid, except that it's on a timer and has purple loot. All of the loot in Karazhan could have been blue and the instance not on a timer (much like Tier 0 in UBRS) and it would have still made a lot of sense and caused a lot less drama in the guild world. It's segmented enough that groups with lots of time could have gone in and nailed the whole place, other groups could skip certain bosses, etc. Win-win.
Instead, they wanted to call it a raid to justify the inclusion of raids in the game basically by throwing a softball out there that everyone could hit even if they're not very good at it.
25-man raids now... there's a real raid that requires a lot more devotion to the game. Most people don't have that, and I bet the amount of people to down a single boss in Hyjal or Black Temple is less than %10 of the entire playerbase. (they're just a very vocal minority). I'm also willing to bet that the amount of people who ever defeat Illidan will be no greater than %25 before the next expansion comes out.
Meanwhile, there probably will be very few people who won't do a full clear of kara at least once if they really want, since most half-decent guilds can manage it in a week and the good ones can do a full clear in 2 nights.
So to say that raiding is popular is only twisting words to fit a situation and justify things. Clearly there are millions of people who WANT to raid, but Blizzard has yet to design a system that can sustain the successful participation of the majority of players. Revamp Naxx all you want, %75 of the rest of us still aren't going to get to see what's after it if it ends up being a 25-man raid.
Incendo Aug 8th 2007 6:42AM
First good idea to do with anything pre-BC in a while.
Calminaion Aug 8th 2007 8:25AM
@#16 - I agree, and if I may, I would like to elaborate.
I'm in 2 minds here .. Firstly - great idea giving players chance to experience Naxx, which is something that 99% of us missed first time round. BUT ... why a 25 man instance?
Think about it, why did most of us miss Naxx ? ... because we were unable to get ourselves into a hardcore raiding guild and dedicate oodles of time to run raid instances (MC, BWL, wtc) as a group of 40 in order to gear up enough to get into Naxx. Let's not forget about the immense amount of Attunement grind in order to even walk through the doors.
Making Naxx a 25 man run will not get rid of this problem, you will still need to be in a guild that is organised enough to run 25 man raids, and that is still out of reach for most players, so I (and a lot of other players) will miss out again.
I'm gonna quote a buddy of mine now, I hope he doesn't mind, but the conversation must have gone something like:
Blizz guy 1: “Hey guys, check this, a 10 man instance is our most popular. Not our 25 man, or 40 man stuff.”
Blizz guy 2: “So let’s make another 25 man?”
Duh ... If they want to make Naxx accessible to the masses ... make it a run like Kara, where it's tuned for 10 level 80's (who can do it even though they are not in a raiding guild together).. that way, the guys who are moaning about having to do it again, can skip it and spend their every waking hour raiding 25-manners, and the rest of us can slowly, casually work our way through the amazing content that we missed the first time round (because we were, and still are, casual players)
Bottom line is that it took an incredible amount of time and effort to get a guild run through Naxx, and that's why 99% of players missed out on it. The way things look like they might be going, it's going to turn out the same way (ok, maybe not 99% .. make it 90% will miss out this time ;->)
Oh, and as for the "What's going to happen about T3 stuff" question .. are you seriously trying to tell me there are guilds raiding Naxx at this moment to get T3 gear !!! Daamn, I hope not !
apavluck Aug 8th 2007 8:56AM
Make it solo or don't bother.
Todd Aug 8th 2007 9:37AM
I hope they also boost the stats on the legendary Greatstaff, because in comparison to TBC and ultimately WTK, Atiesh will be far from superior for a legendary weapon.