Posts with tag jeff kaplan

Monde Persistants, a French Warcraft site, has released their full interview with Lead Designer Jeff Kaplan and Art Director Chris Robinson from last week's Leipzig Games Convention. Some of this information we already know, but there's quite a bit that was new to us. You can read the entire interview (in English!) and see the video at MP. Here's the summary of the new items:

• Part of the lore behind the Wrath of the Lich King expansion has Arthas trying to seduce players to the dark side, both Alliance and Horde.

• Part of the Death Knight lore will have them "break away" from the Lich King influence to be free agents, the way the Forsaken have broken away from being mindless undead.

• Death Knights will "probably" be able to inscribe any weapon with their Runes that give them power.

• Ulduar is going to be a new raid instance. It's controlled by storm giants and is a fortress of the Titans like Uldaman and Maruadon according to WoW lore.

• The Nerubians (spider guys) will host a few instances at the underground Azjol'Nerub.

• The Nexus will have a L70 5-man instance.
  

• The main boss in the CoT: Stratholme instance will be Mal'ganis.

• Possibly new daily quests introduced with the Sunwell Plateau patch (2.4?)

Previous information gathered from Leipzig can be found here.

Via World of Raids

In the last four days, we've reported on interviews with Lead Designer Jeff Kaplan at the European Game Conference going on currently in Leipzig, Germany. So far he has dropped many new bits of information about the Wrath of the Lich King and some new patch content coming before that.

Turns out, Blizzard is reporting on its own activities at Leipzig on its official European page. In addition to the Wrath and Starcraft II demo stations, Blizzard hosted the demise of Illidan Stormrage. Uberguild Nihilum performed a Black Temple raid live at the Blizzard booth in front of 5,000 spectators. Afterwards, Blizzard gave away the keyboards signed by members of Nihilum to the crowd. Blizzard also interviewed the guild. You can read it here.

With the convention wrapping up today, we'll have to start looking elsewhere for more news on the upcoming expansion.

First, we reported on German game site Buffed's interview with Jeff Kaplan that revealed more details of the new COT: Stratholme instance and an explanation of the Death Knight rune system. If you go to their page, scroll down past all that German and you'll find a video of the interview (in English!)

Later in the day, we covered Curse Gaming's own interview with Kaplan that announced Utgarde Pinnacle, gave more detail on the new Inscription profession, revealed the plan behind the increased pre-60 leveling curve and explored the dev's thoughts about giving the Hunter class some PvP love. Now Curse has put up a video of the interview.

Leipzig isn't over yet. Hopefully we'll have more revelations before the weekend is over.

It seems that WoW Lead Designer Jeff Kaplan has a new bit of expansion information for every journalist he talks to at this week's European Game Conference in Leipzig, Germany. This batch of news comes from Curse gaming, who has sent a couple of journalists over to get the scoop.

• We already know about the L70 instance called Utgarde Keep in the Howling Fjord zone. Now we learn that there will be a second wing of the instance for L80 players called Utgarde Pinnacle. Both dungeons will have Normal and Heroic modes. Yay for key grinding! Anybody?

• The new Inscription profession will do more than increases effectiveness of spells and abilities. Devs are playing with the concept of using Inscription to improve other elements like range, duration, etc.

• The "increased leveling curve" of levels 20-60 is going to be accomplished two ways: reduction of the amount of experience required per level and increasing the amount of experience a quest grants by 30%.

• To address Hunter concerns, Blizzard is considering a Woodworking profession as well as a Mortal Strike kind of ability that reduces healing effectiveness on the target in PvP. These are just ideas they are currently considering and have not been confirmed as going live.

The full interview can be read on Curse's front page. Curse promises a video of the interview later tonight. I'll update this post with the link when it goes live.

As for the pre-60 leveling increase, I've been toying with leveling an enhancement shaman, but have been weary about the grind. This may be the incentive to get me to accomplish that goal. Is this enough for you? Will you level an alt before the expansion?

ActionTrip cornered WoW Lead Designer Jeff Kaplan and Art Director Chris Robinson today at the Leipzig Game Convention in Germany (E3 for Europe.) And boy, did they get a lot out of those two about Blizzard's plans for the future. Here are the highlights:

• The art for the expansion will look more like classic Warcraft (gothic fantasy), and less like Outlands art (high fantasy)
• Sunwell Plateau will be coming in a patch before the WotLK launch. It will include both a 25-main raid and a 5-main instance with both normal and heroic mode.
• WotLK will have "just as much" 5-man instances as TBC and more 10-main instances due to the popularity of Karazhan
• A new PvP area called Lake Wintergrass will combine world PvP (non-instanced) with the new siege weapons and destructible buildings. The faction that controls this zone may receive an effect that not only applies to the zone, but to the whole continent
  
• When asked about class balance, they said they had no plans for any major changes to classes
• The Death Knight unlocking quest will start at level 55-60

If I'm not mistaken, the Sunwell Plateau is north east of Silvermoon city, the Blood Elf capital. I hope Blizzard is planning some kind of Alliance friendly transportation into the area with the introduction of the Zul'Aman raid zone in Patch 2.3. If not, they are definitely going to need it for these new zones.

Full interview can be read here.

Via WorldOfWar.Net

EDIT: In regards to #14's comment: Stratholme is the new CoT instance according to this interview with Lead Designer Jeff Kaplan aka "Tigole." It is a 5-man, Level 80 instance. You will travel to the past before Arthas was corrupted and help him rid the city of demons and burn it down. As far as we can tell, the Sunwell Plateau will only be accessible by traveling there physically.

That same article also mentioned that future Hero Classes could be Demon Hunter, Archmage or Blademaster.

He also talked about the Death Knight rune system. What runes the Death Knight carves into his blade will determine what role he plays in the group (i.e tank, dps, a mix of the two, etc.)

In this separate interview, Kaplan revealed another new WotLK instance, Nexus, located in the Borean Tundra zone. It will be split into several wings, one of them for a 25-man raid that must defeat Malygyos, the blue dragon.

Have you ever wondered what the names and faces behind WoW do in their off time? In the recent interview 1up had with Shane Dabiri, Rob Pardo, Jeff Kaplan, and Tom Chilton, we get to find out a bit about that -- at least in regards to some of the games that they're playing right now. Two of them were really no surprise to me: Guitar Hero II and God of War. Those two have been all over the gaming media and are a lot of fun to play, so it makes total sense. The two titles that caught me off guard were several mentions of Viva Pinata and Rob saying that he plays the PopCap game, Peggle. They also covered some great background information from their gaming roots, to some ways they think WoW has changed the genre. Check it out!

Joystiq managed to get a interview with World of Warcraft's lead designer, Jeff Kaplan, (you may know him as "Tigole" on the forums) - and there's some interesting stuff here. Of course there's a lot of info here, but some of the most interesting talk revolves around the new PvP system. As was posted earlier, the system will consist of arena matches of 2v2, 3v3, or 5v5 which will can be alliance v. horde, alliance v. alliance, or horde v. horde and cross-server. And the honor system as we know it will be gone entirely - to quote Kaplan:

It's a competitive-based ladder that uses a rating system similar to the chess ELO rating. One of the key differences is that we require a minimum number of games that you have to play. Unlike in the chess system where if you're on top, you can just sit there, we wanted to ensure that the No. 1 guy can be knocked off his top spot. But, we don't require too many games. We'll require something around ten games.

Further, honor points as we know them will be significantly changed. There will be no more honor decay and instead of determining your PVP rank, the honor points you accumulate can be spent to purchase PVP gear.

And other tidbits touched on by the interview include...

• News that there's been some thought about implementing voice chat in the game, though it won't be coming in the Burning Crusade.
• Dungeons (though whether all dungeons, or simply expansion dungeons) will have a "normal" and "hard" difficulty setting, and loot will be adjusted accordingly.
• They're currently anticipating new races with every expansion - though there is a finite limit on the number of races in Azeroth.

I can't help but be excited about this news.

Xfire has posted a video of their E3 interviews.  It's not really focusing on news (which we've probably all seen by this point already), but  commentary (some interesting and some just for comic value)  from Jeff Kaplan (Tigole), Caydiem, Ordinn, and Eyonix.  It's an entertaining watch with a few interesting tidbits, though I must admit that I had to laugh when Tigole commented, "We know the honor system is a bit of a grind."