World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade Q&A

We had a chance to sit down with Blizzard lead designer Jeff Kaplan during E3 to discuss the Burning Crusade expansion for World of Warcraft. We covered the new Draenei Alliance race announcement and detailed the new jewel-crafting skill in our E3 news and preview coverage, but we wanted to put together this Q&A to share the other interesting information that Kaplan revealed about the expansion.

GameSpot:: Hey, these Draenei aren't ugly at all.

Jeff Kaplan: A lot of people were thinking that we would give the Alliance an ugly race since we gave the Horde a beautiful race, the Blood Elves. It was never our goal to tank the Alliance race. We want the Draenei to be as cool as any other race. If we have any sort of balance issues, the answer is going to be more than just making one race good and one race lousy.

GS: Were you considering any other races for Alliance before settling on the Draenei?

JK: Yes. Actually, we considered other races for Horde as well. For both Horde and Alliance, we considered and debated almost every sentient creature that you see in the game. We have concept art--you name it, we debated it.

GS: Can you give an example race that was debated?

JK: We talked about the goblin race. We debated that for both Horde and Alliance. We made arguments for why they would be cool on both sides.

GS: The Burning Crusade will open up a new Outlands area that isn't a part of Azeroth. How will players reach the Outlands?

JK: You'll travel through the Dark Portal, which is in the Blasted Lands. At one point the Blasted Lands and the Swamp of Sorrows were one zone called the Black Morass in the Warcraft 2 era. When Medivh opened the Dark Portal, it caused a huge crater to form and opened the world to the Hellfire Peninsula. Eventually as the expansion ages, you'll be able to port to one of the key cities, and if you have a warlock buddy and two friends, they can just summon you up. We're not going to force you to run through the portal every time.

GS: What do you have planned in terms of player versus player for the expansion?

JK: We're building a PVP objective into every new Outland zone for outdoor world PVP. They're different for each zone. Hellfire Peninsula actually has three objectives that are very close to each other. Picture an outdoor Arathi Basin that's always ongoing. We're going to have some other big announcements that have to do with the PVP system, but that will be closer to launch, so we're not ready to talk about that yet.

GS: It sounds like the theme for Outlands is that everything is going to be really huge.

JK: Yes, we definitely want the Outland zones to be big because we have such a large pooling of level-60 players that are going to be unleashed on these towns. We want to get them into instances;we don't want them to feel like they're stepping on each other's toes.

GS: Is there more to jewel crafting than just making rings and necklaces?

JK: Jewel crafters can also cut gems. Let's say a star ruby drops in the world. A jewel crafter, in addition to making cool items that people will want, can cut that star ruby to make it a socketable gem. The first key to that is that I'll need to get a socketable item, which can be made by other trade skills, dropped in dungeons, that sort of thing. Socketable items, for example, can have three slots. It doesn't compete with enchanting. If I wanted to put gems in all three slots and have an enchantment, I can do that.

GS: Will there be a combination bonus that will encourage players to use different gem types?

JK: We don't want players focused like, "All I want are intellect gems; that's all I care about," so we have a system, we don't really have a name for it yet, but it's almost like gem sets or metagems. For example, I can socket in this gem that does +12 strength if four blue gems are equipped. There are these gems that will make me shake up my normal socket system, like one that does +4 agility per different-colored gem, so if I keep mixing up gems, I get more agility.

GS: In jewel crafting, can a player with the expansion craft an item and give it to someone who doesn't have the expansion?

JK: Yes, you can. A guy who doesn't have the expansion can't be a jewel crafter, and it's also going to be very hard for him to get socketed items, but there's a chance that people will put up socketed items and jewels in the auction house and he'll be able to buy them.

GS: The warrior you're showing here has the full tier 3 armor set. Can you tell us when those items will be in the game?

JK: The exact same team building the expansion is also building the live content updates. The big feature of 1.11 is the Scourge invasion, with Scourge unleashed all over Azeroth and Kalimdor. We're going to have a necropolis floating over the invading Scourge. For the raid players, we'll have Naxxramas, where the tier 3 gear drops.

GS: Can you tell us about the new flying mount?

JK: The flying mount can run on the ground faster than epic mount speed. We wanted you to be able to land in front of your friends and be able to show it off like, "Hey, dude! Check me out. I'm on a flying mount!" The mount will give you free flight through all of Outlands. So if there's content out on a rock out there, it's only accessible to me if I have a flying mount, which you'll need to be level 70 to get.

GS: Is there a way to get knocked off the mount?

JK: Currently, no, but we are talking about iterating on combat mechanics as we get into alpha and beta. Not that we'll ever give you combat on the mount, but for PVP situations, we might have to make it so that you dismount off. Our first philosophy in general when we approach systems is to make it as fun as possible first and nerf it back in alpha or beta. If anything creates an existing world problem, we'll have to fix it.

GS: Are you allowed to drop off the mount in midair?

JK: Yeah!

GS: And if you drop off from too high up, will you crater?

JK: Oh, yeah. Watch. Clicks dismount action. Ahhhhhh. Player falls and takes roughly 3,700 fall damage.

GS: Can you tell us more about the new raid instances in the expansion?

JK: As far as raid instances go, you'll get to experience Hellfire Citadel. It's a "winged dungeon"-like Scarlet Monastery. You've got two five-man "level-up" wings levels 60 to 62. Then you have one five-man level-70 wing like a Dire Maul or a Stratholme, and it's also got an Onyxia-style raid in it. We're trying to do much more where we bridge the content up so everyone can get the Hellfire Citadel experience in their own comfort zone.

We will have some badass raid zones like the Black Temple, which is pure endgame raid. We're going to have The Caverns of Time: The Battle for Mount Hyjal, the final mission of Warcraft 3 where the Night Elves banded together with Jaina and Thrall to defeat Archimonde.

We're also going to try some new stuff with raid instances. We're going to do a 10-man raid instance called Karazhan on the raid save timer. That should really feel like endgame content for people that don't want to raid with anything more than 10. That'll just be the tip of the iceberg for the real raiders that want to go out and experience the big, epic content.

GS: Are we going to see more challenging five-man instances in the expansion?

JK: Karazhan will be the start for that. In our current five-man dungeons, the bosses are your reward for putting up with 20 to 30 minutes of clearing through normal creatures. Karazhan is where we're going to start telling players that you will need tactics to defeat some of these bosses. It's bigger than any other dungeon existing in WOW right now. It'll be easy early on, but you'll feel like you've really earned it by the time you get to the end.

GS: Will you roll out a graphics upgrade for Windows Vista and DirectX 10?

JK: We know that sometime in WOW's lifetime, we're going to upgrade the graphics engine. We don't know when that will be, but we built the game from the ground up knowing that it's going to be around a long time and needs to be upgradable.

GS: Thanks, Jeff!