wow Warcraft Radio Interview with Game Director Ion Hazzikostas on World First Race

[Stan 5,021]

Warcraft Radio recently interviewed Game Director Ion Hazzikostas and we learned more about the World First Race, Corrupted Items, and more to be revealed about Shadowlands soon. Check out the highlights for more details!

Interview Highlights

• Ion thinks the Ny'alotha World First Race was exciting the whole way through.
• Limit and Method communicated with the WoW team via email and provided valuable feedback on the encounters, which allowed Blizzard to fix many bugs during the World First Race.
• They never test secret phases and the final boss of a raid tier on Mythic difficulty on PTR to preserve the moment of surprise, and despite the Q&A team's best efforts, certain bugs are difficult to reproduce and may slip through to live servers.
• The 25% phase that was firing during N'Zoth the Corruptor was the single biggest bug the team ran into.
• Blizzard despawned N'Zoth for Limit so that they could apply a hotfix for the boss, because they have intended ways on how to deal with an encounter, and Limit tried to completely ignore and bypass a mechanic, so they made N'Zoth's pulse lethal after 12 seconds or so.
• Carapace ended up easier than intended, mainly, due to the damage requirement for Phase 1.
• They never communicate these types of hotfixes to the public, because they literally affect 20 people in the world. The Lead Encounter Designer sends an email to raid leaders of top guilds to let them know when a hotfix will be applied to fix a certain bug.
• The simultaneous rollout of raids in the future is very unlikely, and the main issue are time zones. It would be unfair for other regions to plan around different reset times.
• They are happy with how Corruption is playing out despite the tuning issues. They like how the new system has made gearing choices interesting and deeper than they have been in a long time. 
• Datamining oftentimes hints at secret phases/data that didn't make it live and you see many remnants of failed experiments if you look carefully enough.
• The team is quite happy with six months between raid tiers.
• Live raids might return to BlizzCon at some point.
• They regret how the Ny'alotha raid finale was perceived by most players. It was designed with the idea of you the character being the Hero.
• They will have more details to reveal about Shadowlands very soon.

Interview VoD

[Migol 425]

Our character was supposed to be the hero was their regret?    Not the low budget, short as hell cinematic that was an obvious Lord of the Rings infringement?    The political doublespeak coming out of of Blizzard these days rivals the stuff from Washington.

[darkgreenwax 410]

The following is just ramblings in relation to that last point about the player character being the savior.

 

I know it makes zero sense to ever go back to this in terms of story and logic, but I miss the early days when your character was helping the more powerful heroes.

When you're helping out generals and chieftans and master alchemists and archmages who were above you, and you when you eventually had an encounter with a big name like Thrall, or Sylvanas, or a Bronzebeard, you were like "Oh $%^&!"

Now it's reversed where they're serving us, and it feels odd to me. It also makes it weird when you're doing quests for quest givers. Why is the most powerful champion on Azeroth running around collecting spider eyes and botanical seeds when there's thousands of others more appropriately suited?

I'm sure I'm in a small niche audience that enjoys being part of an epic story versus being the epic story. I'm not expecting change, nor do i think it makes sense to backwards at all, more so pining over what once was. Hard to stuff the power-creep back into the box ?
 

How do other people feel about the direction of the player character being the main power character these days?

[Bobbis 208]

3 hours ago, Stan said:

They are happy with how Corruption is playing out despite the tuning issues. They like how the new system has made gearing choices interesting and deeper than they have been in a long time.

I call BS here, it's not deeper at all. It's aim for the best one as always, and learn to deal with the shite that in brings with it by hovering around 39 ish corruption. It's deep in theory if they were somewhat equal and we could balance around the different corruptions properly, but since that's not the case, it's shallow af.

The only thing deep here is the cave this guy's left his brain or self respect in. Either he's being an idiot and forgot his whole conversation about the issues of WF/TF and how ilvl should be a clear indicator on what's better, or (and much more likely), he's being a standard Activision puppet and saying "yeah nah guys, this is totally great, the best system we've done"...

Edited February 12, 2020 by Bobbis
more

[Prophet001 543]

Actually an amazing interview.

I watched the whole thing.