GamePro Q&A: Blizzard's Jeff Kaplan on The Burning Crusade

We recently had an exclusive sitdown with Jeff Kaplan, the lead designer of World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade. In this interview, Kaplan discusses game design at Blizzard; check back tomorrow for Kaplan's in-depth musings on The Burning Crusade.

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There's more! The second half of this huge interview goes into far more intimate detail on The Burning Crusade, including:

  • Draenei and Blood Elves racial abilities
  • The Outland
  • Jewelcrafting
  • Tons of info on flying mounts
  • Rogue Talent changes
  • cross-realm PvP
  • historical battles
  • and level 70 dungeons!

Read it here.


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GamePro: How does Blizzard provide such consistent after-publish support? How do you outdo pretty much everyone else with bug-fixes, balancing, and new content?

Jeff Kaplan: First and foremost Blizzard is a company of gamers. We love our games, and we play our games, and we want to continue to support them as long as we possibly can. We made all these games because we like them and we always see opportunities for polish. There's not any particular secret to what's going on, we just allocate the proper resources and take care of all our products because they're all close to us.

GP: Compared to a lot of other publishers you guys put out fewer games but seem to focus more on quality.

JK: We're definitely focused on quality first and foremost. Quality is the secret ingredient to fun.

GP: You have accomplished in a short period of time what all other MMOs could not accomplish in years. What was your original mission to set yourselves apart?

JK: I think it was really a focus on doing a quality game. Releasing something that is polished. It's kind of Blizzard policy at that point. I don't think it's unique to making WoW. Also, a constant focus on, "Is it Fun?" I think a lot of people making MMOs overlook the element of fun and they overlook the fact that they're making a game. They get too consumed with social engineering, and sort of socially manipulating communities. We never sat here and focused on, "How are we going to make the community do this, or make the community do that."

Blizzard chose from a

Blizzard chose from a "slew" of races before settling on Blood Elves and the Draenei for The Burning Crusade

We spent a lot of time going, "Is combat fun, are trade skills fun, is the quest system fun? If no player is to ever log into the game ever, would it be fun just to play it by myself?" If we're able to answer yes to that, it naturally became a better experience when we had with this awesome community banding together and all plane at once. I don't think there's any one particular mission statement. It was more of a focus on quality and fun that lead to what WoW is today.

GP: When creating the concept for your first MMO, did you consider doing a StarCraft MMO? Why did you choose WarCraft?

JK: You know, StarCraft is so close to our hearts. StarCraft, Diablo, WarCraft, these are the franchises that define Blizzard, and at some point we want to return to all those universes. When any game comes up for us we're always thinking in the direction of StarCraft, Diablo, and WarCraft.

GP: What was it that made you choose WarCraft?

JK: I think WarCraft at the time and the way that the team was feeling at that point was just natural. We knew exactly what it was going to be. We knew exactly what we had to do. WarCraft was just the obvious choice.

GP: Were there other playable races considered for the expansion?

JK: Yes, we considered a slew of playable races.

GP: Wisps?

JK: Wisps were just a joke. [Choosing the races] was actually one of the biggest debates on the team, and something that we were really passionately encouraging was debate on what races we should do. We felt like that would lead to the best, most obvious races making it into the game. We had a lot of fun doing that. We did a lot of concepting. I actually don't want to talk about some of the ones we didn't pick because you're probably going to see them surface at some later date.

GP: What made you decide to do the Blood Elves and the Draenei?

JK: Ultimately, they were at a slam dunk. We're going to Outland, and we'd already decided that. Outland is this awesome, epic place in the WarCraft universe. And we knew that was the setting for our first expansion. Blood Elves and Draenei had natural ties to Outland. Outland used to be Draenor, which was the home planet of the Draenei. And in WarCraft III: The Frozen Throne the Blood Elves were obsessed with getting to Outland and for Kael'thas Sunstrider, [Outland] was the center of arcane energy closest to the nether and that's where he wanted to be. The whole race was defined by "Let's get to Outland." They were easy choices ultimately.

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