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Gamasutra: I imagine "lead world designer" is a particularly involved role in the new expansion, since it seems to be the most significant redesign of existing World of Warcraft content yet. Is that the case?
Alex Afrasiabi: Oh, absolutely. You might go so far as to say any MMO ever, for an expansion.
I would say every zone in the old world is hit one way or another at varying degrees, from complete redos like Darkshore and Azshara, to moderate questing changes like Feralas, to moderate redos of the terrain and the quests, to light -- but even "light" is debatable -- [modification] in Loch Modan. Every zone is hit by this cataclysm to some degree.
The cataclysm starts out with rumbles, and what those rumbles are are the stirrings of Deathwing beneath the world. He's in this elemental plane of earth locked away in Deepholm. When he finally breaches into terrestrial Azeroth, it causes that gaping wound on the surface of the world -- a cataclysmic shockwave that hits pretty much everything. It's Deathwing, the world-breaker, who is the chief source of this destruction.
Gamasutra: So you've got that lore. But how do you determine from a development standpoint how to translate that into design, asset production, writing, and so on? How do you determine what areas are higher-priority for more extensive recreation?
Alex Afrasiabi: I don't want to say we play it by ear, because we really don't. We know our game really, really well. We've had a lot of time now -- five years, more really -- in development to hone our skills. Each expansion, in my eyes, gets progressively better. We become better designers of the content. We understand what the players want from our quests and our content, and we try to provide that.
We really know our game very well, and that includes [level] one to 60 [zones]. The first thing we did when we set out to do this was prioritize. You basically get that big list of zones, and you give them that -- "This [zone] is a five, the worst. This is just a mess." Like Darkshore. And then, "This [zone] is a one. Moderate work." We basically make this huge prioritized list, and then go through it.
Other mitigating factors come into play, of course. What do you do with Silithus? It's a [level] 55-to-60 zone in this expansion. Is it as relevant? We almost have to triage the zones. We know what our production schedule is roughly -- I'm not going to tell you what that is [laughs].
But we have to triage the zones. A zone like Silithus is probably not the best of zones right now. I'd go on to say it's actually pretty bad. It's not as important a zone like Azshara. So it will probably get less of the treatment, because the people who reach that point are probably going to somewhere else at that point [anyway]. It's not as important as Aziara, which is now a [level] 10-to-20 zone for the Horde. That absolutely was terrible before, and now it's got to be amazing.
Gamasutra: So as you said, you guys have been doing this for well over five years now, and you've learned a lot. What are some of the things you've learned about MMO design, particularly when it comes to conveying story in an integrated, interesting way?
Alex Afrasiabi: The most important one, I think, and this is just from sitting at meetings -- any new guys who come in, they always have that urge to tell their story. "I'm going to tell this amazing story. It's going to make you weep when you read it."
That's when I stop them right there. I'm like, "Stop right there. Nobody's going to read whatever you're trying to do. It could be the greatest thing since Hemingway. Nobody cares. Nobody cares. Nobody's going to read it." You have to take a different approach, and you show the player that.
It's the old adage: show, don't tell. You show them. It's a different world. That's when you're starting down the right path.
When we first started doing this, sure we knew it, but we didn't understand it. There's a difference, and it only really comes from practice. It's almost a zen thing with the quest guys at this point, where it's a [matter of] "Do this quest without any text." Just blindfolded. "Do this quest, and let's see if I even know what's going on. Create something. What's going on? Can I tell if I'm entering this room or entering a point of interest? What am I looking at? What is happening?"
I think that's improved our design vastly over the years. Of course, we're still going to have text, but we're not dependent on it. As we advance our technology, too, with quest map [points of interest] and things like that, we'll become less dependant on it. Because right now, what we use it for is as a means of direction.
Certainly, we will provide story and lore when we can, but we want to provide that in the actual act of doing the quest. The one thing we still can't decouple from it is directions -- where do you go? But we're getting there.
Gamasutra: That's certainly something MMOs struggle with -- are people going to bother with the text? It seems like with Cataclysm, that's got to be almost the whole point of the expansion almost. A huge part of the experience as the player is seeing how everything has changed. Can you talk about any design tools or methods you use to strive for that?
Alex Afrasiabi: Absolutely. It's actually interesting. Initially, we created phasing as a bug fix. It was used to fix a bug with the Blade's Edge quest. That was it. Case closed, right? There was this bug, we couldn't solve the problem, and one of our programmers -- a brilliant guy -- implemented this system. Nobody thought twice about it.
