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[Expansion pack] Wrath [of the Lich King] rolls around, and we're in early alpha. We're getting feedback from the team, and one of my friends on the team is talking to me about [the] Howling Fjord [zone], and he's irate. He's saying, "I can't believe this. I go into [capital city] Valgarde, and I keep getting trained by these [native enemies] Vrykul. I killed them, and I did the quest. Why do I keep running into them?"
It seems really kind of innocuous. "Yeah, of course. That's how the game works. There's an event playing out. Even though you've done the quest, these events don't stop." But that's kind of what got me to start to more seriously approach it. It was almost a blow to the gut. I was aware of it. It was almost a challenge at that point. How could we change the world for the player so that it actually dynamically alters, so they can actually say, "I did take that quest to kill those Vrykul, and once I did that, guess what? They're gone. They're no longer there."
That was all the fire that was needed. From there, it was experimentation. It's funny. If you really break down how Lich King went, the way we tackled zones, we did Howling Fjord, Borean Tundra, and Dragonblight, in that order essentially, during development. Once you get to Dragonblight, you start seeing some of those effects. You start seeing a lot of invisibility -- not phasing -- because at the time, that phasing thing still hadn't clicked. But you start seeing more and more of it. When you get into Wintergarde, you rescue captives or villagers first. Once you bring them into town, the town actually changes.
After that, we went onto [the then-new] Death Knight [class], and it was almost a proof of concept at that point. How can we do this? This obscure bug fix just popped up. We were thinking, "What about that? Could that work?" Sure enough, we did a quick run through with a test, went through from one phase to the next, and we said, "Wait a minute. This actually did change, and it totally worked. Okay. We might have something here."
From there, phasing was born, essentially, in its current [form]. It became a great tool for us, to be able to tell stories like the battle for the [Undead capital] Undercity. You go to [Orc capital] Orgrimmar, and it's completely phased out into another phase, and you have all these [undead] Forsaken refugees pouring in instantly. You don't need to read anything. You just look. Forsaken refugees are on the floor, begging you for help. The Horde are all rounded up. Shops are all closed -- just straight up just closed, can't use them. Guards direct you to the other cities. It's exciting. That was a big one.
So our tools have essentially gotten better. Using phasing is one example, but there are many advancements like that. Vehicles have taken a lot of flak -- some good, some bad. For things that are used for that the player never actually controls, they're actually a very powerful tool for us. An example of a vehicle is the Kologarn -- that's a boss where you have the arms separate from the body. Just using the vehicle tech, he's actually technically just one big vehicle with two passengers as his arms. Again, it allows us to tell this greater story. It's no longer just that boss -- his arm breaks off, and then his other arm breaks off. The technology is definitely improved, and it's helped us tremendously, I think.
Gamasutra: Were you apprehensive at any point in taking something that was basically a bug fix, and resting so much of the game on it?
Alex Afrasiabi: Well, of course we're apprehensive. But the thing to me is that advances in our industry, and in Blizzard, don't necessarily stem from ideology. Ideology is a powerful thing, and it keeps us rooted. It keeps the foundation firm. But it's ingenuity and deviance, dare I say, that pushes you beyond that. So, you take something like this where it's just this thing for a bug fix and you deviate -- you say, "What if we can do something else with it?"
You have to push it. You have to. You have to chase it down and see where it goes. A lot of times, it is a dead end. You'll chase something down, and you're like, "Ah, it didn't work out. Too bad." But you have to push that bounds because otherwise, your game won't grow. That's that.
Gamasutra: In that vein, people have criticized Blizzard at times for being a relatively conservative developer, design-wise. How would you respond to that?
Alex Afrasiabi: Well, like I said, we do have a very b ideology. We are firm in our beliefs, and we won't release a game until it's done -- you've heard that said time and time again -- but we mean that. That implies a lot of things. So we'll certainly take the criticism for it, but I think in the end, the result is often great.
