Ever Expanding

Naturally there's also the likelihood that Warcraft III will spawn one or more expansion sets at some point, although Bill claimed that's something that isn't going to be decided on until after the game has shipped. "We don't really sit and plan out whether there's an expansion or not before the game ships", he told us. "We really look to the players to give us cues as to what we should do. Once the game's been out for a few months, usually there's kind of a natural evolution of what it is that they want to see from the game, what more they would want to get out of the experience, and then we really look at building the expansion set out of that. In Diablo II, for example, it became evident that not only did people maybe want a couple of new character classes and a new act, but they really wanted the gameplay to function a little differently. So not only were we able to go in and provide some new content, but we did a lot of work to tweak the content that was already there, to provide a very very different gameplay with Lord Of Destruction depending on which character class you had." "When Warcraft III ships and we spend some time with the product and the community, I think it will really become apparent if we do an expansion what it is that people will expect out of it. So much of what we do with add-ons is really to look at what the community wants out of the game. I think Brood War's an excellent example of that. After we finished Starcraft we really sat down and looked at what it is people wanted out of Starcraft. We thought it might be a whole new race, but we found out we were wrong, what they wanted was some more units within the races that filled up some of the holes, some of the balance issues. They wanted us to rebalance the game. We did that, we put in a storyline with it, added some different map types, added some multiplayer features, and they loved it."

Feedback

Obviously there's a balance to be struck between giving the community every little thing that they want and following your own instincts, especially as most of the time different people want different things, or don't have any clear idea of exactly what it is that they do want. "You can't give everybody everything they want all the time, and you have to take a lot of comments with a grain of salt", Bill explained. "We do maintain our own forums, and the development team sits there and goes through them and reads everything. We talk a lot with people that we play with, we talk a lot with game rooms, with the big guilds and clans, the leaders and the fan sites, and really try and cull a lot of general sensibilities out of that. Sometimes we'll even pull things out of that that aren't perhaps specific needs, but you can see a general trend. Maybe people are asking for a lot of different specifics, and what you're seeing amongst that is that, maybe, they want more flying units. But you're pulling that out of all the little comments that are made about specific units, and when you kind of take a step back from it you can see what the general desire of the community is and try to address it that way. It is a delicate balance though - you have to realise you can't do everything that everybody wants, you have to try to do what's best for the game." In the case of Warcraft III getting that feedback has meant an extensive multiplayer beta test, with thousands of players and journalists involved. "We just felt that with four races and the balancing we were going to have to do across that many units and different unique styles of gameplay, we needed as much time as we possibly could. Fortunately we've had a very active beta community. Even though we're six or seven weeks into it we're still getting tons of games played and tons of feedback, and that's great. We had some concern that by starting the beta that early people might get burned out after three or four weeks and stop playing, but we've been really lucky in that we've had the community so vocal in their desires and their feedback. I think that when the game ships the end result is that it's going to be exceptionally well balanced."

Four Tribes

When Warcraft II came out it had only two main playable races. Starcraft took that to three, and Warcraft III has four races which players will get to control, as well as the non-playable demons which play a major part in the storyline. "Every time you add a race it's another quantum jump. Three races was a lot harder than two, and four's a lot harder than three, especially when you're trying to make them each have a different feel and a different style of play, and not just pay lip service to that. Also we don't want things to be just exactly like they were when we've done them before, so it's not even that you're trying to make four races that are different from each other, you're also trying to make four races that are maybe different than what's been done before. You want the humans to pay homage, you want them focused on what the humans had done in Warcraft and Warcraft II, and the same thing with the orcs, but you also want them to grow just like the new races are going to be. So when somebody plays the orcs in Warcraft III they're really different to how the humans play, they're really interesting, they have their own unique abilities. And it just gets harder and harder the more that you do." One of the toughest races to get right has been the undead. "I think undead in games tend to be the kind of mindless, soulless monsters that you find. which I think orcs have always been too. One thing we've always tried to do with the Warcraft series is to give orcs a background, a history and a world and a reason for being, so that you can have some sort of empathy with them. An even bigger challenge has been the undead. Why are they undead? Why do undead do what they do, they can't all just want brains! That's been a really exciting challenge for us, to make undead a compelling race to play." Judging from what we've seen of the game so far and the feedback that Blizzard have been getting from the beta test, it looks like they might just have pulled it off. The real beauty of Warcraft III though is that if players aren't happy with anything, they can easily change it, creating their own maps, units and gameplay styles. Tomorrow we'll be joining Bill Roper again for a look at the World Editor and other tools that make this possible.