Project Lore

Gamasutra's Chris Remo recently sat down with Alex Afrasiabi to chat about some of the design philosophy behind the upcoming expansion. Though Afrasiabi might not be the household name that a Samwise Didier, Tom Chilton, or Mike Morhaime is, you might start to hear it more often. Why? Because he occupies a very important position on the development team: Lead World Designer for Cataclysm. And with the world about to undergo some significant changes, he's got his work cut out for him.

Afrasiabi remains tight-lipped in the interview, typical for a Blizzard employee, but he does paint an exciting (if destructive) future for Azeroth and hints about what we might expect are dropped like bread crumbs for those who can read between the lines. For instance, he cites that "the cataclysm starts out with rumbles, and what those rumbles are are the stirrings of Deathwing beneath the world." Perhaps, then, we'll start to feel earthquakes as part of the events leading up to the release of the expansion.

Zones like the Barrens are in need of a major overhaul, while those like Loch Modan still meet Blizzard's standards.

He also spends some time talking about how they prioritized zone restructuring in Cataclysm. Though certainly some attention needs to be paid to those that are important to the progression of the story (meaning areas like Azshara were going to be turned upside-down regardless), others will be changed merely based on an internal ranking system. Essentially, those zones that Blizzard decided they were most unhappy with will undergo drastic modifications, while those that were deemed acceptable will be remodeled less.

According to Afrasiabi, Loch Modan is one part of the world that will be transformed "lightly" (though he hesitates to say any given zone will be affected as little as that term might imply).

Much of the article focuses on the use of phasing and its role in quest design from here on out. Apparently, Blizzard wants to focus more on "showing, instead of telling," which seems to mean less reliance on quest text to relay the story. Providing players with visual information, or scenes that are acted out in the course of completing a mission, seems to be the way of the future. One of the exercises that Blizzard's quest designers reportedly utilize is to see if someone can figure out what they're supposed to be doing with being given any textual information. They better they can manage without it, the better the quest's design is.

One big surprise to come out of the interview is that the invention of phasing was sort of an "a-ha!" moment, a serendipitous accident like Newton watching the apple fall from the tree. Afrasiabi says that it the mechanics, now used to create a more progressive game world, was born out of a bug in the Blade's Edge Mountains. Phasing was implemented by a programmer as a quick fix for the problem, but ended up becoming key to the future of World of Warcraft.

Of course, this is only a taste. I encourage everybody to head on over to Gamasutra and check out the rest of the interview. There's plenty more to read, and some really intriguing stuff in there worth speculating about!