Project Lore

Game Informer's Phil Kollar recently sat down to talk with Blizzard's Jeff Kaplan. Also known as Tigole, the former World of Warcraft Lead Game Designer actually spends most of his time on the company's next MMO project, but he nonetheless has some interesting experience to share. The four-page interview covers a lot of ground, and even though none of it is necessarily new, there is at least on pertinent piece of information we should be aware of going forward: we can expect to see another Wrathgate-style cinematic event play out somewhere in Icecrown Citadel!

"Cutscenes will always be something that we use sparingly, yes. We never want to interrupt gameplay too frequently or for too long of a period of time. The Wrathgate cutscene was a big experiment for us. It was our first foray into in-game cutscenes in World of Warcraft. I don’t think we’ve fully refined how we want cutscenes to work with future World of Warcraft content. We debate like crazy. We debate the length, we debate the frequency, and we have a lot of theories, but Blizzard is a really iterative development house. I think what’s going to have to happen is that you’ll see more cutscenes come into the game for us to really refine our strategy with them. We definitely have an eye toward more cutscenes, but at the same time, we don’t want to become just a cutscene game. Even before Cataclysm, in patch 3.3, there’s going to be a really exciting cutscene moment that’s going to be our next experiment with that."

I don't think it takes a rocket scientist to figure out what said cinematic might pertain to. Oh, I don't know, maybe the most important moment in World of Warcraft up until this point, perhaps? And I think it's the right choice, because unlike the felling of some of the game's other villains, there are a lot of loose ends that need to be tied up involving multiple characters. To have such important events taking place while your raid passes out loot just sort of kills the impact. Don't you agree? I also find it interesting how conflicted they seem to be over cutscenes. This is the sort of thing most game developers go through: how do you let the players experience the story? Now while that's more important for a contained, single-player experience, WoW's core game is expansive and involving enough to reward the player with a cutscene every once and while and not make them feel like they're watching a film. What do you think, readers? Would you like to see more Wrathgate-style cinematics in the game? If so, how far do you think Blizzard should take it?