Q&A
Grubb: It’s a great sentiment. We have time for a few community questions. After your very exciting keynote address. We opened the Twitter gates and some questions came in. So, there are a few questions from some users here that I hope you guys will be able to answer. A question by Bogdanoff, he said: Say for instance, I would like to queue up with a friend as two players, but we want to join part of a bigger haul and go 4v4 random team queue up. So, they are a unit of two, but they’ll be with two strangers and meet some other four. Will that be a possibility?
Jay: Possibility? Yes. We definitely want to improve the “Join” functionality. We’re not sure exactly how that’s going to work yet, but it is on our radar of, like one of those things we definitely want to investigate and see what we can do to make that work.
Grubb: A question from Insomnia, he said, Obviously there’s a lot of work to be done on the current thing, but some people can’t help it, but towards the future. So, is there any chance that you guys will create new side missions, or new campaigns?
Pete: I mean, I think that’s a two part answer. One, like our focus right now is getting the existing game right; and one thing we haven’t touched that much on during this panel, but the campaign itself, right? I think The Culling is a prime example of part of the universe that is evolved greatly since Warcraft III like, the Instance, the revisiting it with Arthas in that moment has gotten a lot of definition between the book and between World of Warcraft, and comics; and there’s so much more kind of there to those moments that we want to kind of back port that in and get parity, so that when you walk in to Stratholme– because we moved the starting location down to the southeast corner for The Culling now, and you actually enter the way you do in WoW and you have that grand entrance.
And we want to reconstruct those moments in this game, and have that parity with where things have gone; and that to me is kind of that mission of, are there new quests? Are there, their new campaigns? Like the, we’re calling this Reforged because of that. Because the desire is to kind of heal up how things have evolved, and make it anew in a really compelling way. After we’ve shipped that, and you guys love it, and you demand more content; then we can talk about more content.
Grubby: Okay. It makes a lot of sense. I’m very excited about Warcraft III becoming more accessible to new players. It’s going to be easier for them to find it on the launcher, play it without a hitch, and beautiful new graphics with new audio or whatever. We still have time for a very short answer from maybe two of you. I want to know what you guys are the most excited about in Reforged.
Matt: I think Pete… you said it earlier in there, so.
Grubby: I know we’ve definitely dealt.
Pete: Yeah! I mean. So, I am one of the people in this crowd. This game means so much to me, to get to revisit it anew is the dream of a lifetime. But I think also those experiences need to be passed on to a new generation. And the opportunity to put this inside of Battle.net and expose it to a new community should strengthen our current community, which is extremely exciting.
But also unlock it for a future generation. I want this game to still be talked about in 15 years in a meaningful way, the way it is right now. And that’s our true mission here, is to pour our souls into it, get it to a state where it satisfies the need of the existing and appeals to the new.
Rob: I’m looking forward to it all just working, because there’s a whole bunch of stuff; and there’s like, I don’t know, 50,000 MODs out there. Jays got his work cut out, the whole engineering staff has got their work cut out; but like, at the end of the day, the level of fidelity from the art team, the work that’s coming from engineering, the creative vision, the design against it, like… it is a lot to package up and offer back in, right?
I mean, you’re talking about hundreds of hours of campaign material. And all of that is just got to seamlessly get sort of up leveled into this grand view of a modern game. So, I think when we’re all said and done, it’s going to be absolutely amazing, and I cannot wait for it.
Grubby: But you have to… (laughs) because its release is somewhere in 2019. We all have to wait for it.
Rob: Sorry, man.
Grubby: But the future is a full width with possibilities regarding that. I’m very, very excited for that, what you guys are doing with this game. Let’s see.
Pete: What are you most excited for?
Grubby: When people ask me they’re like, how do I get started with Warcraft III? And I like to be able to tell them, you can find it on the launcher instead of open your ports and go to the registry and edit the FPS. So, there’s definitely, it was ripe for accessibility for people, you can see that more so than ever almost. A lot of people say like, I don’t even understand this game, because I stream Warcraft III, and they’ve watch it, and they’re like, I don’t even know what’s going on; but it looks amazing, sounds amazing. I think it’s cool.
But in order for the community to get around the game again, to make new maps, or to improve old maps, to start learning the game, helping one another to figure out how this game works, and when you should expand, and what upkeep is. These elements I’m excited to teach new players, and I hope that people will help each other, as there are so many people in the Warcraft III community at home and in the audience that knows so much about Warcrafts, that have blown me away like, I used to compete in Warcraft III and I thought I knew everything about the game, not true.
Like, every week someone’s like: Hey! Did you know that this and this and this works this way? And I’m like, really? Let me test that. And then– and it does, so there’s a lot of avid fans about the game; and I’m just, I’m excited about that.
Rob: Cool
Grubby: Yeah! You’ve given us much to look forward to, our time here is dwindling. Our panel is going to conclude. Thank you, guys here at home so much for watching. Thank you here at BlizzCon for watching.
The lifeblood of Warcraft III is bright, and so is the future. They’re hungry for your feedback, as you click that button many times, we can see where people can leave their feedback. I think it’s somewhere on the slide right?
Rob: uh-oh.
Jay: That’s an easter egg.
Pete: There you go. We got to it. So as Grubby has been talking about, we really want to hear from you guys. Now that the conversation is official, and Reforged is announced, please go here; let us know what you think of the demo. Like, we’ve done a lot to evolve Stratholme, like that’s the future of where we want to take the campaign. So let us know if that’s resonating with you when you go and you play it. Let us know if the new UI is hitting the marks that you want, and what else that you’re hoping for.
Grubby: Members of the panel, thank you so much for your thoughts and your joining us here. People at BlizzCon, people at home, thank you for everything. Enjoy Warcraft III, and enjoy BlizzCon.
| WORLD OF WARCRAFT: WHAT'S NEXT PANEL TRANSCRIPT | ||||
| 1. Intro | 2. Enhancements | 3. Design & Balance | 4. Map Editor | 5. Q&A |
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