BlizzCast Episode 6 - Revision history

Leord at 16:44, 17 June 2010

2010-06-17T16:44:51Z

Elly at 20:28, 5 December 2008

2008-12-05T20:28:23Z

Elly at 17:31, 5 December 2008

2008-12-05T17:31:23Z

Leord: Blizzcast Episode 6 moved to BlizzCast Episode 6: Blizzcast -> BlizzCast

2008-12-05T11:37:01Z

Blizzcast Episode 6 moved to BlizzCast Episode 6: Blizzcast -> BlizzCast

Leord: Blizzcast -> BlizzCast

2008-12-05T11:36:44Z

Blizzcast -> BlizzCast

Elly at 16:58, 1 December 2008

2008-12-01T16:58:10Z

Elly at 15:04, 1 December 2008

2008-12-01T15:04:50Z

Elly: /* Part Five - Q&A with Dustin Browder, Lead Designer of Starcraft 2 */

2008-12-01T01:27:33Z

‎Part Five - Q&A with Dustin Browder, Lead Designer of Starcraft 2

Elly: /* Part Five - Q&A with Jay Wilson, Lead Designer, Diablo 3 */

2008-12-01T01:27:00Z

‎Part Five - Q&A with Jay Wilson, Lead Designer, Diablo 3

Elly at 01:24, 1 December 2008

2008-12-01T01:24:56Z

@@ Line 543: / Line 543: @@
 * [http://us.blizzard.com/blizzcast/_content/en-GB/rss.xml RSS Feed]
 * [http://www.blizzard.com/blizzcast Official Blizzcast Site]
 [[Category:BlizzCast]]

@@ Line 4: / Line 4: @@
 '''Who:''' Interview with [[Monte Krol]], Lead Tools Programmer, WoW.  Interview with [[Sam Didier]], Senior Art Director and [[Dustin Browder]], Lead Designer, Starcraft II.  Interview with [[Anthony Rivero]], Senior Character Artist Diablo III.  Q&A Session for all three franchises.
 =Introduction=
-Welcome to BlizzCast Episode 6!  This is [[Nethaera]] from the World of Warcraft Community Team.  We’ve packed this episode with Interviews with designers from World of Warcraft, Starcraft II, and Diablo III.
+{{BlizzCast navbox}}Welcome to BlizzCast Episode 6!  This is [[Nethaera]] from the World of Warcraft Community Team.  We’ve packed this episode with Interviews with designers from World of Warcraft, Starcraft II, and Diablo III.
 To start things off, I’ll be interviewing Lead Tools Programmer, Monte Krol in our feature, Day with a Developer.

@@ Line 7: / Line 7: @@
 {{BlizzCast navbox}}
 Welcome to BlizzCast Episode 6!  This is [[Nethaera]] from the World of Warcraft Community Team.  We’ve packed this episode with Interviews with designers from World of Warcraft, Starcraft II, and Diablo III.
@@ Line 17: / Line 17: @@
 Last, but certainly not least, Community Team member [[Bornakk]] takes us into our Q&A session where we will be discussing topics from the community with designers from World of Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo.
 =Part One - Day with a Developer, Monte Krol, Lead Tools Programmer for WoW=
 ''[01:08]''
@@ Line 43: / Line 42: @@
 So yesterday we had a bunch of fire fights. In between those fire fights we’re looking at bugs and getting bug reports from the field. We’re also trying to work strategically. Kind of, for the lifetime of WoW, what are the cool things we want to do?  What would make everyone’s work faster? What would make everyone’s work better? Our goal is to make the tools fun and easy to use and we want the designers to come into work and want to use our stuff so we spend a lot of time thinking strategically about how to make the UI better, about how to make parts of the program faster, about how to give them better feedback about what is going on, let them see encounters earlier. Let them work with more textures. Let them work with more creatures. Just all of these types of things that we look at to try to make it as cool as possible for them to build cool stuff for everyone to play.
 ''[06:51]''
@@ Line 92: / Line 90: @@
 '''Monte:'''  They sure can and they sure do.  So I think the toughest project we have is ongoing and that is to make WoW Edit really a world class, truly fun, truly productive development environment for all of the people who need to work on WoW.
 ''[14:03]''
@@ Line 158: / Line 155: @@
 '''Nethaera:''' Thank you. Up next is Karune with our Starcraft segment.
 ''[19:28]''
@@ Line 309: / Line 306: @@
 '''Karune:''' (laughs) Take it easy guys.  Hope you guys enjoyed our Starcraft 2 segment.  Next we have Bashiok with Diablo 3.
 ''[33:25]''
@@ Line 424: / Line 421: @@
 ''[48:36]''
 [[Image:Malformed2.jpg|right|thumb|Malformed.]]'''Bashiok:'' Yeah we should have some concepts. If you’re listening to this on iTunes go ahead and check out the actual BlizzCast website for that artwork.
@@ Line 432: / Line 428: @@
 '''Anthony:''' You’re welcome.
 ''[49:30]''
@@ Line 484: / Line 480: @@
 '''Alex Afrasiabi:'' Thank you.
 ''[55:15]''
@@ Line 544: / Line 540: @@
 '''Bashiok:''' Okay, awesome! Well that’s it for the questions today, let’s thank Monte, Same, Alex, Jay, and Dustin for their time today and thanks to all our listeners for downloading this episode. This is Bornakk from the World of Warcraft Community Team and we’ll see you next time!
 =BlizzCast Resources=
 * Download Episode 6 in .mp3 format 121mb [http://media.wow-europe.com/blizzcast/blizzcast_episode6.mp3 EU Mirror]  [http://us.media.blizzard.com/blizzcast/blizzcast_episode6.mp3 US Mirror]

@@ Line 5: / Line 5: @@
 '''Who:''' Interview with [[Monte Krol]], Lead Tools Programmer, WoW.  Interview with [[Sam Didier]], Senior Art Director and [[Dustin Browder]], Lead Designer, Starcraft II.  Interview with [[Anthony Rivero]], Senior Character Artist Diablo III.  Q&A Session for all three franchises.
 Welcome to BlizzCast Episode 6!  This is [[Nethaera]] from the World of Warcraft Community Team.  We’ve packed this episode with Interviews with designers from World of Warcraft, Starcraft II, and Diablo III.
@@ Line 16: / Line 17: @@
 Last, but certainly not least, Community Team member [[Bornakk]] takes us into our Q&A session where we will be discussing topics from the community with designers from World of Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo.
 =Part One - Day with a Developer, Monte Krol, Lead Tools Programmer for WoW=
 ''[01:08]''
@@ Line 156: / Line 158: @@
 '''Nethaera:''' Thank you. Up next is Karune with our Starcraft segment.
 ''[19:28]''
@@ Line 307: / Line 309: @@
 '''Karune:''' (laughs) Take it easy guys.  Hope you guys enjoyed our Starcraft 2 segment.  Next we have Bashiok with Diablo 3.
 ''[33:25]''
@@ Line 430: / Line 432: @@
 '''Anthony:''' You’re welcome.
 ''[49:30]''
@@ Line 482: / Line 484: @@
 '''Alex Afrasiabi:'' Thank you.
 ''[55:15]''
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 '''Dustin Browder:''' Alright, thank you.
 ''[1:00:30]''
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 '''Bashiok:''' Okay, awesome! Well that’s it for the questions today, let’s thank Monte, Same, Alex, Jay, and Dustin for their time today and thanks to all our listeners for downloading this episode. This is Bornakk from the World of Warcraft Community Team and we’ll see you next time!
-=Blizzcast Resources=
 * Download Episode 6 in .mp3 format 121mb [http://media.wow-europe.com/blizzcast/blizzcast_episode6.mp3 EU Mirror]  [http://us.media.blizzard.com/blizzcast/blizzcast_episode6.mp3 US Mirror]
@@ Line 548: / Line 551: @@
 * [http://www.blizzard.com/blizzcast Official Blizzcast Site]
-[[Category:Blizzcast]]
+[[Category:BlizzCast]]

← Older revision		Revision as of 16:58, 1 December 2008
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	'''Duration:''' 66:18		'''Duration:''' 66:18

−	'''Who:''' Interview with [[Monte Krol]], Lead Tools Programmer, WoW. Interview with [[Sam Didier]], Senior Art Director and [[Dustin Browder]], Lead Designer, Starcraft II. Interview with [[Anthony Rivero]], Senior Character Artist Diablo II. Q&A Session for all three franchises.	+	'''Who:''' Interview with [[Monte Krol]], Lead Tools Programmer, WoW. Interview with [[Sam Didier]], Senior Art Director and [[Dustin Browder]], Lead Designer, Starcraft II. Interview with [[Anthony Rivero]], Senior Character Artist Diablo III. Q&A Session for all three franchises.

← Older revision	Revision as of 11:37, 5 December 2008
(No difference)

← Older revision		Revision as of 15:04, 1 December 2008
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−	'''When:''' Episode ~~Five~~ was broadcast on 19th November 2008	+	'''When:''' Episode Six was broadcast on 19th November 2008

	'''Duration:''' 66:18		'''Duration:''' 66:18

@@ Line 486: / Line 486: @@
 ''[55:15]''
-'''Bashiok:'' In the next part of the Q&A we have our Starcraft 2 Lead Designer Dustin Browder here to help us answer some questions from the community. Welcome back Dustin!
+'''Bashiok:''' In the next part of the Q&A we have our Starcraft 2 Lead Designer Dustin Browder here to help us answer some questions from the community. Welcome back Dustin!
 '''Dustin Browder:''' Thanks.
-'''Bashiok:'' The first question is from Zoltrix at starcrafttwo.com. Can you tell us about the evolution system for the different units? Like how will this be used for upgrading different units like the Hydralisk and the Zergling and what specific upgrades it will bring to these units?
+'''Bashiok:''' The first question is from Zoltrix at starcrafttwo.com. Can you tell us about the evolution system for the different units? Like how will this be used for upgrading different units like the Hydralisk and the Zergling and what specific upgrades it will bring to these units?
 '''Dustin Browder:''' We’re still working obviously on the whole upgrade system and trying to make sure it’s as good as it can possibly be for Starcraft 2. For the mutation, for morphing one unit to another unit for the Zerg in particular, we’ve been working on obviously – you’ve seen a lot of these guys already – we’ve been working on the baneling, we’ve been working on the lurker, we’ve been working on the swarm guardian. This is an old mechanic from the original Starcraft that we’re carrying forward into Starcraft 2 and we’re going to try to keep adding to. We think it’s a really interesting way for the Zerg race to deal with their army, they can sort of look at their own army as a resource. You look at your zergling and that zergling could ultimately run up to that marine and kill him or that zergling might want to morph into a baneling and then roll up and kill a whole bunch of marines all at one go.  So you got to kind of choose how you want to use these units and they are very different units. When you morph a hydralisk into a lurker you get a completely different unit or you’re morphing a mutilisk into a swarm guardian it fundamentally changes the role of the units so it really allows the Zerg player to a limited extent sort of customize their forces on the battlefield. They morph their overlord into an overseer, it really changes the kinds of things that unit can do on the battlefield.
@@ Line 508: / Line 508: @@
 And the hydralisk has a similar kind of role in that sense, obviously the hydra can shoot air, he is also a lot softer than a marauder but the hydra has some very powerful abilities to deal with some of these heavily armored threats that are very low down in the tech tree. Units like the thor, the mothership and the colossus all have their roles and we see them in games probably about a half or a third of the games that we see will actually see these units even come into play.  And when they come into play they can be extremely dangerous of course but there’s a lot of counters already in play and the marauder is just one of the choices you have when dealing with an enemy unit like the thor. You can also obviously bring in mass siege tanks, even mass marines ultimately can be very effective against a small groups of thors because the thor is just not doing enough splash, he can absolutely obliterate a marine in a couple shots but there are simply too many marines at that point in the game sometimes for a thor to tear them all down so we’re really not worried at this point of these end-game units sort of eclipsing the core gameplay experience. They’re definitely finding their place, they definitely have their uses but they are definitely something you can counter and the marauder is part of that counter list but it’s not really the reason the marauder exists.  The marauder really exists for stalkers, immortals, and roaches. Threats like this that are massable, can be fast but they’re heavily armored, they are something that a marine has trouble dealing with.
-'''Bashiok:'' Very nice, thanks for the information Dustin.
+'''Bashiok:''' Very nice, thanks for the information Dustin.
 '''Dustin Browder:''' Alright, thank you.

@@ Line 516: / Line 516: @@
 ''[1:00:30]''
-'''Bashiok:'' In our last segment of the Q&A session we have our Diablo 3 Game Direct Jay Wilson. Welcome to the show Jay!
+'''Bashiok:''' In our last segment of the Q&A session we have our Diablo 3 Game Direct Jay Wilson. Welcome to the show Jay!
-''Jay Wilson:'' Thank you very much.
+''Jay Wilson:''' Thank you very much.
-'''Bashiok:'' Our first question is from Vandro from Diablofans.com – Will we be able to use the old overlay map instead of the mini-map?
+'''Bashiok:''' Our first question is from Vandro from Diablofans.com – Will we be able to use the old overlay map instead of the mini-map?
-''Jay Wilson:'' Right now we don’t have any plans to do a fullscreen overlay. We really felt that the overlay was more there because the mini-map was not very usable as a small map. We feel like when you put that map and you cover it over the whole display it actually adds a lot of clutter but we are planning to do like a fullscreen map that just covers the whole screen so that you can kind of see an entire area like if want to check out if there are any areas of this dungeon that I haven’t explored yet, you can really see more of that. But right now we’re really focused on trying to make the mini-map is very usable at the size that it’s at and so we’ve put a lot of work and the maps are actually custom made. The ones in D2 were kind of auto-generated where as ours we literally we custom make every piece of it. We have an artist go through and draw out so we can make sure that they’re really visible and very usable and so far we’re finding that it’s working really well.
+''Jay Wilson:''' Right now we don’t have any plans to do a fullscreen overlay. We really felt that the overlay was more there because the mini-map was not very usable as a small map. We feel like when you put that map and you cover it over the whole display it actually adds a lot of clutter but we are planning to do like a fullscreen map that just covers the whole screen so that you can kind of see an entire area like if want to check out if there are any areas of this dungeon that I haven’t explored yet, you can really see more of that. But right now we’re really focused on trying to make the mini-map is very usable at the size that it’s at and so we’ve put a lot of work and the maps are actually custom made. The ones in D2 were kind of auto-generated where as ours we literally we custom make every piece of it. We have an artist go through and draw out so we can make sure that they’re really visible and very usable and so far we’re finding that it’s working really well.
 ''[1:01:47]''
-'''Bashiok:'' Awesome. The next question is from Immelmann from Diii.net. Will there be special player deaths in various situations? Like when the Siegebreaker bit the Barbarian in half during the gameplay demo.
+'''Bashiok:''' Awesome. The next question is from Immelmann from Diii.net. Will there be special player deaths in various situations? Like when the Siegebreaker bit the Barbarian in half during the gameplay demo.
-''Jay Wilson:'' Well what we want to do with that, especially for particular bosses is have when essentially when the player is very low on health and they’re about to die the boss essentially checks like when it attacks you, did I just do enough damage to kill you? And if so then instead of just doing his normal attack he’d actually play some kind of special I pick you up and eat you or I throw you up in the air and knock you around like a baseball or something like that. It’s a system that really our announcement video we tested it for the first time, mainly just to see – can we actually do this kind of animation interaction between the characters but the actual system itself is still not in there but we do plan to do that and that’s primarily where. We might do some other things, we’ve talked about physics based deaths we’ve talked about having the characters if they like die to a cold monster he might completely freeze solid into a statue and then shatter or things like that but we haven’t decided at this point if that’s exactly what we’re going to do.
+''Jay Wilson:''' Well what we want to do with that, especially for particular bosses is have when essentially when the player is very low on health and they’re about to die the boss essentially checks like when it attacks you, did I just do enough damage to kill you? And if so then instead of just doing his normal attack he’d actually play some kind of special I pick you up and eat you or I throw you up in the air and knock you around like a baseball or something like that. It’s a system that really our announcement video we tested it for the first time, mainly just to see – can we actually do this kind of animation interaction between the characters but the actual system itself is still not in there but we do plan to do that and that’s primarily where. We might do some other things, we’ve talked about physics based deaths we’ve talked about having the characters if they like die to a cold monster he might completely freeze solid into a statue and then shatter or things like that but we haven’t decided at this point if that’s exactly what we’re going to do.
 ''[1:03:00]''
-'''Bashiok:'' The last question we have is from Sly_dawg19 from blizzplanet.com. During the gameplay video an "Elixer of Vitality I" dropped. Can you explain Elixers and the benefits and roles they will play in Diablo 3?
+'''Bashiok:''' The last question we have is from Sly_dawg19 from blizzplanet.com. During the gameplay video an "Elixer of Vitality I" dropped. Can you explain Elixers and the benefits and roles they will play in Diablo 3?
-''Jay Wilson:'' Well right now elixirs are primarily to provide a short term benefit to the player. I can’t remember exactly how many off the top of my head, I think there’s maybe six different kinds of elixirs and they do things like give you health boosts or give you damage boosts, give you different stats, things like that. So whenever you find one you can essentially use it whenever you want to give you a short term buff. And then as you go through the game the ‘one’ indicates quality so the ‘one’ is kind of a low end, not very good item, it’s not bad – at low levels it actually makes a pretty big difference, at high levels it doesn’t matter that much but as you go through the game they become more and more powerful. So we have a variety of different kinds of items like that we have added in to give the player some interesting buffs. Some of them are something like that were it’s just a nice bonus to have, whereas some of them are actually game changing kind of things like you can fire them off in an emergency to be able to deal with a particularly tough encounter.
+''Jay Wilson:''' Well right now elixirs are primarily to provide a short term benefit to the player. I can’t remember exactly how many off the top of my head, I think there’s maybe six different kinds of elixirs and they do things like give you health boosts or give you damage boosts, give you different stats, things like that. So whenever you find one you can essentially use it whenever you want to give you a short term buff. And then as you go through the game the ‘one’ indicates quality so the ‘one’ is kind of a low end, not very good item, it’s not bad – at low levels it actually makes a pretty big difference, at high levels it doesn’t matter that much but as you go through the game they become more and more powerful. So we have a variety of different kinds of items like that we have added in to give the player some interesting buffs. Some of them are something like that were it’s just a nice bonus to have, whereas some of them are actually game changing kind of things like you can fire them off in an emergency to be able to deal with a particularly tough encounter.
-'''Bashiok:'' Do you think they will be purchasable or will it mainly just be the drops?
+'''Bashiok:''' Do you think they will be purchasable or will it mainly just be the drops?
-''Jay Wilson:'' My guess is that they will be drops only. We essentially added them into the system to put more items into the drop game. One of the things we found is that because we removed things like potions and changed the nature of some of our other drops, like for example – I’ll let this out – we don’t really have ammo anymore, if you use a kind of weapon that would normally use ammo we just let you use it, we don’t make you go collect more ammo, it just has infinite ammo. It’s kind of to support more action aspect of the game. Then if you go back to Diablo 2, a lot of bolts drop! That fills up a lot of the “trash” that drops and when we started pulling a lot of those things like potions got reduced way down and bolts got completely removed we that it really threw off the item drop like you never had anything drop that was less important. So we looked to a whole class of items and we don’t necessarily want to drop trash, we didn’t want to drop stuff that was just vendor trash like that was never our goal. We said maybe we can find things that the player is not necessarily like “Oh my god that’s the best item in the world!” but it’s like “Oh cool, I could use that, that gives me a little bit of a buff” and elixirs are kind of that class of item.
+''Jay Wilson:''' My guess is that they will be drops only. We essentially added them into the system to put more items into the drop game. One of the things we found is that because we removed things like potions and changed the nature of some of our other drops, like for example – I’ll let this out – we don’t really have ammo anymore, if you use a kind of weapon that would normally use ammo we just let you use it, we don’t make you go collect more ammo, it just has infinite ammo. It’s kind of to support more action aspect of the game. Then if you go back to Diablo 2, a lot of bolts drop! That fills up a lot of the “trash” that drops and when we started pulling a lot of those things like potions got reduced way down and bolts got completely removed we that it really threw off the item drop like you never had anything drop that was less important. So we looked to a whole class of items and we don’t necessarily want to drop trash, we didn’t want to drop stuff that was just vendor trash like that was never our goal. We said maybe we can find things that the player is not necessarily like “Oh my god that’s the best item in the world!” but it’s like “Oh cool, I could use that, that gives me a little bit of a buff” and elixirs are kind of that class of item.
-'''Bashiok:'' Okay, awesome! Well that’s it for the questions today, let’s thank Monte, Same, Alex, Jay, and Dustin for their time today and thanks to all our listeners for downloading this episode. This is Bornakk from the World of Warcraft Community Team and we’ll see you next time!
+'''Bashiok:''' Okay, awesome! Well that’s it for the questions today, let’s thank Monte, Same, Alex, Jay, and Dustin for their time today and thanks to all our listeners for downloading this episode. This is Bornakk from the World of Warcraft Community Team and we’ll see you next time!
 =Blizzcast Resources=

@@ Line 331: / Line 331: @@
 ''[35:23]''
-'''Bashiok:'' When you started working on Diablo II what were your first tasks?
+[[Image:Mephisto2.jpg|right|thumb|Mephisto.]]'''Bashiok:'' When you started working on Diablo II what were your first tasks?
 '''Anthony:''' Yeah, let me see let me look at my notes. The first thing I worked on I remember asking my boss, “Hey what can I do?”, after being there a few days getting situated, and that was Erich Schaefer at the time. He and Stieg [Hedlund] said they needed some type of flying insect monster for Act 3, so I came up with the mosquito demon. What’s now called the mosquito demon, and that was the very first thing I worked on. It was kind of for a swampy area so I figured that was appropriate, a mosquitoish-type monster, and yeah that was the very first thing I worked on.
@@ Line 401: / Line 401: @@
 ''[47:20]''
-'''Bashiok:'' Are there any creatures that are announced that we can talk about that you’ve provided some modeling for or have contributed to?
+[[Image:witchdoctor.jpg|right|thumb|Doc's Light & Medium Armour.]]'''Bashiok:'' Are there any creatures that are announced that we can talk about that you’ve provided some modeling for or have contributed to?
 '''Anthony:''' The female witch doctor’s heavy armor set, her look is my design and work.
@@ Line 423: / Line 423: @@
 ''[48:36]''
 '''Bashiok:'' Yeah we should have some concepts. If you’re listening to this on iTunes go ahead and check out the actual BlizzCast website for that artwork.
 I think that about wraps it up. I want to thank Anthony Rivero for talking to us.
@@ Line 463: / Line 464: @@
 ''[52:23]''
-'''Bashiok:'' Is there any particular storyline from the original game that you are excited to be picking up again in Wrath of the Lich King?
+[[Image:Wrath of the Lich King.jpg|right|thumb|Wrath of the Lich King.]]'''Bashiok:'' Is there any particular storyline from the original game that you are excited to be picking up again in Wrath of the Lich King?
 '''Alex Afrasiabi:'' Several. It’s been a nice expansion, it was a good break from Outland where things got a little… different I guess is the best term for it. Anything that involves Arthas, Lich King, we’re all over, we love that stuff. Expanding Tirion Fordring’s line and roll rather in the expansion is huge for us. A personal favorite of mine if the Forsaken’s involvement in the early zones with their plague, their blight, that’s something we’ve been forming for years with the old world and we obviously paused it for Outland and we’re coming back. I think we’re just releasing some new stuff in this next build that will kind of bring all that to a head that I’m pretty excited about.
@@ Line 497: / Line 498: @@
 ''[57:21]''
-'''Bashiok:'' Cool. The next question comes from gamer-source.com. With the all the anti-armored units like the marauder and the hydralisk - is this meant to counter the end game units? And also what role do you think end game units will play on the battlefield?
+[[Image:Sc14.jpg|right|thumb|Starcraft II.]]'''Bashiok:'' Cool. The next question comes from gamer-source.com. With the all the anti-armored units like the marauder and the hydralisk - is this meant to counter the end game units? And also what role do you think end game units will play on the battlefield?
 '''Dustin Browder:''' : I’m not really sure what an end game unit is, I guess it would be like a battlecruiser or a carrier or a thor or ultralisk, I guess it’s what we’re talking about here. But the hydralisk has always been anti-armor, even in the original Starcraft had a strong anti-armor role.