To kick off our BlizzCast series, we’ve decided to begin where every great Blizzard idea begins, at the concept level. To speak with us we have Samwise Didier, our Art Director and concept artist to many of the popular Blizzard icons you’ve grown to love such as the Pandaren, Fel Orcs, Dark Templars, Zerglings, and many more. We’ll be chatting with Samwise on how he came up with the characters he did, as well as what it is like to work on both the Warcraft and StarCraft franchises.

=Part One - Interview with Sam Didier (Samwise), Art Director=

'''Samwise''': I saw an ad in, it was either like the Orange County Register or the Penny Saver, something like that that was saying, it was a little tiny ad -- two sentences -- you know: “Make Art For Video Games.” And, at the time, I had the glorious job of being head usher at a movie theater.

'''Samwise''': And so I met them and they seemed like they dug my art and they offered me a job that day and that was back in the early Jurassic Period. 1991? I think, yeah.

'''Samwise''': The only time that it’s difficult is when you’re working on both at the same time. But like, you know, if you’re working for three or four months on StarCraft, that’s cool, because, you get the StarCraft style and you can work on it. But when you’re like jumping back and forth between the projects, you kind of run into trouble like “Oh, that’s looking too Warcraft-y” or “Oh, that’s not Warcraft-y enough. You’ve been working on StarCraft too long.” So, that’s about the only difficulty with it, but as far as which, you know, both of them are awesome to work in. Fantasy and sci-fi are both great genres.

'''Samwise''': Well, the Warcraft art is a little bit more over-the-top, you know. That’s why you see people running around with giant shoulder pads and their weapons are two-handed weapons but they’re carrying them one-handed. Each hand has a giant two-handed weapon. Warcraft is really, like, hyper-fantasy, you know, real high concept fantasy. There’s machinery and guns involved in Warcraft and then with StarCraft it’s a little bit more, like a little bit dirtier, you know. Everything’s not as polished and shiny. There’s a little bit more grit to the texture of the art.

The stories are a little bit – there’s not as much humor, there’s a little bit more serious tone to it. And it’s a little bit more, I don’t know, not realistic, but it’s a little bit more closer to modern-day sort of thing instead of Warcraft, which is, you know, just completely out there and you can do whatever you want. StarCraft is a very focused universe.

'''Samwise''': Ah yes.

'''Samwise''': Well, it started off, you know, a bunch of years back when I had a daughter, right. And, when she was born, for Christmas I usually draw a picture for my family. Like a personal one. And so I did, for that picture, for some reason, I decided to do like a panda guy because, actually, also like “Samwise,” “Panda” is my nickname because I’m kind of a big hairy bear dude, but I’m not very fearsome. So I got the nickname “Panda.” So I drew a picture of a panda with a little panda cub on the shoulder and that was the picture for Christmas, that I gave to all my family. And “Oh, it’s because he had a little kid. He’s getting soft!” You know? Whatever. It’s for the family. I had to do something that Grandma would like.

'''Samwise''': Oh, the Brewmaster, yeah? He’s actually a cool character. I wish we could see more of these little guys.

'''Samwise''': Well, I don’t know exactly what the story guys are doing, but whenever I do a picture, I have my own kind of story in my head, to start off with. So, basically, what I thought is, the Zerg, or, sorry, the Dark Templar were on Shakuras, and there are Zerg on it now. So now these Dark Templar after the Protoss came, some of the Zerg came with them and now they’re like, “We’ve got to defend our homes.” So, this is actually where you get to see some of the Dark Templar people besides the Zeratul guy. Zeratul is like a secret-agent-type-ninja guy. He’s got the face mask and the one long lethal blade and all that. He’s like kind of a special character.

The Protoss guys, you know, have the two-hand blades, the Zealots. Well, let’s make this guy, you know, a little different. We’ll keep Zeratul with the hand blade because he’s cool like that, you know. You don’t want to change Darth Vader. But for the Dark Templar themselves let’s make them look like they’re a little bit more, they just have a different weapon kit, they have different armors than their Protoss brothers.

'''Samwise''': Right. I know, again, some people are really, really in to the new Dark Templar. Some people don’t like it. You know, I’m like that too, when I see movies and they change something about a character I was really into; it ticks me off, too, so I mean…We’re still working on it, and if it turns out that the idea doesn’t pan out, we have no problems redoing art here. We do it constantly, I mean, not one piece of art that we have in the game is final until the game ships. So, if you love a character, awesome. If you hate a character, don’t worry: we’ll probably change it.

'''Karune''': I can see there’s some bullet holes and stuff in the wings as well.

'''Samwise''': But that was basically the idea. Was to take, you know, sort of a cool character from StarCraft and then give it the next level up. Like, not changing what it is. Like everyone who looks at this won’t say, “What the hell’s that?” you know. It’s a zergling. You know what it is. “It’s a zergling, Lester, a different kind of zerg.” You know, we decide to add wings. It’s StarCraft II, baby, you know. We don’t want to be doing something we did ten years ago and just doing a 3D version of it.

'''Samwise''': Right. Well, for getting into the industry, I would totally recommend taking any kind of courses in Max or Maya or any other 3D programs because that’s how games are made now. Unless you’re doing Flash-based games, you know, stuff like that, you’re going to be doing 3D. So get involved in that. Even if you’re just a concept artist like some of the guys on our team, we really want guys that can do, a variety of things. Like our concept artists on our team, we can all model, we can all texture. We may not be as kick-butt as some of the Blizzard cinematics modelers, of course, but all the characters in StarCraft II are made by our concept guys and our texture guys and stuff like that.

I guess another thing too would be try to be really well-rounded. You know, a lot of places just want a guy who’s a texture artist and all and that’s great but, if you can, if you’re just a texture artist but then you can also model stuff and texture your own things, then, all of a sudden, you’re worth more. Like “Man, we can count on this guy to do whatever.”

'''Samwise''': No problem, man. Take it easy.

=Part Two - Jeff Kaplan Lead Designer on WoW=

'''Jeff''': I’m doing great. Excited to be here.

'''Jeff''': Sure thing. The raid aspect of it is definitely a progression from Black Temple. We’re tuning it for people in Tier 6 gear, however there’s not an attunement on the front door. The first three bosses are accessible by everybody however they will be tuned for Tier 6, but there’s a lot more to Sunwell Plateau than just a raid dungeon too.

'''Jeff''': There’s a reputation associated with the whole Sunwell Isle. So the Isle has not just the raid dungeon, which is the Sunwell Plateau, but it also has a five person instance which is the Magister’s Terrace, which can be normal or heroic, and there’s also a whole hub of quests that are going to be daily quests and that hub actually gets built up by the players over time. And there’s a reputation associated with all of these things called the Shattered Sun Offensive. And what that is, is the culmination of the Scryer and Aldor storyline. The two groups have finally banded together, a continuation of that scene that was playing out in the inn in Area 52. They’re now banded together to drive out the Burning Legion who are inhabiting the Sunwell which has been re-ignited. So we think it will be really exciting – Shattrath, a lot of the NPCS will be changed that were previously either Scryer or Aldor specific to Shattered Sun Offensive NPCs, so blood elves and draenei like those soldiers out front by the flight masters – you’ll actually see them change. So it should be pretty cool.

'''Jeff''': It will be definitely a tier above Tier 6 so Tier 7 gear, however there’s not class specific sets in terms of armor looks. There definitely will be class specific armor and armor set bonuses, but the looks will be shared across armor type. So for example, plate will have a paladin version and a warrior version and there will be some colour differences there but it’s not a completely unique look between the two.

'''Jeff''': Yeah Ahn’Qiraj 40 although we really are planning to do the itemization a lot better than we did with Ahn’Qiraj 40 so people can rest assured.

'''Jeff''': The all important ‘what’s the loot?’ question.

We realize because this dungeon is coming later in the sort of Burning Crusade cycle it’s very important that the loot be relevant to people who are playing the game now, and for people who came into Burning Crusade late, this will give them the opportunity to have a little bit of a catchup to all the players who have been doing the Arena or participating in our PvE content, so it’s kind of win-win, or if people want to gear up an alt really quickly this will be a good place to do that. And of course because it’s only a four boss dungeon, the five person one is, it’s not like you can fully equip a character in this type of gear, there are only so many slots represented.

'''Jeff''': There’s going to be a lot of little things in 2.4. Right now 2.3 went live recently, so we’re evaluating class balance. We don’t want to do any drastic changes in 2.4 until we see how some of our 2.3 balance changes played out. So you can expect changes there. We’re doing other small things like raising the daily quest limit. Right now it’s at ten quests per day. We’re blowing that out to twenty five quests per day. It was never a design limitation, it was more of a technical limitation on how many things that we could track on the server at any one time. So that will open up a lot of content for players, just being able to do more daily quests per day.

And then we’re also looking into many small but really beneficial user interface improvements – to give a very tiny, small example, we’re improving the ready check, so when a raid leader clicks on the ready check button, everybody who has raid leader or assistant raid leader privileges will be able to see who’s responded ready and who’s afk and who’s not ready. A little bit more responsiveness and feedback and assist them. A lot of things like that going into 2.4.

This is Karune, your Community Manager, signing off.

[[Category:Blizzcast]]