Interview: Blizzard's J. Allen Brack

IGN: Can you talk about the talent lines at all?

J. Allen Brack: The reason you can't see those is because we're not ready to talk about them. We've got some idea for certain spells, for certain ideas. We don't have all the classes done and we have just a lot of iteration that we need to do. We'll come up with a series of ideas, put that in, see how that works, and kind of go from there. The talent and spell things is a very iterative process, what you would see today would mirror very little resemblance to what ends up shipping. I've no doubt.

IGN: What about these new vehicle-related quest types? Will those be more of like one-time things or will they occur fairly frequently?

J. Allen Brack: There'll be multiple quests per zone and usually it's just whatever idea the designer has. The vehicle technology that came about was originally just slated to be used for the siege things and the PvP battleground. But as time goes on and we've added more features to it we came up with ideas of how you can do quests. Jeff also talked about how you'd be able to take up on some of those planes in a gnome village. But yeah we'll have several different quests that use that on a per-zone basis.

IGN: As a lead producer, can you tell us how the World of Warcraft team functions at this point. It's a large team, but is it a well-oiled machine or is it still pretty chaotic?

J. Allen Brack: That's a tough question for me because my job is to always be thinking about ways to do things better. As a result I never really think that we're doing things as well as I'd like. I will say that the team is large and we have a method for getting stuff done. Mostly, we have a lot of trust in each other. You'd be surprised how segmented the team is. We've got dungeon artists and we've got environment artists and we've got quest designers and we've got class designers and we've got all these sub-teams that have their job they need to get done, and everyone has a lot of trust in each of those teams being successful. And of course there's ideas for quests or ideas for talents because everyone at Blizzard is at least a little bit of a game designer, but mostly it's just the trust that each of the sub-teams have, if that makes sense.

IGN: Is it a more relaxed environment because of the success the game has had or is it more intense in trying to come up with new and interesting ideas?

J. Allen Brack: I think it's both. The success is nice, and I don't think anyone could have imagined WoW would become what it is. It's really exciting to have people who don't really know what you do.... I was in the game industry for 10 to12 years before my dad really seemed to care or know what I do and now he plays WoW with me all the time and he's level 70 and raids and he's just kind of a machine. On the flipside it's that much more pressure because there's that much more scrutiny, there are that many more players, there are that many more opinions, there are that many more problems to solve. The player base really likes content, they really want the next piece of content now, they really want to know what the next talent trees are, they really want to know everything about the next expansion, they really want it to come out next week. So, you know, there's a huge amount of pressure to get it done, get it done well, and get it delivered and make everyone happy.

IGN: Where do you look to for new ideas? Certainly a team can come up with ideas, but eventually you have to look somewhere to see what other people are doing. Where is the most interesting stuff happening in online gaming?

J. Allen Brack: It's interesting because if we all sat around, just all of us talking about what we're going to do with regard to some ideas for future expansions, very quickly we could come up with five years worth of stuff, just in one afternoon. We've got so many unrealized ideas at this point just because it takes so long to get those ideas to bring it to fruition. The idea of having siege weapons and siege vehicles, that's not exactly a revolutionary idea, right? But to get it into WoW and to get all the technology stuff that has to happen is multiple years of work. There's no real shortage of ideas, but of course we all play different types of games and are really excited about things that have come out in the past or are coming out. And also, you get a lot of ideas just from playing the game. For me, that's actually one of my strengths. I'm not the guy who's going to come up and say hey, we really need to put flying foozles in the next expansion.

IGN: Flying foozles would be great.

J. Allen Brack: But I am the guy who's going to play the flying foozle and say, "Hey, we really need to make these changes to make it better and what if we took the flying foozle technology and did this other thing with it?" That's a lot of my strength is taking your idea and making it better.

IGN: It seems like right now you haven't quite gone the EverQuest route where there's an expansion pack coming out every three weeks, I think it was.

J. Allen Brack: [laughs] Not quite yet, not quite yet.

IGN: Can fans expect to see roughly around a year and half, two years, a new expansion? Because it doesn't seem right now like Wrath of the Lich King is going to come out this year.

J. Allen Brack: [laughs] That's a good question, I think it really depends on what the feature set for the next expansion is. Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King ended up being fairly similar in terms of size and scope. We added 10 levels of content, we added two playable races in the last one and a new class in this one. They both had a new trade skill. In terms of those things I think it's reasonable to assume they'd take about the same amount of time. You also have to realize that our team gets more experienced and gets faster. We're always working on our tools, as our tools get better we get more efficient. Paul Sams has said publicly we have the stated goal of making an expansion in a year and we're kind of trying to do what we can to get toward that. We're not there yet.

IGN: Right, I remember him saying that and thinking, wow that's really fast for as much content as is going into these.

J. Allen Brack: We may be able to be successful with that next expansion, we're not really worried about that right now, but that's something that we try to work towards.

IGN: How do you determine when you cut off, when you have enough content to say this is good for an expansion pack and we can cut this other stuff off and it can be released in updates that we roll out live?

J. Allen Brack: That's a great question and it's a tough answer. Some of it can seem very arbitrary. A lot of it is us just collectively coming together and we'll come up with a decent feature list of how many zones. I think we've established pretty well how many zones we need to level up 10 levels, how many dungeons we need, if we're going to add 10 levels, this is what that means, we have a good idea of what that means. And then there's other stuff we'll come up with. In this case it was, you know, we want to do siege weapons and destructible buildings. That was a big thing. We know what's involved with another trade skill, at this point. But we will have those hard discussions at some point where hey, this piece of content is not going to get done, does it need to go out, does it feel like it's part of the core experience or just something that goes out into a free content patch. We do want to continue down the path of doing free content updates, that's a big part of what we feel is our trust that we have with the consumers and with the players. They expect to buy the box and then have free updates that come out.

IGN: Thanks for your time.

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