World Of Warcraft: NEW WoW interview with Bill Roper! (4/8/2003)

Interview with Bill Roper, 08.04.2003 (english version)

Team worldofwarcraft.de: Hi Bill. Early on we have seen the fantastic graphic of World of Warcraft but now let's talk about some game specific things. First of all, we want to know if there will be a level cap...

Bill Roper: Yes, there will be a level cap, but the number is not set by the team yet.

Team worldofwarcraft.de: What happens if a player reaches this cap?

Bill Roper: You mean the further motivation to play. First you will have to do a lot of combat to reach the level cap. You will have to come together to combat the high level monsters...

Team worldofwarcraft.de: ... well, will you implement stronger monsters or special monsters?

Bill Roper: You can always do things like that, because we have live teams. They will always be able to add new stuff, for example stronger monsters, that are 10 levels higher. If people are for example looking for a special challenge and say: "Hey, we want a monster, which needs 200 people to kill!" we can do this. Thatīs the great part of a live team.

Team worldofwarcraft.de: Have you any idea, if there will be Realm vs. Realm fights, like in Dark Age of Camelot?

Bill Roper: We definitly want to have areas where players will be able to fight other players. PvP is an important part, we also like it. There will be specific places in the world where you will go to fight other players.

Team worldofwarcraft.de: Will there be war between the races? For example Orcs vs. Humans that are directed by the live team?

Bill Roper: Obviously we have built up some natural alliances in the Warcraft Universe. We want you to reflect those in the game as well; we want players to be able to set differences in their behaviour, for example Orcs and Humans are natural enemies but a human player can work to be accepted by Orcs. But then, he will be known as an "orc lover" (Bill laughs), what is possibly not the best for his reputation.

In PvP there can be war at some natural sites but we don't want to make a strict realm structure. If you want to fight for every side you want, you can make a mercenary type, or be a strict paladin for the humans who never decides to fight for the Orcs.
But it won't necessarily mean that we have setups where we have got a GM sponsored event. We can do that but we want PvP to take place in certain areas.

Team worldofwarcraft.de: What about ingame support? Will there be lots of game masters or event masters?

Bill Roper: Yes, we have got three things we want to do: be flexible, do changes and make sure, people get immidiate help. There will be a combination of website and ingame support. What we really want to do is a fully featured and easy to access website, having a lot of questions there, that are already be answered. You know, if there is an easy question, it can be easily answered. So the World of Warcraft team works very close with the website team.

Team worldofwarcraft.de: Do you plan to setup the website in english only or will there be other languages also?

Bill Roper: We want to do it like our actual website. The regular websites we do get translated in different languages, but we know, World of Warcraft is very different and we have to spent a lot of time working with all the partners who translate the websites. Certainly we would love to have it work this way that if you have a question in german you should be able to ask that question in german. That is our goal but we don't know how fast this will happen. Shipping WoW in 20 countries in 20 languages is very challenging, but it will help to make the game more accessible to more people. But think about 100 game masters talking in 20 different languages...

Team worldofwarcraft.de: Would you say there is any similarity to Diablo 2, we mean items, set items, unique items?

Bill Roper: Yes and no. It is nothing like the Diablo 2 item system. There will be - like in any other RPGs - main items, that help you early on, so you know, this item is not far away to reach. We want to have items that are extremly rare and not everyone is able to access them easily, so there are only a few people who have those items. They help to build special reputations, so people feel more special if they manage to obtain such an item.

There will be level of rarity and there will be sets of items, but they will not necessarily work like the sets in Diablo 2, but there is for example a full setup of this type of armor, that will work well together. I don't actually know of sets like in Diablo 2 that give you more power or something like that.

Team worldofwarcraft.de: If a character dies, what penalty will there be?

Bill Roper: Right now the only penalty is that you have a resurrection sign that lasts for 5 minutes where your stats are down. What we don't want to do is to frustrate people, for example dropping down levels, lose items or get to a corner of the world where you have to fight back to your stuff for 15 minutes etc. We will work out the penalty in the beta test, then we can see whether a penalty is too hard or not. We don't want people to turn off their computer after they die. We want them to think: This time I lost but next time I will win. They should try it again against this monster if they feel able to defeat it. The actual penalty is probably not quite enough right now, because you don't care if you die, what is not right either.

Team worldofwarcraft.de: Was it really real time as you played in the show?

Bill Roper: No. In this build we had an accelerated time. When we started it was around 1 o'clock in the night and when we finished it was 6 o'clock in the morning (the period in real time was around half an hour). We play a lot with different time cycles. Right now we try what it feels like if you play with real time. But we won't probably have real time, because if you work, you will always play at night. That won't be funny ;-) We will have compressed time, but we didn't already figure out what the time cycle will be.

Team worldofwarcraft.de: At the screen we have seen an menu point which contains guild stuff. What can we expect?

Bill Roper: We definitly have a lot of things for players that organize themselves in guilds: identify themselves by different clothes, specific chat channels, tracking down guild stats on the website, for example character levels, what the characters already had done etc.

Team worldofwarcraft.de: What about castles or houses for guilds where they can meet?

Bill Roper: We talked about that. We thought about what we will be able to do: if we give them a place to go or if they have to earn it first or pay for it or even let them give a rent. But at first we want to implement the basics, so people can make guilds, communicate through the game and identify as a guild and so on.

Team worldofwarcraft.de: Can you tell us how long the beta will last?

Bill Roper: No. But I can tell you, that we will start with the beta this year.

Team worldofwarcraft.de: Will the beta be worldwide?

Bill Roper: It will probably be like the actual Warcraft 3 Expansion beta.

Team worldofwarcraft.de: Thank you Bill for your time and all the information. We are looking forward to meet you on E3.

Source link: WorldofWarcraft.de
English translation by Gunslinger