GP: Have you had anything to do with the World of Warcraft movie at all?
JAB: Not too much... I guess the big announcement that we did is that Sam Raimi is going to be the director. We're working on it, the next step is to put together a final script.
GP: About the Oceanic servers that you currently have for World of Warcraft, they're not actually based in Australia or New Zealand, they're based in the States.
JAB: Yes.
GP: Are you guys still actually talking about having an Australia or New Zealand based server?
JAB: We are talking about it, part of the issue is where we are going to be located and how we transfer data over, and then there's a infrastructure cost, build out, things like that. It's not just a question of putting one server, it's an entire suite of servers. But it is definitely something we're talking about, because I know that a lot of the Aussies and the New Zealand players like yourself get a bit of latency at times.
GP: Our forum members also wanted to know about WarCraft 4. Can you talk about that at all?
JAB: WarCraft 4 is not currently in development. The team that made WarCraft III is actually the team that made StarCraft II, so they're working on StarCraft over the next few years - we've announced that they're going to be doing two expansions to StarCraft.
GP: About Cataclysm, obviously you're not talking about release dates, but how far through the development cycle would you say you are?
JAB: That's kind of hard to say, because we don't really know everything that we're going to do when we start out, we kind of figure out what we're going to do as time goes on. We started working on the expansion I guess about two or three months before Wrath of the Lich King shipped, so we sort of had a little concept of what this expansion's about, what we thought the game needed, what the next thing would be. Pretty quickly we centred on doing two new races, and then there was a big debate about how we're going to handle the old world and what we're going to do about that, and how far are we going to go, how accessible are we going to make that. So I guess we've been working on it for getting close to a year now.
GP: So with the two new races, how far can you really take the races, how many more can you include into the game before it gets too much?
JAB: That's a good question. We think about it very carefully with our races and classes, the ones that we have, we love their individuality. So we try to release races and classes very sparingly. I think players are going to be very excited about the Goblins and the Worgens. It's just a question of what are the cool and compelling ideas that we have next time we are faced with this.
GP: You must have a huge number of ideas about where to take things, but when you go to do something do you then have to go back to the 'lore' of Warcraft and make sure that it's actually compatible, or can you sort of bend things a little bit there, are you flexible with that?
JAB: It sort of depends on what it is. "Gameplay first" is one of our company's core values, so gameplay is what's going to trump all. But Chris Metzen is our story guy that's been the shepherd of Warcraft for 15 years now, so he's actively involved any time where we're doing any kind of discussion about things like that, when we're doing a new race and looking at the feature set for the next expansion, he is right there helping us with the decision. So it's not something we usually think about - we don't too often - but it does happen where we go into a situation like "well how are we going to make that work with lore?" But it's mostly like, we all get hyped up about an idea "X", and then it's like "OK, gameplay, how are we going to make that happen with the story, how are we going to make that happen with technology", so it kind of all comes together based on how cool the idea is.
GP: When you go into work on a Monday morning - assuming you work Monday mornings - do you all sit down and have a board meeting, and talk about what you're doing for the day, or do you just go to your desk and say, this week I'm going to do 'this', and that's all I'm going to do, or... how does it work?
JAB: We have 140 people on the (World of Warcraft) team, so the idea of having everyone get together in one meeting is pretty challenging. We have a lot of different groups, each kind of department head has on average between five and eight people. There's some topics that have more, some topics have less, but that's generally about the right amount of people. So the way the communication works is we'll have a Monday morning leads meeting, and the decisions that come out of that get filtered down to the rest of the team. But in terms of what an individual does when they show up, we try to do a very good job of pushing out the tasks that everyone has to them, so they've got several weeks of tasks, and they know what they're doing for the next few weeks, because it can be really disconcerting to come in and have the attitude of, OK, I have no idea what I'm working on today. That's very disruptive, that's why we like to have people at least knowing, OK, this is what I need to focus on for the next few weeks.
GP: So these tasks, the whole thing with Blizzard of course is that you release a game when it's done, so when you've got people that are working on it, what if they come to you and say, you know, I've spent three weeks working on this particular model and it's just not working, I need more time... are you guys flexible with that, do you just say "yep, sure, just do it," because it has to be done right? Or do you actually say no, you have to have this done by a certain time?
JAB: Sure, yeah, it depends on the task. You know we've pretty much figured out how to make weapons and armour at this point, we know how long that takes. So making an individual weapon or an individual armour, every artist knows what the expectation is for that. Creative people, you know, they're all creative people - and everyone on the team is an artist of some sort. Not necessarily just a drawing-type artist, but creative people are all artists, and there's never a time when everyone feels like, this is the best thing that it can be, because everyone that creates something knows that they can always make it better.
So knowing where the balance is between what's good enough, and what's not good enough, is definitely a skill. We spent a lot of time working on the Arthus model because we knew it was a very significant character, we knew it was a very significant piece, so when the artists came back to us and said, hey, we need a bit more time, we said OK, that sounds like a good use of time, we want you to have that time, we want to make it the best thing that it can be. The same when we've been working on the Goblins - we spend orders of magnitude more time on those creatures and characters than we do on kind of a normal creature, because they're a new race, a new focal point. So it really depends on how prominent, how prevalent the thing is.
GP: What about security - these great ideas that you're working on, what happens if they get leaked, how do you prevent people from talking about them?
JAB: It's a challenge. Blizzard has over 3,500 people all around the world, but mostly the big things that happen on the team it's, you know, we have tiers of access levels to certain ideas. Some ideas are just talked about on our floor, some ideas are written on our wiki and that goes out to a wider group, and some ideas are even wider. So deciding when to share those, when the right time is, that's an ongoing challenge.
GP: Thanks very much for your time.
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