Gameplanet: How do the Pandaren go from a Samwise Didier April Fool’s joke to full-blown expansion?

Greg Street: Every BlizzCon we get asked the question: When are you going to do Pandaren? It’s funny, it’s one of those things where we're asked a lot, and we’re like, ‘what are you talking about? That was an April Fool’s joke!’

We did a poll asking what would you most like to see in World of Warcraft and the number one feature was Pandaren – not even the number one race, but the number one feature. So we thought, gosh players are really passionate about this; we should take it seriously.

I think a lot of players, when they heard hints of what we were doing, they thought we were going to play the Pandaren as a slapstick silly race and then they realised that they’ve got a lot of depth and this really involved culture. They can carry an expansion, they’re a real race and not just a throw-away joke.

Gameplanet: What were the key areas that you wanted to improve on from Cataclysm?

Street: I’d say there are two big ones. One is the sense of “being in the world.” A lot of the features we introduced lately kind of drove players to sit in the major cities and teleport around the world – whether they were queuing for a dungeon or wanting to go Hyjal by stepping through a portal. So it felt more like an instanced game and less like this huge world that you travel around and explore.

So that was the first one that we’re really trying to address in the new expansion, and the second one is giving players enough to do when they log in. I think World of Warcraft has changed from being a game about levelling up your character to a game about what your character does in the new expansion. With Cataclysm in particular there was a lot of emphasis on going back and making a new character and levelling up. But I think once our players have been playing for a while and have seven or eight, nine or ten characters, they’re kind of done with the whole go back and level thing.

I think in Cataclysm we gave players a reason to log out. Even raiders: they raid Tuesday night then log in on Wednesday and say, ‘Well, there’s not really anything for me to do. The raid is done, I don’t really need any loot from a dungeon and I don’t want to PvP.’ They were done. So we’re really trying to give players lots of different things to do, so they can log in on any night and say, ‘I’ll work on my pet battles,’ or ‘ I’ll try to beat my time on a Challenge Mode dungeon.’ We’re just trying to give them a variety of things to spend their time on.

Gameplanet: Cool. Last question on Cataclysm: Cataclysm in many ways was designed to draw in new players. Was it successful in doing that, or was it the same crowd?

Street: No it was really successful in doing that. I think people often underestimate how many players leave World of Warcraft in any given month and how many new players we get. I think that a lot of people imagine we have this static audience who have been with us forever but we actually have fairly high turnover. We get new players we lose old players, then some of those players come back.

So I think in that respect we got a lot of new players we never had before. They weren’t familiar with the old content and a lot of them had never been to these places that we re-did in Cataclysm.

Gameplanet: What’s striking about the monk and what didn’t get a lot of attention today is that the monk is the first class without an auto-attack. Why have you chosen to do that?

Street: There are a couple of reasons. First was that we just wanted to do something different. How do we make this class feel different to the classes we’ve done before? Fighting games – console fighting games – are super-popular around the office, as they are with a lot of gamers. To capture that martial arts feeling we really wanted that responsiveness: I hit a button, I see my guy do that. So we thought it’d be a little lame if your monk was just going around doing all that stuff without you hitting the button. So we’re really trying to get that button-masher feel: I hit this I punch, I hit this I kick.

So there are definitely some challenges, we’ll see if it works out. There are situations like when a creature is five health away from dying and you have to wait until you can hit your button again, whereas if you were a warrior, he would just auto-attack and kill it. Things like that.

Gameplanet: Because of that the monks have a large variety of animations – need a variety of animations – are you concerned other classes aren’t getting a lot of love? If I’m playing a Warlock and I’m standing there channelling, and I’m watching this monk go all Bruce Lee on a mob, I might feel like I’m missing out?

Street: [Laughs] Well there are a couple of things. We knew if we had the monk with a lot of really vibrant spell effects – lots of fire and tornados – that doesn’t really fit the player’s fantasy of what a monk is. We knew to deliver on the monk it had to be martial arts, and that meant a lot of animations. Fortunately our engineers came up with a system that lets the animators copy the animations from one race to another. It’s not perfect, they have to do touch-up afterwards, but in the past they had to go, ‘here’s the human female attack, now here’s the human male attack. Now let’s do the gnome.’ With the monk they were able to do all the animations and apply them to the races a lot faster.

We hope to be able to do that for a lot of the older classes, and we’re also updating a lot of the visual animations for the older classes. We just put in new Wrath and Hurricane animations in the 4.3 patch. We’ll continue to do that, we have a lot of brand new spells in Mists of Pandaria and that’ll be an opportunity to ensure every class sees a little bit of love and some things they’ve never seen before.

Gameplanet: The Challenge Modes are really interesting. What’s the higher concept behind them?

Street: Yeah, the way we got there is that traditionally you’d run a normal dungeon, then run a heroic dungeon, and then you’d run a raid. As we were getting more and more players into raiding, and as we made raiding more and more accessible, we realised that we were making the normal dungeon really easy, then really hard in heroic, then relatively easy at the raid, and we were just losing them at that point, and they felt like they couldn’t get the gear they needed. We asked ourselves: what are those hard dungeons really serving? They’re just a barrier to entry. But they’re also a lot of fun, and having that challenge where you have to use all your abilities perfectly with just a small group is really cool. So we thought, let’s take it out of the progression path of gearing up and just make it this extra thing players can work on – and embrace this spirit of “PvE competition” which we haven’t really seen in the game before aside from World-First raid achievements, and stuff like that.

Gameplanet: PvE competition is one cool application but do you see other uses for gear normalisation?

Street: Oh yeah! We have a lot of big plans, I don’t know how many of them will work out.

Gameplanet: Are you able to elaborate?

Street: One idea we had which may or may not work out is letting players go back and run old dungeons at the appropriate level. So for example, you could go into the Dungeon Finder and pick any dungeon in the game, and people who haven’t run Sethekk Halls, or Utgarde Keep, or Uldaman in years, can go back and do that. We have a huge library of older content to draw on. So that would be something fun.

Another idea we have that we’d really like to do is what we call ‘Proving Grounds’ where a player goes in solo and we kind of give them a – test is too strong a word – we give them an experience to be like, ‘OK, you want to be a tank? This is what a tank has to do.’ Because really for tanks and healers, they don’t get a chance to try out that role unless they’re in a group and then there’s a ton of pressure to do it right. So they’re like, ‘when do I get to learn how to do that?’ We thought these Proving Grounds would be a good way to teach them what it means to heal a group, they’re all taking damage and you have to go keep up everyone.

If we can do gear normalisation in that, we can make that another form of PvE competition: How fast can you compete a healing trial? Then you can brag about it.

Gameplanet: Do you see any PvP applications for it?

Certainly there are times when PvP players would like gear not to matter, and in Arena Tournament Realms we don’t like them bring in all their gear. We just start everyone at the same level, so I think there’s a lot of application there.

Gameplanet: But nothing planned?

Street: Well aside from the tournaments where it makes sense, we may have some special forms of Arena where it’s not about the gear, it’s about using a set amount of gear and it’s all about the skill – kind of like StarCraft where instead of making your character more powerful you go in with what you have.