Gamasutra has a nice interview with someone on Blizzard’s team that we haven’t heard from very much before — Alex “Furor” Afrasiabi is currently a lead world designer for Cataclysm, and while we have definitely seen him at BlizzCon a few times, he hasn’t done as much press as, say, Tom Chilton or J. Allen Brack. But here he is on Gamasutra, talking about what Blizzard is doing to the World of Warcraft in the next expansion. And boy are they doing it. As we knew, Desolace and Azshara are getting revamped completely, while Feralas is in for some questing changes and zones like Loch Modan are seeing some “light” modification. Blizzard apparently looked at each zone and determined where it lay on the list of todos: Azshara is becoming the 10-20 Horde zone and so will get reworked extensively, but Silithus, while it may need work, probably won’t get more than a few tweaks. Afrasiabi also talks about the surprising origin of phasing and Blizzard’s philosophy. More after the break. Get this — phasing, the revolutionary technology that allows Blizzard to make a more transitive MMO than ever, started out as one of those 180,000 bugs. After a programmer came up with a way

PC Gamer UK was lucky enough to get the chance to grill Blizzard about the upcoming Cataclsym expansion, and they came away with quite a bit of new information, which is available in their latest issue, as well as as in the PC Gamer Podcast. If you don’t want to be spoiled, do not follow the break, I’m warning you now. There’s a couple major story spoilers, especially regarding the origins of the goblins and worgen. The worgen starting zone actually begins in a flashback. Gilneas is besieged by the Forsaken and gripped with rumors of plague. You meet a dissenter, Crowley, who believes that Gilneas’ isolationism is a mistake and that they should rejoin the Alliance. When the worgen curse comes, you and Crowley lead the defensive, but are pushed back to the city cathedral, where you realize that the worgen you are fighting are your own friends and neighbors driven feral. As you realize this, the curse takes you. Flash forward to some months later, when you’re captured in the countryside by your old friend Crowley. From here, the portion we saw at BlizzCon begins. As for the goblins, you start on Kezan as a pretty high level (society-wise, not game mechanics) executive, successful and rich, with a

Reader Andy sent us a good topic to talk about this morning: dances for the new Cataclysm races. Every time we’ve sat down to play the new expansion, we’ve punched in the /dance and /silly emotes, and we haven’t seen a single thing implemented for Worgen or Goblin males or females, so as far as we know, it’s completely up in the air on what dances they’ll choose for each one. You have to think that Blizzard has some idea already (or maybe they’ll just be included in those long awaited dance studios), but we haven’t seen it, so what do you think?   So what’s up with these changes? My guess is actually that Blizzard is streamlining the 1-10 experience, because in Cataclysm, it’s about to get a little crazier. We heard about just how much is going on in the starting zones the other day, and without spoiling it, there’s revolutions, wars, plagues, life, love, and death. That’s a lot to be putting into 10 levels, and The story behind the Lich King’s big sack o’ weapons: “The main idea is that the Lich King has an inventory of weapons that he has stolen and corrupted throughout his reign. These weapons originally belonged to characters like King

Our very own Michael Sacco actually got his hands on a copy of that PC Gamer full of Cataclysm details, and there was apparently one that we missed: Gnomes may be coming back to Gnomeregan. The little tidbit above is frustratingly vague, but it appears that as long rumored (and long hoped by the shorter denizens of Azeroth), Deathwing’s return may break the whole war for the Gnomish capital wide open, and they might finally reclaim their mechanical homeland. We say “might,” because, according to this blurb, it could be anything at this point — a questline that begins a takeover, a questline that represents a failed takeover, a new phased experience that leads to a takeover, or some kind of questline that brings Gnomeregan up to   Of course, the third option is that this a test for a new character customization option in Cataclysm, namely, tattoos. RPers and more aesthetically minded players know that it seems like pulling teeth to get Blizzard to implement cosmetic non-progression oriented character customization (Seriously, just steal stuff from LoTRO, Blizzard! I won’t tell if you don’t!), so even the whiff of a possibility for new stuff is pretty exciting. Then again, we’ve seen

Well, Jaina got her upgrade already, and we’ve heard that other NPCs may be looking a little better very soon. But what about us players? Don’t we get a cool, slick new look too? Vaneras has the answer: erm, maybe. As you may have noticed, our armor has been getting updated as we’ve gone along — the Tier 10 armor is much clearer and more stylish (well, depending on who you talk to) than the original tier gear that dropped way back when. But as for the actual player models, Vaneras says it’s something that Blizzard would like to do, but it’s all a matter of time and priority. They’ll get around to it, sure, but only when it makes sense for them to spend the time on it. Which is what we’ve heard before, really — J. Allen Brack told us way back that things would be updated bit by bit rather than having a major patch be focused on updating everything you can see on screen. Still, Cataclysm, the expansion that redoes the old world and all of its old without a side view. So, after some datamining and image editing of our own, we’ve put You guys have probably noticed The Queue has slowed down a lot as well, and it’s somewhat for the same reasons. We love writing it,

Good times on the WoW Insider Show last Saturday — even though Turpster was AFK for the week, we had a packed show, with Matthew Rossi, Chase Christian, and Eddie “Brigwyn” Carrington all jumping on to share some opinions. We talked about the new instances already testing over on the PTR, as well as what we’ll find in Icecrown (we kept the story spoilers out of it, though we did talk about some bosses and their abilities). And we hit up the character selection and creation screens and chatted about what might be better on those. Make sense? Just because you don’t see, say, Attack Power on gear doesn’t mean you won’t have an Attack Power number governing how much damage you do. It just means that the AP you have will come from stats like Agility and Strength (depending on your class and a sinizuh asked… “With the simplification of stats in Cataclysm, are websites/communities like Elitist Jerks going to have nothing to do?” Elitist Jerks predates the dark voodoo that is the math behind Armor Penetration. Coding arcane magicks into World of Warcraft isn’t what fuels theorycrafting and places like EJ. It’s the drive to get the absolute most out of your game.

Starting at 6:00 p.m. EDT, 5:00 p.m. CDT, 3:00 p.m. PDT we’ll be liveblogging the Twitter developer chat that’s going on with WoW’s Director of Production and Game Director. We’re seeing how this goes. We know a lot of you don’t use Twitter, and that many places of business block Twitter. If this twitter-induced liveblog goes well for us, we’ll do it again during future Twitter chats. If not, we won’t! Enjoy it now either way. Update: Chat over! The transcript of the liveblog after the break. We’ll do a review of this tomorrow, talking about our thoughts concerning the event overall. After you read the transcript you’ll likely come to the same conclusion we did: Save for a couple items nothing new was really presented. There was a lot of fluff and very little substance. 4:50pm CDT: They’re now taking questions, tweet to @warcraft with the hash tag #blizzchat. 500pm CDT: Lots of questions are being asked, no answers yet. Most of the questions are not too good, to be honest. 5:05pm CDT: Nothing yet over their twitter feed. Although we’re told this is today… 5:09pm CDT: Q: Will Path of the Titans be as time consuming as obtaining Sons of Hodir reputation? A:

Ghostcrawler posted a bit this evening on the philosophical direction Blizzard is taking in Cataclysm in three important areas: Talent trees New spells and abilities Recycled raid content The discussion originated from a mild QQ post about what the poster felt were the flaws in Cataclysm, and Ghostcrawler took that opportunity to clarify a few things that the community has been talking about since the initial announcement at BlizzCon 2009. Chief amongst those is that they are specifically designing talent trees now with an intention for there to be 5 to 10 talent points that can be spent where the player wants — and that talent guides like you find in WoW.com’s class columns will only go so far in the selection of the idea talent tree; the rest of the talent selection will be left up to the individual user. Of course, this information isn’t exactly new per se, but it’s interesting to hear some of the refinements of it all as Cataclysm’s development progresses. Ghostcrawler’s full statement after the break. The talent tree comment Ghostcrawler is referring to: No new talent points. But wait didn’t GC say they were going to go back and redo the trees? That is a misconception. All that