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 to fix a bug in Blade’s Edge that allowed different people to see different things happening in the world, they later decided to use that bugfix as the foundation for the death knight starting area, largely considered one of the best experiences in the game.And as usual we answered your emails (including why Gamestop claims to know Cataclysm‘s release date) and chatted live with listeners, and you can listen to the show at any of the links below. Haven’t subscribed to iTunes yet? Why not? Not only do you get the show
Then again, I could be missing the fact that in Cataclysm, warrior tanking will be far different and not nearly so ‘stand there and soak ridiculous amounts of damage’ oriented. Perhaps HS will become a rage generation attack, similar to how some Death Knight abilities generate runic power, which will make it something warriors use when they specifically need rage for other abilities (perhaps that Mortal Strike/Bloodthirst combo once they’re not on the same cooldown calm down and put the pitchforks away it was a joke sheesh people).