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).

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 hot secretary. When Kezan begins to fall apart, you give your life savings to a Trade Prince who promises you safe passage to the mainland. Instead, he captures you and tries to sell into slavery. That’s when the shipwreck happens, and again, the story picks up with the BlizzCon portion.

Apparently, the original goblin city, despite only appearing from levels 1-5, is sort of a Grand Theft Auto: Goblin City parody type of setup, full of sleaze and pollution and robot-powered American-style football. But that’s not all. Apparently the goblins’ brush with slavery and death hasn’t wiped out their unique sensibilities and philosophies, as they’ll actually reshape Azshara to look like the Horde symbol.

The goblins and worgen aren’t the only ones to get story tidbits, though. We also learn a bit more about what the Horde’s been up to. Garrosh is confirmed to be the new leader of the Horde. He’s redesigned Orgrimmar, and has actually evicted all but the orcs and tauren from the center of the city, saying that only those two races are strong enough to defend it.

The ruins of Lordaeron are being expanded, with a pit opening into the Undercity. Zoram’gar Outpost will be a Warsong Hold style base. In zone modification news, Stranglethorn will be one of the most extensively altered zones. In addition, Southshore will have succumbed to tidal waves (which is notably different from what we heard at BlizzCon, which was that the Horde had conquered it).

The lore behind the Arch Cleric would be that the Cataclysm which struck Azeroth awakened a secretive order of priests whom had been studying under the watchful guise of a master Death Knight which converted to the priestly way of life. Now that the world is in ruins, this order of Arch Clerics called the Divine March leads the fight to restore and heal the peoples of Azeroth; seeing to the ultimate destruction of Deathwing.

Do you feel that the commenters on WoW.com have become less trollish and more civil and witty in recent weeks? If so, can you please give them (us?) a well-deserved “Big ups?”

Thanks,
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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 Terenas, Antonidas, Sylvanas, and Muradin Bronzebeard.” Awesome.

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 tatooed NPCs before, such as in the Wolfcult of Grizzly Hills, so this could still just be an NPC thing.
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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, it’s probably one of my favorite things to write because the format lets me be a little more candid with you guys while being helpful at the same time, but it’s a huge time sink and relies heavily on the state of the game. Sometimes there simply aren’t enough hours in the day for the editors to get this thing written up. And some days, like today, we have to go to other places to get questions to answer because we’re currently in that pre-expansion lull that always tends to happen. Everyone wants to hear about Cataclysm, and we can’t squeeze a time machine into WoW.com’s budget.

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. As long as there’s a game, there will be people that have fun reaching the highest heights of it. There are websites online that teach you how to get the most out of playing Connect Four. It would be pretty hard to turn WoW into a game that gives Elitist Jerks nothing to do.