We talk with World of Warcraft's lead content designer about The Shattering patch, the upcoming Cataclysm launch, the game's sixth anniversary, and the possibility of more dynamic events!

ZAM: You mentioned the race changes for goblin and worgen. Some players were a little surprised to hear they'll be able to switch on day one. What was the thought process behind that decision?

Stockton: Basically, our thought process was that after the first week or two, we really didn't think it mattered that people were going to be able to swap. Really, the only reason you wouldn't want people to swap is because it could mess with the idea of our achievements of the first player to get a worgen or goblin to level 85. We removed those achievements from the game because at that point, essentially, you're paying $35 for a race change and gaining five levels to earn that achievement. In our eyes, any achievement that's earned through paying for a race change is not worth having in the game.

Once we made the decision to remove the achievement, it made the decision to allow the race changes at day one that much simpler. At that point, there's really no good reason we could think of to stop a player who is really excited about the goblin or worgen from being able to switch. The closest thing we came to was saying that maybe we'd lock it out for 2-3 weeks, but that didn't make sense. We didn't think it was worth it for the amount of players who wanted to switch at day one. Our feeling was if there's no bad design reason behind it, let's just go ahead and let them do it.

I think lore-wise some people may wonder how they're seeing a level 80 worgen so quickly, but a player can do Refer-A-Friend on day one and get a character up to level 80 in literally a couple of days. Refer-A-Friend gives you 300% experience across the game. This has worked well, so we're not planning to take it away, and we knew it was an option players were going to have at their disposal. If they could already use Refer-A-Friend to level up a character that quickly, we felt like the same players would have the same complaints no matter what. We figured we may as well try to please a larger amount of people by just allowing those race transfers to happen. We talked a lot about it. It's one we went over quite a bit.

ZAM: Out of everything that's coming in the expansion, what's your favorite addition? What do you look at and think, “I'm so glad we got that in”?

Stockton: The guild system is huge. I think it's a feature that's hard for players to understand how awesome it is until they're in-game. Say they're out doing quests at level 82 or level 16 and all of a sudden they hear this new ding sound and see a whole new ding effect. We have new toasts that show up in the middle of the screen. They tell you what new abilities you've earned. We have that entire system in place for guilds. The first time you see your guild level, it's going to say “new perk unlocked,” like 5% more experience for everyone across the board. I think that excitement level is really going to sink in; not only am I in this chat channel, but everything I'm doing is contributing to the guild. Those are just basics. We've got so much stuff in that system for people to unlock. I think that's a huge piece.

As far as in-game content, I've been playing WoW since early alpha. For me, seeing the old world brought up-to-date and up to a level of quality exceeding what we did in Northrend is easily my favorite thing overall. I've had so many memorable experiences in individual zones: getting ganked for the first time, or completing the Tirion Fordring questline in Eastern Plaguelands. There's all these moments that people have, and we've tried to preserve a lot of those individual moments and those things players really liked in the zones. At the same time, we've made the zones flow better and play better from a gameplay perspective. In that respect, it's such a huge thing to be able to go back through and experience that stuff in a whole new way.

ZAM: Getting back to the actual launch of Cataclysm, you're offering a digital download for the first time. You're also launching at midnight PST for the first time. Can you talk a little about that process? What do you feel are the pros and cons, such as time zone difference?

Stockton: For us, I don't think we feel like there are any cons to that situation. Obviously, time changes affect everything we do around the world. That happens when we do patches and when everybody wanted to get to the Lich King and get that first kill. Depending on where you live in the world, you're going to get a patch at a different time. There's not a lot of things we can necessarily do about that. The fact that we're able to offer digital downloads to players is great. If people don't want to get to a store and wait in line, or if they're not into midnight events, I think what we're doing is offering more choice. In WoW, that's the biggest thing we're trying to do with Cataclysm. We want to make sure there's something for everybody. I think it's just great to see the technology come to the point where we're actually able to do that. We can pre-load all the data on your machine and have it ready to go. All you need to do is put your key in and you're good to go.

ZAM: Are you taking any extra steps to ensure that players will actually be able to get in-game at midnight PST without worrying too much about server issues?

Stockton: I think we've done the most amount of preparation we've ever done to prepare for a launch. Not only because of the digital download, but because of the concept of what Cataclysm is and the fact that it's changing the world has required a massive amount of new tech. Along with that tech comes a massive amount of testing. We've bulked up our QA teams here at Blizzard. So many groups have to be involved in that; it's not just a programmer on the WoW team that's figuring out how we're going to do this background downloading and how this is all going to work. It's all the groups within Blizzard that have to contribute to that stuff. I really think it's been a company-wide effort, not just WoW-wide, to get something like that to happen.

I think it helps also that StarCraft II recently just launched and we got to see their launch happen and how everything worked for them. All of that gives us experience in making our launch as smooth as possible. I think that's why you're seeing the patches spaced out like they are. Part of the reason behind that is so we give ourselves time to fix things before we get to launch day. We don't want to end up in a situation where we're launching 4.0.3a three days before Cataclysm ships and then there's some huge issue with 4.0.3a we weren't able to find before it went live. At that point we don't have much time to deal with the situation before launch. Really, for us it's about making sure the programmers feel comfortable with the content that we're putting up and that they'll have time to deal with any issues should they arise. The player experience and the servers being up is our highest priority.