World of Warcraft Patch 3.3 Interview

IGN chatted up World of Warcraft lead systems designer Greg Street earlier today about the Icecrown Citadel raid dungeon, new quest tracker, and other additions being implemented in the game’s v3.3 patch. A snip:

IGN: So once 3.3 comes out, what’s the point of access to all this content? How do players get involved and start to experience the content?

Greg Street: They find Icecrown and walk in the front door. They’ll find that the Argent Crusade and the Death Knights have joined forces into a new organization called the Ashen Verdict and the Ashen Verdict has set up a vanguard ready to invade the fortress and the players are going to be the heroes leading the charges. All the famous NPCs we’ve built up through the expansion are going to be there and they’ve got their vendors ready and their crafters all sitting there ready to turn all the loot that players bring out of the dungeon and the raid into something even cooler.

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IGN: You’ve also added a new quest tracker to make it easier to find content. Can you talk about that a bit?

Greg Street: That’s another great example. Philosophically, over the years, WOW has always been a fairly easy, approachable MMO, certainly compared to the ones that came before us. We made questing pretty obvious. You didn’t have to find the NPC. You didn’t have to figure out if they had a quest for you because they had a big exclamation point sitting above their heads. Over the years, we learned that one of the things our players are looking for is more direction on the quests.

With this new quest map, you don’t have to go find where the wolves live. You open up the map and it’ll tell you, “Here are the wolves you have to kill. Here’s the NPC who gave you the quest.” We have it all hooked up to the tracking system that goes on the right side of the screen and we also have it hooked up to the main map itself. When you hit the M key now it’ll bring up a map and have all your quests labeled on that map with proximity to you. You can go look for quests on other zones as well, for some of the quests that require you to travel to other zones. Then you have marked on the map the basic area you need to go in to look for the creatures I have to kill or the drops I have to get or the herbs I have to collect or whatever it is. It’s pretty cool.