WoW Ghosts of K’aresh – George Velev Interview (Blizzard Senior Game Producer)
With WoW Ghosts of K’aresh about to storm the online gaming world, George Velev, a Senior Game Producer involved in this latest expansion visits Impulse Gamer to discuss this title that WoW Heads have been clamouring for …
Welcome to Impulse Gamer George!
Content Cadence and Development Philosophy
Q) Blizzard has maintained a consistent content cadence with The War Within. As a Senior Game Producer, how do you manage the balance between delivering new content like Ghosts of K’aresh on schedule and ensuring the quality and polish that players expect? What are some of the key lessons learned from previous content updates that have been applied to this release?
A) It’s a fine balance between both giving ourselves time to iterate but also ensuring we meet our deadlines. Internally, we go through a lot of checks or goalposts to make sure we’re on track and we’re consistently iterating on our deliverables (eg. content) to make sure it fits our content schedule. One of the largest goalposts is Public Test Realms, which we leverage heavily to make sure our features are meeting the mark based off of player feedback. That’s our first chance to get initial feedback and we make sure we give ourselves plenty of time to iterate over the course of PTR testing to ensure we’re delivering quality content.
One lesson learned from past updates is giving ourselves time to focus on class balance both on Ghosts of K’aresh and Season 3’s launch. We want to ensure a healthy season, both at launch and through it’s lifetime, so we’ll be continuing to allocate time and resources towards live tuning to ensure that no class or specialization feels left behind.
Class Design and Player Feedback
Q) With Season 3 bringing new tier sets aligned with Hero Talents and various class adjustments, what was the overarching philosophy behind these changes? How actively did player feedback from the PTR inform the final iteration of class balance and design for Ghosts of K’aresh?
A) With the season 3 tier sets we wanted to try something a little more exciting for tier sets. Going into The War Within we knew we’d eventually want to try something like making a tier set that changes based on Hero Talents but we didn’t want to do it too early because Hero Talents were still finding their footing and generally we try to reserve the “spicier” ideas for a later Season. Philosophically how we approached these tier sets isn’t really too much different than how we might look at regular tier sets. However, hero talent tier sets do offer us the ability to do things with tier sets, in the sense that it allows us further tuning knobs between hero talent specs to try and create a more equal value (something that Season 1 and 2 sets didn’t fully allow us to do).
Player feedback is a huge source of feedback for us during a PTR cycle especially as it relates to class updates and we’re incredibly lucky to have such a passionate community that provides said feedback. We try our best to monitor forums, discords, reddit posts, and our own internal feedback. Balance iteration is also very similar but we are able to lean on our internal tools to get a sense of where specs are performing during our raid testing or in Mythic+.
Overall Vision and Future Outlook
Q) Beyond the specific features, what do you hope players will take away from their experience in Ghosts of K’aresh? And looking ahead, how does this content update strategically set the stage for the next chapter of the ‘Worldsoul Saga’ with Midnight?
A) Personally, I’m a raider at heart so I’m really looking forward to players jumping into the new Manaforge Omega raid and beating up some dragons with their friends! But aside from the raid, I’m hoping players are satisfied with the conclusion of some of the major narrative beats that we’ve been building towards all throughout The War Within.
While I can’t speak too much about Midnight, we’re very excited for what the rest of the War Within has to offer even with Midnight around the corner. One of our goals with Ghosts of K’aresh and subsequent content updates for the War Within is to keep players engaged with new content and activities and to keep that momentum going straight into Midnight!
WoW Ghosts of K’aresh is available now to play
About the Author
Andrew Bistak When he's not trying to save the world, Andrew enjoys travel (although loathes turbulence), going to the movies, reading and being a dad to his two dogs (and now twins) with his wife.
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