DesignerDave took a couple of questions. One of the OG Blizzard Level Designers, did Culling of Stratholme among others, alongside a team of 9ish people. He admits he doesn’t know everything because of individual designer autonomy.
Story stuff in bold.
- Designers had freedom. They were given a script by Metzen, would read the script as a group, and allocate depending on who loved it most/called “dibs”. Once scripts were allocated, they had free range outside of dialogue script. So the script had “Arthas culls Stratholme”, but he did the particular encounters therein, layout of the city, and more.
- There was never any plans for expansions after Frozen Throne or Founding of Durotar. Largely due to Crunch.
- There was not going to be an Orc Campaign for the Frozen Throne, it was going to be removed for time constraints. It was Tim Campbell’s idea to push for the Founding of Durotar.
- Ideas that were scrapped: Jaina was going to die early in the campaign to serve as Arthas’s “motivation”, Illidan was going to be a Satyr originally (speaking in Ye Olde English with Shakespearean prose), the final mission changed from slowing down a giant Archimonde
- Back in the day, campaign designers could give feedback on the script and explain how things didn’t make sense, e.g. regarding Jaina, she was saved due to that feedback because the designers said it didn’t make sense (she was a new character, was cool, he already had motivation, players didn’t know her enough to care, etc), or Illidan’s being a demon hunter. This did not continue into Blizzard.
- If could make a new campaign today, he’d split the Elves, Dwarves, Gnomes, and add various other races, and focus on each of the races and their histories. He feels that Warcraft hasn’t told the pre-Orc backstory for the Humans in the right way.
- He sees “nothing but missed opportunity”, but it’s because post-fact it’s easier to think of things due to time. He wouldn’t change WC3, but just a question of polish. He wishes they would’ve done more side missions and branching paths in the storyline with different endings. They avoided it due to fear of being able to track consistency and consequences, and wanting to follow the main storyline. Attributes it to being “lazy or scared” and also resources/time (more cinematics).
- More diversity of races with Curse of the Blood Elves was because they wanted more races and techtrees, particularly due to push by Tim Campbell. They thought it’d be fun and cool.
- He was the writer for the lines of the Blood Elf Engineer unit lol
- It was intended to be able to play as Tichondrius and Kel’Thuzad for the purposes of the map editor. He doesn’t recall any other characters that didn’t make it.
- David Hale probably put the Tichondrius sheep in the game.
- Kenshin unit is a reference to Ruroni Kenshin manga/anime (also in Starcraft) cuz he liked it.
- Curse of the Blood Elves is short due to post-crunch burnout + cut Belf stuff to work on Orc stuff (due to Tim’s pushing)
- Tim Campbell is the brain guy behind the Orc Campaign/Founding of Durotar (cofounder of Frost Giant Studios now), literally would not exist without him.
- World Editor was used for everything, even worse because all the tools weren’t complete at the time of making the game lol a lot of stuff had to be fixed post-fact to change triggers to code
- He was given a book on cinematography to learn what is good/correct camera use as he wasn’t a film guy
- Cinematics department added easter eggs like a hydralisk in Thrall’s Vision
- Scourge of Lordaeron had epilogue text because they thought it was confusing jumping from “we got frostmourne” to “patricide”
- He doesn’t know who is Mil’janza in Driven By Demons
- It would not be offensive to make the engine open source, DesignerDave is pro Open Source, but it would be illegal, “Beware the Eye of Activision”
- Interlude uses Lordaeron tileset instead of Ashenvale because it wasn’t done yet he thinks, but he isn’t sure.
- Illidan has Mass Teleport because of an earlier idea.
