Tag Archives: tom chilton

Blizzard has migrated some of its World of Warcraft development talent onto its mysterious new MMO, Project Titan, filling empty seats with new hires.

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“We don’t comment on rumors or speculation. That (the trademark) can apply to anything. We’ve got comic books and other things we’re doing. We’re definitely working on an expansion but we’re not talking about any details yet.” – World of Warcraft lead designer Tom Chilton to Kotaku regarding the firm’s Mists of Pandaria trademark filing. [pic]

Ready for some more short goodness? Om nom nom away after the break.

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World of Warcraft’s lead designer Tom Chilton has said that it may not “make sense” in the future for the game to have a subscription fee.

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Tom Chilton, known to World of Warcraft players as “Kalgan”, knows a little about community feedback.

As a lead designer on World of Warcraft and its first expansion, Burning Crusade, Chilton became the public face of Blizzard’s development and design team -and the focal point for the gaming public’s admiration and more often than not – anger – at decisions made within the game.

Recognized as the main force behind WoW’s player vs player (PVP) system, Chilton is largely responsible for the game’s “Arena” system, which also acts as the game’s pro player platform. But Chilton’s design influence will be felt beyond that when the next World of Warcraft expansion – Cataclysm – goes on sale.

He’s also one of the core team working on Blizzard’s “next” MMO.

[Interview by Justin Kranzl]

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Speaking to VG247 at Games Convention, World of Warcraft production director J Allen Brack and Wrath of the Lich King lead designer Tom Chilton said that having the most “technologically advanced” graphics in Blizzard games has never been a “hallmark.”

“It’s really never been a Blizzard hallmark,” said Brack. “I mean, our games look good, but they’ve never tried to be the best looking game out there.”

“Or at least not the most technologically advanced,” added Chilton.

“The way we’ve approached the unveiling of new features in terms of graphics,” Brack continued, “is much more organic than just releasing an expansion that has a set of graphics upgrades.

“With this expansion we’re releasing a new shadow system that’s pretty different to what we’ve had before, and we’ve got a new technology that allows us to create better looking terrain, better looking dungeons: it’s just continual improvement.”

Wrath of the Lich King has no fixed date as yet, but appears to be moving quickly towards launch, as it was announced last night that the expansion’s major pre-release content patch has now gone live on the Public Test Realms.

Speaking to VG247, Wrath of the Lich King lead designer Tom Chilton said that the upcoming World of Warcraft content patch – planned to introduce a slew of features necessary for the launch of the expansion – will create a “madhouse” of users trying out fresh talents and devices.

“When we patch any major expansion – like Burning Crusade, or Wrath of the Lich King – it feels in some ways like a new game,” Chilton said, speaking at Games Convention.

“Certainly for the [pre-launch] patch for Burning Crusade there was a huge change, as people got all these new talents to play with, etc.

“It’s going to be the same with Lich King. When our… patch goes live sometime before the expansion actually activates, I’m sure it’s going to be quite a madhouse of players trying out new stuff.”

No date has been put on the patch as yet, but new spells, talents, a harbour at Stormwind and tons more is planned for the update. Get more details here.

There’s also no date on Wrath of the Lich King itself as yet.

Just because Blizzard isn’t screaming about another million milestone for World of Warcraft every ten minutes doesn’t mean the subs numbers have stopped rising: they’re still going up, Blizzard told us at Games Convention.

“It’s actually still growing,” said Wrath of the Lich King lead designer Tom Chilton. “It’s certainly not in a reverse trend, or anything like that.”

While the launch of Wrath of the Lich King, the MMO’s next expansion, Chilton reckons the game will experience another boost.

“I do expect that with the launch of Lich King [it will] probably affect the subscription numbers,” he said.

World of Warcraft hit 10 million subscribers in January this year.

There’s no date on Lich King’s release as yet.

Speaking to VG247 at Games Convention, Wrath of the Lich King lead designer Tom Chilton confirmed that plans are already in place to introduce further landmasses to the MMO, despite the fact the latest expansion is yet to launch.

“We actually already have ideas on how we’re going to expand on that in the future,” Chilton told us when asked if more land was going to be added to the game.

“Certainly, [a lot of] the major landmasses that we talked about heavily in previous WarCraft game have already come to fruition, although there are still areas of the game that we’ve talked about and set up story-wise that we haven’t revealed yet. So there’s definitely more to go.”

Wrath of the Link King will introduce the continent of Northrend to the game.

No date as yet.

Speaking to VG247 at Games Convention, Wrath of the Lich King design boss Tom Chilton told us that new aspects to the play style of the expansion’s Death Knight class have been born from the team’s intrinsic methodology for the entire game.

“One of our core philosophies for World of Wacraft in general is class distinction,” he said.

“We feel it’s very important that each time you play a different character class it feels a little bit different because the class mechanics are a little bit different.

“Also, with Wrath of the Lich King and the Death Knight being a hero class, we want to make sure that it feels a little bit different right from the start, to make sure it feels like becoming of a level 55 character, for example. We don’t want it to just feel like another level one character that just happens to be level 55.”

J Allen Brack, the game’s production director, added that meta-story elements had also influenced the way the Death Knight turned out.

“It’s also the story aspect,” he said. “Lich King has been a big part of the WarCraft universe for many years, and to have players start out aligned with the Lich King then work out how to become a free agent is a big part of the story.”

There’s no date on Wrath of the Lich King as yet.

Speaking to VG247 at Games Convention, WoW: Wrath of the Lich King lead designer Tom Chilton said that increasing the level cap to 80 with the impending expansion will allow Blizzard to better align the game’s hardcore and casual players.

“It… gives us a chance to narrow the gap between the casual and the hardcore, in that, after players have been at the level cap for a long time, the hardcore keeping going through all the different tiers of raid content, and they create a bigger and bigger power gap between the casual and the hardcore,” he said.

“The level-up process gives us an opportunity to reset that for a while and then continue on from there.”

Chilton also told us that increasing the level cap with expansions “has to be part of the formula” in terms of providing content across WoW’s entire user-base.

The last level cap increase in the game was from 60 to 70, executed with the launch of The Burning Crusade.

Wrath of the Lich King has no date as yet.

Speaking to VG247 at Games Convention, World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King lead designer Tom Chilton said that the impending increase to level 80 in the expansion is necessary to provide a content for all.

“Ultimately, increasing the level cap is about giving players more of the content they’ve come to love,” he said.

“A lot of the players out there are very casual and the core experience for them is going through new zones, going on quests, levelling up, getting abilities, talents, etc. So if we’re going to deliver new content for everybody, for all of our player-base, that that, in the large part, has to be part of the formula.”

There’s still no date on Lich King’s release, but Chilton did also say at GC that the level cap in the beta was to be raised to 80 “very soon.”

WoW: Wrath of the Lich King lead designer Tom Chilton has defended Blizzard’s decision to reduce the time it takes players to reach level 70 once the expansion is launched, saying that the game mustn’t become intimidating for new users.

Wrath of the Lich King will see the game’s level cap increased to 80.

“I think what really matters to us is that the game doesn’t become more and more intimidating for new players to take on,” said Chilton.

“We feel like that if we were to constantly increase the level cap and never go back and address the total time it takes to get from the beginning to the end, then we would see the game become a bigger obstacle for new players to start up and play with their friends.”

He added: “I think a lot of our player base actively creates new characters so these kinds of changes benefit those players also.”

Chilton was speaking at Games Convention last week. There’s no date fixed for the launch of Wrath of the Lich King as yet.

Speaking to Videogamer at Games Convention, Wrath of the Lich King lead designer Tom Chilton said that the firm doesn’t hate consoles: but don’t be expecting WoW on a pad just yet.

“It’s really not that we have anything against consoles,” Chilton said. “I mean we love console games also. And I’m sure there will be a successful MMO sometime on a console. So it has nothing to do with that. It’s just more like a square peg round hole thing for our game. It just wasn’t designed with that in mind.”

J Allen Brack, production director, added: “World of Warcraft is designed as a PC game. It’s designed to have a keyboard and a mouse. So the controls and the control scheme that you have are very PC centric. If you think about mapping those controls and all those different type of buttons that you have to a console without a keyboard for chatting, it’s a very challenging proposition.”

More through the link.

Speaking to IGN at Games Convention, World of Warcraft design head Tom Chilton said the level cap in the Wrath of the Lich King beta is about to be raised to 80.

“We should be raising the level cap to 80 in the beta very soon at which point almost all the content will be available,” he said. “So there’s not a whole lot left to test, just a lot of tuning and polishing.”

There’s more through there. We talked to Tom yesterday, and, God willing, we’ll get it written up for you today.