Jeff Kaplan Video Interview Transcript

Will you meet mates from your guild who may be playing for the opposite side on a battlefield?

Maybe. If you're Alliance you won't be able to side with Horde. You may have a common ally but that doesn't make you allies, if that makes sense. So Horde and Alliance will always hate each other even if you chose the same side.

Is Naxxramas the same?

It's the same Naxx, the change is that you can do it as either 25 or 10. So it;s the same bosses with the same names.

Will the legendary item still be in Naxxramas?

We're trying to decide what we'll do with Atiesh. It was a great legendary item that had a lot of meaning. It was Medivh's staff and we felt it was core to the Warcraft story as a whole. We want to make sure we don't ruin the accomplishment for anybody who earned it in the original game. It was such a great item that we might do something with it in WotLK.

Is the story of the corrupted Ashbringer going to progress at all?

Yes. There's a lot of good Ashbringer lore that's going to come in this expansion.

Can you tell us more about Wyrmrest temple.

In Wyrmrest there's a raid instance similar to Onyxia's Lair where it's a small raid instance with a single encounter in the Chamber of Aspects. In the Chamber it's where the 5 different dragon flights in Warcraft Lore meet and it's for only the highest dragons. We plan to put a raid encounter in there and let you take part in that and initially we plan to go with one raid encounter, but if we want to expand the space and introduce other dragon flights we can do that through the Chamber of Aspects.

We saw 2 characters being able to share a horse. Are we going to be abel to give our friends a lift?

With the introduction of our siege vehicles, which is really what all that technology is about. A vehicle in WoW can hold up to 8 players, that's 8 different seeds and we can give the seeds any number of abilities or let you do your abilities from the seed. At the very basic level , for the first time it allows us to let a player give another player a ride on their mount should we choose to do so. We're not sure if that will be available from the start but one of the ideas is to give the players new mounts they can buy and allow these new mounts to be available or passengers.

Will they be usable in the old world?

If they are on the ground we can make them usable in the old world.

Arthas is a big challenge but if he's killed will there be any big challenges left?

Arthas was a construct of Warcraft 3, and previous to Warcraft 3 he wasn't a major character in the Warcraft storyline which had existed for years prior to Warcraft 3. The essence of it was that Ner'zhul had been embodied by the Lich King, and once you had defeated Ner'zhul, the Lich King found a new host which was Arthas at that point. I think the same mechanic should apply should we choose to exercise it in that way should Arthas be overcome in some way so the Lich King could embody somebody else.

We have been working hard at creating new villains in the Warcraft lore that goes beyond just the scope of the current games.We feel that Warcraft and WoW as intellectual properties is going to go on for quite some time so we need to come up with thing beyond just Arthas.

In Wotlk Player will interact with Arthas right from the start right through tot he final dungeons but they wont fight him until much later even in the patches. Ice Crown Citadel, the raid encounter against Arthas comes later in the expansion cycle, even though Ice Crown glacier is filly available and Arthas is present at the time when WotlK ships

There are big important villains we haven't explored yet in Warcraft history. I think of Deathwing who's been on hiatus for a while. I'd like to see Deathwing come out at some point too.

Will there be new arenas with WotLK?

Yes. We're planning on building 2 new arenas for WotLK. We don't have any details yet but it could change. Early thoughts are one could be set in Dalaran which has now moved to Northrend in the expansion.

The other thought is we might use the Orgrimmar Arena which players have always asked about. We might make that available for arena combat with some modifications.

Further Reading/Viewing

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