Interviews// World of Warcraft Designer, Jon LeCraft

Q: One of the coolest-sounding features to me is the flying mount - what is it?

JL: Well, you can get those at level seventy - unless you're a druid where you can get them at sixty-eight - but yeah… they only work in Outland, which are the new areas, and they are very fast and have some interesting gameplay. You can basically swoop in on situations and whatnot. They're very cool!


Q: Moving onto what was possibly one of the biggest mainstream TV ads for the game last year - South Park's 'Make Love Not Warcraft'. Obviously this was a collaboration between yourselves and the South Park guys. Any plans for any more collaborations with them?

IBB: I think that the South Park thing was, you know, them coming to us with a cool idea and we all like the show very much and we said, it would be really cool to do it. We developed the show together with them and it was a great experience. If we have more opportunities like that to do something with them or with another franchise that we feel would go together very well, then we will surely do that.


[b]Q: It was difficult watching that for the very first time to decide whether or not it was a positive or a negative thing for Blizzard…What were reactions like internally at Blizzard when it first aired?[/b]

IBB: I dunno, nobody really took it that seriously. We just thought it was really funny!

JL: I actually did feel like it was a real positive spin, though. I mean, they made fun of some aspects that everyone makes fun of when they look at gaming… 'oh no, they gain weight, or whatever... they don't go outside anymore' which is often the general view people take on that. And that's fine. But yeah, overall I think it was positive and it was basically really fun to watch.


Q: Where is 'the sword of a thousand truths'?

IBB: [laughs]There was one in the game for a short period but we took it out. For now. It's been moved to 'the disk'.


Q: Was there any notable increase in subscriptions around that time that South Park aired?

IBB: No, I think it's more …the awareness… it's something that grows through time. So you hear about the game through South Park, or you read an article here, and then a friend tells you about it, and then someone invites you to come and try the game. So it grows gradually like that... But we didn't do South Park because we felt it would increase our subscribership. We did it because we felt it was going to be cool.


Q: Moving onto the social side of Warcraft outside of the game. I noticed a nice quote in a news item about couples who play the game together recently - 'those who slay together, stay together'. Tell us some anecdotes about couples and families playing the game together.

IBB: I remember the first time that I got a DVD from our Korean office and they told me it was a wedding. And I'm like 'ok, cool, why do I want this?' And they told me that it was a couple who met in the game and got married, and I thought 'that's pretty exciting'…So then we started hearing about people who were getting married in the game and so on. The social element of WoW is just unbelievable, you know? People talk about MySpace or YouTube and all these other internet experiences and at the bottom of it WoW is offering a lot of these things as well. The social element of hooking up with your friends, getting to know them better and having great experiences with them. It's actually more interactive, so it's more interesting.