WOW - Interview With WoW Lead Designer Jeffrey Kaplan : World of Warcraft General Discussions

The guys over at mmo-gamer.com published a pretty good interview with Lead Designer Jeffrey “Tigole” Kaplan that touches on some important factors. Go give it a read...

Well, there’s a couple parts to your question: One, I was often very critical of what I felt were poor design decisions back then, but I also was a huge fan of their raiding game, and there are particular encounters that I thought were simply brilliant encounters in EverQuest.

Their encounters at the time that I was playing were not as complex as our encounters are in WoW these days, but even with simplicity they had done a lot of very elegant encounters in my opinion. Straight down to the Avatar of War which was just incredibly tuned, and it was an endurance fight and very fun, and there was encounters like Sontalek, which was one of my favorites. And I’ve actually tried to pay homage to some of those encounters in WoW. Patchwerk is actually a direct response to the Avatar of War, which I thought was great. And, Sontalek was actually the inspiration for Vaelastrasz the Corrupt.

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http://www.mmo-gamer.com/?p=218