by JR Cook - 8 years ago     show comments

Lead Hero Designer Kent-Erik Hagman, also known as Centaurik, made a forum post today addressing the community’s concern over the abundance of Warcraft Assassin releases recently. The post offers some interesting insights into the development process, as well as a few very vague hints of what may be coming in the future.

While I understand the concerns from fans of the different franchises and non-assassin players, it is worth noting that the Meta is as diverse as it has ever been, and this is largely the result of the recently released Heroes. That being said, there are a lot of players who don’t play competitive and get their enjoyment from playing Heroes that resonate with them, so a broader range of releases does appeal to more players.

You can find the full post below and if you would like to join the discussion on the official forums you can find the thread here.

We’ve seen a lot of discussions about our recent hero releases in the community lately, and we agree that we definitely overdid it a little bit with the Warcraft assassins over the past few months. I wanted to step into this thread to say thank you for sharing your feedback on this with us, and to hopefully give you a little more context into how we wound up with what’s happened.

Something that’s important to consider is that our development process for each hero starts nine months to a full year ahead of their planned release dates. After a certain point in the pipeline it becomes very difficult to shuffle heroes around without slipping on our goal of putting a new hero into your hands every three to four weeks. By the time we took a step back and said “You know, we sure have released a lot of assassins lately…” we were well past the point where we could change things up. 🙁

First up was Samuro, whom this team has been wanting to do for over 2 years, and we were finally in a place we could ship him. Awesome! Next up we had Varian. He was what we had labeled a “Gladiator” archetype, which would later be renamed to Multi-Class (as we felt it was more true to what it meant).

Next up was Ragnaros. Originally, we had pitched him as a Core-Replacement Hero, who would influence the battlefield from afar. Something we had penciled in as a Specialist. About 2 months into development, however, we moved away from that design to the Ragnaros you know today. We considered leaving him a Specialist, but thought his role as a Bruiser would be more accurately reflected as Assassin, a la Thrall.

A while after we were into Rag and Varian design, we realized that Zul’jin would make an excellent addition, as we hadn’t added a Sustained Ranged Attacker to the game in quite some time. However, we realized we now had 4 Warcraft Heroes in a row. We decided to stick with it, due to what kind of flexibility we had (or really, didn’t have) in maneuvering the schedule.

About 3 months after we had started work on the next set of Heroes to follow Zul’jin, we had to shuffle up Valeera to follow Zul’jin first, due the needs of the team as a whole. At the time, we didn’t pause to consider the ramifications of what it would mean as a player experience, in terms of getting a diverse roster of Heroes in regards to our Archetype definitions and our Universes.

At the time, we were looking at the Heroes, and from a very Game Designer view, we saw this:

• Stealthed 3-Card-Monté assassin
• Multi-Class Hero: Warrior, Bruiser, Dive Assassin
• Bruiser with Heavy Map Implications
• Sustained Ranged Attacker
• Enemy Carry Disabler

Now, while to us that’s 5 very different experiences (and in fact a new role in the form of a Hero that focuses on Disabling a team’s primary damage), in the current Heroes Archetype listing, that’s 5 Heroes that can be called “Assassin”.

We realize that unleashing so many Warcraft assassins back to back wasn’t the best decision in terms of hero diversity, and isn’t quite as exciting for those of you who don’t necessarily enjoy assassins as much as the other roles.

However, once you’ve had the chance to try out Valeera, we’re confident you’ll find her playstyle is pretty different from our other assassins. Internally, we’ve had a blast striking from the shadows and figuring out all of the various ways to use her combo mechanics effectively, and we hope that you’ll find her just as fun to play as we do.

We know there are also some of you who have concerns about another stealth hero joining the Nexus so soon after Samuro’s release. Valeera has undergone many rounds of playtesting and iteration, and one of our primary focuses was on not only how much fun it is to play as her, but how it feels to play against her as well. We think we’ve reached a nice middle ground, and we’d love to hear your thoughts after you’ve played a few games with and against the rogue.

Now that Valeera is out in the wild, we think you’re going to be pretty happy with the rest of the heroes we have planned for 2017. The feedback you, the community, has provided us has greatly influenced our planning. You can definitely expect more diversity in terms of both role and universe compared to 2016. I would hope that in January of 2018, we’ll be able to look back and see a much wider offering of Heroes (including, yes, Supports!).

We can’t wait to show you what we have in store! Thank you so much for continuing to provide feedback! We’ll see you in the Nexus!