WoW -> Insider -> Insider Interview

ne of the most notorious instances in World of Warcraft is the Scarlet Monastery in Tirisfal Glades - a major fortress of the Scarlet Crusade. The Crusade is pledged to eradicate the Undead Scourge from Azeroth, but their holy war has taken on a zeal bordering madness. What terrible and dark things are taking hold in this powerful seat of the light? Players have the chance to find out in this epic instance made up of four unique wings each containing a separate adventure. Though now an epic dungeon, the SM was just an idea, a drawing on a board, and World of Warcraft designer Jeffrey Kaplan has taken the time to talk to us about the dungeon's evolution from idea to inception.

Where did the concept for the Scarlet Monastery originate?

ur Creative Director and story guru - Chris Metzen - usually comes up with the starting themes and ideas behind a new zone or a dungeon. He'll meet with the team, sometimes has maps sketched out and rough ideas of the general direction, as well as the lore and background of the area. Then we start brainstorming as a team and rolling from there.

What are the steps in creating a dungeon in World of Warcraft?

ell, I've already mentioned step one, and that's Chris coming to us with the background and story for the dungeon. It's important that everything fit into the world's evolving storyline and the main themes. So once we all meet and get the background from Chris, the next task is for the art team to start generating concept art to get a feel for how the area will look. At the same time, we'll create a 2D rough layout of the dungeon. This rough layout is something we added to the design process after the Scarlet Monastery was created. It helps to avoid problems with the flow of the dungeon - which is a difficulty we ran into while building the Monastery.

After the rough layout is agreed on and the concept art has given us a sense of the style and look of the dungeon, then its time for the level designers to build it out in 3D. The art department takes it from there, creating the textures and lighting the dungeon to give it that World of Warcraft feel. Next, there is what we call the 'doodad' pass, where all the little items that are window dressing and decoration are placed in - like weapon racks or book cases.

After the dungeon is laid out and built out in 3D, we need to add the monsters and loot (otherwise what'd be the point - although the dungeons do look pretty...). The designers decide the numbers and types of mobs, pathing, spawn rates, and of course boss design. Our boss encounters are something we are really proud of in World of Warcraft, and we hold a lot of meetings when deciding how these are going to play out. At this point in the design, things are actually really collaborative and happening in an iterative, group process. There aren't really linear steps, as the quest designers are asking for certain types of monsters, loot is being balanced out against the difficulty of the encounter, and so on.

Finally, it goes almost without saying that we playtest over and over and over and over - until everything feels right to us. It really is a fun and interesting process.

How do you decide the level range of a dungeon?

arly in the project, we had a giant whiteboard with all the zones written on it and the level ranges of each zone. One of our goals in instance design was to make sure that players of all levels had choices on dungeons to explore. There was not just a single one in your level range at any given time. The Scarlet Monastery, as one of the early dungeons created, began life (or is it unlife?) as a Scourge newbie instance. But the content was shaping up to be so cool that we decided to raise the level cap. It felt as though content that rich needed to be deeper into the game.

Describe the early drafts of the Scarlet Monastery and how it evolved from there.

s I said before, we now do a rough layout of any new dungeon before going to 3D and fleshing it out. SM is one of the reasons why. When it was originally designed it was a long, sprawling, linear instance. We needed it to cover a wide level range, so in this early version, we had content built for level 30s players. Then toward the end it was designed more for level 40 and upper 30s. The problem here is that higher level players had to go through content that wasn't challenging, and lower level players could only dip their toes in the water but not plunge in head first without getting frustrated by how tough it was. Once we realized this was a problem, though, it had already been rendered out in 3D, so it was more of a pain to change than it would've been at the rough layout stage. So we redid the layout and decided to break up SM into four instances each in a different wing of the monastery. This gives the players more choices in how to tackle it. You can do all four in one marathon session or you can attack each one at a time when you have shorter periods to play. Also, by breaking it up it allowed us to differentiate each part more, and to make the challenges and feel different for each.

How is designing an instanced area different from tackling non-instanced zones?

he biggest difference is that we know within a small range how many players will be in what part of the dungeon at any given moment. An example of this is a locked door. It is difficult to have locked doors in the primary game world, because if one person opens it then it is open for everyone - even though only one person had the actual challenge to overcome. In instances, we can lock doors, have doors close behind the player, things like that. Also, it is much easier to set up scripted encounters and ambushes in an instance for the same reasons.

When you first started playtesting Scarlet Monastery were there any surprising strategies from the players? Cheese loopholes you had to close?

eah, players exploited the hell out of it! During Beta, this was the highest level dungeon in the game, so it was essentially the end-game content - which it was never designed to be. We learned a lot from the process though, lessons that carried over into the final game to help polish it. We saw game mechanics getting bent. For example, aggroing monsters and then using geography to kill them - standing in places where the player couldn't be reached but the player could get at the monster. We fixed that by not allowing players to hit mobs that couldn't strike back. Also, we saw players running SM again and again and acquiring too much loot, so we added in the binding system to keep the number of powerful items in the world lower than it was. Another example is that spawn timing was too long, lower level players were beating the dungeon through sheer tenacity just by coming back again and again until they managed to get through it. This was allowing players of lower level than should be able to make it through succeeding and getting the loot it generated. There are a lot of other things we learned from watching players tackle the Beta (too many to list them all here) - resourceful players always find the path of least resistance and are often surprising with their inventive solutions.

What's the most fun part of the creation cycle for you as a designer?

his may sound a little cheesy but I love all of it. Building a dungeon is an interesting process with so many different types of thinking coming together. From getting the original ideas from Chris on the story to brainstorming monsters to watching players defeat the challenges we've designed in new and fun ways, every part of this is fun to me.

Any interesting sidenotes about the dungeon that the average player running through it pell-mell and focused on loot might miss?

few interesting sidenotes. Anyone that played WOW at E3 a few years ago might remember that the monastery was in Duskwood during the show. Tirisfal Glades wasn't quite ready to show... Also, the interior of the monastery is actually larger than the outside - a cool little thing we can do with instances. While playing through you have the chance to encounter High Inquisitor Fairbanks behind bars - the Scarlet Monastery former leader that fell beneath the course of the Scourge. Ironic, isn't it?