PC gamers have some great deals to take advantage of this week, from a high-end processor to a spacious tempered glass case. Those looking for fast storage or a new laptop are also in for a treat. Arguably, the best deal is a high resolution, fast refresh rate monitor for the lowest price we've seen thus far.
If you come across any notable sales, feel free to share them in the comments!
The CPU market had been relatively uncompetitive for a while, but PC owners now have more options with AMD's Ryzen processors. The 1700X is an eight-core, 16-thread CPU clocked at 3.4GHz that can boost to 3.8GHz. It performs incredibly well in tasks like video production and image rendering while being competent for gaming. And for $50 off its normal price, you can snag the 1700X--one of the more cost-effective high-end CPUs.
It may not be the most affordable case, but the In Win 805 is on sale for $60 off its retail price. Those who aren't into flashy cases will appreciate yhe sleek, minimalist design with a tinted tempered glass side panel. There's plenty of space on the inside, but this case is on the heavier side.
To go along with the Steam Summer sale, Valve is offering the Steam Link device for just $15. It allows users to stream games from a PC to any other display as long as the PC and Steam Link are connected to the same network. This device only has an HDMI port, which shouldn't be an issue for modern TVs, but a strong wired connection is recommended to get the best performance.
One of Dell's best monitors is going for just $340, which is a steal considering that its retail price is $500. It has all the makings of a gaming monitor: 1440p resolution, 165Hz refresh rate, and Nvidia's G-Sync technology. Just make sure you have a PC powerful enough to take advantage of these specs.
Gaming laptops are often cost-prohibitive and come with compromises. But occasionally you can get a great deal on one, like this laptop from ASUS. It comes with an Intel Core i5-6300HQ CPU, a 3GB GTX 1060 video card, 16GB of RAM, a 1TB hard drive, and a 15.6-inch 1080p display. The normal list price is $1250, so you'll be saving quite a bit if you're in the market for a gaming laptop.
Solid-state drives are highly recommended for modern day PCs, but they're still quite expensive. However, you'll be equipped with one of best SATA drives in the Samsung 850 EVO for $144. It offers 500GB of space with read and write speeds of 540MB/s and 520MB/s, respectively. Take note that this sale from Fry's requires you to sign up for a mailing list to receive the necessary promo code to get the drive at this price.
It's difficult to ignore the massive critical and commercial success of Marvel Studios' superhero films. With each consecutive release, the studio has managed to consistently craft unique and entertaining stories with the company's extensive roster of characters and properties. Regardless of how you feel about the system Marvel Studios has built to produce its films, the company doesn't show any signs of slowing down.
While Marvel's films continue to do well, its games division has only just recently started to grow with its myriad mobile titles and collaborations with big-name studios in the industry. The company's push to get more involved with gaming is a fascinating shift; historically, the medium remained mostly reserved for movie tie-ins or the occasional gaming crossover. For a time, there existed few high-quality Marvel game experiences for people to latch onto--at least, in the way that people did with Warner Bros.' Arkham series. But with upcoming Marvel games, like Insomniac's Spider-Man and Square Enix's Avengers, Marvel's once inconsistent game offerings seem like they could be a thing of the past.
At E3, we got the chance to chat with Marvel Games vice president and executive producer Mike Jones, discussing what prompted Marvel to enter games in the first place, his philosophy towards creating and managing the production of superhero games, and how the success of Rocksteady's Batman: Arkham series affected Marvel's approach.
Marvel properties mostly appeared as tie-ins to other larger media projects. At what point did you start thinking about entering games at a more serious capacity?
It was really when my boss Jay Ong joined [Marvel Entertainment]. He comes from Microsoft and Blizzard and has a very long career in the business side of gaming. With the tremendous success of Marvel's films and shows, and our long history with telling great stories and creating characters in publishing, Marvel wisely looked at the business and asked, "Hey, why are our games not as great as our films and TV shows?" Games shouldn't be a derivative business; it should be a pillar of the brand, so the company found Jay and then he found some game professionals, like our creative director and longtime Marvel Publishing editor, Bill Rosemann, and me.
At Marvel, we began to understand that so many of our fans interact with our characters, our brand, and our stories through gaming, so it became important for us to put truly unique and high-quality products out there. And we found the best way to do that is to partner with the best, as we're only as good as our game partners. While we've had incredible success with our live-service titles--Contest of Champions, Future Fight, Puzzle Quest, and Marvel Heroes--we've been hard at work on creating big console titles. And it's only now that we've started to show the world what we're working on. Our strong presence at this year's E3 has been a historic moment for us as a brand in the gaming space working with such incredible partners, but it's really just the beginning in our minds. We want to continue to surprise and excite our fans.
It shows. When I was watching the Spider-Man footage and saw the way Insomniac animated Spider-Man's movements and attacks, I could tell you guys have been working hard to do your research. This isn't a typical tie-in action game with a superhero inserted in; it was a clear that Insomniac studied Spider-Man's fighting philosophy and the way he moves.
Around the office we call those sort of tie-in games a "brand slap," and that's a dirty word to us. Oh, yeah, you built a game, you built a mechanic, and you slap the character in there. But you don't really dig deep into what the DNA of the character is, what the DNA of the experience is, what makes a unique and great story for that character, nor do you lean into that for what the overall gameplay experience is.
With the Spider-Man game, we talk a lot about how he is not a brawler; he's an acrobatic improviser. He has mobility, super-strength, tech, and webs; there's like a whole complex ecosystem of mechanics and things to draw upon. The combat and storytelling that happens in the game's action, and the scale of it was really important to us. It was one of the reasons that we chose that mission [for the Sony press conference]. It steadily builds in scale, but it also shows some stealth, combat, open-world web-slinging, parkour, and a bit of spectacle. It was a sampler of everything to give people a clear idea of what this experience is going to be. We're luckily about 10 minutes down the road from Insomniac, so we go there two, three times a week to look at gameplay, cinematics, and story. We're invested and collaborating very closely on that game.
Has the success of Warner Bros.' Arkham series influenced your approach to games? Has the quality of those games played a part in encouraging you into entering gaming?
I'm personally a huge fan of the Arkham series; I've Platinumed every single one of those games, with the exception of Origins--because I think that one had an online component that I didn't get all the Trophies for--but I'm a huge fan of what DC and Rocksteady have done with Batman, creating a very unique take on the franchise that stands apart from the films and comics. When I look at Arkham's mechanics and story and think about where it sits in the pantheon of DC and gaming, it's massively successful and innovative not just as an action game, but as an experience. Even if you took Batman out of it, those games would still be compelling to play. Rocksteady and DC didn't rehash stories that you had seen or heard; of course, they took inspiration from the animated series and the films, but at the end of the day, it felt authentic. The recipe that those games created resonated with everyone, myself included.
The Arkham games...inspired us to lean into our characters and trust that nailing the uniqueness of each character experience is really what's going to make the gameplay compelling.
But what Arkham tells all of us is that you can do a unique take on characters in a game and tell a story that people care about. You can do a take on a character that people remember and connect with that isn't derivative of anything else. That really challenges and inspires us to really lean into what makes a character unique and then bring that into the experience. We look at Spider-Man, we dissect it, and we ask: "What's essential to a great Spider-Man story and the superhero power fantasy of controlling him? And what's essential to telling Peter Parker's side of it?"
The same thing goes with Avengers: "What makes an Avengers story unique and different from a Spider-Man story or even a Defenders story? In a sense, we've learned from all kinds of great storytelling in gaming. And the Arkham games--while we're not necessarily trying to copy any particular thing that Rocksteady has done with them--inspired us to lean into our characters and trust that nailing the uniqueness of each character experience is really what's going to make the gameplay compelling. It's not a checkbox of mechanics. That's what's paramount to us. We love the Arkham games and the healthy competition they inspire in us, but we also want to evolve and do better.
With all these games--and especially that Miles Morales name-drop--do you have any intentions of making them be a part of a shared Marvel universe?
Marvel Studios is very centrally controlled; they bring in directors and writers for each individual project and they have a master plan of everything they're doing and how their films connect. The structure of their business works a little differently from us. Because we're working with individual developers, publishers, and licensees, we don't want anybody to be handcuffed or bound by limitations preventing them from using a character because somebody else is. Early on, we saw value in [a shared universe], but we want to do what's best for each individual game, first and foremost.
Miles Morales appears at the end of the Spider-Man E3 2017 demo.
That said, we do feel like, years from now, we want to keep the door open for some exciting things that people have never seen before in games. We certainly don't want to paint ourselves into a corner, nor do we want to contradict ourselves. But right now we're focused on making the best possible games that we can, and then when there's opportunity to do new crazy daring things, we're going to jump at it. We want to break the mold and try to do some crazy stuff. We're not bound to anything just yet.
Like Marvel Studios, does Marvel Entertainment also have a large roadmap of what games you want to create and when they'll release?
We absolutely have a roadmap. We have some incredible mobile, console, and VR games planned that I can't announce or talk about today. We are curating our portfolio and trying to find the best match for character, partner, genre, platform and trying to not just see who wants a license to make a game. We're actually very active in planning what are the right experiences for the right franchises for the right platforms, as well as finding the right partners who can provide the best of that.
A lot of times partners come to us and tell us they're really passionate about a character and have an amazing idea for a project. While other times, we have partners and developers that we really respect and want to work with. It's definitely music and lyrics, and we're always trying to find those perfect marriages.
Marvel Studios decides who directs a film based on a character's genre and type of story they're in, so we're similarly thinking the same way of who would be perfect for a Spider-Man or an Avengers game experience. We want to make sure that we pair the right characters and the right franchises with the best possible developers. There is a clinical portfolio management excel spreadsheet component to this process, but more importantly, it's about passion. Teams are going to work on a game for three or four years, so the quality and the authenticity of the experience lives or dies by the passion and the vision of the teams that we're working with. We're constantly looking for development teams and publishers who love Marvel and are excited to tell a story or bring a particular experience to life. We're here to support that drive. We think of ourselves as kind of facilitators in that sense. We want each of our partners to be the vision holder for their games.
Have you ever thought to license out Marvel properties to smaller "indie" studios too?
The artwork of Skottie Young
Oh, absolutely. We're looking at mobile and we're looking at VR. Of course, Insomniac is an independent studio, but in terms of the smaller scope you suggest, absolutely. I think from a strategy and portfolio standpoint, we're making sure to get our big behemoths set up first. We have our live-service games, mobile games, and big console games. But once all of those tent poles are established, I think our next step would be to create smaller, interesting indie-made games. I'm not announcing a new game, but as an example, Skottie Young's artwork would be a perfect match for a fun indie game. There are all of these little things that we think about that we're eager to look into.
Of course, we have a smaller team with limited time and resources, so we're more focused on the big and important stuff first. But absolutely, the independent space is where so much creativity in publishing has come from. So many writers have taken their shots at Frank Miller's Daredevil and reinventing that. Reinterpreting characters over the years is what has made so many Marvel characters and stories great. We absolutely want to carry that philosophy into gaming, which is a space that has had such rapid experimentation and strong artistic vision.
How do you decide what Marvel properties are made into games? Is it mostly related to what films are being made by Marvel currently, or do you get to have your own freedom choosing properties?
Yes and no. Obviously, many of our characters have been popular over decades of publishing with over 8,000 characters, some of which have been extremely successful, some of which have been forgotten in time. There are characters like Spider-Man, Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Defenders, which are all properties that have a natural awareness and fan affinity. And we absolutely want to make sure that we deliver on those, but I think we're also interested in plucking some characters from obscurity that you may not have not heard of and making a game around them. I never would have thought my mom could be an Ant-Man fan; she even didn't know what an Ant-Man was until she saw the movie and then, boom, she loves it.
We don't see any reason why we can't do that in gaming, through an emotionally connected interactive experience. Bill loves to say, "People love all of our characters--they just haven't met them yet." And so we want to deliver the super-exciting characters, the obvious ones that everybody wants, but we're very much looking at how else can we do bold and exciting things and introduce people to new characters they may not have yet met.
A dream Marvel game for me would be an MGS-style stealth-action game starring Captain America and Winter Soldier with an espionage thriller story akin to Ed Brubaker's Captain America run. Please tell me that has crossed your mind.
Ed Brubaker's run on Captain America framed the hero's story as a political thriller with a touch of espionage intrigue. It served as the primary inspiration for Marvel's film, Captain America: Winter Soldier (2014)
Oh, gosh. Ed Brubaker's Captain America would be great. You can do so much with that: you could use Winter Solider, Black Widow, or any of those SHIELD characters. Captain America, Red Skull, and Nick Fury definitely have a Metal Gear Solid sort of flavor to them, so I personally would love a game like that. That's definitely something that has crossed my mind. Absolutely.
Professor Layton's adventure has broken into the real world.
If you're not aware, the promotion for the latest Layton game, Layton's Mystery Journey: Katreille and the Millionaire's Conspiracy is a puzzle-solving journey that's broken beyond the bounds of its 3DS roots and is now something you can experience in a web browser. But that new experience at Layton.World is just part of the plan for Level-5 president & CEO Akihiro Hino. In a recent interview with the man behind the successful series of puzzling adventures that currently stretches across six mainline games (with a seventh on the way), we talked about how his team creates its original conundrums and the recent expansion into new ways to experience the series.
Layton's Mystery Journey is set to launch on 3DS sometime later this year, but surprisingly the mobile version is coming out worldwide on July 20. This latest game also switches up the protagonists trading in the familiar professor for someone claiming to be his daughter. But we'll go into that in the interview below.
GameSpot: What drove the decision to bring Layton to smartphones?
Akihiro Hino: Of course, Layton has always been a continuous series on the 3DS. But for me as a user, I'm always in a taxi, on the go, and I like to play on my smartphone. Solving mysteries on the smartphone is really fun for me; that's what I wanted to do. I know that there's going to be a lot of people out there that want to do this kind of mystery solving, so that's why we decided to go for smartphones.
Is it going to be on iOS and Android?
Yeah, for both.
My favorite thing about the Layton series is how it marries these quirky, fun stories with engaging puzzle elements. How do you go about deciding the best puzzle to create for each part of the story? It never feels random; it doesn't feel like I'm just talking to somebody and then suddenly there's a random puzzle that doesn't fit.
So what we do first is make the story. And then once we've made the overall story, we create puzzles that fit into that story. And then once we've created the puzzles and added them in, if they don't match, we go back and re-create those puzzles to make sure everything fits correctly.
We have about ten-plus people who go into a kind-of bunker, into a little room over something like a weekend. They come up with all the puzzles because the puzzles are the key to the game, and we want to make sure that we have the right ones. We really make sure that we focus on making great puzzles for the game.
Outside of the puzzles, I think one of the things that Layton does best is to create an almost movie-like world. I remember playing the first Layton and feeling surprised that it wasn't something directly from a film.
When we were creating the very first Layton, there wasn't a DS game where there was an actual anime story inside a game, so I wanted to make the first one. I wanted to be an innovator. And when you make something new, it's got to have a lot of impact. That's why we decided to make sure that we made a movie-quality anime within the game.
Did you have a hand in creating the actual Layton movies as well? Or do you ever think about taking the games that you've already made and creating a movie out of them?
Yeah, I did help with the creation of the movie. And I get a lot of questions asking when we're going to make a movie or a TV animated series. I'm definitely looking into all that and trying to figure out a new way to bring the Layton world to the public.
Or even giving people access to those older games. Consoles keep changing, like Layton going over to mobile. Nintendo has had a big push with Switch. Do you think about giving access in some way to the previous Layton games to a wider audience through smartphone or Switch?
With Layton's Mystery Journey on smartphone, we're getting that know-how, the knowledge of how to move it onto the smartphone platform. And we are actually looking into trying to bring past projects onto maybe a smartphone, maybe even a new console, like Switch. But nothing is really decided yet. We're looking into that right now.
Going back to the story, I feel like there's always a mix between the fantastical aspects of Layton's life and a more scientific, Sherlock Holmes-like grounding in reality. Where do you draw the line between the realistic and the kind of surreal worlds of Layton?
I wouldn't say I try to bring the real world into the Layton series too much, but it is set in London. So I look up things like when the telephone was invented and things like that, just to get an age range. But I want to create this fantasy London where all of the good things of London are within it. It's not the real London, but I want a miraculous London.
For Layton's Mystery Journey, what drove the decision to switch the protagonist from Layton to Katrielle?
In the Layton stories, he solves mysteries to tackle a bigger mystery. That was the core of the story, and that's the Layton series' defining characteristic. But I felt like for this seventh one, by switching to his daughter, we're able to create a more everyday kind of mystery that people might actually run across. And then it's a young, vibrant atmosphere, which we thought would bring in a more interesting, new story for all the fans out there. And this is a little bit of a secret, but Layton will probably appear a little bit in these series too. [laughs]
Is Katrielle really his daughter? There has been a romance angle in the previous games, but did Layton end up getting married?
So the whole question of whether or not she's really his daughter, that's also part of the mystery of the Layton series. Just keep playing and you'll find out a little bit more about the history behind that.
Thinking about Layton's previous adventures, some of the crossovers have been very interesting. How did a character like Phoenix Wright end up in a Layton game?
Phoenix Wright has a close relationship with Capcom. So in order to bring about that idea of "impact" that I mentioned earlier, we thought it would be a good crossover. And it was also a way to bring an interesting plot to both fans communities. For that collaboration, Capcom was primarily in the driver's seat, so a little bit more of the creative leaderships goes towards the Capcom side, but it was something I enjoyed creating too.
Do you have a dream collaboration or a dream team that you'd like to work with on another crossover-type game?
Sherlock Holmes. I'm a big fan of Sherlock Holmes.
Have you seen the BBC Sherlock series with Benedict Cumberbatch?
Yeah. I like it because the characters are very edgy. I like their characteristics.
There hasn't been a live-action version of Professor Layton yet, right?
Not yet.
Do you think Benedict Cumberbatch would make a good Professor Layton?
[Laughs] I'm always thinking about those entertainment opportunities. I think he'd be a great fit, he'd be a lot of fun. And who doesn't like Benedict Cumberbatch?
With this new series with Katrielle. It's broken up into 12 stories and each of the chapter titles is from a movie. And it's based off of those kind of Sherlock movie themes. It's going to be really interesting because it's got that entertainment vibe in there too. So I'm sure the fans will pick up on it.
Katrielle's going to go out and solve mysteries within the town. It's like everyday-life mysteries that people might encounter. So closer to what Sherlock Holmes was doing. You walk up and people will say, "Oh, there's a dead body."
To me, Sherlock Holmes' focus is more on, not the murderers, but everyday life. Times when people might get lost and you have to find them. Or maybe they've lost something. He's focusing on those kind of everyday mysteries, and not as much on the dead body part.
One of the mysteries that you discover in the game is a wealthy man that's missing his cat. So Katrielle needs to go and find this cat--they look all over the place, but they can't find the cat. The cat might be in a very peculiar place, and that's part of the mystery. Or, at least, one of the chapters of the mystery.
The ending, the climax of that story is very interesting, so please play and hopefully you enjoy it.
This isn't about the game, but when I think of Layton, I think escape games. And there's been big a boom in escape games here in California. Does that kind of idea intrigue you as well? Expanding the idea of Layton, not just the video games, but to the physical world and like these escape games.
Actually, we're working with the puzzle company SCRAP to bring Layton into the real world by making kind of a large-scale escape room. It going to run for three months across the web on layton.world.
It's a large-scale mystery, and people worldwide will need to help each other out. You can use Google Translate and things like that. For example, for some puzzles, someone in London, Tokyo, and LA will need to work together or they won't be able to solve the mystery. That's what we're trying to do right now.
And if you solve the mystery, there is incentive within the game of Layton. So maybe you'll get extra content. I'd suggest trying it out!
The People's Republic of China has strict censorship laws regarding media in all formats for the sole purpose of protecting national security and maintaining social stability. While it has made some strides in regards to lifting gaming bans, Reuters reports these laws are now targeting a different form of communication: livestreaming.
China has reportedly contacted three major social media and news websites to take down all video and audio streaming services due to politically charged social commentary. China's Twitter-esque social media website Sina Weibo, video-sharing and game streaming platform ACFUN, and news website Ifeng.com are being affected by the ban.
The move is due to the presence of politically charged material that violates China's censorship laws within these websites' livestreaming content. User commentary is also inciting "negative opinions."
Because of its censorship laws, China's government regularly combs through its social media websites for potentially harmful comments and content. This includes, but isn't limited to, politically charged comments, anything that slanders and insults others, promotion of cults or superstitions, mockery of China's culture and traditions, and the showing of drug use and violence. While pictures and written comments that include these things can be deleted, it's harder to regulate livestreams, videos, and audio content.
Foreign social media websites like Facebook and YouTube are banned in China entirely. Videogame streaming platform Twitch is banned; even Google is banned. Although China in 2015 lifted its videogame console manufacturing and ownership ban made in 2000, while its laws regarding content censorship remained in place. To this day, the content of video games is subject to the government's censorship for the same reasons as its internet and media censorship: national security and stability.
Sina Weibo has acknowledged the notice issued by the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SAPPRFT) of the People's Republic of China and is in the process of evaluating who the ban will affect from the staff to its major influencers. But what's most interesting is that the SAPPRFT notice states that Sina Weibo does not have the proper licenses for internet livestreaming services, in addition to its content violations.
Sina Weibo, like other livestreaming social platforms like Momo and YY, is part of a booming livestreaming market in China, which grew 180% in 2016 alone, according to Technode. The same story includes a report from the China Internet Network Information Center, stating that there were over 344 million livestreaming users in China in 2016, which constitutes about 47 percent of all of the internet users in the country. Video game streaming was the largest part of this market to grow, led by gameplay streaming platform Douyu and gaming and social media giant Tencent.
Without question, this ban will have effects on that livestreaming market, and the bans on Sina Weibo, ACFUN, and Ifeng.com could just be the beginning.
It is currently unclear when these livestreaming services will be taken down from the websites under the ban.
The content updates continue to roll out for World of Warcraft, with last week's patch 7.2.5 unleashing flying, a new raid, and bunch of other changes into Azeroth. Just prior to the content launch, we talked with Paul Kubit, senior game designer for World of Warcraft, about how Blizzard approaches these ".5" patches, the state of micro-holidays, and keeping players engaged regardless of whether they've been playing since launch or they're just starting now.
While Paul does a deep dive into the WoW's design, the game's class designers recently held an AMA on Reddit that you can check out here.
GameSpot: The timing for this update, hitting during E3. Was that intentional? Is it just that this is the time in the development calendar to put out the update? Or do you feel like these are different audiences--that E3 has a more console-centric feel versus what hardcore World of Warcraft players are looking for?
Paul Kubit: I don't think we thought about it that hard. With Legion, we had a pretty holistic plan of making sure that we had a lot of patches come out; lots of times for that content train to leave the station. Whether that particular patch was delivering a new outdoor zone for questing or a new raid or just the additional side content or class updates like we're seeing a lot of in Patch 7.2.5. We knew that those patches should come out pretty regularly, so 7.2.5 just kind of ended up landing around that E3 date, but it's probably more coincidence than anything else.
And it has become such a regular rollout of content. It must feel like you're almost on a well-oiled machine at this point.
Yeah, it feels a little oiled. I mean, there's still a lot of work that goes into each one of these little patches, big or small, but yes, we're really happy that we have been able to, up to this point, provide plenty of patches. 7.2 was not that long ago; we just landed on Broken Shore, and have been pushing towards The Tomb of Sargeras. Now with 7.2.5, we're going to have that raid actually opening and also some additional little bits of content landing in as well, whether that's a Chromie scenario, some new micro-holidays, new brawls, and so on.
How carefully does the team have that roadmap laid out? Obviously, for 7.2.5, you know what's coming up, but for the ones further out, are you guys partly playing that by ear and seeing how things work out?
It really kind of depends. We don't just work on one patch at a time. We always have lots of different wheels spinning, and how much of a head start you get on that wheel depends on how big the wheel is. For something like 7.2, that was being worked on either as original Legion was launching, or maybe even a little bit before it. For something like 7.2.5, the team that works on that is a little bit more agile. We're able to respond more to what the game needs, so if that's a particular change to something like a class mechanic, we can make those changes. If it's something like just deciding when it feels right for the Tomb of Sargeras to unlock, we make those changes, as well as just adding content.
I mentioned the Chromie scenario earlier. One of the things about the Chromie scenario is, as we were building it, we were making a decision how often you can actually run the scenario, and after hearing a lot of feedback that some of the content in 7.2 felt, maybe it was a little bit gated, that definitely weighed into some of the decisions of how Chromie ended up playing, which there's not really any time-gating at all.
What separates the raids specifically from the patches done, in terms of your development process? Compared to the past, the raids are not as closely timed to the patches as they were before. They come a little after. How has that impacted the development of the patches themselves?
It's been freeing. We've started thinking about the game and the way we release parts of the game a little bit differently. In the past, it was more discreet patches--a patch is just "this much" content, and you get it on this date, and everything that's in there is available. As we start building content a little bit earlier, if we have the Tomb of Sargeras in the game before it's actually ready, it's really time for us to be in the Tomb of Sargeras. Then we can release that raid or any type of content that's time-gated at the time that feels right. We wouldn't want to release it too early.
If we'd released it in 7.2, I would argue that it would probably feel like we didn't have enough time to explore Nighthold. I know there's lots of guilds who are still working their way through some of the last bosses, and if we'd waited much longer, then it would probably feel like we were in Nighthold too long. Sometimes a raid tier can drag on and lose your interest, so decoupling those two things has been freeing. It gives us a little bit more freedom to listen to feedback, feel out the way that the community's responding to what they're playing now, and then release content when it feels right.
Given how big 7.2 was, do you feel extra pressure in order to deliver more with the subsequent patch? Or do you feel like that gives you the freedom to just focus on class changes and the sort of things that you do expect from the .5 patches to begin with?
I don't know if it's "pressure" that we feel. I mean, as WoW's development rolls on, our team has gotten a little bit bigger, and our efficiency's probably increased as well, so you will see patches have tended to get bigger as time's passed. But that doesn't mean that every patch has to be bigger than the last. 7.2.5 for sure is not as big as 7.2, but it was never intended to be. This is more of an opportunity to explore other parts of Azeroth that aren't as closely tied to the Legion storyline. 7.2 covered the assault on the Broken Shore and the Legionfall campaign, and that's very much in the story of Legion, working alongside Illidan and fighting against the Legion.
The story stuff that's happening in 7.2.5 is a little bit more evergreen. You're working with Chromie, and she's not even in Dalaran. She's in Wyrmrest, in Northrend, so this content, as well as things that we've seen in other smaller patches like the Brawlers Guild, they're not really tied to Legion. That also means that they're going to be around for longer, or at least relevant for longer. You will probably not be playing through the Legionfall campaign one or two expansions down the line, but you'll still be able to do the Chromie scenario or play through any of the micro-holidays or anything like that.
What has the feedback to micro-holidays been? I think it's been about six months now since they were introduced. Are there plans to expand those further? Is there a certain point where you feel like you would have too many?
We're still kind of feeling out the space that. Some of the answers to those questions--how often they should be and how many we should have--the response has been good. It varied from one micro-holiday to another. Some had more players playing in them than others. A lot of that had to do with just how long the micro-holiday is or, in some cases, just how far away and hard it is to get to. You know, we saw a lot more people participate in the salute-a-guard day just because it happened to be right there in Orgrimmar or Stormwind or any of your capital cities, you could flash "salute a guard" and then be participating in the holiday, whereas something like Hatching of the Hippogryphs, not as many people played because you actually had to fly all the way down to Feralas to get it.
But that's okay for micro-holidays, as well. We intentionally built micro-holidays to feel like something that you opt into. You don't feel like you need to absolutely do this unless you want to because, for something like Hatching of the Hippogryphs, all you really get as a reward is a little baby hippogryph who sits on your shoulder for the next five days or so. There's no 500 gold or 100 million artifact power or anything like that. And, for a lot of people, that means they don't want to do them because they want to get that artifact power. And that's fine, but there are a bunch of people who are very interested in having a little baby hippogryph on their shoulder and will go hunt that down.
I imagine with the holidays, that you have really good insight into both who starts the proceedings for those and who actually goes through and completes them. Have you guys been surprised by the popularity of any of them, or, in the same way, surprised that people weren't as interested in a holiday you thought was going to be a big hit?
I think we've been pleasantly surprised by the popularity that we've seen of these. One of the interesting things about it is that you do see different people being interested in different micro-holidays. It's not just the same handful of people who are running them. For example, a lot of the people who chose to participate in the Glowcap Festival, were people who were a little bit more interested in reputation hunting because that one actually did give a reward which was a permanent thing for your character--the Sporeggar rep.
That kind of ties in with the point of micro-holidays, is that they're not necessarily built to be for everyone, but some of them might be more interesting for you as a player than other people, people who are our peers, who are really into the Balloon Festival, because they had a lot of baked-in opportunities for players to RP their characters and interact with other characters.
I think you've said that the new Trial of Style thing was originally envisioned as a micro-holiday, but it seems to have graduated beyond that to being something bigger. What caused that change? Is there just a certain point where you feel like this is too substantial to simply be a micro-holiday?
Yeah. It was more of a feeling, that micro-holidays are, to be honest, a term we came up with very recently, so the actual definition of what one is is still up for debate. But up to this point, they've only been one to three days long, and the Trial of Style felt like a big enough event that you wouldn't want to miss it, and it's a little bit more miss-able, even at three days, so we extended it out to five days and, in doing so, said, "Well, let's not call this a micro-holiday. We'll just call it an event." And that also frees us up to be able to release it at a different cadence if we choose to later, depending on how it feels once players start playing it.
Going more broad, it seems like new technology has been sort of an emphasis during the life of this expansion. Is that something that you sort of see as a continued focus moving forward?
I definitely think that. This isn't just a Legion thing. Maybe we've done more of it in Legion, but since the original WoW, we've always been adding tech into the game. We didn't have the capability to make a daily quest until BC came out, and then we decided we wanted tech for that. Our water didn't look very good for a long time, and then all of a sudden, it started looking pretty good. There's always tech being put in.
Legion is no exception. Even simple things like in the Chromie scenario, we needed bits of tech just to make the Order Hall talent tree work on Chromie, since she was not representing a class but just a character. Just getting the 1's and 0's to work behind the scenes to make that work was little bits of tech which all add up here and there, that makes it easier for people like me and other designers on the game to really make the experiences that we want to make.
Thinking about somebody like Chromie, when people come into the game, and especially maybe another year or two down the road, they're not necessarily going to experience this patch in the same way that we experience it now. Are you guys giving thought to how you want to make that, accessible to players, no matter when they come in or when they Yes. For sure. We're always thinking about stuff like that, and that's really a big guiding principle in a lot of the content which goes into these .5 patches. We want to make content we call evergreen: things that you can play at any point in the expansion or future expansions. Chromie is an example where, the way it actually works is it uses time-walking, another little bit of tech we had to get, which is the ability to time-walk your level higher and item-level higher up to Level 112, item-level 1000. But that doesn't mean that you can only run this at Level 110. If at some point in the future your character is higher than 112 and your item level is higher than 1000, it'll still work. You'll still be able to talk to Chromie on top of Wyrmrest and say, "I want to help save you because I heard that you're going to get killed," and it'll still work.
Things like that, they help, instead of extending the length of the game, blow out the breadth of the game a little bit, giving you more things to do. It's a different way of storytelling. It feels a little bit more incidental, a little bit more exploratory, as well as things like that, go to make the world of Azeroth bigger. When there's more stuff to do, then the world actually feels bigger and more impressive.
One thing people have been talking about recently, not necessarily related directly to this patch, are the recent class mounts. Some people, of course, are really excited about their new class mounts, and some people, particularly druids, are a little bit disappointed, since for them, it's just a form change rather than a new mount. Is that something you guys are also still addressing and talking to the community about?
It's something we're looking at and talking to the community about, for sure. Listening, absolutely. Things like this are. We want class mounts to feel great, so if people have feedback on them, they're giving it to us through the right channels--via forums, via elsewhere--we're listening. Nothing to announce in terms of changes right now. The class mounts just came out, but, "We are listening," I guess is the important message there.
And naturally, the question always becomes, as soon as one patch hits, when will we start to hear about the next one? Do you anticipate that 7.3 will follow sort of a similar schedule, in terms of how long the gap was between the most recent, 7.1 and 7.2 patches?
Like I alluded earlier, when it feels right is when those patches come out. But one thing I do know is that 7.3 is being worked on. We know what Argus looks like, and that's where we're going next. Shortly after 7.2.5 goes live, PTRs will start rolling up with 7.3 builds. As far as actual release dates, nothing to announce at this point. It's still a little early for that, but it is on the horizon.
And for this patch, I think the biggest thing that's going available day one, outside of class changes if your class got any changes, is that Chromie scenario. I would say, in addition to anything else you're running that day--your normal raids or mythic classes or world quests or whatever you're doing--I would encourage checking that out, even if it's not something that immediately catches your attention. It's an iteration of a type of gameplay that we started just playing with in Legion with the Wizard Army Training, and something we learned a lot of lessons from. We're very curious to see how people respond to it this time.
Another thing that I would point out for people to look for is micro-holidays. We've added a couple new ones, and they've been a little bit more miss-able in the past. You actually have to know they're coming. You need to see it in the launcher or look at your calendar. Not everybody opens their calendar every day. I know I don't. Those are going to be a little bit more visible--all of them will be in 7.2.5. We've added kind of advertisement characters into Dalaran who will be there a day ahead of time, so a day before the Moonkin Festival, you'll see a couple druids and Moonkin show up there in Dalaran, in a very visible spot. You can talk to them, and they'll say something like, "Oh yeah! The Moonkin Festival is here!" Or, "It's coming tomorrow." If you want to have a little Moonkin buddy who follows you around, be there. That's something I guess people could be looking out for, as well.
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