Build of the Month
Recent Blue Posts
Yet another Timewalking loot post ( As directed by GM)
Opened timewalking Cache before hotfix
Recent Forum Posts
The WoW Companion App is Retiring
New Card Reveal: Madam GoyaBlizzCon Developer Interview
Vanion had the chance to talk to Matt Goss, a Lead Game Designer on WoW.
- There is no cap on the number of legendary items you can obtain.
- You can repeat the legendary item quest line to upgrade multiple legendary items.
- Ahn'qiraj Remembrance Day lets your faction fly a flag in Silithus. It is region wide so it will be their first attempt to do a race between the two factions.
- The team tries to make sure everyone can do all of the Brawler's Guild bosses. There aren't any bosses that require a healing or tank spec, as everyone can fall back to a DPS spec.
- There won't be a new bonus roll currency for Nighthold.
- Mythic+ dungeons will have the max item level rewarded increased when Nighthold comes out, similar to what was done for Trial of Valor.
- The team is always looking for new Keystone affixes, but they are mostly happy with how they have turned out so far. Everyone has one that they hate!
- The team isn't sure if you will need to get all 20 points in the final Artifact Trait before you can progress towards the new golden trait in Patch 7.2. Anyone who plays Legion shouldn't feel any regret on how they spent Artifact Power in Patch 7.2.
- There are no plans to make it easier to switch specs and Artifact Weapons. Artifact Knowledge allows you to catch up fairly quickly.
- The team doesn't just look at damage numbers when balancing tanks. They also have to look at utility, how much damage they take, how much healing they need to be viable, and more.
- The choice in Patch 7.2 on what to build for the new base is region wide. The team will see how it works in playtesting. The world should feel cohesive.
- New World Bosses will be added in the upcoming patches.
- The team doesn't want to maintain multiple caps on how high items can randomly upgrade. When Patch 7.2 is released, everything will be able to upgrade to the new max item level.
- Patch 7.2 will add better crafted gear, but they haven't decided if it will be through more Obliterum or a new system. Professions should stay relevant.
- The team wanted to try the new Karazhan experience before they added a version you can queue for. There are still a lot of players that don't want to do Mythic dungeons or don't want to find the group to do it. These players should be able to experience Karazhan too.
BlizzCon 2016 - Blizzard Engineering Panel
Along with the WoW Engineering panel, there was also a Blizzard Engineering panel not on the stream on Day 1.
Heroes of the Storm
- Heroes is a fun game to work on because the team likes to do the impossible.
- The team was working on Cho'gall and someone came up with the idea for him to carry his horse.
- Mounting assumes that you have a horse under you that is playing a running animation and the character model plays an animation in sync with that. This was very hard to change, especially with a week left before the BlizzCon build had to be finalized.
- He ended up riding an invisible horse, playing a running animation, and had an added horse on his shoulder.
- The team eventually went back and improved the mount code.
- You can see this with Ragnaros, his trails are a custom special mount.
Legion Launch
- About a year before Legion launch, a designer came to the team and pitched Khadgar casting a spell in Dalaran that would teleport everyone to the Broken Isles at the same time.
- Teleporting the entire population of WoW at the same moment was a bit farfetched.
- The team used the new Automation team to determine what they actually could do.
- How many people could they teleport? What is the rate they could teleport people at? Could they really teleport everyone all at once?
- After a lot of testing they determined how many people could be teleported at once and went back to design with the current implementation.
- Players got a quest between 11:45 and midnight that allowed them to teleport over.
- Historically there was a lot of lag and latency during the first couple days of an expansion launch.
- An engineer suggested splitting up the world in a way that left it populated but also smooth, which was dynamic sharding.
- It measures the population of players and creates a new shard when the population approaches a target that the team set.
- This way you always feel like you are in a full world but don't have the bad experience that comes with an overpopulated world.
- This tech was first seen during the Demon Invasions during the pre-expansion event.
- During launch day everyone went to Dalaran and the sharding split up the population. All of the new Dalaran shards were spun up ahead of release so that everything was smooth.
Overwatch Play of the Game
- The first implementation of Play of the Game in Overwatch Beta just looked at how well you were performing in regards to kills.
- If you got a lot of kills in an eight second period you would win the Play of the Game.
- The team originally also considered showing each player their own Play of the Game, but it felt cooler to watch the best Play of the Game.
- The second iteration on this looked at actions players took that were not kills, such as saving another player's life or shutting down someone's ultimate.
- Now the game also keeps track of interruptions to someone who is going to do something to your team.
- For example, it will track how many people McCree has in his sight for the ultimate, so if you stop him from getting the kills the game knows and assigns a score based on the number of people you saved.
- Each of the categories are weighted and the Play of the Game can now be something that isn't just a lot of kills.
- The team is still iterating on the system and has plans for improvements, such as camera improvements and tweaking of existing categories.
Hearthstone
- Hearthstone went with Unity as their engine in the interest of speed. The server is a custom C++ program.
- Designers script a card using their custom scripting system and all of that happens on the server side.
- The server is where all of the rules exist, it just tells the client what happened.
- With Yogg, secrets didn't work, choice cards didn't work, but they got far enough to get a feel for it. It then was tasked to a gameplay programmer to fix secrets. Fixing the rest of the things resulted in moving the card implementation into the C++ code rather than the scripting language used by designers.
Hiring
- The team looks for people that have actually finished a project, everyone can have a cool idea and start on it, but actually finishing is something special.
- The other thing they look for is passion and how you demonstrate that passion. People that don't just do work for school, but instead work on something outside of that.
- You can also target your projects towards the company or team you want to work for. This helps to show your passion and ability to complete things, as well as bringing your work to the attention of people actually working on the product.
- One of the Hearthstone gameplay engineers applied to Blizzard with lots of Unity projects under his belt. He also played a lot of TCG games.
WoW Realms
- Originally the realm itself would be responsible for running the instance servers.
- Some realms are very populated and some are less populated, so when hardware was allocated in that way the high population realms were utilizing all of the hardware while lower population realms were sitting almost idle.
- The team then took all of the instance servers and put them into a pool. This allowed the higher population realms to use more resources and the lower population realms weren't so idle. This took a lot of engineering effort.
Overwatch QA
- The Overwatch has a QA team that sits on the same floor as the developers and all of the different engineering disciplines leverage that team.
- The QA team will attend all of the meetings and design discussions so that they are aware of all of the changes coming.
- When the team is implementing features, ideally the QA team is already ready with a test plan to make sure the feature is pretty close to bug free.
- Occasionally there are some larger features that are too big for the internal QA team to test, so the team will ask if there are any QA people on other game teams that want to spend some time testing the new feature. One example of when this was done is the Halloween event.
Mobile Development
- Originally there was a mobile team at Blizzard, separate from the Hearthstone team. They were working on things like the mobile armory. The Hearthstone team borrowed people to help get Hearthstone shippable and then kept them.
- Eventually the mobile team got absorbed into Team 5.
- The Legion Companion app was developed by some engineers on the WoW team using Unity. They consulted with the Hearthstone team a lot.
- They abstracted out Battle.Net management code for Hearthstone so that it can be reused across multiple projects that are being worked on.
Open Source
- Blizzard makes use of hundreds of open source projects.
- They don't contribute as much as they probably could and that is something they are looking into.
- You can find some things on their Github.
Hearthstone State
- Hearthstone sends what happened in the game to the client, but it doesn't actually save this data anywhere, so the server can't replay what happened when you temporarily lose your network connection.
- They could also do a better job of chunking up assets.
- The team has spent time optimizing things on mobile, such as loading of XML files or the art assets. The server side doesn't do a great job of saving state.
- There is just a current state that gets sent to the client when you reconnect.
Testing
- The team pushed hard from the beginning of Overwatch to have automation be a big part of testing.
- The team wanted to be able to reliably do things like stress testing things before they go live.
- What happens when half a million players suddenly start playing? What happens when the servers are overloaded? What happens to game stability when new features are added?
- It is hard to keep track of things that break that no one really tests. Automation was seen as the solution to many of these problems.
- It has been really successful so far, allowing the team to stress test servers before they went live and test every single build.
- The team uses headless clients to automate gameplay and ensure that a build is okay.
- For WoW, the team has functional testing. People do black box testing that catches problems without automation.
- WoW does have build verification testing.
- If the client has performance problems, having a bot teleport around to measure framerate and find hot spots is helpful.
- The team also did a full scale test for Legion launch, having lots of clients connecting to test things for launch.
Blue Tweets
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
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BlizzCon Cosplay - Ragnaros
There was lots of great cosplay at BlizzCon, including this Ragnaros by Danielle Beaulieu. Ragnaros is coming to Heroes of the Storm along with Varian!
Dark Legacy Comics #559
DLC #559 has been released!
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