On our way back from GDC, we took a moment to drop in on Blizzard HQ, to find out what they were working on. We weren't quite sure who we'd run into, but were lucky enough to run into World of Warcraft lead game designer Tom Chilton, who had a few moments free. We sat down in a quiet little office for a bit of a chat about the impending 3.1 content patch for Wrath of the Lich King.

While he may be a household name for many World of Warcraft fans, it's important to understand where the designer is coming from, what he's most looking forward to in the upcoming patch, and whether or not Blizzard really do just include things to annoy people.

Back in the day, when World of Warcraft was first launched, there were three lead game designers - Tom Chilton, Rob Pardo and Jeff Kaplan - and this arrangement worked quite well, with Pardo splitting off to become Vice President of Game Design, leaving the other two to work happily until the release of the second expansion, Wrath of the Lich King. At that point, Blizzard decided to concentrate more time on their fabled "unannounced MMO project", which needed a full-time game director. A flip of the coin later, and Kaplan headed off to his new job, with Chilton stepping up into the sole Lead Game Designer role.

He explains:

Game director under the new structure is essentially the person who is ultimately responsible for the game experience, while the lead game designer is the guy that's ultimately responsible for the game design part of the overall game - it's a slight differentiation.

What it meant more than anything else was exposing me more to all the things that he'd worked on before, on the content side, a lot of raid and dungeon design. We used the last couple of months of Lich King as a transition period to do that, after which he (Kaplan) moved on to work on our new game, and now I'm driving this all alone, without Jeff.

He continues, explaining that both Kaplan and Rob Pardo are still involved in World of Warcraft.

I still have regular meetings with them, by no means take that as a sign that they have nothing to do with WoW anymore!

Chilton laughs and confesses that the biggest change he's had to get used to is having to go to all of Kaplan's business meetings - "It's a lot of meetings!" he says.

The 3.1 update for Wrath of the Lich King is the first major content patch to be released for the expansion, following a few minor bug-fixes in recent months. Among the usual tweaks and updates, this patch is notable for the introduction of the eagerly-anticipated Ulduar raid (which we've looked into previously, the long-awaited unveiling of dual-spec, the opening of the Argent Tournament and the implementation of a new hard mode.

As we've looked at Ulduar in some depth recently, I questioned Chilton about the introduction of dual-spec into the game. He told me that - while they're pleased to be able to introduce it in 3.1, it's actually a feature they'd hoped to implement with the launch of Wrath of the Lich King, back in November 2008. This is a feature that's been such a long time coming - giving people the ability to level their characters with more than one set of specifications - what makes now the right time to introduce it?

The thing that would have made Lich King the right time to do it is that we knew that people were going to re-spec for levelling, and that as players got to the end-game, they would once again go into their pattern of wanting multiple specs.

We figured that even though we very much wanted it for Lich King ship, we figured that - well, there's probably a little bit of time where they're just levelling up and dual-spec's not that important during the level up period - it's only when they get to the end-game again and they're going back and forth between radically different activities (like raiding and PvP, or that sort of thing). That's when it really gains a lot of value.

The designers working on the project were really under the gun, trying to get the feature included in the Lich King release, as they were aware that a "huge percentage" of players would get to the end-game before 3.1 was ready - but, unfortunately, when it came to the crunch, dual-spec slipped from the changelog, to reappear a few months later.

Chilton continues:

dual-spec saves a lot of gold expense and "nuisance factor". The whole process of going and untalenting and then respending all your points and then setting up your action bar, and getting new glyphs... and then "Oh, I forgot to put this in the action bar!" in the middle of a fight... a lot of that stuff will be dealt with.

As will always happen when people are given something they've wanted for a long time, Chilton told me that he was already facing questions about whether dual-spec will turn to triple-spec before too long.

I am completely prepared to be fielding those questions at BlizzCon - I can see it right now that it's absolutely inevitable...

Perhaps rehearsing his answers for August, he goes on to explain his standpoint on the issue:

At some point, I want players to feel like a spec is meaningful, and that their choices are meaningful. If they have infinite, free flexibility instantly, then those choices don't necessarily feel very meaningful. so we're just trying to balance how many different things do players really, really need, and how do we moderate things as well as we reasonably can?

I know there will be paladins out there, for example, saying "But I tank, I heal, and I DPS depending on what I'm doing - and I can only have two specs, where's my third?" ...we'll just have to see over time. Never say never!

Chilton and the rest of the design team recognise that World of Warcraft is in a permanent state of evolution, and while dual-spec wasn't possible earlier, it has now become a practical option, and triple- or multiple spec may just be another step in the process.

Another new evolution to surface in 3.1 is the Argent Tournament, a re-vamp of the arena system. Built by the WoW World Event team, Chilton explains that this is actually part of the build-up for a "more major thing" that will be revealed in patch 3.2.

The Argent Tournament is - conceptually - it's the argent crusade essentially putting out a call for champions across Azeroth to come together to hone their skills to take on Arthas, eventually.

So, really, it's this build-up - it's all about bringing players together... and the way it's implemented, at least from a gameplay perspective, is that it's a whole bunch of solo content and small-group content. The idea being that you are not only gaining faction with the Argent Crusade, you'll also be able to gain faction with the different major cities like Stormwind and Ogrimmar - without having to do the little (kind of annoying) cloth turn-ins that didn't turn out to be such a fun way to gain reputation.

This promises to be a new way of raising your reputation with groups that may have otherwise been difficult to raise - as well as providing gamers with "a bunch" of new daily quests.

Not only that, it's new daily quests that have a spin because you're able to do it through things like jousting mechanics, which is a relatively interesting little mini-game. Players have a bunch of different jousting abilities, and they get on one of their charger mounts... it turned out to be a pretty fun little way to get players to fight, in the way that they don't normally fight.

If you're more in the market to take on NPCs, this is also available to you - with Chilton describing how it will be a "really good addition" for gamers who enjoy solo content and daily quests - providing a "new and interesting" source of activity.

On the other hand, if you want to try out a bit of jousting outside of the Tournament, we're told that you'll have to "wait and see".

We'll see how it turns out. There may be cool extensions of it that we end up doing in the future, but at this point it'll be wait and see how it pans out, see what we end up liking about it in the long run, what we didn't end up liking about it. I'm sure there will be things that we learn from it, but it's definitely a possibility that we will extend it in some way in the future.

Another game element that started off small and has grown to be a major part of 3.1 is the addition of hard mode, which Chilton was pleased to describe as being an extension of an experimentation started in Wrath of the Lich King. Taking inspiration from the Sartharion encounter, where you can fight Sartharion directly or take on the three drakes that protect him. Chilton continues:

You could choose to kill any of those drakes before you fight Sartharion, but if you don't kill the drakes and you fight him, you get additional rewards. So - we used that as a kind of template, we'd also experimented with it a little bit in the past with the Zul'Aman raid instance before Lich King came out, in Burning Crusade. Players cleared it more quickly essentially rescued different prisoners that were being held captive in the instance, so that you would get bonus rewards, bonus items, all the way up to the special bear mount. We used those as our template for Ulduar.

One of the reasons why we're doing this so heavily now is that one of our philosophies for Lich King was that we wanted to make the content more accessible, we didn't want raiding to be a hardcore-only activity, and a lot of that was in the tuning. Not only is it harder to get 10-25 people together than it is for a 5-person dungeon, but the encounters and all the tuning and level complexity for raids went up a lot, over the Burning Crusade and also the original World of Warcraft. We wanted to make sure that the tuning didn't make it impossible for pickup groups to be able to go through raiding, because we figured that's how a lot of our more casual players would approach it, but at the same time, we wanted to have the hard-to-master element without having to suddenly just say we're going to triple the amount of content!

Tom goes on to explain that there's also an amount of psychology that goes into a decision like this - Blizzard want most of the player base to be able to see all the added content, but still leaving an avenue for the more elite guilds to show off that they're the best.

Chilton also addressed the concerns of many WoW fans, who are wondering if perhaps the designers have gone too far in the other direction - making things too accessible.

A lot of that is reaction to how Naxxramas was tuned, and we didn't have much in the way of hard modes for that first tier of content. Sartharion was really the only hard-moded boss - and when you only have one boss in the whole tier of content that has a hard mode, it's not really enough for those elite guilds to differentiate themselves from the rest of the crowd. It's just a one off at that point. While I think that the base level of difficulty was right for Naxxramas, I do wish that there had been the additional tiers of difficulty. That's why we're trying to make sure we do that.

This is not the only time that Chilton mentions listening to the fans - with a community the size of World of Warcraft's, while many of the changes do come from internal testing, he's always keeping an ear out for what the fanbase is interested in, often posting on the game's forums under the name Kalgan.

A lot of the guys on the (design) team are very appreciative of the fact that they can go through pickup groups for Naxxramas, all that - and then we have our hardcore guys who are on the team also, it's interesting. Our team's big enough where a lot of what we hear from the player community are the same things that are being said within the team itself. It’s a pretty big sample size within the team. it helps us confirm and have a little bit more first-hand knowledge.

Chilton concludes by pointing out that they've been watching some of the top-rated guilds in the world as they try out 3.1 on the Public Test Realm, and the players have been having a hard time with some of the hard-mode bosses, "so the level of challenge is definitely up there."

It's definitely our intent with Ulduar that we satisfy both crowds, so that's why ten of our bosses in Ulduar have hard mode.

I asked the man considered Blizzard's "PvP Guru" about what he was most looking forward to - personally - in the 3.1 update. Unsurprisingly, the new arena season was high on his list, as was the new content to be introduced through the Ulduar raids.

Not only does Ulduar give new content for me as a player - new goals to achieve, new things to see... it's very different, playtesting it internally than playing it when it's live. When we playtest internally, it's very methodical and mechanical, without the sense of reward - it's like "Oh cool, I got this item", well, okay, I can get that item just by dropping down the console, if I want! It really does become different once it's live and I'm playing alongside friends, instead of a very mathematical test group.

Then beyond that, there's also the new arena season - I always take part in the arenas and battlegrounds. I'm definitely an avid PvP'er, so I'm interested to see how some of the changes we've made for Season 6 shake out. We've really made a big effort to identify some of the things that we think we messed up in Season 5, primarily how hard it was to get a lot of the rewards.

A lot of the psychology around the end of the Burning Crusade was that PvP was way too easy a way to get items, relative to raiding, but unfortunately we compensated on both ends of the spectrum, with Wrath of the Lich King. we made the raiding much more accessible at the same time as making the PvP stuff much more difficult to obtain, when really only one of those two parts was necessary - just having brought down the raiding requirement, how hard it is to get the items for raiding, probably would have been enough to solve that. We kind of over-solved the problem.

Again, Chilton asserted that the lessons learned here were a combination of internal and external responses, based both on what the team had been testing, and also what they'd been seeing in-game and on the forums.

There's some big changes coming to the arena system with 3.1, which Chilton is pretty excited about:

The change that we're making where teams will start with zero rating, and then progress upward from that should be a much better play experience for those that are new to the arena system. One thing that we found over time was that players would create teams, and they would start off with a 1500 rating... 1500 is the median skill, which means that half the people who experience the arena system are actually going to -mathematically- be below 1500, by some amount. They might be close, they might be way below 1500. Their experience always felt very negative: you started at the highest rating you were almost ever going to achieve, and it just went down from there. That's not very fun psychologically - you don't feel like you're working towards something, it's like you're working your way away from something.

I think that the general experience for players that are new to the arena system, and who come in for the first time now and start at zero rating, say they lose a bunch of games, they're not losing any rating at that point, but when they gain rating, they're going to go up a whole bunch. I think they'll have a much more positive experience.

Obviously though, for every positive experience there will be a negative one, again something that is made clear through the community response to the game. Chilton promises that "it in no way benefits us just to make people mad" - and goes on to explain that - simply - you can never please all the people all the time.

There are always imbalances in the game, and we're always striving to moderate them as much as possible. The game will never be perfectly balanced, considering how broad a game it is, considering how many different players of different skill levels and different activities there are. What we do try to do is to make the experience as good as we possibly can, for as many people as we possibly can, and the reality is that everybody's view of game balance is based on their perspective. Their perspective, again, is altered by their skill level, by what class they play, and what type of activities they do. Let's say you're a warrior that does raids - your perspective on game balance is going to be completely different than the hunter who likes 2v2s and happens to play with a druid partner.

The problems that the game has - and the solutions that we come up with for those problems - are going to be viewed completely differently by those different people. We just try to take as broad a view of it as we possibly can, and do what we think is right for the game as a whole.

So far, we're pretty happy with the job we've done over the years - doesn't seem to have driven too many people away from the game!

The most recent official number we were able to get from Blizzard was that there are "over 11.5 million" people currently playing World of Warcraft, so - as Chilton says - they're obviously doing something right.

There's still no set date for the release of the 3.1 update, but we're seeing rumours suggesting that you may want to mark April 21st in your calendar. Of course, it could be earlier, or it could be later - Chilton explained that it all comes down to the Quality Assurance team. They'll need to sign off on the project, and then it'll hit the interwebs the Tuesday following.

In closing, Chilton grinned:

There's a whole lot of stuff in 3.1, and I would highly encourage everybody to check it out - even for anybody who's stopped playing because they ran out of stuff to do at level 80, I would say try it out!

I think people will find that 3.1 is probably the most ambitious content patch we've ever done for World of Warcraft. There's definitely more content in there, Ulduar is as big and as wild as any other raid we ever put in the game, it has more depth because of the hard mode... the features list of UI features and new game features like dual-spec, it's huge - and the number of class balance changes will practically make it feel like a new game!