Warcraft Rumbleseason 7 is officially underway, although some features will not drop until July 24. Season 7 is, among other things, introducing the biggest drop of minis sinceWarcraft Rumblecame out, including Cenarius, Onu, Ancient of War, Moonkin, and Bog Beast.
It’ll be interesting to see how they impact theWarcraft Rumblemeta, but their journey from concept to screen has been an equally interesting one. Game Rant recently spoke with senior designer Brendan Farrell and art director Jeremy Collins at Blizzard Entertainment’s campus in Irvine, California. We talked about the processes of making a new family in Warcraft Rumble, the development of each mini’s talents, and much more. The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
The Art and Design of Warcraft Rumble Families
Q: Can you talk a little bit about the process behind creating families in Warcraft Rumble?
Farrell: Anytime we’re going to add a newmini or a new family to Rumble, we pull from a lot of different sources. We have a giant pool of ideas, right? We have all these developers who just are super passionate about the Warcraft universe, and we all have ideas of what we’d love to see in the game. We have a really passionate fan base, so players also have ideas. One of my favorite things about Rumble is that you put it in front of someone and immediately go, “Who could you picture here?” and we’re going to have a lot of ideas.
We then take those ideas and have to think about what makes sense for what the game needs and what the players are asking for. We look at things like the current meta, PvP, what are players struggling against, what’s underrepresented, or strategies that we haven’t given players yet.
We look at all that, and then we also look at it thematically. Jeremy can talk about the art and visuals behind it, but we have to look at what the game needs lore-wise too. Recently, the answer to all of that was Cenarions. We realized we didn’t have anything that had a nature-y feel. Strategically, the Cenarion family is all about sustain, resist, healing, map control, and utility. We didn’t have any families that focused on that. We have minis that do bits and pieces of those different things, but to have one whole family encompass that is something we didn’t have yet. We’ve also been talking about Cenarions forever. Everyone loves their own differentCenarion minis, so we just felt it was time to start building them out.
Collins:From a visual standpoint, it’s a very collaborative process for us on the Warcraft Rumble team. We basically just jam with Design during the early ideation phases of a new mini or, in this case, a new family. From the early onset, we knew were going to do Cenarions, and we knew we wanted some more tanky units with some resist. It was just a matter of making sure we were choosing the right units, and that’s a bit of a loaded answer because there is no right answer. The design predicates what the unit does. If the unit is a tank, we obviously don’t want to throw some spindly or smaller-scale character into the game. We have to throw something that looks like it has a large pool of health, just visually, in general.
Getting to play with all the creatures inside of the Cenarion family was just really fun, like the Faerie Dragon is great and Onu is really cool.
Q: Could you discuss the morale behind the scenes of building up to the reveal of Cenarions and getting them into the game?
Farrell: Oh, we were so excited. Like I said, so many people have been asking for Cenarions for so long. When I joined this project, there was already this giant pool of ideas, but Cenarion was a pretty consistent one. If you ask any one person what characters they want to see in the game, most people have a list one mini that would belong to the Cenarion family in their big list, so I think we’ve just been super excited.
Visually, it was kind of like a treat to work on. There are a lot of new characters, new colors, and things we haven’t really done in Rumble before.
Design-wise, it was a joy, and it’s also our biggest launch of minis since the game launch. We put a lot of work, effort, and thought into these five minis, the event, and the Moonglade mission, and there’s just so much love poured into these. We’ve had so much fun working on them, but it’ll be even more fun to put it out there and let the players see it.
Collins:We actually ended up developingthe Moonglade mapsjust slightly prior to the minis themselves, so it was a really good opportunity for us. We had the zone laid out already and we knew how we wanted Moonglade to feel. We were able to experiment and bring all the creatures that we created for the Cenarion family, just to ensure they kind of like fit with the game world that they were inside.
Q: How did creating the Cenarions differ from other families?
Farrell:Design-wise, they rely on different strategies and mechanics. When we’re designing, let’s sayWitch Doctor, we knew we wanted them to have a relatively high damage output, low health, and that’s a very important tuning element. With Cenarion minis, we have the opportunity to do the opposite. They have higher health, lower damage. On their own, they might not win against as many minis as a Witch Doctor or Chimera might, but together or in some kind of combination, they’re much stronger. That speaks to the whole hybrid nature of utility at some sort of cost.
For example, Moonkin has an AoE ability, but only half the time. It’s a single target, AoE. It’s like, okay, you may have an AoE, but you also have to have a single target. Another example isCenarius has an AoE heal, which is always on, but it heals less than Tirion because it’s passive. We had a lot of really fun design opportunities to think about those things and think about what those kinds of druidic trade-offs might be.
Collins:For art, we’re always just looking for character hooks wherever we can. My background is in character animation before I came to this project, so it’s very important to me. Celebration animations,when you level up a unit, are where you really get to see and understand who the character is. We try to find a hook for each of those characters, like Faerie Dragon for instance. We knew that we wanted teleportation to be part of the Faerie DragonBoss kit, but we didn’t know how we wanted to go about it. The idea came about that, well, maybe she sneezes to teleport, like she gets pollen in her nose. That’s going to be in the game now as a result of that hook for us. It just sold who the Faerie Dragon was to everybody else on the team. I think it just really helps get everybody on the same page about whom the characters are.
Farrell: Yeah, and everything we do is so collaborative. Faerie Dragon talents hadn’t been fully decided yet, so when the other team said she sneezes to teleport around the map, I was like, “Well, that’s an excellent talent too.” Now she has a talent where she teleports when she takes damage and it uses the sneeze animation, so everything just informs everything else.
Bringing The Cenarion Family Into Warcraft Rumble
Q: Can you talk a little bit about the process that comes with adapting existing Warcraft characters into Rumble and how that applies to the Cenarions?
Collins: We affectionately call that Rumble-finding the character. Obviously, we all have our own personal list ofWorld of Warcraft characters, stories, epic places, or vistas we want to see Rumble-fied inside of our game. But honestly, it comes down to just whatever choice we do make for the character, we do make art for the screen that you’re playing the game on. On a mobile device, especially our game which is vertical, you have a limited amount of space for the characters. When we’re designing new characters, like the Cenarions, we’ll have to keep the color blocking of the characters to two or three main colors. That way, when you’re looking atbattles in Warcraft Rumble, there’s joyful chaos everywhere.
It’s really important that, at a glance, you get an instant read on what a character is. We use color and shape to define that in art, and we went ham basically on Cenarions. You’ll very easily tell the Faerie Dragon from Onu.
Farrell:Design-wise, it’s a similar process. We’re trying to make something that’s based on two sorts of paradigms. First, some characters are super riched and storied, and have a million possible abilities (or talents). If they’re based on the class archetypes, taking that and distilling it down into a playable mini with only three talents is a fun challenge. Tirion is sort of thearchetype of a paladin. We have to ask what his abilities and talents would be if he only gets one ability, three talents, right? How do we create the feeling of a Paladin, even for someone who has never played Warcraft and doesn’t know what that is? We still want to encapsulate that feeling in a single playable mini.
Second, we’ll sometimes turn a character into a mini that’s the opposite. Bog Beast, for example, is just a guy who hangs around in Un’Goro, and we wanted to make him into a playable mini. He doesn’t have a talent tree in World of Warcraft, so how do we add or further develop the idea of Bog Beast as a character, right? How do we give him an identity in Rumble and give him abilities and talents that speak to that? For Bog Beast, where we landed is that he’s a resist because not a lot of our tanks have resist. He’s this plant-y magic guy, and his talents are all related to Cenarions things. He has a talent where he receives more healing, he has a talent where he gets armor on top of the resist, and stuff like that. That’s always a fun process of looking at what’s available and fitting it into a smaller container.
Q: Based on all this so far, can you talk a little bit about how this applies specifically to Cenarion leaders?
Farrell:Sure, let’s start with Onu as an example. We knew we wanted Onu. He’s just a cool guy, he’s a big tree. We knew he’d be fun to model, animate, and design abilities for, and we know people have been asking for something bombastic like a mobile deploy zone. When someone says that, there are a lot of ideas that come to mind. Do we want to this to be a leader? Could it be a spell that creates a portal? We landed on Onu being a mobile deploy zone, and it’s super fun.
It’s also not too strong. We can make them vulnerable, which, you know, makes them take more damage from elemental sources. That’s when you send a Pyromancer, and great, he’s countered. However, if you manage to get him somewhere, to an enemy base or tower, he’s really strong. When we were thinking about this, it was like “Okay, what does it do?” He’s a mobile deploy zone that fits with his character, that fits into this sort of kit. Cenarions are supposed to introduce a lot of utility and duality, this fits, great.
We had this mobile deploy zone now, so we have to get his talents figured out. They’re going to lean into his mobile deploy zone, so he has one where allies who are deployed in his mobile deploy zone deal double damage on his first attack. That’s a very offensive one. He has one where allies deployed in his zone gain Armored for eight seconds, so that’s a more defensive one. you may use that to keep him alive longer and keep his mobile deploy push going. He has one where, if he dies, he can persist for some time after. That all just felt so fitting.
Someone had suggested it would be cool if his mobile deploy zone could persist after he dies. We thought, great, he’s a tree. He could petrify. That’s a thing. That’s already a word we use in World of Warcraft. It just worked for Onu.
Collins:It works visually too. We actually change him into a petrified tree when he gets petrified and dies. It’s a very sad moment for Onu, but a good moment for you.
Farrell:Cenarius had a very similar process. We knew he was theleader of the Cenarion family, so we knew he needed to be very druidic, very hybrid in nature, and encapsulate and inform that strategy of the family. His aura does two things right out of the box. It heals allies and roots enemies, and that just speaks to the whole family in general. He’s doing these two different things. His talents just leaned into that more.
Q: Earlier, you had mentioned wanting to achieve utility and duality with Cenarions. Could you talk a little bit more about that?
Farrell:When it comes todruids in World of Warcraft, I think the phrase they used to toss around was jack of all trades, master of none. I don’t know if that’s true anymore. In the later expansions, I feel like they’re pretty good at a lot of things, but we wanted to give players a lot of lot of flexibility. A great example of that is Ancient of War. He’s one of the other new minis that’s coming out in season seven, and he has a new trait called Surge, which, when you play him, he uses all your gold. If you have one gold and you play him, he costs one gold. If you have seven gold and you play him, he costs seven gold. For every gold that you spend on him, he increases in size, attack power, and health for every gold, so it’s super flexible. It gives players a great way to have one mini but do multiple things.
They could hold on to him for a huge single mini push and put other stuff behind him when they start generating more gold. They can use him as a quick response to something then like, “Oh, there’s a Prowler attacking my base. Let me drop a two or three gold Ancient of War, just to take him out.” The trade-off for that is he uses all your gold, so you have to think about that when you play him. You have to either put him at the beginning of a push or have a push already going and then use your last bit of gold for him.
Onu, for example, is a mobile deploy zone, but he’s one of our only leaders that doesn’t grant some sort of passive bonus automatically to certain other allies. That’s his trade-off. He’s a mobile deploy zone, which is very strong, so that’s the duality there. Every mini in the family has that sort of concept going on. Moonkin has the AOE, as I mentioned, but it’s only half the time. That trade-off kind of flows through the design of all of them.
Collins: They don’t necessarily just synergize with each other; they also synergize with the other 65+ minis in the game. As Brendan was saying, we do a lot of testing via QA, internal, and external testing just to verify we’re shipping a quality product all the time, but we still find stuff that people do that we had no clue about. The combinatorics at this point, when you take all of our minis, the three talents, and you multiply them by each other, you’re talking millions of talent combinations. It’s always fun to see that kind of emerging gameplay come out in the playing public.
Q: What are you looking forward to seeing out of the Cenarions in the live game?
Farrell:I’m looking forward to seeing what the players do with them. Anytime we build something, we have some idea of how they’ll perform. We do a lot of internal testing. We’re like, this is a good strategy or that’s a good strategy. We come up with as many as we can, but there are only so many of us. Our players are basically nearly infinite. There are so many of them, and it’s lovely to put something out and see people come up with stuff that you haven’t even thought of. I know for sure that’s going to happen, because we’re giving them five new minis to experiment and play with, and they’re doing some crazy things. I’m sure they’re going to come up with cool stuff that we just didn’t even think of. I love getting that feedback and using that to fuel the next set of stuff that comes out.
Collins:I’m curious to see if people will findall the Easter eggs and goodiesthat we’ve hidden inside the game. There are still quite a few Easter eggs that exist that have not been found yet. I’m very, very excited to see if people can find those callouts that we put in there too.
[END]
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