Exploring Warcraft Rumble’s road to release

Blizzard has already had a busy year with the launch of Diablo IV (and, you know, that whole getting acquired by Microsoft thing), but the studio still has one more big release for 2023: Warcraft Rumble, a free-to-play strategy mobile game releasing on November 3.

I had a chance to chat with game director Tom Chilton and executive producer Vik Saraf. I asked them about the creation of this new take on the Warcraft franchise and its name change from Warcraft Arclight Rumble.

GamesBeat: I’m curious about inspirations for the game.

Tom Chilton: I can get into the origins of the project in a lot of ways. It started as far back as 2013, when a bunch of friends of mine in my WoW guild were playing a lot of Puzzle and Dragons. We would go out for guild dinners after doing some raiding and they were playing this game on the side. What is this thing you’re talking about and playing so much? They wouldn’t shut up about it. Eventually they dragged me into playing it a bit. At first I had a hard time taking it seriously. A mobile game? Is that a real game platform? Can’t be. But I wound up playing the game with them for several years and really enjoying it, discovering the magic to that kind of game. That was the game that first planted the seed in my mind. It could be cool to someday make a Warcraft mobile game. It showed me that a very deep, strategic experience could happen on mobile.

As years went by more games came out. Other games like Clash Royale, an obvious one, where they found a graceful way to adapt some of the concepts of RTS on PC to mobile. They were greatly inspired, from what I understand, by Warcraft III. Combining a lot of those different elements of a deep PvE progression game, realtime combat, inspirations from Warcraft III and World of Warcraft, the content structure of World of Warcraft. A lot of those different things started to blend together in my mind as to what could be a cool thing to make. With that I pitched the idea, got the project greenlit to make a prototype, got together with one artist and one engineer, spent some time building a prototype, showed it around to various parts of the leadership in the company.

What we built was a single map. It was Hogger. It was very different from the Hogger map in the game today. But it served as an inspiration point. How do we make one really fun PvE map? Can we do it? It had elements in it like the towers. It had the gold mines you could capture. Things like that. Really proved out some of those very early mechanical concepts. It was legitimately fun. A lot of people across the board, as people played that prototype, they got it. They could see what we were going for. From there we got greenlit to go into pre-production, and then started from there to build our tools and technology and all the things you have to start doing once you go to make a game.

GamesBeat: Starting up the game, I was surprised how quickly it got me going, and not necessarily swamping me with tutorials. Was that an important goal?

Chilton: Very much so. We’ve had an inspiration, from the tutorialization standpoint, from the original Plants vs. Zombies. To me that was a great tutorial experience. At the time George Fan and that team did an incredible job of making sure that the tutorial felt just like playing the game. It didn’t really feel too tutorial-ey. That’s what we’ve always been going for. I would say that’s a super high bar to live up to from a tutorialization standpoint, but that was one of those inspirations for us. It’s awesome to hear that that landed at least a bit for you.

GamesBeat: Monetization is always important with these kinds of games. Blizzard has done plenty of games with free-to-play and other DLC systems. Was that tricky to nail for this game, or did it come relatively naturally?

Chilton: Yeah, it was tricky in a lot of ways. We wanted to build a monetization system that felt right for this game, and also felt like it was designed into the game from the ground up and not really slapped on to the game at the end. That’s why, very early in the game, we developed the grid system that’s in the store. One of our philosophies there was that interacting with the store should be fun. There were certain things that we wanted to capture about card packs or loot boxes, but without really doing card packs or loot boxes. We felt like card packs and loot boxes have been very pervasive. It’s a common mechanic out there. We wanted to see if we could approach getting your collection a bit differently.

Generally speaking card packs and loot boxes can be very exciting, but they also have down sides. As you continue to build your collection it gets hard to find the things you’re trying to get. You can end up feeling like you spend a lot of money on getting things you don’t actually want. That was something we wanted to avoid, while at the same time capturing the good essence of a card pack. Which is that everybody has a different experience going through the game. It’s very cool, in a game that has collectibles, that what you experience and what I experience are different. When I have to find my way through the content in the game, I have to figure out my own ideas for strategies. One thing that can undermine strategy games is just the internet guide. Well, first, you just get this thing, then get that thing, put them together in an army like this, and step by step here’s how you do it. As long as you–here’s a video of me playing it, just copy these exact moves. That can be the bane of fun for strategy games.

We wanted to capture that ability for every player to figure things out for themselves, to be inspired by other people’s strategies. You could watch someone else play and think, wow, that’s amazing how they did this. They played this unit like this at the right time and that was cool. I can incorporate that concept into what I’m doing. But I have to put my own spin on it because I don’t have X, Y, and Z, or not leveled up the way they do. I have to adapt that.

GamesBeat: There’s quite a stable of Warcraft games at Blizzard going on right now. Are these games going to interact with each other in any ways, or with Warcraft Rumble more specifically? Or is Rumble going to stand on its own?

Chilton: I do think it’s important for games to stand on their own. Granted, there are always going to be some touch points. There will be some cross-promotions. The Warcraft Rumble game machine itself is going to be in Azeroth. You’ll be able to find the game machine in some of the taverns in Azeroth, stuff like that. It’s going to be integrated into the canon of Warcraft lore. But those touch points are very light. There’s a quest line for it and some fun stuff for players to do in WoW. But by no means are we trying to deeply integrate the games with each other.

GamesBeat: Like with Hearthstone, there’s an effort to have Rumble exist within Warfracraft lore. This is a game that people in the Warcraft universe play. Why not just say, “This is a mobile game, don’t have to think about it that much?“

Chilton: Mostly because we care. [laughs] It makes it more fun. Honestly, it made the creative direction of the game more fun when we decided to go that route. Hey, what if this were an Azerothian pinball machine? How cool! That helps inspire a lot of things. It helps inspire creative direction, art direction. There are a lot of good things that come out of that as part and parcel of making what makes a Blizzard game. While you’re right that they’re not strictly necessary, they’re cool.

GamesBeat: The art style is interesting. We’ve seen different artistic takes on the Warcraft universe. This one reminds me most of original Warcraft III, just a bit more toy-ish. Did it take time to find that direction, or was it pretty obvious to do something a bit more colorful?

Chilton: It took a lot to figure it out. We were all over the place. We started off in that original prototype – we were literally at that point just taking assets from World of Warcraft and Warcraft III to use for the prototype. World of Warcraft, we took the fully modeled with interior tower, the human tower you see in Elwynn Forest. That was shrunk down to this big and put in the game. Obviously not very performant. We took that giant tower in WoW, put in the game. We took the barracks from WoW. We took some buildings from Warcraft III, the footmen from Warcraft III. At first it was just this mishmash of Warcraft stuff.

As the creative direction started to crystallize, something else happened simultaneously, which was that we started to realize, hey, we have to make this stuff a lot more readable. It doesn’t read well to take this higher fidelity, the current WoW models, and shrink them down and put them in a mobile game. It’s hard to tell what’s going on, especially with highly detailed environments. We started to learn, okay, what are we going to have to do? How are we going to simplify in a way where all this stuff comes across? The moment-to-moment gameplay in our game, it’s extremely important for players to quickly recognize and be able to distinguish minis from the backgrounds they’re on, from the environment, from each other as they get into dense combats and be able to piece it out. Oh, I see that huntress just threw a glaive that bounced off three harpies and killed them all. I see what happened there. I shouldn’t send harpies against their huntress. It’s important for people to read what’s going on. That helped inform it as well.

Even our first take on the art style for the game, we went with a much higher level of detail in the characters and in the environments. It was only once we had those in the game, even though they were not as detailed as some of the current WoW stuff–it was still, wow, this is just way too busy. We had to continue to tone it down a bit. Now we’re at this spot that we feel like really identified a great middle ground. It has the right level of detail. It’s funny that our characters for Rumble have way more detail than the original 2004 WoW assets. A human character back in 2004 had barely even 500 polygons. Now these characters are many thousands for this game that goes on a mobile phone screen.

But really figuring out how to make the details of those characters not read as too busy, it was a huge part of that process of trying to figure out what the right combination of creative direction and art style would be.

GamesBeat: Other Warcraft games, when I think about road maps and content updates, I usually think about big expansions. Is that something that will happen with Rumble, or will it focus on smaller consistent updates?

Chilton: It’s more that, although there will be spikes. There will often be times that we theme things. For example, while we don’t plan to do a WoW style expansion, or Hearthstone style expansion, we do plan to introduce a new mini to the game on a six week cadence as each new PvE, PvP season rolls around. There are also times that we’ll introduce new cosmetics, like a new tower skin. We think that a lot of people will want the classic Horde towers, the orcish towers, or the undead ziggurat towers, things like that. We’ll be introducing those on a regular cadence. Those will have big spikes when we introduce, let’s say, Molten Core, with the entire raid system that goes with it. Or as we introduce other features as they come down the line.

GamesBeat: What is it like spinning up a new game at Blizzard these days? Are you pulling people from other teams? Are you hiring a lot of people to work on this game? How does this new team come together?

Chilton: It’s a combination. Our first three people, myself and two others, were internal to Blizzard. Some of that is because, well, it’s unannounced, we don’t know if it will ever see the light of day, so we want to keep it to just a couple of people that are already familiar with each other. But then over time, as we start building, there’s a lot of expertise that we didn’t have as far as building mobile games, building the tech stack pretty much from scratch. Outside of Unity as a renderer, effectively. There were tons of parts where hiring externally makes sense for expertise, and then it’s also always a good thing to balance – you want some people that have worked on Warcraft. You want some people that have worked on RTS before. But you also want some fresh blood that’s worked on mobile, but never worked at Blizzard. The team very quickly, over time, became a mishmash of all of that.

Vic Saraf: It was intentional, as we thought about building a new Warcraft game, that it was authentic to the Warcraft experience. There are super big benefits to having people who have lived and breathed that through the development of World of Warcraft and other games within Blizzard. But as the game got more mature and was going into full production, we realized we wanted to balance that out so we had a healthy balance of folks that understood what it meant to make a Warcraft game based on experience, and also those that come from mobile-specific backgrounds, so we could get the best of both worlds when we think about live services for the players.

GamesBeat: Is it especially fun to once again pull from those earlier days from World of Warcraft?

Chilton: One thing that was super fun about this game was also being able to put more focus on some of those characters that were quest targets in World of Warcraft, but didn’t have a whole lot behind them. For example, Goldtooth. Goldtooth was an early quest target in Elwynn Forest that was simply a normal looking kobold with a unique name. There was a quest, a couple of quests to go deal with the kobolds in the deep mine and all that stuff. But it gave us a chance to envision, well, we get to make a unique model for Goldtooth. What does he look like when you can create a unique model? In some ways a lot of these characters are the legendary B-list characters of the Warcraft universe. It made it a lot of fun to get to dig into them a bit more and blow that out.

GamesBeat: How do you perceive the mobile game industry right now? It’s still hot, but the buzz doesn’t seem as loud. A lot of the games at the top are games that have been at the top for a long time, although Blizzard has obviously had success there too.

Saraf: I’ve been fortunate enough to work in it for 20 years now. It’s been a while now that I say that out loud. Through all of its evolution, it’s always been this nascent, fast-growing market. It’s still a very large market, obviously, based on how much revenue comes in just from mobile alone. But I think somewhere in the middle part of the last decade, you started to see the market get pretty saturated. It became much harder to just create clones of games that already existed in the market and have that same success. There’s a lot of respect we have for games that have come out since then, but it became very evident that in this mature market, you need something that delivers an additive experience to what’s already out there. I feel like that’s one thing that’s unique about this game. It takes a lot of the pieces you see in great mobile games today, but it also adds to it to take mobile as a gaming platform to the next level.

Chilton: One thing we focused on for this game specifically that I think could be changing in the market in general is making sure to have really fun moment to moment gameplay. We always felt like there were a lot of games in the mobile space that had very compelling metas about them, very compelling progression elements, but didn’t necessarily have very compelling moment to moment gameplay. In a lot of ways you were playing the game in quotes, whether it was more through autoplay, or the game itself got distilled down to a point where games were just simulated or whatever.

That got mined out a lot, but I think a natural evolution for any kind of platform is to figure out, what are the actually intrinsic fun ways to interact with a game on this platform? How can we build a game that’s both intrinsically fun, and then also has some of those extrinsic progression elements built around that, that are really more there to support the game that is intrinsically fun, rather than to prop up a game that on its own doesn’t really have much in the way of gameplay?

GamesBeat: BlizzCon is coming up next month. Are you looking forward to that? What is Warcraft Rumble’s presence at the con going to look like?

Chilton: BlizzCon is huge for us, and being able to go back to doing BlizzCon in person again is going to be super exciting. I was there from the very first BlizzCon back in 2005, I think it was. I got to see them evolve and change over time. Then it was so strange when the pandemic hit, and it just went away. Now it’s almost strange to have it coming back again. It’s been a long time. It’s always an exciting moment for every team. I believe you’ve already been informed that we’re going to be going live on November 3 at BlizzCon. People at the show will have the opportunity to get the game on their phones or come by our area and play the game on the phones that we have there. It’s going to be a lot of fun for us. Obviously, it’s a big deal for the game to be going live at the same time. Definitely a lot of excitement.

GamesBeat: You had the name change not too long ago. I understand why that happened, but what is that process like, to change the name of a game that’s already announced? Is that difficult, or was it an easy decision to come to?

Chilton: Not particularly difficult. When we first come up with the name and we’re doing it before the game has ever been announced, it’s hard to know exactly what’s going to resonate with people. An example would be, Hearthstone was originally Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft. After years of everyone just calling it by its internal name, Pegasus – our game has the internal name of Griffon. Everyone just got to know the game as Griffon. It gets very weird and difficult. People work on the game for years just calling it Griffon, and then all of a sudden it has this other game, a real name, externally facing. That’s always a strange process.

But when we made that name, when we originally did Warcraft Arclight Rumble, we knew players are going to shorten this in some way, but we don’t know which way they’ll have a preference. Is it going to just be Arclight, the way they call Hearthstone Hearthstone? Or will they call it Warcraft Rumble? Or will they just call it WAR? We thought it was cool that it abbreviated to WAR. Maybe people will just call it WAR? All these different words have different elements that are worth investigating. Let’s see what resonates the most with people.

And then once the name was out there, we did some surveys, some actual studies to see which variation of these actually worked best for people now that they know a little more about it. Warcraft Rumble came out as the clear winner. That’s what resonated with people the most. At that point it made sense to make the change. There wasn’t a whole lot to change at that point. A logo, some trademarks, whatever.