Interview: Warcraft Rumble devs explain name change, tease possible PC port, more BlizzardWarcraft Rumble is Blizzard\u2019s newest real-time strategy title available on mobile devices. We spoke to Blizzard developers Tom Chilton and Vik Sarraf to learn more about the game\u2019s recent soft launch and get a glimpse at their plans for the future as it heads toward its full release. Blizzard\u2019s ever-expanding universe of games is growing once more with the soft launch of their newest title Warcraft Rumble. The real-time strategy title has launched in the Philippines, which the team has expressed their excitement for as a form of technical test for the full launch. \u201cIt\u2019s exciting stuff. This step is always exciting because it\u2019s usually one of the last steps you go through before going worldwide. Our launch in the Philippines is set out to be a technical test to just make sure everything\u2019s working, gather some device-specific information since there\u2019s a wide variety of device types in that market as well,\u201d Saraf explained. The goal for the Warcraft Rumble team is to roll out to the other servers as soon as possible and continue to carry on from the beta, taking things they learned and gaining player feedback and insight. On top of this, the team wants to take the time to polish the game fully and place the final touches before its global release. Inspirations and learnings for Warcraft Rumble The Warcraft Rumble team was fortunate to have shared learnings from the teams at Call of Duty Mobile and King who have published a heap of mobile games before them. However, working at Blizzard puts the team into a rather unique position, as they need to be careful with well-beloved franchises like Warcraft and Diablo, and stay true to the game\u2019s origins whilst keeping it fresh. \u201cI think with Blizzard one thing that\u2019s different is because we have such heralded franchises\u2026 there\u2019s a balance which Tom alluded to before which is also understanding and recognizing that you have a passionate fan base that really cares about the games itself. \u201cAnd you already have a lot of AAA development and design experience helps you know how to design games that have great moment-to-moment gameplay, and good core loops. So what you want to do is stay true to your roots as a game developer on these prized IPs but also be able to then take mobile\u2019s best practices to make sense for you,\u201d Saraf elaborated. Rumble without the Arclight One major change that dropped with the soft launch of Warcraft Rumble was the removal of Arclight in the game\u2019s title. Originally the RTS was supposed to have the lengthy title of Warcraft Arclight Rumble, before the devs decided against it, thinking about what players would do. \u201cBefore we announced the game, we were trying to figure out, \u2018Ok, what are all the different things that we feel like encapsulate what the game is, and which parts do we want to emphasize, and which parts do we think players are going to glom onto the most?\u2019\u201d Chilton recounted. The devs knew that players often like to shorten the names of video games, take World of Warcraft becoming WoW or Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft becoming just Hearthstone, as two key examples. So the team thought about a variety of different factors, including reducing the title\u2019s length and shifting around where each word went. The Rumble team even thought about reducing the name down to just \u2018War\u2019 as players might just call it by its acronym, devs shared. The team, however, was still unsure even after thinking it out and decided to \u201cbeta test\u201d the title as well. \u201cOur kind of take on it was like, \u2018Let\u2019s come up with a name that has the different components that we think really work well with this game and in a sense beta test the name\u2019\u2026 After doing that and watching what players grabbed onto, it became pretty clear that Warcraft Rumble was what resonated with players the most.\u201d Warcraft Rumble\u2019s future may include a PC launch Many Blizzard games have had their time on both the PC and mobile platforms. Games like Hearthstone have seen major success double dipping across the platforms, potentially paving a path to PCs for Warcraft Rumble. \u201cWe\u2019ll have to wait and see in a lot of ways. It\u2019ll kind of depend on what players want. If there\u2019s a demand for PC, which there may well be, then that would be something that we pursue,\u201d Chilton answered. The team explained how they felt Rumble was the opposite of Hearthstone in that way, which was originally ported to mobile after being developed for PC. \u201cWe were sort of the inverse of Hearthstone from the standpoint that Hearthstone was developed for PC first and then translated onto mobile. We\u2019re kind of the reverse of that. The game\u2019s always been functional on the PC insofar as we\u2019ve developed it using Unity on the PC and all that kind of stuff.\u201d Alongside this, the team explained that they don\u2019t have any problems with players developing emulators to play it on their PCs and believe that it may potentially make its way to the PC in the future, but they don\u2019t have anything for players on that front at the moment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Interview: Warcraft Rumble devs explain name change, tease possible PC port, more BlizzardWarcraft Rumble is Blizzard\u2019s newest real-time strategy title available on mobile devices. We spoke to Blizzard developers Tom Chilton and Vik Sarraf to learn more about the game\u2019s recent soft launch and get a glimpse at their plans for the future as it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-82391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82391","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82391"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82391\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}