Games

Warcraft Rumble Devs Talk Split Leaders, Minis, And Upcoming PC Port

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5 hours ago

November 23, 2024

Warcraft Rumble is celebrating its 1st anniversary this year, which lines up with the broader 30th anniversary event for the whole Warcraft franchise. With a PC port and a new Split Leader system on the horizon, Warcraft Rumble is set for another busy year.

It’s an important time for Warcraft fans. Not only is the franchise as a whole turning 30, but the ever-popular MMO World of Warcraft is turning 20. Moreover, one of the series’ newer titles, the mobile game Warcraft Rumble, has also turned a year old in 2024. That game has been wrapped into the IP’s bigger celebration, with the recent Warcraft Direct stream announcing a new PC port for the game, among other features. To learn more about Rumble‘s changes, Game Rant sat down with executive producer Vik Saraf and art director Jeremy Collins. The following interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

You Can Only Pick One: Hearthstone or Warcraft Rumble?

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If I could only choose one, in this moment in 2024, I would perhaps controversially choose Warcraft Rumble. I have played plenty of Hearthstone over the years, but it’s been out for a long time now, and Warcraft Rumble feels more fresh and interesting to me, even if it does pull from other established mobile game genres.

Warcraft Rumble Devs Talk About Bringing The Game To PC

Q: Warcraft‘s 30th Anniversary stream saw a PC port announced for Rumble. How long has this decision been in the making?

Saraf: PC is something we’ve always talked about wanting to bring Rumble to. We know that, for a lot of Warcraft and Blizzard players, their introduction to these universes was largely on PC to begin with. When we set out to make this game, it was meant to be a mobile-first experience because we really were hopeful to try and expand the Warcraft universe—introduce it to players that have not yet had the chance to experience WoW or Hearthstone or other games in the Warcraft universe.

We felt that going to mobile platforms would be a great way to introduce it to a broader segment of players, but we also wanted to make sure that, when it did come out for PC, it was something that we felt really good about. So it’s something that we wanted to do for a while, but we had our priorities set on wanting to do the mobile version first.

Collins: That’s basically it; as much as we’re fans of mobile games, we’re Blizzard fans—and to be a Blizzard fan is to really be a PC fan. It just made sense for us that we were going to chase making the PC version of the game. I actually have a pretty hard time choosing my preference between the two, since you share an account between the mobile version and the PC version. You can kinda just pick it up, play, and then when you get home later on you can pick it up on Battle.net. It’s designed to be a seamless experience between devices.

Q: How seamless will that transition between versions of Rumble be?

Saraf: If you have a Battle.net account, your Rumble progress on that account will carry over on both the PC and the mobile version. The way our game has been architected is heavily server-authoritative, which means that a lot of your actions and progressions are stored on the server and attached to your Battle.net ID. If, for example, you started playing the mobile version and logged in to your Battle.net ID, when you log onto PC using that same Battle.net ID you’ll come right into the same experience.

Collins: We made some accessibility improvements on PC as well. Any time you make a game, you wanna be sure you’re taking advantage of the hardware that you’re playing the game on. For mobile, that comes down to touch interaction with the screen, but for PC that meant for us that we had to actually go back in and change a lot of the art to be able to accommodate for hover states. You don’t actually have a finger to interact with your computer monitor—you’re using a mouse and a keyboard. You need to know what you’re about to select on PC, and that’s not really a concept on mobile, so we added that.

We also added keybinds on PC, so you can hit 1-2-3-4 and that’ll basically queue up the four units that are in your tray at the bottom. We basically tried to accommodate to the platform you’re gonna be playing the game on, so we tried to do some fun stuff with PC.

Q: What other struggles did the team go through in adapting Warcraft Rumble for PC? Do you think PC players will have different expectations from mobile users and, if so, how do they differ?

Collins: In the case of mobile, we’re creating a game with a lot of different clients. You could have an Android phone, you could have an iPhone, you could have an iPhone 13, you could have an iPhone 15. What that essentially means is you have a lot of different aspect ratios at which you can see the game. I personally, when I’m playing the game, play on iPad (because I’m the art director and I like seeing all the art); the iPad is closer to a square so we support that. The kind of cool thing that happened when we decided we were going to make a PC version of Rumble was, like, we have all these different maps with different aspect ratios based on whatever device you’re looking at on mobile.

Because of that fact, we’re actually able to take the widest aspect ratio we have for each of the maps and give them to you in PC. It doesn’t necessarily give you a tactical advantage, because everyone sees the same amount of map, but now on PC the borders are widened on quite a few maps. You can see a lot of the artwork we put on the edge of the map to sell that sort of environmental storytelling thing we’re so big about here at Blizzard, making spaces feel lived in by the characters. We’ll have lots of props and stuff like that on the outside, and that’s just one example of PC player expectations.

Another example would be texture limits. For us on the mobile game team, we have to limit textures based on the available RAM on any given phone at any given time. Since PCs use graphics cards, and because our game is very performant on mobile and also on PC, we end up unlocking all the textures. We have, like, 2048×2048 versions of all of our characters, so you’ll see a bit of a natural up-res anyway—simply because you’re using a computer monitor and have much higher resolution textures.

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The Art Of Warcraft Rumble And Its Minis

Q: Following from that, Rumble very much has a different tone and aesthetic to mainline Warcraft. With Rumble coming to PC, was there any discussion about these different worlds coming together?

Collins: Not really, I mean we focused very early on creating our own art style, mood, and tone for Rumble before we even went into full production. It’s very important for us, at the end of the day, that we want everyone to be able to play Warcraft. That could mean you’re playing retail WoW, you could be playing classic WoW, you could be playing Hearthstone, you could be playing our game. The goal wasn’t to make the experiences look and feel similar to retail or classic, the goal was to carve our own niche within the Warcraft universe and bring as many people in as we possibly can. That’s a lot of the reason why we picked a more stylized art style for our characters.

The requirements, from an art angle, for World of Warcraft versus a mobile version of Warcraft characters… there’s actually quite a big delta in-between there. If you’re talking purely about just the amount of screen space when you’re playing WoW retail, I have an ultra-wide monitor here so I’m playing at full res, whatever the res of this monitor is. For that experience? Yeah, absolutely, you wanna turn on a way higher level of detail—you wanna turn on more detailed textures and stuff like that. But for a phone screen? For us, you need to be able to look at any unit on the field at any given point and go “Oh, that’s the orc,” or “That’s the footman because I see silver and blue—and I see green and red for the orc.”

We very much take the platform that we’re going to be presenting the game on into consideration when we’re defining those art styles. If we were to move Rumble more towards the WoW art style, I think it would actually suffer a little bit on mobile, because the screen is so small, and it’s not built for that level of detail.

Saraf: When you’re looking at a mobile screen, which is notably smaller, you need the colors to pop more and have a little distinction behind them. I’d also say that part of the original conceit was for this to be a game within the universe itself. If you watch the Warcraft Direct video, Jeremy talked about some of the inspirations and that we wanted the minis to have a tactile feel to them. There’s an element of collectibility with these units themselves that we wanted to emphasize, and I think that really came through with how the art style of the game came out.

Collins: Yeah, like, Warcraft to me is hand-crafted. Because all of World of Warcraft is hand-painted textures, a literal artisan has touched every single character—painted in those details for you. We wanted to capture that with the tactile style of the game, but we represent it in a bit of a different thing. We use this thing called ‘chipping’, and chipping basically is like… the characters that you’re using to actually deploy on the battlefield have been used over and over and over again. They naturally develop a little bit of wear, or a little patina, on the minis themselves. That was really important to us because it spoke to the tactility of the art style.

Q: The anniversary stream placed special emphasis on Rumble’s miniature-based gameplay/art style. Considering that 3D blueprints for these minis have already been released by Blizzard, are there any plans to bring Rumble together with the world of tabletop wargaming?

Saraf: This is a question that actually comes up quite a bit inside of Blizzard. We don’t have any official plans on that right now, but I can give you a nice little anecdote of what we’re seeing inside of Blizzard. One of our colleagues that we work with took it upon himself to take the 3D blueprints and print out a bunch of minis, and he went ahead and made a Horde vs. Alliance chessboard! So you’ll see Warsong Grunts as pawns in the Horde, and then you’ll see Footmen soldiers as pawns on the Alliance side of it. It was pretty clever. I think this is something a lot of us have a lot of interest in, but there are no official plans yet.

Collins: Yeah, we have a lot of interest in it to be completely honest with you. We were really huge fans of releasing mini models as STLs to the community. We’ve already seen even within Blizzard, not even outside of Blizzard, people at Blizzard took those STLs, downloaded them, printed them themselves, and some of those minis made it into the case in the museum you saw, that we were looking at earlier.

We’re just really passionate about miniatures in general at Blizzard. There are so many different groups that already do all sorts of wargaming, like Warhammer 40K stuff and fun miniature painting. We would be remiss to not see the value in that, so yes, we have had discussions—nothing to announce, but yes, the minis were very, very cool. There’s certainly the desire to do more, but we have nothing to announce at the moment.

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The Choices Behind Warcraft Rumble’s New Frontier

Q: Back to the port discussion, do you see ports to any other platforms in Rumble’s future?

Saraf: Nothing as of yet. The original desire was to bring this game to mobile and to expand this universe to new players who haven’t had any experience. Bringing it to PC was very much like coming home. We knew that’s where a lot of Warcraft players are. When we think about future platform support, it’s gonna really depend a lot on ‘Does it actually make sense for that platform?’, just because of the way the control mechanics work out and how people will experience it. But anything can happen at this point, yeah.

Q: Why has the team decided to go with a beta release for Rumble’s initial PC launch?

Saraf: One of the things we’ve tried to talk about in the past is the learnings that we got from the first year of the game’s launch. The game has evolved quite a bit since it released last year, not just in terms of the amount of content we put out (15 new minis over the course of the year, multiple features, and events). A lot of it has been us keeping our ears very close to the ground, listening to the community and their feedback on what they think would make the game a much more fun experience. A lot of those suggestions have panned out for Rumble.

When we think about PC, obviously it’s bringing a mobile game to PC—whereas with Hearthstone it was PC to mobile. We wanted to also make sure that we had enough time to be able to register community feedback and discover ways that we can help improve the PC experience alongside that with the players. It’s not too dissimilar from Rumble‘s mobile path. We released Rumble as a beta before we released it worldwide last year, so a lot of this is just to learn from the community and understand what’s working for them and what they think can be improved in the PC experience.

Collins: Yeah, 100%. It’s kind of like us saying that the game is never finished, we always have to keep improving it, keep listening to the community, and keep making adjustments to it so it’s better, faster, and more accessible. That’s kind of why we’re going with the ‘beta’ tag right now, we’re still learning, and we have to put our final level of polish on it.

Q: The updates to Rumble announced in the stream included some changes to monetization – mostly towards improving consistency in the storefront. Do you see bigger changes coming in the future? How has the community’s response been to Rumble‘s monetization model?

Saraf: I think that the real thing that has materially changed with Rumble has been ‘daily goals’ for the players. One thing when you’re putting out a game in this era of consumption and games living as a live service that you want to live forever—we want to make sure that players have something to do every time they go into the game.

To give an example, we talk about community feedback. Some of the feedback we received, which was rightful, was like, “I’ve gotten to a point where I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do in the game,” right? Like, “I’ve done a lot of campaign missions, I’ve done my quests,” and what we try to do is not just build out more features just for the sake of saying, “Here’s more stuff for you to do.”

We’re trying to be very specific about having each day you come into Rumble have its own specific set of goals for the player to aspire to, so there’s a meaningful sense of progression in their player journey on a day-by-day basis. So, really, what everything has been at the root of is to provide players more avenues for engagement, making the overall experience something you can interact with. In some cases, it’s like “Hey, I’m looking at the grid, and for my set of events today I feel like upgrading this specific mini.”

It does provide more of a reason for you to come into the grid and understand which minis actually make sense, and that’s really because of our Events system. The core of this has really been about trying to increase players’ engagement with the game by giving them goals on a regular basis.

Collins: Yeah, I think the Events system we’ve been doubling down on lately is a really good example of that. The only thing I wanted to highlight too was that we’ve got these giant reward trees in each of the events. There’s certainly different nodes that you’re looking for in each of them, but there’s no requirement to buy any of that stuff. The cool thing about Rumble is that the rising tide lifts all ships, basically. Any time we deliver something new, like new events running at the same time or an additional siege, that’s just another opportunity for both paid players and free-to-play players to have fun. We really like that about our game—even within our team we have free-to-play players and paid players.

It’s interesting to see how your choice of rewards on the rewards tree is very much tied to where you think your journey is going in Rumble, and I really like that. We have 65+ characters in the game and not everybody’s going to want to level up the same characters. I feel like these multiple events give you a lot of different avenues to zero in on the characters you care most about, and make sure you level them up from a collection standpoint. I think that’s just a really cool other part of it.

Q: How did the idea of Split Leaders come about? How big of an impact do you see the concept having on the game?

Collins: Well, if you’re thinking about it from a combinatorics perspective, all of our new Split Leaders (whether they be Sylvanas or Malfurion or Doomhammer or Anub’arak) all belonged to two different families. Because those leaders exist within two different family paradigms, the number of combinations that you could make with just their talents (plus the other units you put in their army) is actually far greater. Some armies are going to be Horde-flavored and get a bonus for having Horde characters inside of them, some might have Undead inside of them and get a bonus from Undead. That really throws your army comp, which maybe you settled into by playing the game, out the door a little bit, and you have to rework how your armies are going to work.

So I think, just by default, having a leader that exists in two worlds is going to give us a lot more options for combinations on the game field, as well as just different synergies. If you look at every different leader in our game as a deck architect, that just means the decks are split between two different families—which gives you just so many more options in terms of creating new armies. That’s one of the things I’m most excited about with these Split Leaders, I think people are going to have a real blast trying out a bunch of different combinations that work well with leaders that are in two different families.

Saraf: I think one of the parts of your question was how this came to be. Similar to the PC version, this is something we’ve wanted to get into the game for a while. A good chunk of our players are, obviously, Warcraft and strategy players, and they really do enjoy the strategic element of the gameplay. They find value in different army configurations, trying to figure out what is the right configuration to be able to win. In terms of our expectations, we’re excited about it. What’s notable about it is that the feature itself is awesome, but it’s also serving as a gateway for us to introduce even more prominent characters in the Warcraft universe, which we’re excited about. We think the playerbase will also really like it, especially as it comes alongside the PC release.

Q: Where do you see Warcraft Rumble in another year’s time?

Saraf: I think a lot of things will continue to evolve that are already in the game. One thing that we’ve really leaned into is our events, and really driving a much deeper seasonal experience. Before, we would have maybe one mini per season, now we’re averaging 2-3. I think what you can also expect is just us to lean in more to that and be able to provide a much more macro lore framework to these different seasons.

With the evolution of the PC version, we’re excited to be on that journey with the players. More notably, I’d say that we know that Warcraft (particularly World of Warcraft) is a social experience, and we want to lean into evolving the overall social meta of the game itself. I think that will be a focal point for us in the months ahead as well.

Collins: The good news about the Warcraft universe is that it’s almost infinite, and we’ve really just scratched the surface when it comes to overall content for the game. So, for the year ahead, I’m most excited for the new characters, the new environments, the new sieges, and the new raids that we’re going to bring to the game. We have a lot of really fun ideas that we just have sitting in a document, waiting for the right mini to take that game design and become part of the game. I have my favorites and the team has their favorites, but we’re just excited about bringing more Warcraft content to Rumble, in general.

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