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What was once Warcraft Arclight Rumble has undergone a slight name change to the snappier sounding Warcraft Rumble, which is finally soft launching today after having been revealed over a year ago. The game will first come to the Philippines in the form of a technical test, after which Blizzard’s free-to-play Clash Royale-like strategy game featuring iconic characters and creatures from the Warcraft universe will roll out to additional territories over time. The soft launch will mark the first time audiences outside of Blizzard will be able to experience Warcraft Rumble on iOS devices.
In an interview with GameSpot, Warcraft Rumble director Tom Chilton and executive producer Vik Saraf discussed what the team learned from the game’s Android-only closed beta that concluded in June, and how feedback has helped flesh out the mobile strategy game ahead of a worldwide launch that Blizzard said it’s hoping is “not too far away.”
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Now Playing: Warcraft Arclight Rumble Hands-On Preview
When the closed beta first launched, Warcraft Rumble only had what Chilton called “rudimentary systems,” one of them being the game’s Quests. They tasked players with battling opponents on random maps, and were designed to not be too challenging but also not too easy. What Blizzard found was doing that over and over again quickly got repetitive, with players craving new additions to break up the monotony. That new addition turned into a feature called Arclight Surge, which reimagines familiar maps with new mechanics and modifiers. A similar idea was introduced as part of the game’s PvP seasons, which now feature rotating modifiers and maps to keep the game’s meta fresh.
Chilton said one of the hardest things to nail is a game’s “onboarding experience,” as it’s difficult to find the right balance when it comes to preparing players for increased challenge. Warcraft Rumble was no exception.
“We really had to take things slow with ramping up complexity and difficulty, slower than we originally imagined,” Chilton said. “That’s maybe not all that surprising, usually the people making and designing a game are very familiar with it, so our estimation of how quickly people will pick up on things and how easy or hard they will find them tends to be off. We ended up reflowing the campaign so that you wouldn’t get walled on progress because of suddenly hitting content that was just a lot more difficult and feeling, ‘Oh man, I just slammed into this wall and it was brutal.’ One of the things that did was it indicated to us that people want to be able to flow through the campaign and get their feet wet and get to the point where they understand the game very well, but later on want they want a lot of challenge for the long term [to] stay interested in the game for months and years.”
That challenge came in the form of Blizzard adding a Heroic version of Warcraft Rumble’s campaign. Taking inspiration from Heroic dungeons in World of Warcraft, Warcraft Rumble’s Heroic campaign does more than just give enemies more health and make them do more damage. That’s not very interesting, Chilton said. Instead, Blizzard retooled each campaign map to further highlight what made them unique to begin with for their Heroic versions, introducing new mechanics for players to learn and overcome.
“We felt like if it’s just, ‘Oop, the levels went up, things have more health and do more damage,’ it would feel like you were doing the exact same thing…and it would be just not all that interesting,” Chilton said. “So we hand updated every single map with interesting new mechanics that really sort of make it the maximal version of itself and really emphasizes the things that make that map unique and different as much as possible and really takes them all to the extreme.”
Prior to the closed beta, Warcraft Rumble’s miniatures, the units players collect and use to build their armies, only came in a single rarity and with fewer talents. Now, units have additional rarities that can be earned and and a total of three talents for players to unlock and experiment with, further broadening the game’s collection elements.
How players earn those miniatures is unique, as the team sought to capture the rush of adrenaline from opening card booster packs and finding a rare card, but without the feeling of throwing money away on random items that a player might not want, ala loot boxes. What Blizzard came up with is a system where players are presented with a 3×3 grid of options to choose from when selecting new miniatures to spend their currency on. The bottom row of the grid resets every day, and players have additional ways to reset it if the items listed aren’t to their liking. Chilton described it as a system where “what you see is what you get.”
“That’s really our approach, and it’s really novel and different,” Chilton said. “There’s not really anything else like that. It’s something that players found that they liked in beta and that’s carried on to now.”
As for what’s next, Saraf said the team already has a robust roadmap planned, and that while the team has updates in the works, it also wants to stay flexible to be able to adapt and react to player feedback during the game’s soft launch. The soft launch period will also be used to further polish the overall game experience, something that Saraf said you can never have enough of. In addition to seasonal changes, future updates will add new miniatures, leaders, maps, and more to the experience.
“We’re obviously very grateful to all the players that participated in the beta,” Saraf said. “What we found out and discovered a lot was some really great feedback that has really honed us completing the game itself and getting it ready for worldwide launch.”
Those interested in being able to play Warcraft Rumble as soon as it’s available in their region can do so by pre-registering via the game’s official website.
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