Warcraft Rumble, the new mobile action strategy game set in the World of Warcraft universe, will launch worldwide for Android and iOS on November 3, during Blizzard Entertainment’s BlizzCon celebration in Anaheim, Calif. We caught up with Associate Game Director Adam Kugler and Lead Technical Artist Josue Mariscal to dig into every detail of the free-to-play mobile title.
Blizzard has this big incubation behind the scenes. It's all stuff that we're working on until we're ready to announce it. Everything was developed in-house from that moment.Newman: For every successful mobile Blizzard game like Hearthstone, there are games that aren't as universally well-received, like Diablo Immortal.
Newman: You already had one mobile game using the Warcraft IP. Tom came from this place, given his background, but was there any discussion about whether this should be a Warcraft game versus, say, a cute andWarcraft has been around for 30-ish years, so we have a lot of inspiration to pull from, and the universe is vast. You have all the heroes and villains that we get to recreate—we're making it much more lighthearted and cutesy, with these mini-units.
Newman: I’m betting that Onyxia is longer as well.Yeah, Onyxia is kind of like a single player raid map if you like. All of our super endgame content is about twice as long — eight minutes, last I checked. The idea is that you just get in and play and you can win matches in as little as a minute or two if you know exactly what you're doing and the stars align. But mostly it's like two to three minutes for a match.
You're going to have to counter it a little bit differently and actually react in the moment rather than going through the puzzle that you remember solving before. There's a ton of replayability.We have a cohort system. Let's say I put an abomination in there. Abomination is this big tanky guy — I'll say that's a tank. And then when you play a Quest with her, we can replace the abomination with any tank in the game.
You could potentially buy units with real money if you wanted to, but that's not going to really give you a leg up on anybody else, because the simple fact of the matter is that you can get every single mini in the game just by playing. The only thing that gets you is your collection of minis quicker.