Druidic Dualities: Bringing the Cenarion family to Warcraft Rumble

We’re a year into the life of Warcraft Rumble, and in recent months the game has dropped a bunch of new minis that form the first new ‘family’ to join the game. But why are families even a thing in a game based on the classic ‘Horde versus Alliance’ struggle of the Warcraft universe?

We sat down with Brendan Farrell, Senior Game Designer, and Jeremy Collins, Art Director, to learn about what it takes to devise not just a new mini but a whole new family and what it will do to the meta – with a few strat hints thrown in to get you going.

Why are there even ‘families’ in Warcraft Rumble? Why did you take that approach?

Brendan Farrell: When Rumble first started there was just one family. Just a collection of five or six minis – a bunch are still in the game. So they were just the original family. As we built more of these minis we realised it’d be appropriate to have them in some buckets.

In classic Warcraft there’s Alliance and Horde, but we thought there’s more variety here. More room for strategy and building out these different armies. So that’s where the first five families came from: Alliance, Horde, Blackrock, Undead, and Beast. There’s so much in the Warcraft universe to pull from to put into Rumble. It’s really easy when you have five families to start grabbing things – it frees things up a lot more than being restricted to [Alliance and Horde].

Philosophically, whenever we’re thinking about adding a mini or a family to the game we’re thinking about what’s missing. In terms of World of Warcraft lore – what haven’t we yet represented? And also what does the game need strategically? What family or minis would add to the diversity that’s already there?

Another philosophy is rather than just tuning existing minis, just buffing or nerfing, we’d rather introduce new tools to counter or shake up the meta a little bit. That’s where the idea of Cenarion came from. Cenarion is about sustain, building big pushes, the duality Druid thing. Almost all the Cenarion minis have some sort of utility – they can do more than one thing. Lore wise, that just seemed perfect.

Everyone who joins the Rumble team, immediately when they play a game they’re like “Oh my God, I have so many ideas. You know who’d be great in here?” So we have this massive list that we can pull from. There’s so much to be inspired by. But Cenarion was a pretty common request from a lot of the team and from a lot of players. Even if they didn’t ask for the family by name, they were asking for specific characters that would easily fit into that family.

Talk about your approach to designing the Cenarions?

Jeremy Collins: With the phone you have a limited amount of screen space. I go home and stare at an ultrawide monitor and it’s awesome. We don’t have that luxury on a mobile. So it’s very important for us in art to make sure that, at a glance, you can see a unit and know who that unit is.

The gameplay, we call it ‘joyful chaos’. Something’s happening in this lane, something bad is happening in another lane, you’re constantly jockeying your attention between places. Because of that we were very intentional about making sure characters we designed only had two or three major colour blocks so when I’m in the middle of a fight I see green and red and I know that’s the Warsong Grunt. We didn’t want to overcomplicate the design of things.

As far as Cenarion goes, it’s fun in general. Design and art collaborate very closely when it comes to creating anything new for the game, but any mini too. The designers said we need a tank character but we have this really fun idea where you have to spend all your gold to play it. You could spend a little bit, or spend all of it, and depending on how much you spend the size of the tank gets bigger or smaller. That’s a great idea! But there’s not many characters that fit that tank mold – and you don’t want to see thin, spindly characters in that role because visually it just wouldn’t really work out well. So that’s how we ended up going with the Ancient of War from Warcraft 3. And that’s something that hits the nostalgia for players quite a bit.

We just had so many strong ideas for Cenarion that we very much wanted to pursue them. They all ended up fitting into that kit really well once we got the whole army together. We’ve got two characters from the Cenarion family that came out first – the spell Earth and Moon and then the Faerie Dragon.

What makes you decide between building out existing families versus launching a whole new family?

BF: It comes back to what the player needs and what the game needs. When we came up with Witch Doctor, for example, we saw Horde doesn’t really have a lot of Cycle options. They have Sappers, but it’d be really nice to have a Cycle option for Horde that doesn’t delete itself when you play it. So Witch Doctor was this really fun idea that we’ve been tossing around for a while. I’m a huge fan of Warlocks in general in World of Warcraft and Witch Doctors have a lot of overlap in terms of abilities and talents and stuff. So Witch Doctor fit that need very nicely.

With Chimaera, we saw Beast doesn’t have a lot of flying AoE options and the game in general could probably use more flying AoE. So we came up with this really fun idea for Chimaera and it was super novel because it has two heads and two abilities, so that was really fun.

I think we knew for a long time that eventually we would be adding a family and there was a lot of general discussion around it. The need for Faerie Dragon came up and we thought, well, she has to be Cenarion, but we knew we were eventually going to do Cenarion. So she seemed like a great intro to the Cenarion family for players. Her kit is really good. She can see stealth, which changes a lot of the meta stuff. She’s resistant to a lot of stuff. She’s also really a well known and beloved character. Even if you have no connection to the Warcraft universe, even if Rumble is your first step into the Warcraft universe, she’s so cute and colourful and friendly and approachable. She’s just really adorable. So I think she was a really good introduction to the Cenarion family and all those pieces aligned to building out Cenarion from there.

Rumble has its own art style compared to Warcraft. What’s the thinking and process there?

JC: We affectionately call it Rumble-fying the characters on our team. When we’re having the discussion, “OK, what is this new mini?”, we obviously look at our source material from other games that have been out there. We try to add our own Warcraft Rumble spin on things.

So much of the World of Warcraft art style is based on hand painted, handcrafted art, and that’s something we’re very proud of here at Blizzard. When we were originally making the first family, creating the Orc was the first unit. We are Blizzard Entertainment, What are we good at? Orcs. Orcs is always the answer to that question. So our first unit was the orc and we started down that hand painted road in those early days. But we realised it was great, it looked good, but it doesn’t give us enough of an identity as a game.

The whole point of Warcraft Rumble is to broaden Warcraft. To have great stuff for people that are huge fans already but to bring people in that maybe don’t know anything about Warcraft. A lot of the appeal of the Faerie Dragon that Brendan’s talking about really plays into that. That desire to want to bring in people with an appealing art style, even if you don’t know the 30+ years of lore of the Warcraft universe. It doesn’t matter. You should be able to come in and have a good time either way.

There isn’t really a formula when it comes to choosing. It evolves organically on our team based on the needs of what the game has. It’s really an exercise in patience, because we all have our rock stars that we want to throw into the game and we all have to wait because we can’t drop them all at once. We have to make sure they come out at a regular content cadence, which is also part of the reason why we brought out Earth and Moon and the Faerie Dragon so that it’s not just “here’s everything” and maybe you get overwhelmed and I think that is an easier way to ramp you into enjoying the Cenarion family.

Any you enjoyed Rumble-fying the most?

JC: After the hand painted Orc, the first really Rumble-fied character we ended up making was the Kobold. There’s this magical moment when you’re creating a new mini for me, where we’ve talked about the design, we’ve done a bunch of concept art of what the character looks like, but maybe the character isn’t modelled yet. At that point, somewhere in that pipeline, Brendan and I write the script for the characters and then I’ll go record it in a VO session. That moment is when the mini kind of comes alive.

We had this amazing voice actor, who played Invader Zim, for the Kobold and he just started going “money, money, money” and all this stuff that you hear in the game right now. It was a moment for me where I was like “Oh my God, this character is real now!” and then you pair it up with the model and the animation and the rig. Everybody does their piece of the pipeline and you have this new thing. It’s just a very edifying experience. So probably the Kobold.

But then if you’re asking my favourite? Sappers by far. I animated them so I have a very close relationship to it. I thought it was fun. The whole idea is they have a barrel of explosives strapped to their back and they jump into the towers to explode them. I did a bunch of poses where one’s laying down, one does a swan dive, and it randomly chooses what to pick when it goes in. So that’s awesome.

BF: I really like Whelps. There’s three of them, the eggs look so cool, they’re really spikey. The gradient on the shell and the spikes. And it’s just a really cool mini gameplay wise. It just does something very different that none of our other minis do. It just waits there, and then it gets hit and turns into something else. I think it’s really cool.

JC: I have them in a lot of my armies too. The Whelps actually looked very different from how they looked at the start. We had a different model of them. They weren’t as appealing. So we took it back to the drawing board and did another pass on it and I’m really happy with how they ended up turning out.

So give us the run down everyone we’ve met so far in the Cenarion family!

BF: So there’s already Faerie Dragon and Earth and Moon. Faerie Dragon is a flying mini with a range attack that can see stealth, and she’s immune to poison, burn, and slowing effects, so she’s very tricky.

Earth and Moon is a double spell. You equip it in your army and it’s either Entangling Roots or Starfall and it changes form whenever another Cenarion mini is played, including itself. So if you have no other Cenarion minis in your army it’ll at least rotate every time you play it. But if it’s in your hand and you play a different Cenarion mini it’ll swap right then and there. So you get extra control over it at the cost of having to play a Cenarion mini to toggle it. Starfall is our highest damage spell. It’s expensive gold wise but does a ton of damage in an area. It’s like a supercharged Blizzard.

In Season Seven we introduced two leaders and three minis. We have Cenarius, who the family is named after. He represents what the Cenarion family is supposed to do. He does two things right out of the box. He has this giant aura around him which passively heals allies over time and roots enemies who approach for the first time - after a few seconds they can’t get rooted again. So he’s not the strongest leader, he’s not going to be killing all these enemy minis on his own, but what he does is really supports having a team around him and buys time for them to kill approaching enemies.

We then have Onu. He’s this big tree guy. He’s a super beloved character from World of Warcraft. His whole thing is he’s a mobile deploy zone. So you deploy him, he lanes forward and wherever he is you can deploy other minis near him almost as if they were unbound. And so the great thing with him is, if you can keep him alive and get him to enemy towers or the base, you basically have a portal straight to the thing you’re trying to target.

So you could drop a Gargoyle or Sappers right where he is and do a ton of damage, or another Onu and keep the Onu train going. And his talents all relate to his mobile deploy zone. My favourite one is Petrify - when he dies the mobile deploy zone persists for eight seconds and we have this really cool animation for it. He literally just dies and calcifies. 

There’s Bog Beast, he’s a big swampy guy, a pretty standard tank. He’s a guy with a lot of health and a single melee swing. But he has Resist, which not a lot of tanks have. Most tanks have Armor, so he’s really good if you’re up against a bunch of elemental damage enemies.

Then we have Moonkin, which is super famous from World of Warcraft with a whole Druid spec based around it. Moonkin alternates between a single target Moonfire attack and an AOE Hurricane style attack. So again, it goes into the whole Cenarion idea of duality. You get these two things, but at a cost. He’s not going to do one or the other reliably, you have to wait in between.

And then last is Ancient of War. He has a new trait called Surge. When you play him, he uses all your gold, however much you have. So if you have three gold, it takes three gold. If you have 10, he takes 10. But for every gold spent he is bigger, stronger, and has more health. So he’s really fun. You could start a push with him - here’s 10 gold, deal with that. And then as your gold refills you can supplement behind him. Or you could use him in response to something. There’s a Prowler attacking my base? I only have two gold. Drop an Ancient of War you need in that moment. But he always uses all your gold, so that’s the cost.

So the whole family kind of revolves around this idea of utility at a cost, so they’re really powerful in the right hands. I think there’s so many possible strategies.

One of my favourite things about this game is we put stuff out, we test it, we design it, we think a lot about it, and we come up with our own strategies internally. But inevitably, without fail, players find other ways to surprise us. That’s my favourite thing. Like with Onu, I just told you to do Sappers and Gargoyles. I’m sure players are going to find other crazy stuff that we haven’t even thought of. I love that. I think the Cenarion family is going to open up a lot of potential for that, because each mini does multiple different things.

That whole scaling of the Ancient of War design sounds fun – and hard. Tell us more about making that work.

JC: For Ancient of War’s design the good news is the game tells you what it needs. At 10 gold it has more health than a Molten Giant. So visually we need to make sure that it’s slightly bigger than the Molten Giant when you see it on the screen, because size is really tied very, very closely to overall health pool of a character. If you’re in the raid and you’re fighting Ragnaros, he has a lot of health. He’s gigantic. So in the same way, we use the Molten Giant as a guide for where our 10 is going to be. And then the scale from that point went down. We also wanted to make sure that when you play Ancient of War for one gold it’s more health than a Kobold. It isn’t that tiny, tiny size.

BF: It was a really fun process, because that’s the first mini we have that dynamically changes size. His size is going to be changing different times you play him. It was a really fun conversation to go to the art team and say I want to have 10 different models for Ancient of War, one for each gold cost.

They were like, OK, well, when we animate his feet we need to make sure they’re tracking properly on the ground. What’s happening in the background is we also have all this stuff like a speed modifier for the animators to use. At different sizes based on the size of the model they can adjust his movement speed ever so slightly so his feet don’t slide around. It was a really fun back and forth.

We did the first iteration and the animators came back and the 10 gold one was too huge and taking up way too much space and the one gold one was too tiny. So we just took the entire scale and kind of squashed it back towards the middle a little bit. It took a few tries, but we got it in a good spot.

JC: My background is in character animation. The foot sliding thing is something I have to put my foot down on. Tying the size of the character to the speed just looks so much more like a mobile tree that way as opposed to if he was just ice skating across the ground.

Adapting beloved Warcraft characters, how do you give them talents and abilities?

BC: That’s my favourite design thing that I do. There are certain characters where we’re spoiled and we have too much. Jaina is a Frost Mage, so there’s so much to pull from. There’s an entire talent tree. There’s all this lore around Jaina specifically.

But then you get a character like Bog Beast who isn’t playable by players, there’s lore through quests but Bog Beast as an identity hasn’t really existed. Bog Beast certainly doesn’t have a talent tree. So it’s fun. There’s so much to pull from in World of Warcraft so we knew what we wanted Bog Beast to be functionally in the game. Then it’s a matter of, OK, he’s going to be a tank for the Cenarion family, and he’s going to be resist themed. OK, he’s covered in these vines and swamp water. What do we want him to do? If he’s negating enemy magic or resistant, maybe his talent should be that he’s more receptive to ally magic. Like that old ability mages had that was amplify magic or dampen magic. He’s got the right version of both of those. So for his talents maybe he could have a talent where he receives more healing because Cenarion is all about sustain.

So then we go, OK, what in the World of Warcraft universe exists that kind of implies that something would receive more healing and would fit a Bog Beast. So we have amplify magic for mages, but it doesn’t really fit with the kit of Bog Beast. So we start reading through all the lore and the druid tree and we start pulling themes and language from there. And that’s where Flourish, the name of his talent, where he receives more healing, comes from.

So that process repeats for all these other sorts of characters that don’t necessarily have a fully fleshed out talent tree or identity. There’s still so much to pull from and be inspired by.

JC: We’re designing really thinking of gameplay moments. When you’re playing a game that’s really what you’re playing - a string of moments. With something like Sylvanas, she’s a badass undead night elf archer and shoots stuff. But at the end of the day we’re like ‘what makes Sylvanas?’ That moment in the cinematic where she just becomes a banshee. That defines the Sylvanas experience. So that’s how we knew. We already have a banshee in the game. We can do possession. Then it all started to click into place.

Talk about the new Moonglade missions?

BF: Five new missions for Moonglade. I don’t want to spoil the details of every single one, but my favourite is Brumeran, which is the Chimaera boss. The Chimaera is constantly laying eggs you have to deal with. If you don’t deal with them they’re going to hatch into baby Chimaeras.

What I really love about the mission is when you pause and take a moment – I know there’s a lot going on when you’re fighting – but if you stop and look, you’re actually on the top of a mountain and it’s so cool. I don’t think we have any other missions like that right now. There’s this really lovely fog around it. You just get the sense that you climbed to the top of this mountain in Moonglade and you’re doing battle with this Chimaera. It’s really visually cool and distinct. Every time we come out with something new it’s like there’s a whole new visual language we get to use. I think the art team did a really good job with it.

JC: Anytime we come up with a new zone we’ll do this thing we call virtual tourism, where we basically get on a mount and fly around the zone in classic WoW and also in retail WoW if they exist in both places. Just to get a sense of the design choices that were made.

One of the things we found in the art team that really contributes to the overall feel of a zone is actually the environment fog which in the old days of WoW was necessary because you didn’t want to have the computing power to render stuff in the background. That tone contributes so much to the zones in generally. You’ll actually notice it shift as you go from zone to zone to zone. We took that blue-green of Moonglade and made sure all the maps had that variety. We actually have our own version of environment fog that we throw into all the maps.

My favourite is Brightwing’s because she’s got this secret garden set up and we had a lot of fun designing her. We knew she was going to have a talent that teleports her and we thought what would be really funny is if she sneezed and when she sneezed she teleports to a new place - like she can’t control it. Then the animators went, oh, well what if she had a really ugly face right before she sneezed. So we baked that into the character and it all just fell into place. Now when you play on that map it just feels like you’re in her domain in a lot of ways. It’s very cool.

BF: I think you said the voice actor for Brightwing ended up doing like nine takes for sneezes?

JC: It was like 40 minutes of sneezes.

Lots of anniversaries at the moment at Blizzard, with Hearthstone turning 10 and World of Warcraft turning 20. What do you hope people will think about at the 10th anniversary of Rumble?

BF: If we hit 10 years and people are still playing it and having a great time? What I would love is to meet someone who played for all 10 years and ask what they enjoy. We love feedback from players. We’re always listening. There’s so many channels and it’s all valuable.

Even if a player comes to us and is just ‘oh, I hate this mini’. They’re not asking you to remove the mini from the game. There’s some reason they don’t like it. Either they don’t find it useful or they’re playing against it and it’s kicking their butt. It’s all valuable. In that case we give them a different tool or something or we give them a mini that helps build a new strategy around that. I love that our players care as much about the game as we do.

So for 10 years from now, if I could talk to someone who’s been there for 10 years and say what do you think? What’s your journey been like? What have you been up to? Obviously you’re max level. What are you working on now?

I’d also want to talk to someone who just joined. Something really nice about Rumble and something we’re always talking about on the design side is, even if the game has been out for a year or two years or five or whatever, there’s going to be new people who join in. We want the game to be welcoming and gentle to them as well.

I’m sure we all have the experience of jumping into a game that’s pre-existing and your friends are all ‘oh, come try this game’ and you jump in and there’s just so much to process. One of our goals with Rumble is to make sure there’s a ramp into it. Then both your collection and when you learn how to play and all these fun new systems and features, we want players to gain that stuff over time and get used to it. So I’d be very curious to talk to both people 10 years down the road, both types of players, and see what they feel.

JC: Fun is your measure of success in video games. I would just want people to still be having fun in 10 years with the game. It’s been a real privilege to develop it. I use this analogy a lot. We got tossed the keys to Warcraft and they were like “make a really cool Warcraft mobile game”. We’re all just bound together by our love of Warcraft anyway. So it was a really wonderful privilege to be able to make the game and I hope it’s still fun in 10 years.