Celebrating Warcraft Rumble’s evolution: Behind the scenes with Vik Saraf and Jeremy Collins

Warcraft Rumble is celebrating its one-year anniversary, and the game has certainly come a long way since its announcement and release. To get the full scoop, esports.gg sat down with Warcraft Rumble vice-president and executive producer Vik Saraf plus art director Jeremy Collins for an interview! We discussed the game's first year, the new split leaders revealed during the recent Warcraft 30th Anniversary Direct broadcast, tips and strategies, plus what's next for the game.

In their interview with esports.gg, both Saraf and Collins reflected on Warcraft Rumble's first year, recalling how its evolution was driven by player feedback. While Saraf talked about "continuing to keep our ears low to the ground" to shape game's content, Collins mentioned the team's love for experimenting with game modes and new ways to play Warcraft Rumble. The game's first-ever raid, Molten Core, is an example of this. There's also Stormwind Siege and Ironforge Siege as other examples.

"From a development perspective, the coolest achievements that we've been able to do is just the consistency of our content," Collins said, with Saraf adding that the game has introduced a new mini roughly every month. Collin then noted that from an art angle, he's really proud of the team and all the work that they did on running concurrent events in the game.

Saraf agreed, mentioning the Darkmoon Faire and how community feedback helped the team with player retention. "I think the event system we talked about is actually a great way for us to be able to promote more engagement for our players to interact with the game in different and unique ways, and it just gives them a reason to want to come back into the game every single day," he said.

In addition to making the most out of community feedback, Collins, in particular, made it his goal to create characters that felt appealing and tactile for players.

"They have a tactile quality to them 100%," he said, recalling how the creation of minis started with painting actual figurines that later evolved into a common lunchtime activity and even a colleague creating an entire Horde versus Alliance chess set using Warsong Grunts and Footmen. "But my barometer for success really was the first time I heard the press say that the game felt like an authentic Warcraft game. That was the most important thing for me going into it."

Saraf and Collins then detailed how Sylvanas' abilities and design fit within Warcraft Rumble's strategic gameplay. According to Saraf, the team had been planning characters like Sylvanas from the early stages. He told esports.gg how players' love for the strategic and collectible aspects of the game influenced the creation of diverse leader abilities and army configurations.

Collins also revealed that the design process always starts with finding the right gameplay mechanics and not the character. The team often holds pitch meetings every couple of weeks called "The Treehouse." Once a fun gameplay hook is identified, they match it with a Warcraft character who fits that style.

"We really wanted a burrowing unit, so Anub’arak just felt like a no-brainer right there," Collins said, referring to a split leader belonging to the Undead and Beast families. "We needed somebody that could protect towers and do healing on towers — that ended up becoming Malfurion. And then Doomhammer has this great thing called the Mak'gora where he actually calls out a unit to one-on-one combat and then rushes the unit, bumps into 'em, and then if he beats that unit, he then evolves into this yoked out, bigger form of himself. It's really, really cool."

As for the reintroduced Dark Lady and Banshee Queen herself, Collins shared how Sylvanas' Black Arrow ability and Banshee's Wail talent evolved from the existing Banshee unit with the Possession mechanic. The Warcraft Rumble team also drew inspiration from a Battle for Azeroth cinematic.

In terms of what they're both excited for players to experience while using the new split leaders, Collins and Saraf mentioned Malfurion's Deep Slumber talent that lets him boost a tower's health while he's sleeping. This mechanic turns Malfurion into a "battery" for the tower, healing it until he's awakened. This talent could lead to powerful strategies like building a push around him to create a formidable "death ball."

"Whenever we introduce a new leader, [...] it allows players to test the meta of the game to really show how exciting and powerful this leader can be, [which] allows us to learn from that itself," Saraf added. "Because those are sometimes the most exciting parts about seasonal drops — when you have new characters or ones that really start to transform the meta itself and force us to transform it as well. So that's going to be exciting to see."

During the aforementioned Warcraft 30th Anniversary Direct event, it was revealed that Warcraft Rumble will get a PC launch. The beta will arrive on Dec. 10. According to Saraf, this decision stemmed from a desire to bring the game to the broader Blizzard and Warcraft communities. He also revealed that Warcraft Rumble on PC will have cross-play.

"I think the PC version is something that can really help us bring the game to the broader Blizzard community and Warcraft community itself," Saraf said. "The good thing is it's going to be cross-play. So if you log in with your Battle.net ID, whatever progress you make on mobile is going to be on a PC."

He continued, "And the reason why we're calling it a beta for this December 10th is because we learned a lot in this first year of the mobile launch in large part due to the community feedback that we got. I think that we want to be very intentional about how we evolve the PC version, which is why this beta period for us is very critical to just be able to solicit feedback from the community to understand how we can help continue to evolve the PC version itself."

As for parting words, Collins told esports.gg that the team has been doing a lot of cool experiments with events lately, particularly a "holdout" mode where players must survive while a boss' health ticks down. He shared how the Hallow's End event with the Headless Horseman was a hit. Therefore, players can expect more fun, holiday-themed content arriving down the line.

Saraf echoed Collins' enthusiasm for the evolving event system. He then highlighted improvements coming to co-op, raids, and sieges. The goal is to keep making these features more accessible to a larger player base.

"The year has had its ups and downs, the learnings and growth, and everything, and I really feel like we probably wouldn't have been able to have such an awesome set of announcements in Warcraft Direct if it weren't for the community feedback and our team's hustle," Saraf said.

That's all for now. Stick around on esports.gg for more news, interviews, and updates!