World of Warcraft at Ten Ton Hammer

EverQuest just hit its 10 year anniversary back in March, and this November WoW will be halfway there. Where do you see WoW 10 years after launch?

I’m having déjà vu , did I talk about WoW 2 already? So many people asked me about WoW 2 today. It was like bizzarro world - why would we even talk about something like that? Contrary to the perception of how we do things, we’re working on really only two things at one time on the WoW team. We’ve got the current patch, and maybe we’ll have multiple patches that we’re working on, but pretty much one expansion that we’re working on (in this case, Lich King), and then the next expansion (Cataclysm). That’s about as far as we look ahead.

For us to look much farther ahead is not a good use of our time, because we’re going to be so much smarter when it’s time for us to start thinking of that stuff. We had a lot of ideas for Wrath of the Lich King in terms of what actually became Wrath of the Lich King that were not going to Northrend. We eventually decided that going to Northrend is the right decision after Burning Crusade so that’s what we’re going to do.

Similarly, with Cataclysm, we brought up a lot of those old ideas and said ‘hey, what about these old ideas that we talked about before?’ And we even thought that we were going to do one of them this time, but we ended up not doing it. So doing five more years of pre-planning is not too useful because I’m going to be so much smarter tomorrow than I am today. As a smarter person tomorrow, I can make better decisions about the game.

So [Chris] Metzen isn’t sitting on 5,000 pages of documents?

Man, I know that you guys think that he’s in a room with a light and he sits like this [puts face in hands] and he’s got a book and he’ll pick up the pen once in a while and then he’ll just go back. And then someone will come and get him coffee. And someone will come and take the pages away and say, ‘ hey, we’ve got the new...’ (laughter) It doesn’t work that way.

To be fair to his question, you do have some idea where the game’s going to go though?

Ok, to be fair, I wasn’t going to talk about this, but we do have plans for the zerg to invade. (laughter) And that’s after Tyrael comes through in the portal on the prime material plane of Azeroth. That’s after Outland has crashed into Azeroth.

That’s a story.

Brack - I really have no idea. Anything I say would just be stuff I’m pulling out of my ass, kind of like the stuff I just told you.

Will players be able to play the old content once Cataclysm comes out?

Deathwing is the impetus behind the Cataclysm, so this is not something that happens slowly. It happens instantaneously. So whenever that happens and you log in, you’ll be in the post-Cataclysm world. The old world will go away.

Part of the motivation for Cataclysm is to bring up the quality level of the 20-60 experience. That’s one of the motivating things behind this decision. Given that, it really doesn’t make sense to have you going back to do stuff that is so bad that we actually want to go back and revise it.

[Jason "Medawky" Bolton - Ten Ton Hammer] Many players saw WoW as primarily a PvP game at launch. With the guild achievements system and rated battlegrounds, are you trying to inject more PvP back into the game?

The point for the guild system is just to enable you to play with your friends more. Players love achievements - I don’t mean achievements like the system, I mean achievements like achieving things. They love goals, and the achievement system is just a checklist of things you can go out and do. The point of that is shared goals that you can go out and do with your friends.

One thing that we learned with the more casual arena in Burning Crusade was that it’s easy to get into the trap of thinking that someone is a PvP player or a PvE player. Actually, players just like to advance, and they’ll figure out whatever the easiest way for them to advance is. If the easiest thing for them to do is to go into arenas and lose ten games a week, that’s what they’ll do. If the easiest thing for them to do is to go in and bash their face against Kael’thas for a month then that’s what they’ll do. You have to think of that psychology and figure out how do we incentivize players to do things that help advance themselves. The fact that we have PvP advancement is really kind of what has put a damper on the Southshore / Tarren Mill kind of thing.