More news is emerging from the Blizzard summit in Irvine this week. Kotaku’s World of Warcraft interview touches on a number of topics, including Nostalrius and legacy servers (not much new there; Blizz is still at “cool ideas, but they are actually hard to execute”) and how expansions are plotted out and paced (yes, Blizzard really does have the next two expansions planned, and no, it doesn’t know how many years apart they’ll be).
But the most interesting revelation was Tom Chilton’s response to the question about the fact that there have been only two — two! — content patches since the launch of Warlords of Draenor a year and a half ago.
“We certainly have a richer patch content lineup plan for Legion. We ended up not being happy with the amount of patch content that we did for Warlords. Some of it was because we believed that we were going to make Legion faster than we were actually able to, and so when we were planning the patch cycle for Warlords, we were being aggressive. We thought, ‘OK this time we’ve got our ducks in a row and we’ll be able to make the expansion faster and so we won’t be able to fit in more patch content.’ We just ended up being terribly wrong about that.”
Chilton explains that scaling the team for an expansion and the resulting training of new team members is one of the culprits. “One of the things we have a tendency to underestimate is that even though we scaled up the team a fair amount to be able to do more stuff, what it allowed us to do was more stuff in a similar amount of time, not the same amount of stuff faster,” he says.
