Gamespot has a new interview out with four members of the “300 strong” World of Warcraft live team this week, and while the quartet bring up micro-holidays — kind of a lot — there’s also a bit of insight on what the team has learned over the years. Unsurprisingly, they don’t like the word “drought.”
“We know and remember well the narrative or the sentiment from Warlords, where people were very happy at the start and then after that, there were the concerns we heard, that you described, about droughts,” Class Designer Jay Gill says. Senior Designer Paul Kubit explained that the team is trying to address those criticisms with content.
“When working on WoW, we constantly learned from the past expansions–we learned things from Cataclysm going into Pandaria, Pandaria into Warlords, and so on. The big one that we learned from Warlords is we just need to do more patches. We need to keep the game vibrant with content, and the way we do that is by making sure, every couple months or so, we have something new to do. And that’s the point of these .5 patches–it’s to have, even if it’s not the giant raid tier and outdoor farming zone, something new that you can play.”
Lead Class Designer Adam Kugler suggests that the large size of the team is a strength rather than a weakness:
“The nice thing is there’s so many people that work on the team, and they’re all working on something to make the game better, so they have their own spin on what’s making the game better. Sometimes, when we’re looking at what’s coming up in the next patch, I’m like, “Oh, I didn’t even know we were doing that.” There’s so many people that are making new content that I think that there’s just a giant initiative for different directions, different plans of attack to come in and create a different style of content than any other person on the team, and that’s what makes it so strong.”
There’s also a bit on iterating on legendaries, class balance, and front-loading content, and no one says the words “class fantasy” at all! Bonus.
