World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Interview
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Talking about the possibility of new careers leads naturally into Mark Jacobs' recent comments on your focus on the live game. While you have had discussions about what will be in the expansion, that's not something you're focusing on right now. What you just discussed as far as not feeling the need to put in additional classes, does that tie into this same 'focus on what you already have' mentality?
Josh: Yeah, we will never expand the live game simply for the sake of expansion. We will never develop another expansion just so we can put another box on the shelf. For us, expansions represent a strategic element of the ongoing lifecycle of this product. If you're familiar with what we did on Dark Age of Camelot, it was always a mix of free live content updates and occasional retail expansions.
We generally feel that for a game like this, that's only been out for a couple of months, it's far more appropriate for us to be focusing on adding new content in a way that doesn't cost the players additional money. In these rough economic times the last thing we want to do is force our players to shell out another fifty bucks to continue playing the game.
We want to reward their loyalty, we want to show we're dedicated to the ongoing quality of the product we already have on the market, and we want to leverage all the resources we've got. We have an entire team here that's already worked their fingers to the bone on this game. Adam has no fingers left, he just has two stumps he uses to beat on the keyboard. These people have worked so hard for the last few years, we want to make sure that content is given enough attention.
A game like ours, because it has so many different features in it, we were aware it was going to require constant adjustment and changes as the game matures. You'll start to see that in patches like 1.1. This patch is, in many ways, focused on improving the mature game. It's focused on making sure the experience is not just a weird retro-fitted version of what we launched with. These are living breathing systems that change over time. A responsible developer will recognize it's not on the player to shell out money to keep the game running. It's the developer's responsibility to make sure the game is fun and exciting.
Expansions should be different from this baseline; they should represent a unique and special addition to the existing content. That will come well into the future.
Adam: We like free stuff.
