World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Interview

GameSpy was able to track down Blizzard's Tom Chilton and J. Allen Brack at the Leipzig GC and chat with them about World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King.
GameSpy: Lots of MMOs that are focusing their efforts on PvP. What are you doing with Wrath of the Lich King to stay competitive in terms of PvP?
Tom Chilton: Obviously we're trying something new with Wintergrasp. Players will get the chance to try that very soon, when we fully implement it in the beta. Players can get in there now, but they can't do anything since we haven't implemented it.


Whether or not that really keeps us competitive with games entirely designed around PvP, like Warhammer, we have yet to see. We're not changing the philosophy of the game itself. PvE is a huge, huge part of the game, if not the biggest part of the game. If other games turn out to have ideas that work very well, it's certainly something we can draw inspiration from and work on, but we don't have any immediate reactionary plans.

I think we'll have incremental improvement in our PvP game. I think that the way that we do our itemization for PvP vs. PvE is a little more smoothed out than it was with The Burning Crusade. It probably feels a little more equitable as far as how hard they are to achieve. Then also, the innovation in new styles of gameplay takes us one more step ahead of what we're currently doing.

It's kind of cool, because I don't think any of the other games out, like Age of Conan or Warhammer Online, have something we have. They have the ability to build siege, but it's stationary from what I'm aware of. You build it on a pad, and that's all it does, while we have vehicles that you can drive around.