World of Warcraft Interview
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VideoGamer.com: With patch 3.2 there's a new 80 player battleground called Isle of Conquest. Tell me about it.
TC: What we're trying to do is create another epic-feeling battleground. We haven't done that since Alterac Valley, other than Wintergrass, which of course isn't instanced, so it's sort of in its own category. Alterac Valley is one of our most popular battlegrounds. We hadn't done another one like it because they tend to be harder to build and test, especially harder to test. With a battleground like Warsong Gultch, for example to take the other extreme - much easier for us to test. Even within the design team we can get together a 10 versus 10 fight, test it out, quickly iterate on it and then feel pretty confident that it's going to be good when it gets released. It's much more difficult for us to do that. We do have the QA manpower but it's a lot harder to organise. At the same time there's a strong desire among a lot of players to see more things like Alterac Valley. So we're trying to take a lot of the best ideas from some of the different battlegrounds, like Alterac Valley and Arathi Basin, and even Wintergrass with the siege vehicles, and create a new battleground that feels epic and different than the other ones. You're doing things you don't always do in any other battleground. There's getting into a Zeppelin and flying the gunship and shooting the cannons from there and parachuting off into their base and all kinds of mayhem.
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VideoGamer.com: Another thing I asked you when we spoke last year was about the graphical issue. You mentioned then that Blizzard games tend not to be focused on graphics, more on gameplay. Does that mean that there will never be a need for a Warcraft sequel? Will you be able to make do by iterating on the game with expansions that slightly improve the graphics each time?
TC: I don't really know the answer to that yet. I don't feel like right now would necessarily be the right time to be creating a World of Warcraft 2. There may well be a day when that's the right thing to do. For now the right way to approach it is for us to continue doing that iterative improvement. And I also don't think that the right way to necessarily do it is with a big graphical overhaul expansion. Like we've talked about before we've seen other games do that and not do very well, because just making such a radical visual change to the game in the middle of its history, it's very hard to pull off.
