Interesting Commentary from Blizzard During the Seoul Invitational

w175jab

I found the following article very interesting... Future of WOW, WOW profits, introduction of WOW to China and the cultural factors involved.  Pretty interesting stuff.  The link to the actual article is posted below.  Enjoy!

Cheers

I asked a Blizzard rep about how the company manages to keep news about projects it's working on so quiet. He said that the company is internally very mum about projects in development. It's all “need to know,” and if you're a mail room guy and you don't need to know, you don't find out until the last possible moment. He also said that if you leak something to the press and Blizz finds out, you're probably going to get fired.

Mike also said something very interesting about WoW. When speaking about the limited projects that Blizzard was capable of working on at the same time, he indicated that there were definitely two that Blizz teams are devoting their time to: Starcraft II and the next WoW expansion. To be honest, I at first thought Mike had made a mistake, and had inadvertently let slip a secret. You see, Blizzard has never stated that they're working on another WoW expansion.

I explored this a bit with a Blizzard representative. He advised me that yes, Blizz is definitely working on a new WoW expansion. A few tidbits on that topic:

One, Blizz never made a big announcement about it. They are not, however, treating this with the characteristic Blizzard secrecy. In short, everyone knows it's being made, and they are willing to talk about the fact that it's being made, even though it's unannounced.

Two, they don't expect the expansion to take 18 months to 2 years in the way that the Burning Crusade did. Instead, they are hoping for a much shorter development cycle.

Three, the delays in bringing TBC to market were a result of two problems. The first was that WoW grew into massive proportions so quickly it overwhelmed the company. Plans for TBC had to be shelved for months while the entire company worked on dealing with how quickly WoW itself was expanding. The second is that, when WoW shipped, it wasn't “done” in the mind of many of the company's developers. It was polished, sure, and it was a complete and workable game. However, while developing WoW they had wanted to include features and zones in the game that didn't ship when the game was released. The devs spent months (and longer) working on putting that stuff into the game even after WoW was released. After that was done, working on the expansion proceeded full bore.

Blizzard is still committed to providing lots of free content to WoW-heads. The big patches, new zones, new dungeons, etc are Blizzard's way of giving free mini-expansions to its customers.

Blizzard loves the people who play its games. Practically every Blizz person we talked to oozed this feeling.

Blizz expects that WoW is going to have a nice, long life cycle. By long, we mean 10 years or more. At first, this struck us as a bit odd, but remember: Starcraft I is 10 years old and is selling well. And UO is now 10 years old, and that MMO is going strong.

Article Here: LINK



EDIT: Fixed the double paragraph... sorry... long nights at uni are wearing me thin. 

Alienovrlord

Blizzard actually lifting their veil of secrecy a little?  That's nice to hear.   This company is like the CIA of the gaming industry when it comes to trying to get info on their projects.  It'll be nice if they start being a little more open, even if it means they won't be able to have all the silly hype like they did with SC2.

shae

Really good move by Blizzard if you ask me.

It's high time they start being a little smarter about letting people know WTH is going on. So many things that were promissed years ago have gone completely ingored because of it's popularity, I don't understand why they've gotten away with this for so long.

As far as a new expansion goes, it's not just nice, it's absolutely needed right now, if not completely. necessary. TBC was ok, but it was more of the same and people are getting hella tired of that from Bliz. Bring in some of the stuff you promissed before release, RTS like cities, gathering of resources for player cities, true zone meaningful PVP, two player mounts and coliding stories.

w175jab

One of the reporters from the UK was actually pissed that he traveled all the way to Korea only to hear nothing of WOW and everything about Starcraft 2.  I found that kind of funny... traveling is awesome... I'd love to get paid to fly around to various game meets for the press or whatever.



"I asked a Blizzard rep about how the company manages to keep news about projects it's working on so quiet. He said that the company is internally very mum about projects in development. It's all “need to know,” and if you're a mail room guy and you don't need to know, you don't find out until the last possible moment. He also said that if you leak something to the press and Blizz finds out, you're probably going to get fired.

Mike also said something very interesting about WoW. When speaking about the limited projects that Blizzard was capable of working on at the same time, he indicated that there were definitely two that Blizz teams are devoting their time to: Starcraft II and the next WoW expansion. To be honest, I at first thought Mike had made a mistake, and had inadvertently let slip a secret. You see, Blizzard has never stated that they're working on another WoW expansion.

I explored this a bit with a Blizzard representative. He advised me that yes, Blizz is definitely working on a new WoW expansion."



I wouldn't say Blizzard is lifting their security at all... General statements were made, but nothing was 'Announced by Blizzard' regarding WOW...  Mike just offered a few tidbits of information that the general public could have already figured out.  Either way, it's moderately exciting and informative in regards to why TBC picked up such a bad rep and the future of the game.

Pietoro

the last couple of paragraphs in the OP are pasted twice, btw.

warror

One thing blizzard should do if they release another expansion is to create new zones throughout the game. The new zones for blood elfs and dranei were very good. I also thought outland was well done. But there is no new content from lvl 20-60. Gear rewards in the new zones was also greatly improved. The gear rewarded in quests in the 20-60 zones should also be improved. Yes they addded alot of content for lvl 60 plus toons but they seemed to forget about the grind before outland.

w175jab

Considering Blizzard felt rushed to release TBC...



 I'm sure the next expansion they release will  be of significantly higher quality.



There are many things people would enjoy seeing being amended, added, ECT.  Hopefully some will make it into the game!



(the double post was corrected btw  thanks Pietoro)