An Expansion a Year May Be a Pipe Dream
Most of you may know that Blizzard has publicly stated that they wanted to produce WoW expansion at a 12 month pace, or once a year. So far, with WotLK, we’ve seen that this hasn’t happened. GamesIndustry.biz recently interviewed Blizzard’s Senior Vice President Frank Pearce and asked him directly if an expansion a year was still the goal:
Q: Is producing a World of Warcraft expansion every year still an ambition and do you feel any extra pressure to do that now that companies, such as Turbine, have said they will?
Frank Pearce: I don’t think we would impose pressure on ourselves to do something like that based on what other companies are doing. Ultimately we want to do what is right for the franchise and what is right for Blizzard as an organisation. Ideally our goal would be to ship one with the regularity of 12 months or so, but we’re so ambitious with the type of content that we want to put it makes a difficult challenge, especially when you mix in content patches and developers working on the content patches are the same developers working on the expansions. that’s how we maintain consistent quality across that content.
We’d like to be able to deliver them on a tighter schedule but ultimately we want to make sure the content is right. We’re constantly trying to do things to improve that efficiency, a lot of the tools that we’ve developed internally at this point are commercial quality in terms of development tools. We have a whole team of programmers, probably six or seven programmers, devoted to developing tools full time. We’ll look at the scope of content for future expansions and try to pick a list of features and the amount of content that we can deliver on a more timely schedule but also still meet everyone’s expectations in terms of what they want out of a boxed WoW expansion.
You can read the full interview over at GamesIndustry.biz
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oh well, like i voted. doesnt matter to me as long as the expansion is of good quality.
[...] Random Feed wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptMost of you may know that Blizzard has publicly stated that they wanted to produce WoW expansion at a 12 month pace, or once a year. So far, with WotLK, we’ve seen that this hasn’t happened. GamesIndustry.biz recently interviewed Blizzard’s Senior Vice President Frank Pearce and asked him directly if an expansion a year was still the goal: Q: Is producing a World of Warcraft expansion every year still an ambition and do you feel any extra pressure to do that now that companies, such as Turbine [...]
As long as they don’t rush anything, they took their time with Wrath, and look at the result… pure tons of massive amounts containing nothing but cool, fun and great stuff. I’d rather wait a few years for more expansions like this, then to see Blizzard start racing against other companies, resulting in not-even-half finished expansions with poor quality and features. Thumbz up Blizz!
I wouldn’t like this at all. As a player who likes to take time, enjoy the game and the people in it, pushing out expansions every year would throw everything from a “relaxed” point to a “messed up” point for me… where as one day I could hang out with friends until a raid because I felt comfortable with the game, if expansions were being pushed out too often, I would feel a constant need to be doing something… or perhaps I would feel as most of the community feels now… that the game is going into a pre-Expansion depression. Economy is hurting, it’s hard to sell things, most instance groups are either hyped and tense or utterly lethargic. Even while it’s wonderful for there to be new content, and I’ve enjoyed Blizz’s implementing new in-game activities to get us into the “expansion groove”, on the other hand having it too often would ruin the gaming experience for quite a lot of people, especially the ones with a tighter budget.
I think 18-24 months would be a more idle schedual, I don’t know about others but I have like 5 70 alts (would have more but I had a habit of getting up then deleting then getting up then deleting until a good chunk into BC. Main reason I have so many alts is because back last Nov when I had my first 70 that I didn’t get up to just 69 and restart I figured that by the time I geared it would be junk, Though yes lots of us have 70s and it only takes like 1-3weeks to level 10 times if playing casual there are people who are leveling for the first time given any expansion so giving say 3 months to level 3 months to gear and 1.5years to level alts raise professions what not is a good amount of time to make it so it doesn’t feel like those 100’s of hours in AV whernt to last only for a short time.
I think that the current 2 years per expansion is a bit slow. 18 months is probably better. Generally, the big guilds are near the endgame at release +6 months sometimes release +9 months. For me (not in a big guild) BC lost momentum in the Spring of this year. I had run about all the content we were going to run. I had BG’ed and Arena’ed about all the stuff I could. I had made some more alts. At that point boredom set in.
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