Tom Chilton reconfirmed to Gamespot Blizzard Entertainment’s desire to launch World of Warcraft expansions faster than they usually do. While no specific timeframes were given, their hopes are between a year or two, but aiming for less than two years.
They invested a couple of years with Cataclysm to bring the content to more quality standards on par with their latest expansions’ technologies, and now that the world has been revamped, they wish to create a yearly expansion — as stated in previous interviews.
Will there be a BlizzCon 2011? It seems so.
Blizzard Quote: | ||
GS: Looking forward, do you see future expansions being just as work intensive? Or do you plan to scale them down? How do you think that will play out? TC: I definitely think that two years was longer than we’d like to see for how long it takes to get an expansion into the hands of players. On this one, we’re willing to accept that and feel like we did the right thing because we’re trying to make the right long-term decision for the game in terms of the quality of the level 1-60 content. But going forward, since we’ve already bitten that bullet, we’re going to try to hit a better pace. Exactly what that pace might be, I don’t know, but I’d definitely like them to hit more quickly than what we’ve done in the past. GS: You’ve said something along the lines of an expansion a year. Is that still the target? TC: That would be probably really close to ideal in my mind. I don’t know that we have the capability to do that. Maybe if we stopped doing content patches completely and just went straight from expansion to expansion, I think we would be able to do that. But we’re still committed to doing content patches, and I think that in some ways makes nailing [every] year infeasible, at least for now. So somewhere in between [a year and two]. | ||