An Interview With WoW's Lead Designers

During our visit to Blizzard's HQ in Irvine, CA, we had a chance to sit down with both Jeffrey "Tigole" Kaplan and Tom "Kalgan" Chilton. This wasn't a one-on-one interview, though, so credit needs to be given where it's due. Also in on the interview was Ten Ton Hammer and MMOGAMER. We all took turns grilling both Tigole and Kalgan, to see if we could get any juicy info out of them on the expansion, and to hopefully learn more information gleaned from the demonstration. This is an extremely long, but very informative interview, so buckle up and enjoy the ride.

TTH: I thought it was a pretty interesting decision that you guys decided to go with the dual raiding system thing. How did you decide to go and do that, was it just a lot of community response to we need 10 man and 25 man raids going at the same time or was it just what you saw from the numbers?

JK: No, we wouldn't do anything we saw from the numbers. I think when you look at statistics you can bend them any direction you want, to make a case for or against anything. I think it was really an evolution of a lot of things. You touched on one of the things which was community reaction, another thing was that we were really just trying out the Heroic system with Burning Crusade and getting a feel for it and what would be successful and what wouldn't be.

At the same time with Karazhan, it [Karazhan] in and of itself was a bit of an experiment to treat a 10-person zone like a full-blown epic raiding zone and see how that could come off. It came off pretty well and was very popular, and then Zul'Aman was an evolution of that. "Ok we did this kind of good entry-level 10-person raid." People treated it as raiding, came up with strats for fights, got stuck on bosses for a week or two, and I think Zul'Aman really showed we could do pretty elite raiding at that point and pretty hardcore and epic fights. Fighting a major storyline character like Zul'jin and defeating him with 10 people, that it came off ok.

And then on the flipside of the coin there was a lot of discontent from the 25-person raiding crowd about having to go through Karazhan, having to kill Nightbane. "Hey we're a 25-person raiding guild, that's what we want to do, why are you forcing us to do this other content?" The goal with the 10 and 25 thing is not that we want to have sort of easy mode and that's 10, and then hard mode and that's 25. We really do just want to have two separate, clear progressions. And even within those we want to have easy 10 and 25 raids, and then medium 10 and 25, and hard 10 and 25; we want to have progression through those.

So it seemed like an overall good decision, it also seemed like a way that we could get a lot more people to experience the content, and not just feel like "Why are you making this stuff? It doesn't make any sense to us. Who are these people who go in there; I never see them." So it gives us a way to sort of address a lot of issues at once.

Curse: Touching on that, how drastic are the encounters going to change between 10 and 25 man, because like Naxxramas Four Horsemen may not really be viable in a 10 man, meanwhile 25 it may be more [viable].

JK: Yeah um, the Four Horsemen's actually just a gnome on a puppy dog now [laughing]. It's just Mr. Bigglesworth and we put him in that room. No we definitely recognize that as a challenge to us as a development team; something we need to overcome. What we've been doing is analyzing all the fights in a place like Naxxramas, and trying to come up with what was the heart of what made Naxxramas cool, or the Four Horsemen cool. Was it the fact that you needed lots of tanks? Is that what made the fight cool? Or was it the fact that it took a high level of coordination, the stacking buffs, the movement, and really trying to find the essence of each encounter.

And we'll have to do different things between 10 and 25. Already the Four Horsemen doesn't work in 25-person raiding; we're gonna have to make some changes to the encounter. But what we don't want to do is just come up with the gnome on the puppy dog, or like we don't want to just gut the encounter and start over. We want to hit whatever that core was of the initial 40-person Naxxramas, and then come up with a version that doesn't force weird class composition in the 10 and 25.

One other note about Naxx that I've been trying to communicate to people too is, it's gonna feel very different anyway, even if we hadn't done the 10 and 25 thing because of where we're placing it in the raiding progression. It really is that entry-level raid, so that means it has to be tuned to be more at the bottom of the curve, rather than at the top of the curve where it was before. So Naxx will be pretty accessible in both the 10 and the 25 man versions. And then later on as we get deep into Ulduar and some of the deeper raid dungeons after that, that's when it'll start to get crazy again.

MMOGAMER: So, are 40 man raids gone for good? 25 seems a little low for, say... Arthas.

JK: That's a great question. I don't want to say 40 man raids are gone for good, because if we ever felt like the quality of the gaming experience would be better if we did a 40-person raid, we would do it. I don't know what the right number conceptually is that would defeat Arthas. I could make the same argument for Illidan or Zul'jin. Why are these powerful guys dying to so few? What I hope, and I'm sure the community will correct me if I'm wrong, because they are excellent at doing that. But what I hope is that, in the essence of those encounters, we've captured something that was epic. And for those that were present... sure you might hear "Yeah Illidan died to 25 people and that sounds weird or wrong," but for anybody whose been there and killed Illidan... man was that an epic moment, and that's what we're hoping to deliver on. I want anybody who fights Arthas, whether it's with 10 or 25 or that one guy who figures out how to solo him... god forbid, to say "Man, that was the most epic fight that I've ever been a part of."

TTH: How are you guys handling Death Knight in PvP? It seems like... I wouldn't say an overpowered class, but you're introducing a whole new system with the runes and that sort of thing. How do you guys blend the Death Knight into the current classes as far as PvP goes?

JK: That's a really good question. I was thinking of that when we were watching Tom do the demo, and I'm like "Man this is gonna freak everyone out" when he showed the pull ability, or the chains of ice, or the Death and Decay with the fear going off. I mean, you can see some of the arena implications behind that, but even if we hadn't introduced the Death Knight with Wrath of the Lich King... we have the talent panes disabled on the machines in there, if we were to show you the talent panes right now for the remaining classes, and the new abilities that they're getting... sort of the class balance as you know it today is going to change pretty drastically without the introduction of the new class.

Because we're adding 10 new talent points, new tiers across all three trees for every class, we're adding those new core abilities, and we're also retuning some of the old abilities. Some of those you can probably notice in there, like take a look at Warrior Rend or Thunderclap. There are ones in there that are like old abilities for classes where they didn't use them or felt they were ineffective. We're going to have to rebalance PvP in this expansion anyway, so if anything it's the perfect time to introduce the Death Knight, and then make sure it just works within that balance.

Curse: Resilience was introduced in The Burning Crusade. Can PvP players expect anything new with this expansion?

JK: We haven't finished completely itemizing PvP. Resilience is here to stay, we like the statistic. I don't think we'll be adding anything else to Resilience at this point, it's a pretty powerful statistic, and I don't know if we'll be adding any additional PvP-specific things. Itemization is still up in the air in terms of what exact stats will be PvP desired and PvE, but Resilience is a very clear PvP stat at this point and we're going to continue on that trend.

MMOGAMER: Staying on the topic of PvP, you're adding your first open world zone... some would say Hillsbrad is the first open world zone, but on that subject are the open world PvP zones going to be exclusive to expansion content, or are you thinking about going back and adding them to some of the unused areas in the old world?

JK: Well, that's a great question. I think before we commit to adding open world PvP to the old world, we really want to see how Wintergrasp plays out. We have a really good idea how we want it to play out, and what mechanics we want to work there, and what we don't want it to degenerate into. So we have some pretty good ideas behind that, but before seeing it play out in action we don't want to immediately go back to the old world and affect some of those areas. I hope though that we've proven, like in the patch where we addressed Dustwallow Marsh, that it's on our agenda to hit lots of old world areas whether it's PvP revamps or PvE revamps, and just taking a hard look at the old world and keeping it viable, keeping it cool. It's one of our favorite areas; we put so much time into building it so it's sad when people move on from it.

I'm really excited about Stratholme for that reason actually. The Caverns of Time Stratholme event, I think it's great not just for the War 3 players, since it's based on the culling mission, but just for all the hardcore WoW guys who spent a lot of time at 60, doing a lot of Stratholme runs, it's gonna be cool to see the city pristine as it was.

TTH: How are you handling item inflation and that sort of thing in the upcoming expansion? Because I know with each expansion you have to increase the power level to make players want to get it, but is there a certain point where it becomes ridiculous when you get to higher levels and the shoulder pads can't get any bigger, and the swords can't get any wider?

JK: Our artists have assured us that we haven't even seen the beginning of how big shoulder pads can get. [laughing] We would say that to them, we were like looking at something... "Man that's awesome, but that's the shoulder pads you get when you get off the boat," ... "Artist: Dude don't worry about it, we can go bigger than that." In terms of item statistics, we planned out World of Warcraft with inflation in mind, knowing we were gonna have to inflate the item curve and the power curve of players as the game went on. What we didn't do is just plan 1-60, we planned it out very far. It's always shocking to players, and they sometimes look at it as a mistake in the game where they say "What's going on? The items are inflating!" It's next to impossible to come up with items that are exactly equal in power but for whatever reason you'd want item X rather than Y. So we don't look at the item inflation as a shocking surprise that happens, it's no different from us giving 10 new levels to the character.

We planned for it, we're hoping we can do a better job of smoothing out some of the bumps. Examples are making sure that the green items as you're questing up or the random world green items aren't over-optimized or split too many ways, making sure that the dungeon blues are better than the quest blues so that when you go into a dungeon that has more risk involved to it you feel rewarded better for it, making sure that Heroic dungeons exist on their complete separate tier. We're also obviously going to make 25-person raids far more rewarding than the 10-person raids to keep that sort of prestige to that, and then in the PvP spectrum... season 4 is a good example where really the top gear all has rating requirements on it and you really need to earn that prestigious gear. There will be lesser gear that you can earn out of that system that won't have rating requirements, but it won't be at the insane power level as the current arena gear.

And the same goes for the Honor gear; will be brought much more in-line with the other tiers of content of things that you'll be experiencing. So there won't be these crazy jumps of, you know... "Should I do Black Temple or should I hang out in Alterac Valley and get a pair of boots?"

Curse: Isle of Quel'Danas was honestly probably the best introduction to the game patch-wise; the world event, Magisters' Terrace, Sunwell Plateau, all of that... can players expect events similar to that in Wrath of the Lich King?

JK: I hope so. We do want to do an event to kick off Wrath of the Lich King; it will be different than Isle of Quel'Danas, but I think why Isle of Quel'Danas feels really good to players right now, is we've sort of embraced the philosophy... we've always thought along these lines but we're really trying to prove it through what we deliver in patches, that there isn't a right or wrong way to play WoW. It's not that WoW is about the hardcore 25-person raiders, or WoW is about the guys who like to do dungeons, or WoW is about the guys who like to solo and do quests. All of those players exist in WoW, and none of them are right or wrong, and it's our job to make sure that they're all getting content, and that they feel their way of playing is right and supported. I really hope that that's what Isle of Quel'Danas represents. It really just proves that there's kind of something for everyone out there, and that philosophy is going to translate directly into Lich King with how we're itemizing, and how we do content.

And in terms of the event, we also want to do a "kick off Northrend" event too, and then more events where areas build up... I think that's cool; players feel like they're contributing. We always wrestle with the dynamic event idea; players in MMOs always go "I want to go into the village and burn it down, and from that day forward the village is always burnt down," and like the guy who comes a week later "Dude, where's the village?" ... "Oh it was epic, we burned it down!" ... "Well I wasn't there for it!" But an event like this, you feel like everybody, even if you miss the event, you gain from it having happened rather than feel like something was taken away from you.

MMOGAMER: Probably the number one complaint when speaking to the average WoW player who logs on an hour every night, maybe raid with their guild on the weekend, is once you get 70 their daily existence in the game consists of: farming primals, farming reputation, or doing daily quests... and they seem to feel that's slightly monotonous. Do you personally feel that that's a problem in the game, and if you do, do you have any plans to address it in Northrend?

JK: Yeah, I do think that it's a problem, and it's a very true statement like you said. What I really hope is that getting level 80 is not the end, but just the milestone... a very momentous milestone. I think some of the issues with The Burning Crusade is that the barrier to entry to some of the endgame content was very high, and it made it hard for players who were doing this nice leveling segue through the game. Once they hit the end of the line, they didn't feel like they could make a nice smooth progression through anything... everything felt like a brick wall to them. I want to try to smooth out that progression that takes place when players hit the endgame. Even in the daily quest example, which I think is a great example for players who don't want to go PvP, or they don't want to do 5, 10, or 25-person content, they just want to play by themselves and do quests.

I think we can do a better job with the daily quests. The daily quests that I've really enjoyed lately are things like the fishing daily, the cooking, the battleground, the dungeon dailies because they have randomization in it, so you don't feel like you're in a set pattern of activity every time you log in. I would rather players do daily quests for money than farm primals, which is a very repetitive sort of behavior. So I think we can do things to smooth out what feels like a grind, and make it not the same every day that you log in. That's when it becomes an issue, is when you log in and do the same activity every time, because certainly when you're leveling up that's not your experience.

At about this point, Tom "Kalgan" Chilton entered the room as well.

TTH: My next question has to do with customization -- character customization -- not at the creating a character level, but like with socketing and gem socketing, I think you guys really created something that was very interesting for players, that allowed them more customization for their character after the initial creation process. Are you looking to introduce some more types of those elements in Wrath of the Lich King? I don't know if you're just gonna introduce more gems, or more socketed items, or something completely different... are you planning to do anything like that?

JK: The biggest thing in that regard will be Inscriptions, the new profession which is gonna allow you to modify your spells. That will give players a lot of customization. There are other aspects too, just the new talent trees... being able to spend those points again. Then there are some sort of fluff things like the barber shop, being able to change your hair, change the way your character looks. Do you have any other parts? [directed at Tom Chilton]

TC: Potentially like... Legacy Items; we haven't really talked about those in the past. We are planning to do certain types of items that essentially bind to your account, so they're deliberately created as twink items. So you might be able to find one of these items when you're doing an endgame instance, or a raid, or something like that... and you might get an item that binds to your account and can send that off to your other characters, but it does have to stay within your account. So you can deliberately overpower a character to help level up or whatever.

TTH: Does it go server to server, or is it just on that one single server?

TC: Yeah on that server. You have to still be able to physically give it to that character, or mail it to them, or whatever.

Curse: New battlegrounds... are there going to be any introduced?

TC: Yep, there will be a new battleground. Set up as sort of an attack-defend scenario; features siege vehicles, and destructible building components.

JK: Both sides have to attack and defend.

MMOGAMER: This is a morbid curiosity question. One of the executives at THQ... I think it was last month, said he believed WoW had peaked and from here it was all downhill. I'm sure that was somewhat wishful thinking on his part, but what do you think about that statement?

TC: I think it's inaccurate.

Nethaera: I don't think anybody actually knows where the peak is... you know? We won't know until we get there.

TTH: I have a question since you're here Tom, about the Death Knight. With the Death Knight's DPS and tanking ability, how will Warriors and Paladins continue to have a presence in groups and raids, since there are going to be so many Death Knights when the expansion comes out. There's gonna be like 8 million of them running around.

TC: 8 million level 55 Death Knights; there won't be 8 million level 80 Death Knights. Well, I think in a lot of ways you can actually make the same comparison to Warriors also, as a hybrid DPS/Tanking class, but that doesn't mean necessarily the Paladin has no role in tanking. I think it's in terms of the way we set up their tanking niches. We're kind of designing the Paladin tank to be the best AE tank, and we're designing the Warrior to be the best sheer mitigation tank, and we're designing the Death Knight to be the anti-spellcaster tank. At the same time we want those lines to be blurred enough to where in a 5 man run you won't notice a difference, or all of them should be viable for a Heroic run for example. But at the cutting edge of the competitive endgame, when you kind of cross into that spellcasting boss, you'll probably want the Death Knight to tank it, for example.

TTH: Sorry to follow up, but why'd you decide to make another tank class?

TC: Well, we felt like that's where the biggest need was, as far as the whole looking for group activity. We felt like the Death Knight both fits the kit of the Northrend expansion, and also fills the biggest need. Seems like most often people are looking for a tank, and then possibly a healer after that.

Curse: Going back to Daily Quests really quick, you said that you want to introduce a lot more for the expansion and have them there at launch. Is this for leveling as well as max-level, for max-level, or?

JK: We've actually experimented in the build... I don't know if you guys got to any of them, but we're trying it out and having some Daily Quests in the level-up experience, which is something we have never had before. We want to make sure it plays out as a cool bonus if you happen to be in the area, but not as a driving force to keep you in the area. So we're gonna keep a real close eye on that in the Alpha and the Beta to make sure that you're not hovering around one area just because there are dailies there. But we are gonna try new things with the dailies.

At this point, Jeffrey Kaplan departed, as his schedule saw many more interviews throughout the day. Thanks for taking the time to talk with us, Jeffrey!

MMOGAMER: I remember elite classes or something that were mentioned back in beta, and then on the upcoming features page since that was launched. Is it going to take 4 more years to see the next one?

TC: It could, I don't know. We'll have to see how the Death Knight goes in terms of how well does it slot in with the overall kind of scheme of the classes. Really what's taken so long is that one of our core values is we have distinct character classes, and I think on some level the original idea of Hero Classes and have all this kind of forking Hero stuff that would go on, like each class could go on to become one of multiple Hero classes was... that was kind of what our imagination was before we even shipped the game, but the realities of... ok if we want the game to ship, we have maintain the integrity of the game and make sure we don't screw it up over night by tripling the number of character classes in the game all of the sudden, or even adding two or three of them at a time. So really looking, now that we've had a couple years to look at how character classes play out, we don't feel comfortable adding several character classes to the game at once.

So with the Death Knight there's a very specific role we want it to fill, and we feel like it fits the kit of the expansion very well so we're doing that, and kind of watch and see how it plays out. If it doesn't cause huge problems for us, then in the future if it feels like, hey there's a need for some other kind of hero class to fill this particular role, or we have this really cool idea for this Hero class, and we do, there are several different hero classes that we have different ideas for, then you know... the time might be right again to introduce another one. But how long that might be exactly, I don't know.

TTH: Can you tell us a little bit more about the PvP vehicle system, or the vehicle system in general? I saw a little bit of it from playing in there, and it's pretty neat, but how is that going to work in PvP and how's that going to work just in the general world, and that sort of thing?

TC: Right, right. So, the vehicle system we're in the process of integrating physics into it. We'll have a variety of different vehicles and they have different kind of handling characteristics. Some of them are one-man, fast-moving Forsaken Catapult kind of thing, or the lumbering Demolisher that packs more of a punch but doesn't move as quickly or turn as quickly. We have different dynamics going on like that, we have flying vehicles, kind of like as flying machine that's like fast... kind of like a bomber where one person drops bombs and the other guy is flying it around. What we do is kind of integrate them into Lake Wintergrasp and the new battleground in a way where, what we'd like to achieve is that everybody feels like they have a chance to use vehicles, but not everybody is in a vehicle all the time. So we want it to be pretty fast-paced, we want players to be in a vehicle and blow each other up, be out of a vehicle and fight normally, go back to using a vehicle, etc.

So we want players to mix it up quite a bit; we're hoping to keep the action pretty fast-paced, trying to keep it pretty simple to get a vehicle, and pretty accessible. Because it can also equalize the playing field between if a player doesn't have very good PvP gear, once he's in a vehicle his class and his gear doesn't matter anymore. So it gives him a shot to have a lot of fun and participate on a meaningful level without having all that.

Curse: Ok so Death Grip being able to pull mobs and players to you. You also mentioned that knockback effects can affect mobs in the expansion. Is that kind of hinting that other classes may be able to do it too?

TC: Indeed, indeed. It's quite likely that somewhere for a couple different classes we'll probably make use of the knockback mechanic. So, yeah... you can probably expect that.

MMOGAMER: With Naxxramas moving into Northrend, do you guys have any plans to makeover any of the older pre-expansion dungeons, and move them up to level 80? I wouldn't mind doing Blackwing Lair again.

TC: Right, right... exactly. Heroic version of them, etc. We do still have ideas for doing that, but it just comes up to when the time is right. We've definitely thought of it as the way to add endgame 5-person content in subsequent content patches. The idea is definitely possible, but we don't have any specific, kind of concrete, yes this is when this patch will happen.

TTH: In this expansion you seemed to place a lot of emphasis on your environments, like you know making them different elevations, making them slopy, putting lots of different environments in a small space. Was that, I mean it was obviously a conscious thing, why'd you decide to go down that route instead of having like an expansive zone?

TC: Well, it all comes back to our original kind of WoW level design philosophy as far as varying the environments and keeping things interesting for players.

TTH: This even seems more extreme than The Burning Crusade was.

TC: Yeah, yeah... we actually are trying to push it more. We feel like the landscape has to feel cohesive; you should be able to look around and not feel like it was just a kid with a paintbrush. But at the same time, within that, we really want to vary the environments as much as we can get away with, because otherwise the environments will feel oppressive, monotonous, and it just starts to get boring to see the same things over and over. And it gives the world a better feeling of being alive and dense... a lot of games out there, they have kind of big open landscapes, it always kind of felt like there wasn't anything going on in the world. So we feel like it's important to make sure that every little nook and cranny where possible feels like something kind of carefully detailed.

Curse: With all the changes you're introducing -- 10-person instances for every raid instance -- can we expect a similar shift for the Arena and Honor systems, where the Honor system is basically the equivalent of 10-person, and Arena is 25?

TC: Certainly the itemization is going through some changes to reflect that. The way we have it set up is, the highest end of the Arena gear and some of the Honor gear that has Arena requirements on it will actually be equivalent to 25-man raid instances. So when Season 1 starts for level 80 Arenas, the best stuff that has really high rating requirements, kind of like what you're seeing for the Season 4 rating requirements, will mirror the 25-man Naxxramas quality. Then we'll have a middle tier that's below that, that has lower rating requirements and is much cheaper, but it parallels the 10-person raiding quality. And then we're also going have a tier below that of PvP gear, that has no requirements at all, and it parallels the Heroic dungeon quality gear. So we do plan to start out with multiple tiers right out of the gate, and we're going to make sure that the best stuff also feels, from PvP, kind of equivalently difficult to get as the best stuff from PvE. So we're trying to equalize the balance a bit better.

MMOGAMER: When the Reputation system for PvP Battlegrounds was first implemented, I remember everybody in my guild being very excited to go out and get this reputation, yadda, yadda, yadda... it's gonna be great. Within one or two weeks it devolved into a 'Korean leveling grind' where they weren't even concerned about the PvP anymore, they just wanted to get in and farm the team. I'll be honest, I haven't played WoW in about a year, but the people I've spoken to seem to maintain that that is still the case.

TC: Well, certainly not with Reputation. The Reputations for Battlegrounds don't really do almost anything anymore... they just get you a title. But you can make the argument that it's that way for Honor now, where players will try to do Battlegrounds very repetitively to try to maximize their honor-per-hour. We've done a few things over the last year to try to mix that up, for one the introduction of the Battleground Daily Quests, so that it can be very beneficial to go in there and do your one Battleground per-day because you get a whole bunch of extra bonus Honor for doing it and some gold. Then any subsequent Battlegrounds you do are worth the normal amount of Honor. So we're trying to do things like that to help the more casual players who don't want to feel grindy or don't want to be compelled to grind, to help them get the rewards they want by spending a little bit of time. So we'll probably do more of that kind of thing in the expansion, also I think a lot of it is that we have to make sure to vary up the content.

We're adding another Battleground with Lich King and we're also adding Wintergrasp, so those are almost like adding two new Battlegrounds there. The more different places and ways people play, the less grindy it feels.

TTH: What tier level is the equipment going up to in the next expansion?

TC: Well, it'll start off at like tier 7 quality gear, or tier 8. It depends on whether or not you consider Sunwell to be sharing another tier of gear, and then Ulduar beyond that will be another tier of gear. There are even tiers within that for the 10 and 25-person, so while the art is shared between the 10 and 25-person instances, there are color variants of it, so for example you'll be able to see the difference, but thematically it's the same. Also the sets within that tier, within that instance, work with each other. So a lot like right now the Season 1 Gladiator, Season 2, Season 3 are all part of the same armor set, you can mix and max the pieces and still get the set bonuses. That will be the case for 10 and 25 man instances, so with Naxxramas 10 and 25, if you have the leggings from the 10 man zone and the chest piece from the 25-person zone, you'll be able to wear them together and get the set bonus.

Curse: Something that just popped into my head regarding the 10 and 25 for each raid instance. Are you concerned that guilds at the cutting edge will put together 10-person groups just to learn encounters, and then take that knowledge into the 25-person instances?

TC: Yeah, we have talked about that possibility. One thing we're also talking about doing -- we haven't finalized it yet -- but one possibility would be that the instance actually has to be defeated by somebody on that server in 25 man mode before it can be unlocked for 10 man. With of course some kind of fail safe, so that if some amount of time goes by and it still hasn't been beaten, it would unlocked for the 10-person anyways, just in case there doesn't happen to be a guild on the server that's capable of doing the content. That is definitely a concern we're actively talking about how to approach.

MMOGAMER: The thing that perked my ears up the most during the demonstration this morning, was that the Arthas encounter would not be patched into the game until the end of the Wrath of the Lich King cycle. Does that mean we might see the third expansion announced before players are able to fight Arthas?

TC: No, it would definitely be in a patch that happens before the third expansion. But the idea is that it would be the final patch before that expansion. Oh I see... before he actually dies. Not likely because it tends to be those patches come out far enough in advance of the expansion launch so that if players haven't beaten it, it's because we mis-tuned the encounter in some way, and we get that fixed pretty quickly. Some good examples would be Naxxramas... you know, it came out several months in advance of The Burning Crusade launch, and it was a huge, huge raid instance, but players still got through it and killed Kel'Thuzad. A good chunk of guilds were able to do that before the expansion launched.

TTH: So you also, in the presentation, talked about different kinds of raids and loots that would be dropped in 25 man versus 10 man. Do you think there's going to be any kind of backlash from people that enjoy doing 10 mans more, since there's gonna be better loot in the 25 man raid, or are they just gonna be content with having x amount of raids?

TC: Well, you can argue that that's kind of the case already. Zul'Aman loot isn't as good as Black Temple loot, so I don't think it violates our expectations too much. As long as they're getting content at the same time as the 25 man raids are getting content, then I don't think it's too much of a problem. When Ulduar is opened up for players they'll be able to do it in 10 man very quickly thereafter, and the same goes for subsequent raid zones.

If you haven't had a chance yet, be sure to check out our recap of the demonstration's key points, as well as 10 new Wrath of the Lich King screenshots