Today Curse had the opportunity to participate in Blizzard's second fansite summit, and one of the treats of the day was a chance to sit down and have lunch with Blizzard developers -- including Jeffrey Kaplan and Tom Chilton -- both Lead Designers of the game.
We had a chat with Kaplan in a round table-style discussion where he shared a few pieces of information previously not known. First of all, the big news: the Ashbringer storyline is currently planned to be resolved in patch 3.3. Now the bad news: you'll be sitting on the edge of your seats for a few months, because when that patch is coming out wasn't shared.
From there Kaplan spoke a bit more about the patch cycle for Wrath of the Lich King. Arthas is the story that will culminate the expansion, but there are a few surprises planned that he wasn't willing to discuss just yet.
3.1 -- the first major content patch of the expansion, which is already done according to Kaplan -- will release the Ulduar 10 and 25-person raid instances, with 3.2 containing that secret surprise raid instance, and 3.3 likely being the patch that introduces Icecrown Citadel.
Next up someone at the table asked about the dance studio, how that came to be, and when we can expect it. "After Lich King releases for sure," Kaplan said. The team wants to do it, but adding even a single dance animation for a race takes as much time as creating a new creature for the game. So for every development cycle, they must weigh which will be used more. However, the ultimate goal is to get the dance studio system in, and one of the desires is to allow players to not just choose a new dance, but string together multiple dance moves to create their dance.
Another future goal is to add more substance to the guild system. While the team feels the new calendar feature added with Wrath of the Lich King offers a lot of new possibilities to guild planning and organization, there is still work to be done. To that end, there are ideas being tossed around related to Guild Ratings, where a guild receives a rating based on their PvE and PvP accomplishments.
We then ended the discussion with a topic of some of our favorite raid encounters, and one member of the table mentioned C'thun. Kaplan then went on to tell us how the C'thun encounter is one of his favorites to actually watch, because it's one of the more enjoyable encounters in the game to sit back and watch players raid since so much is going on.
We were also treated to a story of the C'thun "stomach" mechanic and how it was originally planned for the Onyxia encounter. "But we'd already thrown the kitchen sink in," Kaplan said [in terms of encounter mechanics], so Blizzard decided to save the idea for later. It turned out C'thun was a perfect fit for it.
We were also treated to a tour of the Blizzard campus, but unfortunately weren't allowed into any of the development area as the World of Warcraft team is already working on something new. Kaplan mentioned that they're always 3 patch cycles ahead of the live game in terms of content design, as well as typically working on the next expansion. Take that for what you will!
We'll hopefully have some pictures from the visit to the Blizzard campus up soon.
