Interview with Dave Kosak about WoW in 2012

Videogamer.com has interviewed Lead Quest Designer Dave Kosak about the 2012 timeline in World of Warcraft.

Interview

You can find the whole Interview here, I’ll just mention a few highlights.

• Blizzard is happy with Looking for Raid (LFR) and Transmogfrification
• Raid Finder is the most successful part of 4.3
• Players have enough content to chew on until MoP comes
• We try to bring content faster

Oh well, what can I say? The Patch has been out a good month and the excitement is ebbing down a bit. The Deathwing fight has a shallow taste since we do not actually fight Deathwing, just some tentacles and crap … and in Dragon Soul you simply chop him down from 20% and he does not even fight back.
Of course we haven’t beaten all on heroic, but we have seen it all and while it is still fun I am not sure that will hold „a couple of months more“.
The exact wording is „the three excellent dungeons we have, the new raid, and Raid Finder that should give people something to sink their teeth into for a few months„.

Mists of Pandaria

All expansions so far were at least a 3-4 months on beta. MoP is not even in Alpha stage, yet. This means we still have at least 4 (more likely 5-7 months) before it goes live. Wonder if they can really afford to not bring new content up to then.

Bring new Content faster

If you have read blue posts and dev blogs you have heard that one before. In fact it was one of the goals Blizzard had in mind for Cataclysm. But we had never had in any expansion this little content updates before. WotLK and Catyclysm were roughly released at the same time of the year, but now one year later we have less contentupdates than before.

Wrath of the Lich King

• Obsidian Sanctum, Eye of Eternity, Naxxramas
• Ulduar
• Trial of the Crusader
• The Brood Mother Returns: Onyxia
• Icecrown Citadel
• Ruby Sanctum

Cataclysm

• Blackwing Descent, Bastion of Twilight, Throne of the Four Winds
• Firelands
• Dragonsoul

The locations in Dragonsoul are simply recycled content. Path of the Titans, Wyrmrest Temple, Maw of Go’rath, Maw of Shu’ma, Airship and the Maelstrom with a few Bosses added. Also the Models do not have any new look, just a bit customized, recycled models.
Basically we payed ~72€ on monthly fees to get it.
Recycling old content seems to be the biggest thing in Cataclysm. Shadowfang Keep, Deadmines, Zul’Aman, Zul’Gurub.

Random Heroics

Speaking about these last two instances. The current System for heroics is also a major step back and is part of the daily (weekly) heroic instances System. In Wrath of the Lich King you did get a random heroic daily, but not just from the last 2 published batch. This made the system a lot less boring than the current system. I mean we ran Zul’Gurub and Zul’Aman for 7 months, just these 2 instances, 7 times a week … roughly 210 times … and now we will run End Time, Well of Eternity and Hour of Twilight equally often – yay! I think this is what Dave Kosak referred to „something to sink their teeth into“.

what would I do

To improve the current game I would:

• Fix the Looking for raid Loot System
• Exclude non soulbound items from calculating Item Level
• Introduce a separate PvP Item Level
• Merge all 5 man heroic instances into „Random Cataclysmic Heroic“
• Prepare a new Sanctum at Wyrmrest Temple, in case MoP is still more than 4 months out

And please Blizzard bring content faster! It doesn’t always have to be a new raid or new instances, or a ton of features at once. Sometimes little things help to cover time much better than a whole bunch of content.