World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade Q&A

Senior VP of product development at Blizzard sat down and chatted with CvG about the upcoming (November/December-ish) Frank Pearce expansion to World of Warcraft, The Burning Crusade. Everytime I try to play any current PC games on my PC, it spits in my face and insults my mother but I'm sure fans of the WoW franchise would appreciate the info. Nothing too earth shattering was relvealed but Pearce does give a look into what you can do once the new areas open up and why they aren't including Hero classes with this expansion. One thing he doesn't go into is the world event that causes this Dark Portal to open up. For that goodness, you'll need cold, hard cash.

A tidbit:

Blizzard said recently that the plan is to release WoW expansions on a yearly basis...

Frank Pearce: That's our goal.

How set in stone is that plan, and how far into the future are you looking in terms of overall WoW development?

Frank Pearce: Well, the goal is concrete. That's our goal, and we've publicly stated that. Whether or not we'll be able to achieve that goal remains to be seen. An expansion set of the scope of The Burning Crusade is a lot of content to deliver on, on an annual basis. We're working to improve our production methods, to try and be more efficient on delivering and creating quality content. But at the end of the day, the quality of the experience is more important than the timeline it's delivered in. It's our goal to do it in that timeline but, if it's not ready, then... [sounds, on our dictaphone, like someone was eating a big bag of crisps at this point so we couldn't quite hear what was said. No one was actually eating a big bag of crisps, but that's what it sounds like].

And as far as how long we'd do that, that depends on the community, right? Because if players are playing WoW, we certainly want to continue to support it.

[pic from WoW site]