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Blizzard Interview - EU Press Tour July 2007

Every year Blizzard head across the pond to show their latest game developments to the press and earlier this week Blizzard arrived in Germany to show the Burning Crusade. Our German partner site Worldofwar.de was on hand to get the low-down on the expansion from Blizzard's Frank Pierce.

You decided to give the horde the Paladin and the community's response to the news was massive. People are concerned about the balancing. Are there any differences in the classes depending on the faction? what's is the future for the game as there appears to be no difference.

There won't be any notable distinction between the classes available to the Alliance and Horde but in terms of PvP, battlegrounds and the war and all that stuff, it's all still there. I don't think that because we have this class cross-over that we're going to see any drop-off in the amount of PvP, because at the end of the day, they are still warring factions. I still hate the Alliance as much as I did before :)

Certainly, the community was very vocal about the announcement and that's healthy. We want to hear what the community has to say, they wouldn't be so vocal if they didn't care about the game and so in that respect it's good to know they care so much about the game.

We know there are two new races but what helped you decide not to implement two new classes?

When the Burning Crusade finally launches and everyone has a chance to see it, I think when they look at the quantity of content that we're going to deliver, no one is going to be dissapointed with the quantity of content. We have a big long list of things we'd like to do for the game, a new class or new classes is something that's on that list, it's just a factor of if and when we get to it becasue there's a LOT of things we want to get to. The content for this expansion, the Blood Elves and Draenei, really ties in well with the Outlands because of the war from Warcraft III and how that's all unfolded because the Outlands were formelly part of the Draenor and so it's the Draenei homeworld. It was a very cohesive unit as relating to the Burning Crusade and it's a lot of content so another class on top of that means a lot of work.

One criticism has been the lack of 'casual content' at level 60 so you're forced to raid, are you aware of this problem and in the BC will you address that?

Yeh, we're certainly aware of the fact that people feel like their options diminish somewhat when they get to level 60, and that is really where want to leverage the winged dungeons. We want people to have content they can consume in whatever time they have available so that they don't feel they have to raid for four hours at a time. It's something we're aware of and something we want to address and hopefully some of the stuff we're doing the he BC will help with that.

In the BC you can level to level 70. Once a player reaches level 60 will they be able to level to level 70 immediately? Because over the last one and half years you've built a lot of level 60 content so what about this content? When you level through level 60, 61 and so on. Do you have have to go to Molten core for example.

You don't have to, in Outland there will be enough zones and quests and content to take you from levels 60 to 70 but certainly if you would like to spend time in Molten Core or Blackwing Lair during the process of going from 60 to 70 you won't be prevented from doing that.

Will there be new talent trees?

No we're expanding the existing trees. There's three trees right now for each class and there will two additional tiers or rows of talents at the bottom. So once you've mastered a tree there will be two rows of abilities below that so you won't have mastered a tree until you have mastered the two new rows below the last row currently in the game. So we're expanding the current trees specifically with two rows in each tree. I am not sure what the plans are because we haven't worked out al the details, we may disperse some additional new ones, because if we only added two rows we would have limited options on that third row from the bottom so it;s possible there may be additional talents at the lower ends.

We hope to release some additional info on this in the near future.

In Naxxramas you implemented the tier 3 set, can we expect a tier 4 in Burning Crusade, or tier 5 etc

Well, I don't know but there will certainly be epic gear sets going forward. Generally the gear sets are very well received and it's not a philosophy we plan to deviate from any time soon. You can see that with the Scourge invasion world event, there's some gear sets. Everyone loves gear sets so we don't plan to deviate from this,

You have put a lot of investment into server structure and you have new hardware but what are you're plans for the future? Because there will be a time after WoW, and do you plan on multiplayer games like WoW in the future?

When you look at the infrastructure for WoW our hope is that WoW will have a very long life span, if you look at other online RPG's they enjoyed a very long life span and we hope to also enjoy that success so the hardware is going to be used for a while because if we do anything with games in the future we would use this hardware anyway. Going forward, we're talking about what's next for Blizzard, we got a couple of projects in development that we haven't announced yet

So you see the future of gaming as online gaming?

For Blizzard Entertainment online gaming has always been the foundation for what we do going all the way back to 1994 when we released the first Warcarft, it had a multiplayer component, although it wasn't online. Online gaming is the foundation for us . Whether it's exclusively an online game like WoW, whether it's a subscription based model, an online component is important for us. With an online component a community evolves.

There are so many MMORPGs in development, do you think there is a market for all these games?

When Wow launched in Europe the complete subsciption base across all online RPGs was in the 100s of thousands and everyone thought that was the extent of the market and when we launched WoW everyone found out that wasn't the case so I think there's still room for this market to grow if the game is good, I think that good games and competition in that space is important for the gamers because it ensures gamers will get quality games.

Are there any plans to expand the guild system in the game, such as player housing

Guild housing is not on the list for the Burning Crusade, it's one of those features that someday we'd like to get to. As far as developing the guild system further. I'm not quite sure what our plans are for the Burning Crusade. Dependoing on the feature, it may not be something that needs to wait for an expansion set if you look at the things we have done since we launched with all sort of features, v1.12 is a big deal, so we'll continue to do patches and also

At Blizzcon it was mentioend that trading Burning Crusade Items outside of the Outlands wouldn't be possible? What is the current situtation with items from the expansion as far as trading is concerned?

If it's portable content that can be sold at the auction house it's accesible to everyone, the only thing would be like gear from the Outlands is probably going to have level requirements higher than level 60. So you as a level 60 player would be able to acquire it but not equip it because of the level restrictions.

But then at the same time there is going to be content from jewel crafting and the jewel crafting stuff is something that will be available to all players. There's going to be a lot of stuff people will have access to, new recipes and stuff. Keep in mind that even when we do live content updates going forward, we want to make them available to players of all levels. A subscriber is important to us whether they purchased the BC or not.

Will there be a BlizzCon this year?

Not this year but we will be doing a BlizzCon again at some point.

Any news on Starcraft 2? *laughs*, Well it was worth a try ;)