World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King (PC)

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VideoGamer.com: Fair enough. Back to WotLK. Apart from the Death Knight what are the other headline features?

TC: Well we have the increase of the level cap from 70 to 80. We have the whole continent of Northrend that supports that. Brand new zones. We have all new instances, five man instances as you're levelling up from 70 to 80. We have the level 80 instances, the level 80 raids, both 10 and 25 person. We have a new battleground, two new arenas, a new world PvP zone, we have vehicles, destructible buildings, a new profession...

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VideoGamer.com: So not much then! I played the first expansion, The Burning Crusade, and found that I levelled from 60 to 70 quite quickly. Is it going to feel as quick this time?

TC: I couldn't really gauge whether or not it would feel quick. But our starting point was actually the same amount of time it took in The Burning Crusade to get from 60 to 70. That was how we balanced the Northrend level curve initially. However we ran into a problem where because Northrend has a lot more quests than Outland did, people were getting to level 77 before they even finished the second zone. So what we ran into was the reality that people were out-levelling the content. So we slowed it down. Turns out we slowed it down too much. It got to the point where it just didn't feel good. It just felt really kind of grindy and slow. So as of our last beta push we then sped it up somewhat. It's going to be longer than the 60 to 70 was in The Burning Crusade. But hopefully, I don't feel it will really last a lot longer. It will take a little longer.

JAB: We're trying to let the content help guide us on that. The content density for Wrath of the Lich King is much higher than even The Burning Crusade.

VideoGamer.com: So tell me about Arthas, the game's poster boy. Obviously the end encounter is going to be a mega event. Tell me how that's going to work and the story behind that.

TC: There is quite a bit of story that leads up to it. You experience some of that story when you create a Death Knight. Your very first quest comes from the Lich King. There's also a cinematic moment that nobody has got to see yet in the beta. It's at a location called the Wrath Gate, so there's going to be an event there, and a lot of quests that players do lead to that, and players get to see this cinematic storyline unfold. In-game cinematic, not a CG cinematic. Then in addition to that we'll have the Arthas encounter. But we're not actually going to have players encounter Arthas until the final content patch before our next expansion.

JAB: By encounter Tom means fight. You'll encounter Arthas it's just you won't fight him until then.

TC: Right. So that fight won't happen until near the end because we want a big climax of the expansion. If he's available in the early raid tiers then it kind of feels weird that you kill him, and after that it's like, where are all these other guys? So that's how that is going to progress. But we haven't released any information yet about how the actual fight against Arthas is going to work.

VideoGamer.com: But it'll be epic, right?

TC: It'll be epic!

VideoGamer.com: I remember playing The Burning Crusade for the first time and going through the portal, it was an OMG moment, with a war happening in front of my face. Will it be a similar thing when you first arrive on Northrend?

TC: It is a little different. It's not quite like you've arrived on this huge battlefield. It's more like you've arrived at these strongholds that the Horde and Alliance have created on Northrend because the Horde and Alliance are making an assault on Arthas. So unlike The Burning Crusade where you're entering a world that is being assaulted by the Burning Legion, you're entering a continent where the Horde and Alliance are trying to take the fight to the Lich King. So it is a slightly different feel, but it's very cool because there's more architecture in place, there's a lot of base camps and things like that. All in all Northrend looks really incredible.

VideoGamer.com: It looks like you're going for an expansion every year. Is that something you'll continue going forward?

TC: It's a goal that we have. We haven't really got to that point yet. First and foremost what we do is we sit down when we decide to make an expansion, we decide what features we need to make a Blizzard quality expansion. Once we decide on that feature set we then go figure out how long it's going to take us and take it from there. So we're hoping to get to the point where we can deliver a Blizzard quality expansion in a faster amount of time, closer to every year. Whether that actually happens for the next expansion, I don't know.

VideoGamer.com: A lot of the new content is aimed at high level players who are more hardcore. Is there anything in the expansion for more casual WoW players?

JAB: We've got several features that are going to go for pretty much all levels of player. The biggest one I think is the achievements system. So the achievements system is a record of your past glories. It also can act like other things that maybe you haven't thought about doing. We'll have achievements for dungeon bosses, for high end achievement things, for killing Illidan, for killing Arthas. But we'll also have more social, more whimsical achievements. Achievements for each of our world events, like Hallows Eve, like Wintervale. Achievements for barber shop, getting a hair cut. We'll have exploration achievements for exploring certain parts of the map. So really different types of achievements for all different kinds of players.

VideoGamer.com: Will players be able to check out other players' achievements?

JAB: Yeah. It's actually called compare achievements. So just like the inspect, another option is compare achievements and you get a side by side view of your achievements and their achievements.

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