World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Preview

VideoGamer.com: How many achievements will there be?

JAB: We have over 600 right now and there will probably be over 700 by the time that we release Wrath of the Lich King.

VideoGamer.com: And some will be incredibly hard I imagine?

JAB: Oh yeah. Some of them are very easy. Some of them are a lot more difficult.

TC: Part of our philosophy about creating achievements is that we're avoiding creating the kind of achievements that are just huge time sinks. We don't really want the achievements to create really abhorrent behaviour among our players. We don't want them to just decide oh well the game is telling me I need to kill a million bats. We don't find those achievements super interesting even though they've been done in some other games. So we don't really have that kind as a hard achievement. What I would consider to be something like a hard achievement would be win the Arathi Basin battleground 2000 to 0. So it's like, OK, well the Arathi Basin battleground is probably only going to take me 25 or 30 minutes to do, but it's hard to win it so completely.

JAB: The first achievement that we talked about was kill 1000 wolves. And we decided that's a bad achievement. We're not going to do that kind of achievement.

VideoGamer.com: Earlier I asked Frank Pearce about the possibility of bringing StarCraft 2 to console and he said if the chances aren't zero then they're close to zero, but it would be a completely different experience. Is it a similar situation for World of Warcraft?

JAB: Yeah, absolutely. World of Warcraft is designed as a PC game. It's designed to have a keyboard and a mouse. So the controls and the control scheme that you have are very PC centric. If you think about mapping those controls and all those different type of buttons that you have to a console without a keyboard for chatting, it's a very challenging proposition.

TC: It's really not that we have anything against consoles. I mean we love console games also. And I'm sure there will be a successful MMO sometime on a console. So it has nothing to do with that. It's just more like a square peg round hole thing for our game. It just wasn't designed with that in mind.

VideoGamer.com: Funcom with Age of Conan are implementing new technology that allows them to map everything to a 360 controller, and they're also bringing out a 360 version. So people are exploring the idea.

TC: We've actually had players who've found ways to map their controllers to be able to play WoW. And that's cool but we don't think for our game that it's actually a very good experience playing like that.

VideoGamer.com: Wonderful guys. Thank you for your time.

The World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King is due out for PC when it's ready.