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WOW : Interview : Wrath of the Lich King
Four years ago, World of Warcraft was released to the masses and Blizzard expected a player base of around 1,000,000 at peak. Roll the clock forward and we have the single most successful MMORPG, boasting 10,000,000 active subscriptions and the game is still getting bigger. In 2007, Blizzard Entertainment released the first expansion for World of Warcraft - The Burning Crusade. In this expansion, we were treated to new abilities and spells, new talents, new levels, a whoe new continent and much, much more. The expansion was a hit, selling over 2,000,000 copies in the first 24 hours but for all the success it saw, there were still a lot of things to be learned from this frist expansion. Now it is 2008 and we are expecting to see the second expansion for World of Warcraft at some point in the next 12 months. It looks like there are things that have been learned and yet more to learn from this new content rich add on. CVG sat down with Jeff Kaplan, the Lead Designer for World of Warcraft and talked to him about what the future holds. Jeff Kaplan: When people heard the expansion was going to be set in Northrend, they freaked out, saying 'No, I can't go to a continent that's all snow!' Just visually alone, we've made sure that all the zones are not full of ice. For example, the Howling Fjord is completely green, and it's modelled after the Redwood Forest on the Pacific north-west. There's another zone called the Borean Tundra that has typical autumn colours, and we're really going out of our way to make sure the zones are visually distinct. Another cool part of Northrend is the big PvP zone. It's about the size of Westfall, and will be all-PvP - in no way, shape or form will we support PvE players in it. It'll be optional, but it'll be completely non-instanced, have multiple objectives, siege weapons, and destructible buildings. |
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