When you've just released the third expansion to your massively successful online game, what should you do? Take a vacation? Write a screenplay? Dive into a pool full of cash?
If you're Blizzard, you start thinking about expansion number four.
"I think in an ideal world... We've talked before about what it would take to have an expansion come out every year, or something like that," lead systems designer Greg Street said to Eurogamer. "If we delivered on expansions more often, I think players would love that."
A concept for World of Warcraft's fourth expansion is already in the works, Street added, noting that the team is "super excited" about its direction.
World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, the game's third expansion, officially launched Tuesday. In Cataclysm, a gigantic dragon named Deathwing has completely devastated the land of Azeroth, irreversibly changing the entire game's landscape and structure. The expansion also increases the game's level cap to 85, adding a host of quests and items as well as two new races.
So will the company aim to pump out an expansion a year? Street doesn't think so.
"The risk is that we try to come out with a leaner expansion more often and we end up cutting features or making it shorter and then still taking two years," he said. "That would be... we can't do that. So you either have to deliver on tons and tons of content or deliver on coming out very quickly."
Since World of Warcraft's inception in 2004, Blizzard has released a number of content-heavy free patches, many of which included full quests and dungeons. For example, a patch in late 2009 opened up the Icecrown Citadel, a large dungeon that provided quite a few hours of content. Huge patches like that can help satiate players' never-ending cravings for new content without forcing Blizzard to release yearly expansions.
Plus, patches are free. No complaints here.
Image courtesy Blizzard
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