World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King

And you know, the levelling curve in the game, we don't feel it's incredibly brutal, but when you say to someone "you're going to have to level up 70 levels in order to catch up with me so we can play together", that can be pretty daunting. You can use it as an excuse as well: "we can beat the system, it won't be like normal, it won't be slow like you've heard".

Absolutely, and that's why with this expansion we try to speed up the levelling curve. We do feel like the content in Northrend is better than what we've done before.

That's an axiom of game development - the best thing in the game is the last thing that you worked on.

I do - I think that sometimes the experience gets distorted when somebody gets power-levelled by a higher-level character. That's why the recruit-a-friend is designed to motivate you to play alongside your friends as a similar-level character. It makes the experience much better, it's challenging, exciting, it's not like some other guy's towing you through the game.

Well, certainly it's very new. We've done a lot of internal testing on the siege engines and destructible buildings and it certainly feels different. The battleground is a little bit more limited in terms of how different it is; it doesn't have the same level of depth that Wintergrasp does.

But I think the most difficult thing with Wintergrasp is going to be giving players the experience that they imagine when we have no way of controlling how many players show up for it, and how balanced it might be in terms of how many players there might be on one side versus the other. We're building in safeguards, things to help when your side has fewer players, and trying to design it so it scales reasonably well between 200 people or 30 people. So hopefully those things will work out, but I would definitely say that it's the biggest unknown in the expansion, because world PVP is by far the most unpredictable thing for us.

We have two new arenas that are actually now complete and will be in the next beta build or two that comes out. The Arena maps are very cool - I think those are more of a known quantity. The most bold thing we're doing is having some moving geometry that will throw a little bit of a wrinkle in in terms of line-of-sight-breaking objects and that kind of thing.

The thing that surprised me - I'm constantly surprised by this type of thing - the number of people that got their beta key, had their level 70 copied over, logged in and immediately ran over to Eastern Plaguelands on a PVP server, waited for those 55 Death Knights to pop out and... BAM. [laughter]. It's like, you've got a beta key and this is how you're spending your time? Just ganking level-55 Death Knights? It was amazing. Deviant behaviour.

Oh, absolutely. I was surprised that it happened as quickly as it did, but I wasn't surprised that it happened.

Well, I do believe that a lot of our players are Blizzard gamers. We really felt that, by tying it in, if you stopped playing WOW and started playing those other games you wouldn't feel like you'd lost all of that accomplishment. Also, to give you a reason to come back when an expansion pack comes out and get some new Achievements, increase your Blizzard score.