World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Interview

The editors at CVG attended the Leipzig Games Convention last week and brought back a new World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King interview with Blizzard Entertainment’s Sam Didier and Jeffrey Kaplan.

Q: What major level 80 end-game content are you including?

A: There’s a few things. We’ve a number of instances. We’re doing instances to cover all the levelling up experience as well, not just end-game instances. We’ll have five-person instances at the end-game and for the levelling up experience.

We’ll also do the heroic dungeons again, so that provides a lot of end-game content right there. We’re going to do a 25-person raid game.

We’re going to focus on bigger raid instances, meaning more like Naxxramas with lots of bosses rather than the smaller ones like Tempest Keep.

The big lesson we learned from The Burning Crusade was that our ten-person instances are extremely popular. So for Wrath of the Lich King we wanted progression in the ten-person raid game for the players… who want to stick to that ten-person cap.

We’ll also add a new arena, and there’ll be new arena awards.

Something we introduced in patch 2.1 – that we’re going to be [building on] in upcoming content patches as well as Wrath of the Lich King – is our system of daily quests.

Daily quests make for good end-game content for players who don’t want to PvP, who don’t want to do instances, who don’t want to raid and don’t want to group – they just like doing quests by themselves.

Daily quests are quests you can do once per day and then it resets the next day. And to alleviate the feeling that those create grinding or repetitive content, we’re coming up with daily quests with randomisation.