World of Warcraft: Cataclysm Interview

The folks at Blizzplanet have wrangled up a Cataclysm-focused Q&A that they conducted with World of Warcraft lead content designer Cory Stockton during this year’s BlizzCon. The usual snip:

What is one of the main changes in Cataclysm that you’ve made that you are most looking forward to players experiencing?

The new guild system by far. Just because guilds are kind of the core of the game. Most people that play the game as a group are playing as a guild. I think most people that really enjoy World of Warcraft enjoy it more when they are in a guild. Everything about a guild typically makes the game more enjoyable. It’s not necessary by any means, the game can be played solo without any trouble. It just really felt like guilds, though, were just a chat channel and a bank. What else did you really get out of it? So if you bounced around guild to guild it wasn’t really that big of a deal. People didn’t really feel a commitment to their guild because they would earn an achievement, but it was just yours and not the guild’s. So being able to take the guild system and give it things like leveling, achievements, and rewards and a hole new UI so it feels fresh and cool I think that’s going to be gigantic for the game. A lot of people haven’t even really seen it yet either. In the beta, we’ve been testing it and playing with it, but even in the beta it’s really hard, because it’s not a real world scenario. People aren’t leveling like they normally would, or doing battlegrounds like they normally would, because you know you’re just going to lose everything anyway. So I think it’s a feature that I think will play out really really big in the game overall. I’m super hyped on it, because of my guild and being able to watch us level and earn the perks and earn all the new stuff. It will just feel great to be able to earn that as a group.