World of Warcraft Interview

Joystiq recently had the opportunity to chat with World of Warcraft game director Tom Chilton about the long-running MMO’s upcoming v4.3 patch, as well as what’s in store for the game down the road. A couple of paragraphs to get you started:

Patch 4.3 should be on the game’s public test realm, according to Chilton, in the next few weeks. And he says there’s still plenty more content in the pipeline for World of Warcraft, even as Blizzard plans to release at least six games over the next few years and then some. In fact, he wants to do even more. “I still feel like we have a long way to go, in terms of getting ourselves to a pace where we’re adding content and new features that I’m happy with and that a lot of the team’s happy with,” Chilton says. “I think one of the things we need to do is continue to evolve the gameplay, so that people who have played the game for many years at this point, find fresh and new interesting things to do, and aren’t just hit over and over again with more of the same types of content.”

There’s definitely another expansion planned, which we’ll presumably hear about at this year’s BlizzCon conference. And while Chilton agrees that a Diablo-style auction system using real money is probably not in the cards for WoW, even he doesn’t know what will happen next. “I know that WoW will continue to evolve over time, and it’s difficult to predict what long-term impact the Auction House will have on the that players approach games and the way that we approach games as a result of that. But certainly, there are no current plans.”