World of Warcraft Q&A

WarCry is offering up a short Q&A with Blizzard's Jeffrey Kaplan, quizzing the World of Warcraft lead designer about recent and upcoming changes to the massively successful MMORPG.
Q: Having leveled both a blood elf and draenei character, I've found the leveling process in both the new starting zones to be much smoother than in the launch starting zones. Was this a specific concern in designing them? Were there any lessons you learned after launch that you applied to these new races?

A: The more time you spend doing anything, the better you get at it. We've been continually developing World of Warcraft for a number of years now, and over that time we've learned quite a few lessons about how to make a better game. Since the launch of World of Warcraft, we have been able to see our theories in action. Certain elements worked well, others didn't. We realize that we need to constantly strive to evolve as a development team. The content we make today needs to be better than the content we made five years ago.

Also, new technology and systems within the game have opened the doors for us to do new and different kinds of content. When we created quests for the first two World of Warcraft zones (Elwynn and Westfall), we only had the ability to do two types of quests: "Kill X number of monsters" or "Bring me X number of items." Since then, our programmers have provided us with a ton of new options, such as escort quests and bombing runs, to name just a few. With each patch and expansion, we have more tools in our toolbox. More importantly, we've got years and years of lessons learned =).