Mists of Pandaria unleashed its expansion to the World of Warcraft on Sept. 25. While rivals like Guild Wars 2 have been more popular, Mists of Pandaria was slow in sales.
Blizzard production director J. Allen Brack is taking things seriously. He said in an interview to gaming site, Rock, Paper, Shotgun.
"It would be interesting to see where we are in another month, in terms of sales and how that comes out. There's a percentage of people who are not necessarily excited about Pandaria or Pandaren," he said on the slower sales of Mists of Pandaria. "We didn't really necessarily know what that was going to mean for the expansion. I saw some criticism about it getting kidded-up a little bit, which is not really what we were thinking about,"
Brack shared his views on how Blizzard will bring battle to the fore, "The central theme that we explore with Mists and Pandaria, with the base game, is this idea that war creates the problems of Pandaria. There's a lot of stories where the player is figuring that out... Okay, now Pandaria has been discovered by the world. We'll have the armies of the Alliance doing their land grab," he said.
"We're trying an experiment where we're going to do smaller... We're going to change what it means to be a WoW patch. Every patch for the modern WoW era has been a raid tier, sometimes a dungeon, sometimes not, but a whole content for every kind of level," Brack said, indicating that smaller updates will mean more frequent updates from Blizzard.
"There're new things that we've introduced with Pandaria that we've never had before. We have new mechanics with the monk class that we've never had before. It would be very difficult for us to fundamentally change a lot of how certain classes operate. You can add new mechanics on top, but ultimately you're not going to want the person who plays a mage... It's a delicate balance" he added unveiling plans to keep WoW relevant in terms of its content.
Brack talked about subscribers, free-to-play models and different reaction of WoW players to pandas and dragons.
"We're still going to have patches that are going to be what people traditionally think of as a WoW patch," said Brack talking about the upcoming patch, which is being developed by his 165-member development team. " But we're also going to have very small patches that just have a few scenarios, maybe a movie or two that are little vignettes, and a round of daily quests. That's what 5.1 is."
