14 DAY TRIAL // The development team at Blizzard working on the Mists of Pandaria expansion is worried that long-term fans of the series might be disappointed by the content that they are working on and by the tone of the new class and race.
Greg Street, the lead systems designer working on World of Warcraft, told GameSpy that, “I worry about the perception. I think after BlizzCon we faced this misperception that we were somehow forsaking our hardcore players. Which is not at all what we were doing.
“There’s plenty of violence and sadness and death still going on in World of Warcraft. We’re not trying to dumb it down or shoot for a lower age demographic or anything like that. We’re just trying to offer more varied ways for players to play the games.”
The developer believes that it’s crucial for Mists of Pandaria to deliver variety and cater to as many categories as possible.
He added, “If someone logs in and says, ‘I’m tired of PvPing, I’m locked out of my raids for this week, but I still want to play,’ you can go work on your factions.
“We have seven factions that all have these little mini-games you can do rather than just ‘I’m gonna kill Furbolgs until I’m exalted.’ That’s not the kind of gameplay we can keep asking players to do year after year.”
Street says that Mists of Pandaria will continue to use the core gameplay concepts of the MMO and that Blizzard will continue to encourage long-term fans to come back to the game.
Mists of Pandaria will include the new Pandaren neutral race, the monk, a new continent to explore and revamps for some of the older areas of the world.
At the moment Mists of Pandaria is in beta, with those who have Annual Passes for World of Warcraft set to be invited in waves to the game.