14 DAY TRIAL // J. Allen Brack, the production director working on the MMO World of Warcraft, says that the team at Blizzard working on the game is changing the way it approaches the patching process and will start releasing smaller updates in order to fix various issues with the game.
He states to Rock, Paper, Shotgun that, “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.”
Since World of Warcraft was launched, all patches that Blizzard has released have included at least a new raid tier and sometimes a new dungeon, in addition to bug fixes and changes to the core mechanics of the game.
Brack says, “We’re trying to make smaller patches and larger patches. We’re still going to have patches that are the giant raid tiers. We’re still going to have patches that are going to be what people traditionally think of as a WoW patch.”
The smallest content additions for the game will include small new scenarios, a round of new daily quests for players to tackle and maybe a new movie or two that expands on the story of the game.
The next big update for World of Warcraft is labeled 5.1 and Blizzard says that it is still not sure when it will be introduced to the MMO.
The company has just launched the Mists of Pandaria expansion for the game, which has sold well and managed to push the overall subscriber number back over the 10-million mark.
The new content included in the expansion consists of one new continent, one new race and class to try out and a variety of changes made to skill trees and abilities.
Blizzard says that it continues to have long-term plans for World of Warcraft, despite the fact that a number of veteran developers are now moving on to work on Project Titan.