It’s because players aren’t ”really ready for the next raid yet,” saying enough hasn’t been looted from Cataclysm. Aim for smaller but more content updates.
”We feel like the player base isn’t really ready for the next raid yet,” said J. Allen Brack at GDC 2011. ”And that led to some changes where Firelands is now actually going to be in 4.2.” Blizzard will also stop stockpiling features for huge content updates.
”Our plan is to package… features into smaller content updates and to release them as soon as possible, rather than wait and release larger updates more infrequently,” said Blizzard in a statement. Patch 4.1 now gives ”a dungeon revamp, as opposed to an entirely new tier of content with an entirely new raid,” explained Brack.
Heroic difficulty has been dramatically kicked up which has left some of the community reeling from the changes, complaining it’s ‘too hard’. ”One of our goals before Cataclysm was to make it a little bit harder than for Lich King,” he said. ”We feel like players were really able to be very successful very quickly and looking back, the way we handled the itemisation, we feel like we’ve learned some lessons from.”
”In terms of whether it’s the right difficulty, that’s something that we evaluate on a pretty regular basis. Things have happened and we’ll do tweaks and things to make things easier,” he said. Brack was asked if Blizzard ‘nailed’ raid difficulty. ”Never. We’re never confident… But so far we think we made the right decision,” he added.
Has Cataclysm kept you in Azeroth, videogamer?
