When's Blizzard's Wrath of the Lich King expansion for WoW coming out? When it's done. So how does that jive with previous Blizzard comments by COO Paul Sams that suggest the company plans to release a new expansion every twelve months?
Today, Kotaku spoke to WoW game director Jeffrey Kaplan, who was able to offer some clarification.
"That is our goal, and sometimes it gets taken in a weird direction," he said. "Like you're failing [if] you're not releasing an expansion each year. It's probably going to be a long time before we get to the point where we are releasing an expansion each year."
Kaplan explained what the team would rather focus on:
"Our goal is to make an awesome experience, and obviously we felt that Lich King needed more time to get to where it needed to go," he said.
So while Blizzard is still aiming for annual expansions, "We're never going to slim down the content in order to make an annual date."
Kaplan told us that the developers who work on content and patches are the same team members who work on expansions. Those developers, he said, are "core to the quality of both the patches and expansions, and we aren't going to sacrifice the quality of one or the other just to get an expansion out."