At GDC last week, you also talked about how quickly traditional MMO content is consumed and how that plays into your decision to adopt a philosophy toward emergent gameplay. The question comes up about how that affects the future of raid content -- something that takes a lot of time to design and is usually played by only a portion of the community. What are your thoughts on that?
This is a very interesting question. I think it's at the core of why what we're doing is sustainable. I'll go right to the heart of the matter. You get to the point where we make an expansion, and when I say we, I mean the entire MMO community. You make your expansion, the real hardcore players consume it in a month, and they're doing the raids over and over and over until the next round of live content that we put in. Typically, three or four times a year, we as MMO companies put new endgame in there to keep the raiders happy.
We absolutely need to build that style of content into every game we make because players want that. We're not talking about the end of raids, the end of this incredibly high-level content. We're talking about changing the nature of the world around it so that there's a lot more to do "in between" expansions. A good example, but a very narrow example, is battlegrounds in WoW or EQII, where players get bored doing it over and over again. But imagine the entire world as part of the interaction. Imagine seasons changing. Imagine if you're a Druid and you need to literally seek out reagents for your spells or worship your deity in a glade somewhere off in the wilderness, but you don't know where. Or image forests growing back after they're burned to the ground by invading forces. What we want is a dynamic world that gives all those other possibilities and doesn't just say OK, go to raid X with group composition of X, Y, Z, and kill the dragon for the 52nd time to get the tier 800 gear. It's this rinse-and-repeat gameplay that's got to change, and so we're changing it.
