Blizzard: 'Changing techniques to be more cheap and less penalising is an improvement'


It's the old secure vs. the new secure in a latest World of warcraft group forum range, and Blizzard's Bashiok walked in to thoughts on the title's move toward availability. "What we've always been trying to do," he said, "what WoW has always been about (and to which much of its achievements is due) is to make an available MMO."

Bashiok is aware of the older, so-called "masochistic" design of game play, but he says that MMOs are popular away from this in an attempt to entice rather than repulse players. "I think that modifying techniques to be more affordable and less penalising is an enhancement, not a hindrance, to activities in common... But I experience we're fortunate to now be in an age where those values (intended or not) are providing way to real fun, real task, and not fabricating it through high-reach specifications."

While Cataclysm's difficulty stages are a problem of some debate nowadays, it's indisputable that Blizzard has tuned World of warcraft to become more user-friendly since 2004. Bashiok notices that even at launch, WoW was drastically different in comparison to its contemporaries: "Anyone that looks coming back at the experience at launch and desires it was as challenging now as it was then is not aware of the thoughtful attempt put into WOW Gold creating the experience available as in comparison to its forerunners."