Remember you’re a WoW patch. Remember, member, member what a WoW patch, WoW patch, WoW patch you are, goes the old folk song. I forget the rest. Yet WoW patch 5.1 remembered nothing of this. The inclusion of new, gigantic raid tiers slipped its mind, and it failed to remember to be released much, much later than it was.
But all of that was by design, says WoW production director J. Allen Brack. And it’s set to continue.
“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,” Brack told RPS. “Every patch for the modern WoW era has been a raid tier, sometimes a dungeon, sometimes not, but a whole content for every kind of level.
“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. But we’re also going to have very small patches that just have a few scenarios, maybe a movie or two that are little vignettes, and a round of daily quests. That’s what 5.1 is.”
Blizzard are breaking the habit of a lifetime. What do you think of their new approach to patch-making?