Ahead of the release of World of Warcraft’s Battle for Azeroth expansion in August, Blizzard have struggled to keep some information hidden from the game’s active datamining community. Despite some of the troubles that causes though, the game’s production director, John Hight, told PCGamesN team enjoy seeing speculation around the game.
Find out how Blizzard are preparing WoW for Battle of Azeroth.
According to Hight, “it’s actually a lot of fun” seeing the community speculate about forthcoming content, even when datamining makes them unusually well-informed.
“For some of this stuff, it’s hard to keep it from our players once we’ve uploaded that data.” Hight acknowledges how adept WoW players have become at datamining the game over the past few years, but says that the process still isn’t perfect: “sometimes we’ll put some of this data out, but without the intention of immediately unlocking it,” which can cause problems when fans assume they’ll have access to new content in the short term.
To counter that, Hight says that Blizzard have become “pretty careful about saying in the patch notes what players will actually see in the patch, so they know it’s intentional and not an accident or some hidden quest.”
Despite having to step carefully, Hight says the team do enjoy seeing the community discuss upcoming changes, and that some of that speculation comes from sources you might not immediately expect: “there are even cases of people speculating about something they’ve seen in Hearthstone and being positive it’ll pop up in WoW.” It’s more likely that the community themselves would influence development, as Hight says “the decision to put in Dark Iron Dwarves was very much based on players saying for years that they’ve wanted to play that particular look of dwarf.”
We’ll be publishing the rest of Hight’s interview later on today, so be sure to stay with PCGamesN to see the discussion in full.