The range the game can cover in an MMORPG

"[Vice chief of creativity"[Vice-president of creative development] Chris Metzen had already done some of the lore and lore for World of Warcraft and before the WoTLK Gold game, we got the chance to get a head start talking about the various regions, Stormwind or Lordaeron," World of Warcraft continued. "And you can feel this through the games. When you consider the Eastern Kingdoms, in a number of ways, it"s far more well-developed from the perspective of backstory and lore as Kalimdor as a result of the fact that Eastern Kingdoms really had three games and expansion sets to build it up as well as Kalimdor was something completely new and exciting."

Cataclysm was not initially on Blizzard"s expansion plan.

Of course the range the game can cover in an MMORPG is far greater than an RTS. This difference in scale was apparent in Blizzard"s original plans of what it would like to include in the initial WOW when it launched on November 4, 2004. According Kaplan Kaplan, Blizzard initially intended to include the content of The Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King, as well as a large portion of Cataclysm when it launched the game in its initial version.

"We had planned the game very far ahead of time," he said. "To put it in context, Outland and Northrend and many of the concepts in Cataclysm all were part of the initial shipping plan for the game. Each now and then we"ll encounter the moments from a planning and management perspective, when we"ll think to ask, how is it that we"re actually doing and where do we want to be? However, part of what brings us there is staking the project for decades and years to come and always having a clear concept of where we"d like to go. This is what allows us to guide the ship until we reach our destination."

Outland and Northrend finally arrived as parts of The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, and Cataclysm is scheduled to buy WoTLK Classic Gold be released in the next few months. Oddly to be honest, Cataclysm was not the top priority for Blizzard when it first started thinking about expansion possibilities.