Blizzard COO Paul Sams Says New MMO Will Be “Cool”, “New”, and “Different”

Paul Sams speaks to VG 24/7 about Blizzard’s in development “Next-Gen MMO”

The day before the official release of Wrath of the Lich King, the second expansion pack to Blizzard’s blockbuster MMO World of Warcraft, VG 24/7 had a chance to speak with Paul Sams, Chief Operating Officer for Blizzard Entertainment.

Surprisingly the conversation didn’t involve Wrath of the Lich King at all. Instead it focused on the unannounced “next generation” MMO that is currently being developed by Blizzard Entertainment. Although the conversation was brief, Sams elaborated on some of the thought processes going into the new game. Some excerpts from the conversation are below.

“We’re definitely at the beginning, in the first half of development.”

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“When we’re building a new game from the ground up, what happens is that it’s slow going for the first bit, while the team goes round and round and round figuring out how it’s going to look and feel, what the player experience is and what the differentiators are, and then the speed at which we then bring in the content and polish and actually get to the finish line…I think the second half of the process is always substantially faster than the first half of product development.”

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“For us, we want to make sure that the gameplay and the experience that the players are going to have is fleshed out quite a bit.”

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“The last thing we want to do is say, ‘Hey we’re doing this,’ and everyone says, ‘Oh cool,’ and then we change things completely. We want to have a level of confidence that the direction we’re going in is the right one, and that it’s polished enough to be able to show something, also. And we’re not in either of those places yet.”

The full conversation is definitely worth a read, so head over to VG 24/7 and check it out!

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