Curse.com had the great opportunity to sit down with Lead Designers Tom Chilton (Kalgan) and Jeff Kaplan (Tigole) for the Blizzard Community Summit and what they learned may strike you as cool. Looks like the developers have some nice content lined up for us and other ideas that may be implemented after the release of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion.
First of all, the major content patches that will come out after the expansion is released have already been lined up. This is similar to TBC when we experienced the release of the Black Temple patch then the Zul'aman patch then finally the Fury of the Sunwell patch that gave us Magister's Terrace, Sunwell Plateau and the entire Isle of Quel'danas. According to Mr. Kaplan, there will be 3 major patches coming out and they are as follows:
Patch 3.1 - release of the patch that will include the Ulduar raid dungeon, availbale on both 10 and 25 man of course.
Patch 3.2 - release of the patch that will bring us a secret surprise raid dungeon (wonder what the surprise is...)
Patch 3.3 - release of the patch that will likely bring us the Icecrown Ciadel
Of course there's still no timetable for when these patches are coming out so we'll just have to wait. Fine with me since right now I'm just anxiously waiting for the expansion to come out.
Other interesting things mentioned in this summit are the following:
Dance studio - not only are new dances coming in a content patch but also the ability to combine dance moves to create your own customized dance.
Guild ratings and achievements - a feature might be added in a future patch where guilds get a rating based on their achievements for both PvE and PvP. I guess this will make it easier for guilds to recruit and players to find guilds using the rating system as a measure of what they want. I really hope this turns out to be something like the guild system in Warhammer Online where guilds actually level up based on its members' accomplishments and are able to get special rewards based on its level.
Whew. That all sounds so cool. All this WoTLK anticipation is making so restless!