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AusGamers has posted a new interview with Blizzard Entertainment's Tom Chilton and J. Allen Brack about the company's successful MMO franchise, World of Warcraft. The game developers discussed a variety of topics related to the game including armor customization, wrapping up Wrath of the Lich King content, and plans for the upcoming Cataclysm expansion.

AusGamers: In terms of player goods like armour and such, the question I’ve got here: is there any plans to introduce a dye colouring system on those to try and make those a little more unique?
Tom Chilton: Not really. We’ve talked about the idea of dying armour a lot before the game shipped and there were two different directions we could go. Two very different philosophies about how to approach visual customisation for player armour. One of them was to give players a lot of freedom to dye their armour and look however they want them to look. The advantage of that approach is it gives players a lot of freedom; people can look how they want to look and express themselves however they want to express themselves.

The downside being: we don’t really know anything about the player by looking at them, as far as what they do in the game, what they’ve accomplished in the game - at that point it’s kind of a random mishmash out in the world.

The other direction which you can go is the achievement based, so by accomplishing things within the game you essentially earn the right to look a certain way. And we felt like World of Wacraft was an achievement-orientated game more than a character self-expression kind of game. So that was the direction that we went.

Now within that, we’re always trying to find reasonable customisation to give players, and we feel like there is more we can do in that regard then we are doing today, to give players a little bit more control about how they look - whilst still maintaining that link between the character and what they have accomplished.

AusGamers: So the Lich King is wrapping up, if I understand correctly? Are there any status updates that players might not be aware of and need to be aware of coming up in the near future?

Tom Chilton: Well, we have a little bit more content coming up on the horizon. The place called the Ruby Sanctum, and that will contain another raid boss that the players will be able to fight. It’s part of Wyrmrest Temple, which is already an existing physical location in the world and we’re just opening up another area of it. So it’s a boss that players will be able to go in and fight in the near future.

There’s a little bit more content coming down the pipe before the expansion comes but other than that, players will pretty much wrap up the Lich King story line and players are seeing the conclusion of that every day now.

AusGamers: Blizzard Interview

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