World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King

I know there are definitely plans to do a lot of website integration... Right now we have your inventory and your guild bank that you can look at if you log in. But the big fear that everyone has is that we're going to say these characters are associated with this WOW ID or Blizzard Account, so I know what all of your "alts" are... we've no intention of doing that.

It's a combination of both. We want the Achievement system to serve as a record of your accomplishments, yet at the same time it's definitely a motivator to go back and do some of those things that you always thought about doing, but never really got around to. It could be something like "win Arathi Basin 2000 to zero", or "kill all the bosses in Scarlet Monastery within 20 minutes".

There will also be a list of things that players will never have considered doing, more of a to-do list; like you log in to the game and go, "I don't know what I want to do today, I'm going to pick a random Achievement and go get it". Also just different play types, like we'll have hardcore dungeon and PVP things, but also more whimsical type things, like exploring all the pieces of the maps or getting haircuts or falling certain distances.

We are very cognisant of trying not to design Achievements that encourage really deviant behaviour, or even just excessive gaming behaviour. We don't want it to turn into a "you must play 24 hours a day, 7 days a week" kind of thing. We're very wary of Achievements that feel extremely grindy, or really motivate players to do things that they probably shouldn't.

Right, "kill a million of these!" We're not going to have that.

It was more that as gamers ourselves that have been playing a lot of games that have Achievements in them, like on Xbox Live and such, and just really enjoying it, we thought to ourselves that it would be really cool if we had something like this.

We also looked at the things that we didn't like, in true Blizzard style, in the systems say on Steam and Xbox... So we don't have hidden Achievements, with the exception of very rare Achievements called Feats of Strength that are worth no points. We also have progressive Achievements that you can click on and see what you need to do to get that.

Well, we are definitely trying to one-up ourselves. I feel that in a lot of ways, we're doing that - I feel very confident about the quality of the zones and quests, the fact that we're introducing a new class that seems to be going over pretty well. But there's definitely pressure, no doubt about it, and I'm sure that's going to continue to mount, year on year. But at this point, we're feeling pretty good about it.

But I think the pressure that we feel mostly is not necessarily from outside, but from ourselves and our fans.

We actually put that pressure on ourselves throughout the process. At Blizzard, every several months each team demos the game to the rest of the company: here's what we got, we put it on stage. There's a lot of pressure to meet the expectations of people who work at Blizzard.