Blizzard: World of Warcraft: Cataclysm Took Six Months Longer Than Expected

Devoted World of Warcraft players are now able to freely enjoy the latest fruits of Blizzard’s many years of labor in the form of the newly released World of Warcraft: Cataclysm expansion. However, as Blizzard’s Tom Chilton told us during this week’s episode of Feedback, the long awaited expansion is being released half a year later than originally intended.

“We have some sense from all of our previous experience of how much we can do in a given period of time,” Chilton explained. “We were obviously not very good about that with Cataclysm in that it took us six months longer than what we thought we were going to do.”

Given the "cataclysmic” changes Blizzard decided to bring to the WoW universe with the expansion, it’s hardly surprising that applying those changes ended up requiring a surprising amount of effort. It probably also didn’t help that once Blizzard started thinking about what Cataclysm was going to be that, the team couldn’t help but think about how to better the overall WoW experience.

“We had this idea in mind that it was really important for us to improve the old world and bring it up to the quality standards that we have now, and that’s kind of how we embarked on that idea of redoing the level 1-60 areas, and when we knew we were going to do that we were like, ‘Well, what’s the traditional expansion stuff that we can also do?’ And that’s where we came up with the idea to [raise the level cap] five levels instead of 10.”

Check out this week's Blizzard-filled Feedback for more details.

Should the need arise, feel free to E-Mail me your tips, suggestions, and/or personal philosophies, or follow me on Twitter.