ANAHEIM – World of Warcraft has been the epitome of a gaming cash-cow ever since its 2004 launch.

Though solid figures are hard to come by, estimates on the game's monthly revenue often tops $100 million, and the game boasts subscriber rates that eclipse its closest competition by a factor of 10.

During Blizzcon I had a chance to sit down with J. Allen Brack, the game's lead producer, to discuss the upcoming Wrath of the Lich King expansion, where the game goes from here, and the title's Deathknight class, an addition many fans see as the latest example in Blizzard's new-found desire to homogenize their once unimpeachable games.

Wired: Warhammer Online just came out. It's the first MMO since you guys released *World of Warcraft *four or five years ago that has really had the kind of fan reaction and critical praise to compete with World of Warcraft on, at least, a content level. Does that change how you guys approach the game, or approach your own game anyway?

J. Allen Brack: Um, not really. We are interested in making WoW the most fun game that we can make it and that’s sort of been our philosophy for the last four years, it’s going to continue to be our philosophy. So, as far as Warhammer, I’m excited to see more games come out, I’m a gamer, I love playing games ...

Wired: Have you played it?

Brack: I have a copy. I’m going to play it over Thanksgiving. I haven’t actually played it yet.

Wired: It takes a bit of time to get into.

Brack: Right. We have a couple of people on the team who play it.

Wired: Really? And they aren’t immediately fired for blaspheming against the company?

Brack: No, not at all. Quite the opposite actually.

We’re gamers. We wanna play fun games. So, if it’s a good game and they’re enjoying it, great. We’ve had people play D&D Online, Lord of the Rings Online, Age of Conan – we’ve got lots of people who play lots of different types of games, both before WoW came out and after.

And not just MMOs either. I’m very personally excited about what Valve is doing and I play a lot of multiplayer games. A lot of Team Fortress.

Wired: You guys – Blizzard, the overarching company – has StarCraft II coming out theoretically soon, Diablo III coming out, also theoretically soon. After you release Wrath of the Lich King this holiday season, is there going to be a lull in creating new content for World of Warcraft in an effort to prevent cannibalization of players who might otherwise go to StarCraft II or Diablo III?

Brack: No. Not at all. The WoW team kinda operates as its own unit and then there’s a Diablo team.

For us, I don’t think that there’s a lot of crossover, in terms of cannibalization. If someone stops playing World of Warcraft and goes and plays StarCraft, ok great, it’s not a big deal. If someone stops playing World of Warcraft and plays Diablo, ok great.

I think people usually end up playing maybe one or two MMOs and they play other games on the side. There doesn’t seem to be any competition as far as we’ve seen. I’m really excited to play StarCraft and Diablo both, and I’ve played a lot of WoW and will continue to play a lot of WoW.

Wired: What comes next for the game, content-wise after the 3.0 patch and after Wrath?

Brack: We've started talking about what our content plan is for post-Wrath and the first thing we’re going to work on is Ulduar Raid.

This will be a raid in the Storm Peaks, which is a Titan Zone. It will be a full 25-person/10-person raid, with I-don’t-know how many bosses, but 10, 12 bosses would not be a bad estimation. We’ll have several new quests that are going in as part of that, and then we’ll add other stuff that we haven't really figured out yet.

The whole team’s focus is on getting the 3.0 patch finished and then finishing up everything that needs to be done for Wrath of the Lich King. As soon as that’s done we’ll start talking about what goes into 3.1.

Wired: So you guys don't already have a plan for the next boxed expansion already?

Brack: Not at all. We have some ideas for what the next boxed expansion could be and are kinda starting to talk about what that would look like, but its a long process to kind figure out – to go from “anything” and distill it down into “okay, this is whats going to go in the box.” That’s many, many months of discussion, sitting down and thinking about things and figuring out what worked in Wrath of the Lich King and figuring out what we want to improve...

Wired: Right, but after Wrath and after The Burning Crusade, haven’t you guys already covered all of the lore and landmass accumulated in WarCrafts 1-3? Are you creating something new?

Brack: Well we haven’t decided that, but...

Wired: Do you have that option?

Brack: We absolutely have that option. Absolutely.

Technologically WoW – the world – appears as one giant continuous thing. We’ve got Outland which is kind of a separate entity and Northrend is kind of a separate entity as well, so yeah, we definitely can create new land.

Northrend, did not exist before we started working on it. It was just a very long time ago, before the original game was released that they’d done work on a couple of zones. It’s nowhere near what we have today.

Wired: I’ve been playing the Wrath beta and I’ve seen increasingly, as time goes on, there are more and more Deathknights.

Brack: Sure.

Wired: Everybody is rolling a Deathknight. And it seems to me – I was discussing this last night with some people I’ve been playing MMOs with for years – it seems that that class, more so than any other, is kinda like a multitool kinda thing. You can do anything, right? It doesn’t do it as well as some other classes, but it can fill any niche necessary.

Is that kinda the direction you guys are going for with the game, where the classes are more – I don’t want to say "homogenized" – but there’s less of a focus on needing certain special classes to fill certain special roles in each group?

Brack: There is a desire at least – and certainly in the case of the five person raids and kinda the 10-man content – to really reduce the “for this encounter you must have 3 warlocks, two warriors, and one healer” and there's a desire to do a lot less of class requirements. If you aren't one of those special classes you have a serious disadvantage.

In the case of the Deathknight, the Deathknight started out as, its goal was to be a class that could tank effectively and a class that could DPS effectively – many classes have that ability. many classes have two or more roles that it can fulfill, and the druid can fulfill four roles. Yeah, the Deathknight does have a lot of ... it's a hero. if you're a hero, you're fantastic. So yeah, the Deathknight does have those kind of things. I hope it does them well. But there's no thought that a Deathknight is going to be the one class to rule them all. The sort of design philosophy we had with it was “epic” in terms of how it feels, but equal in terms of its overall power compared to the other classes.

Wired: When you guys create a new class like the Deathknight, even throughout the beta there have been drastic changes to the character with every patch. In the Burning Crusade beta, when you introduced the Draenei, there weren't that many racial changes. You guys have to do ridiculous amounts of balancing when you put in a class than, compared to, say, a race.

Brack: I would agree with that.

Wired: So, because obviously at some point you’re going to add something new, would it be safe to say that you’ll do a new race next, just for ease of development?

Brack: I don't think that's safe to say. I think the way that we make decisions, once we’re sure about the next expansion, is we’ll talk about what the game needs. What does the game need? With The Burning Crusade we wanted to add a “pretty” race for the Horde and we wanted to add an "ugly" race for the Alliance, at some point we decided we wanted to do the Shaman/Paladin swap for Horde and Alliance – which I think worked out pretty well – and so that is how we’ll decide to do the next expansion as well: what are the possible ideas.

Y’know, the Deathknight was not the only class on the list that we came up with, so that will certainly be something that comes up was well: What about adding another class? Some people will talk about adding another race and what that means.

Wired: All of Blizzard’s games, particularly World of Warcraft, have been known for this “dark, high-fantasy” feel, but they’ve also got a lot of humor and a lot of in-jokes that are just everywhere. The whole zone of Un’Goro jumps to mind.

How does stuff like that make it into the final build of the game? Everyone on the development team must think “Oh! We’ve got a great idea for an in-joke!” but it's stuff that they and two of their friends would actually understand.

Brack: [Laughter]

Wired: How does the process go from someone having an idea to you guys saying “Yes, we absolutely need to put that in the game!”

Brack: [Pause] Um ... that’s a great question.

So, the development team is actually divided up into many subteams. We've got over 140 developers on World of Warcraft, but each individual team, we usually try to be like 5 people. There are some exceptions to that. Some teams have 5, 6, 7, 8 people. There are some teams that have fewer than that. But 5ish people is kinda where we’re trying to target.

The quest team is responsible for a whole bunch of content creation and they're a very small team. They all sit in a room and they can talk and make jokes and kinda bounce stuff off of each other and that’s really ... a lot of the success of Blizzard’s games is that level of interaction and polish.

We’ve got the extra level designers who are kinda split up into two teams – these are the guys who have to create all the zones – and then we’ve got the environment artists who are – this is a very small team – people who make skyboxes, people who make the concepts for zones. We’ve got another team that creates what we call the little environment objects like, we call them little doo-dads or the little props, like the chests or the fence posts or the little town decorations. All these teams work together to come up with a vision for the zone.

As that discussion happens, and as people kinda figure out what the story for a particular zone is, that will lead you down certain paths and in the case of Un’Goro, certainly, it lead us down the path of “yeah, it should be a sister zone of Sholazar” and the various things we came up with. A lot of it is just creativity on the team, but it's also just empowering those small teams to make the right decisions.

Wired: WoW is coming up on a half-decade of life.

Brack: Yeah! It’s freaky!

Wired: Yeah, it’s obviously been doing really well for you guys. Even though you won’t tell anyone what your subscriber numbers are, estimates range from the $70 to $150 million a month range...

Brack: Okay.

Wired: [Laughter] That was a very diplomatic way to answer that.

Brack: [Laughter]

Wired: So everything is going well, but how long do you intend to keep the MMO going? Is it like “as long as people are playing it” or after 10 years are you just going to say “screw it” and close everything down?

Brack: I ... have no idea. Our outlook is for about the next two years of WoW. We have ideas, we have a strong idea, of what we’re going to be doing over the next few months, we have the next content patches that we’re kinda talking about, we’ve got this next expansion that we’ll start to figure out what that is, but beyond that is where I have no idea.

Blizzard has a history of supporting products for a very long time. WarCraft III is, I guess, 6 years old now and they just released a patch for it a couple months ago, so there’s a lot of desire to keep Blizzard products alive and going. Diablo II – people still play it a lot – WarCraft II is still supported on Battle.net, so yeah.

We’re also historically pretty poor at predicting stuff like that. We’ll make this expansion, we’ll see how that does and that will kinda inform our next decision. I feel confident that there is another expansion around the corner.

Wired: In theory it could go on indefinitely?

Brack: Well, Ultima Online turned 11 this summer. Meridian59 is even older than that – it actually shut down for a couple of years, but it has been going for quite a few years now – a lot of these games that have, I guess we’ll call them “first-generation MMOs,” have been around a really long time. Everquest still has a very rabid fanbase that continues to play it, and they still create expansions for Everquest, which is coming up on its 10 year anniversary.

It’s hard to see us pulling the plug on World of Warcraft any time soon.

Correction: The new raid is dubbed Ulduar. We apologize for any confusion.