Game Informer's Interview with Tigole  | read this item

Game Informer recently sat down with Jeff Kaplan (aka Tigole) to discuss World of Warcraft.  Kaplan had been on the world design team for years before finally switching of to Blizzard’s as of yet unnamed next-gen MMO.  He talks about some of the history about the game’s development and where its looking to go in the future.

One excerpt of note though confirms an in-game cinematic for 3.3 ala Wrathgate.

“GameInformer: I would agree that the game has gotten much better at showing rather than telling, but Wrath of the Lich King also saw the introduction of cutscenes to the game. It’s obviously much easier to tell the story in that, but you’re also taking the player out of the game. Do you think that those will keep showing up future expansions as well? Is it something you’ll use sparingly?

Jeff Kaplan: Cutscenes will always be something that we use sparingly, yes. We never want to interrupt gameplay too frequently or for too long of a period of time. The Wrathgate cutscene was a big experiment for us. It was our first foray into in-game cutscenes in World of Warcraft. I don’t think we’ve fully refined how we want cutscenes to work with future World of Warcraft content.

We debate like crazy. We debate the length, we debate the frequency, and we have a lot of theories, but Blizzard is a really iterative development house. I think what’s going to have to happen is that you’ll see more cutscenes come into the game for us to really refine our strategy with them. We definitely have an eye toward more cutscenes, but at the same time, we don’t want to become just a cutscene game.

Even before Cataclysm, in patch 3.3, there’s going to be a really exciting cutscene moment that’s going to be our next experiment with that.”

Checkout the entire interview here: http://gameinformer.com/games/world_of_warcraft_cataclysm/b/pc/archive/2009/12/02/blizzard-s-jeff-kaplan-on-warcraft-s-past-and-future.aspx