hile were at the German Games Convention in Leipzig a little while ago, we had a chance to meet up with Blizzard. The company has been behind some of gaming's biggest franchises, and it's currently working on sequels for three of them. Here, we talk with Tom Chilton, lead designer of the World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King expansion.

Game Informer: How’s the beta going?

Tom Chilton: It’s going very well. We’re really close to raising the level cap up to 80 and releasing all of the final content for Lich King. Then we’re also moving into our tuning/polishing/bug-fixing phase.

GI: Historically with World of Warcraft, what kind of feedback have you scrounged up in beta that’s made it’s way into the game directly?

Chilton: There’s always quite a bit. Not only on the obvious class, spells and abilities and quest feedback—we get tons of quest feedback. “I found this confusing, I couldn’t find the quest objective,” et cetera, et cetera. There are also level-design changes. A good example would be the death knight starting experience. You start off in a necropolis in the Ebon Hold. The necropolis is floating over this new area of landmass that we built for the death knights. At first, it had four levels. What we found is that when players created death knights the first time, they were in there and given instructions to talk to this guy, go talk to that guy. It was really confusing to try to navigate the place, because there were these teleporters that would send you to different floors, but people didn’t know which teleporters took you where. So we rebuilt that from scratch, just based on beta feedback, and turned it into more of a one-and-a-half level structure so it’s easy to see where you need to go.

GI: When you walk around now, are there death knights everywhere?

Chilton: There are definitely a lot of death knights. Not surprisingly, it’s the new thing so people want to check it out. I expect that kind of behavior on the live servers, at least for a couple of weeks. I expect to see a lot of death knights for a while.