ANAHEIM--World of Warcraft is a game that continues to defy expectations. Four years after it launched, the MMORPG continues to grow. It has more than 10 million subscribers spanning the world, and Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime said that if WoW were a country it would be the 75th most populated nation in the world. The company plans to release its second expansion to WoW, Wrath of the Lich King, later this year, and we caught up with producer J. Allen Brack to talk about it and WoW in general.

Brack said that the team was currently in crunch mode for the expansion pack’s release next month. He explained that the company would launch the expansion in two phases. The first part involves rolling out the "Echoes of Doom" patch before the launch of Wrath of the Lich King. "It will give people certain number of new features—it will give them their 51-point talents, it will give them access to the guild calendar, it will give them access to the achievement system, it will give them access to the barbershop," he said. Meanwhile, Blizzard will update its serve architecture in preparation for the expansion. Then the expansion will be released in box form and at that time Blizzard will "unclamp Northrend" and let players enter the new play area.

One thing that has cropped up from this year is the idea of introducing graphical improvements to the game. Four years is a long time in the computer industry, and the graphics engine in WoW is certainly aging. Brack ruled out a massive overhaul of the engine, but he did note that they were still introducing improvements. "We’re taking a very incremental approach; we’ve introduced a lot of new graphical updates with Wrath of the Lich King, even though it’s just an extension of our client, and that’s going to be our plan going forward. Our big [improvement] that we’ve kind of talked about for Wrath of the Lich King is shadows. We have a new shadow system, new lighting in dungeons to cache shadows; it’s a significant upgrade over what we have today. And that’s going to how it is with new graphical features going forward. We’ve got some new water technology that we’ve been working on; it’s not quite ready to deploy."

When asked about the potential lifespan of WoW, especially considering that early MMOs are still going (Ultima Online recently turned 11), Brack said that Blizzard doesn’t really think a whole lot about that. "That’s such a long time frame; I mean, where are we going to be in ten years? I have no idea. We’re historically not good at making those kinds of predictions, so what we kind of think about is the expansion that we’re working on, the patches that we need to work on, the next one to two years."

With that said, he added that Blizzard has begun to talk about another expansion for World of Warcraft, and the team has been tossing around ideas. "I think it’s reasonable to assume that we’ll work on another expansion at this point."

On a more reflective question, we asked Brack how the game has succeeded. "Our big thoughts about what the game would eventually be internally was, ’Well, one day we might have one million subscribers.’ And that would be just really successful; [the] pinnacle of success with one million subscribers. Now we’ve got more than ten times that. It’s really forced the company to change, the team to change… it’s really humbling."

When asked if that just makes the bar for the next game too high, he thought about that. "That’s hard to say; I think that WoW coming out and WoW being a success was a combination of it being a good, fun, polished MMO unlike that the world had ever seen—MMOs typically don’t come out very polished. Kind of that aspect also combined with really good luck. And are those things going to happen again at some point in the future? I’m sure they will, but I don’t know if that’s necessarily the bar being raised to some point."