The War Within - Creator Summit Group Interview - Michael Bybee and Sean McCann

wowhead.com:

Blizzard held a Content Creator Summit and we participated in a group interview where a couple of kindly devs addressed questions from Content Creators. The devs for this interview were:

• Michael Bybee: Production Director on World Warcraft
• Sean McCann: Senior Game Designer in charge of Delves

Please note that the questions and responses have been reordered by topic, and edited for clarity and readability.

Release Cadence and Dates

Is there a rough timeframe for Beta and release of the War Within that we can expect?
Michael Bybee:
I think you can expect what we'll do is we'll see how the Alpha goes, we'll take feedback. Every week we're going to post new content on the Alpha. Then, as we are starting to feel like everything's coming together, we're feeling like it's in a great place to get a cohesive round of feedback, what we'll do is same as we've done in the past, we'll clear characters, we'll boot up the Beta, and we'll do the entire experience again with a broader audience to continue to get feedback. Based on how that goes is when we'll end up shipping the War Within. So no specific feedback on dates today, but honestly the Alpha really matters to us so we're excited to get player's feedback.

Are there any plans to mirror Classic for a release schedule for expansion launch and/or patch launches
Michael Bybee:
Yeah, totally. We've been doing that in modern for quite a long time. Actually, it's going to be a little bit more structured even in the War Within. That's because of the early access that folks who bought the highest tier preorder were able to get.

We want to make sure that people who bought the preorder get the chance to play through some of the story, but don't get an advantage over other players in terms of the raid. So we're going to have the three day preorder period where folks have access to play through the content, level their character, etc. Then everybody who plays the game will have access for a period of time where the raid won't