Beginning with Mists of Pandaria, the recently-released expansion to World of Warcraft, developer Blizzard is taking things smaller, production director J. Allen Brack told Rock, Paper, Shotgun.
"We're trying an experiment where we're going to do smaller," he said. "We're going to change what it means to be a WoW patch. Every patch for the modern WoW era has been a raid tier, sometimes a dungeon, sometimes not, but a whole content for every kind of level."
Smaller updates also mean more frequent updates from the 165-person development team. In keeping with that goal, the game's upcoming 5.1 patch will bring "few scenarios, maybe a movie or two that are little vignettes, and a round of daily quests."
In the interview, Brack also talks about subscribers, free-to-play models, and how World of Warcraft players react differently to the pandas of Pandaria than the dragons in the company's other expansions. The developer announced that patch 5.1 was "well underway" earlier this month.