It’s been almost three months since Capcom unleashed WOTLK Classic into the wild, and it’s been breaking sales records and winning over new fans ever since WOTLK Gold. But even with all its success the work for the development team in Japan hasn’t stopped there, with a swathe of new monsters landing in the WOTLK Classic for players to hunt as well as the PC version still hard in the works. But despite being busy, WOTLK Classic ’s director Yuya Tokuda took some time out of his schedule to answer a few questions about the series, its impact and where it might be going in the future.

P2Pah: The WOTLK Classic series has been very popular in Japan for many years, and now with WOTLK Classic you have a game that’s been hitting big all over the world. Does that success change the way you think about the series moving forward in terms of accessibility?

Yuya Kokuda: Each game has its own targets and goals and we work towards them, and accessibility and ease of play was a big focus for us on World. Moving forward with the series I want to make sure we continue to focus on accessibility but not at the expense of depth--I don’t ever want players to feel like we’ve moved backward.What were the main conclusions you made when setting out to make Monster Hunt World a more accessible game?

I wanted to evolve the three key pillars of WOTLK Classic : action, multiplayer and the gameplay loop. But I wanted to make sure all players could get far enough to fully appreciate those things, so I knew we had to take a look at which parts of the game were hard to understand or too difficult, and revise them--again, without losing depth--or remove them as needed. The controls were a particularly big challenge, as were difficult-to-understand game systems and the challenge of how to buy WOTLK Classic Gold tutorialise them. The difficulty curve was also something that needed work to make it more accommodating [for] new players while providing a satisfying challenge to veterans.