World of Warcraft’s developers have made a sudden about-face after largely ignoring player feedback and nearly ruining the game during the Shadowlands expansion. With The War Within, the MMO’s 10th expansion, on the horizon, game director Ion Hazzikostas told PC Gamer that Blizzard is revisiting WoW’s foundational systems more than ever before to respond to player requests.
“The last few years have been a time of introspection and reexamination of every component of WoW, its design DNA,” he said. “We held everything up to the light and examined it and asked ourselves: ‘This has obviously served us well for a long time, but is it still the right thing for players in 2024?'”
“And in many cases the answer is yes: put the stone back and keep working. In other cases, it’s time to rebuild the foundation.”
A recent example proves this point: the radical overhaul of Mythic Plus.
Mythic Plus difficulty dungeons have followed a long-established pattern in WoW: each week, different affixes add new challenges to existing dungeons, such as increasing boss health and damage. Some of these mechanics can be tougher for players of certain roles in the five-person groups that play them regularly; some weeks are tough enough for tanks and healers to hang on to, others are considered easier “push weeks” to climb the difficulty tier, and sometimes are so difficult that they limit the playtime of even the top-tier teams.
When beta testing began for the Mythic Plus dungeons in the upcoming expansion, The War Within, players were quick to respond harshly to minor changes to affix balancing, with the high-end team in particular once again expressing their dissatisfaction with the affix system in general and how it was hindering the enjoyment of tackling high-tier Mythic Plus dungeons.
And Blizzard responded: Affixes no longer affect “push keys” or keys at level 12 and above in the infinitely scaling difficulty progression. Four existing and unpopular affixes have been removed entirely; four others that were in testing have been scrapped. Fortified (an affix that buffs the “minor mobs” in a dungeon) and Tyrannical (an affix that buffs bosses) have been effectively removed from the table by adding both affixes to all dungeons level 10 and above.
The goal was to keep the affixes diverse and the dungeons interesting for lower level players, while still allowing the hardcore push team to play only on raw difficulty, as they requested. Frankly, this is a bold set of changes, and we’re only two months away from the release of the expansion.
Throw away the old
Hadzikostas’s interview comments suggest that we may see more of this type of radical listening in the future.
It took Blizzard a while to fully recognize the shift in WoW’s user base, he said.
“I think that was the beginning, but it definitely accelerated during the production of Shadowlands. We did a bit of reflection, especially from a design standpoint,” Hazzikostas says. “We built systems and relied on time-honored WoW principles like deep character investment and meaningful choice and differentiation.”
This resulted in options that allowed players and their characters to be tied to a specific in-game faction, preventing them from earning rewards and cosmetics from other factions.
“But what we’ve heard from players is, ‘That’s not what we want anymore. We’ve done this, why do we have to do it again? We don’t want this mandate to be tied to cosmetic choices. We want them to be separate,'” he said.
According to a presentation by former Warcraft general manager John Hight at GDC earlier this year, Blizzard’s failure to address these issues led to a mass exodus of players during Shadowlands. With the follow-up expansion, Dragonflight, Blizzard finally acknowledged this growing problem and addressed it head-on, with great success.
“that is, [asking ourselves]”These are lessons that were instilled in us as designers and developers on our team by our predecessors, but are we going to blindly stick to them?” Haddikostas said.
“Or will we face the reality that players have changed, that the way people engage with WoW has changed, and our duty as stewards of this world is not just to stubbornly stick to our original vision, but to evolve and meet players where they are and ensure Azeroth remains the place they want it to be.”
Warbands are a great example of how WoW is evolving with The War Within. They remove the problem of character-locked progression. Nearly everything you earn or achieve applies to all characters you place in your warband, fundamentally changing how you interact with MMOs. Hazzikostas explained this in a recent interview as a system for the player behind the keyboard, not just for individual characters. This is the kind of functionality that probably wouldn’t have been accepted 10 years ago.
But the overwhelmingly positive response to the Mythic Plus changes, and other changes made with this philosophy in mind, seems to indicate that Blizzard is moving in the right direction.
WoW’s tenth expansion, The War Within, will be released on August 26th (with early access available to those who pre-order three days before).