Holding The Light Up

“I think we reached a tipping point where we realized we really needed to re-examine every one of our long-held assumptions and hold them up to the light,” World of Warcraft game director Ion Hazzikostas says. “[We needed to] ask if this was still the right thing for our players today, and in many cases, the answer was yes, but in a whole lot of other cases, the answer was that we needed to change a lot.”

Rather than playing it safe with its 11th expansion, developer Blizzard Entertainment is reexamining the status quo in World of Warcraft: Midnight, shaking up long-held systems and introducing new ones in an attempt to lay a new foundation for the future of its 21-year-old massively multiplayer online role-playing game.

“We were really in the midst of a lot of self-reflection as a team,” Hazzikostas says. “[We were] mid-pandemic but also looking at the state of the game and the feedback we were getting from the community and coming to the conclusion that a lot of the playbook that we had been using to build World of Warcraft for the prior 15 years just wasn’t resonating with players the way it previously had, and that we needed to change a lot of things.”