Blizzard Doesn't Want to Start Over with WoW. Game Director Comments on Problematic „Pattern” with Events
The World of Warcraft director explains why he doesn't see the point in starting over with the game, and why Blizzard tends to take a „conservative” approach to events.
There's no drastic rebuild or sequel coming, at least not anytime soon, for World of Warcraft. This is the opinion of Ion Hazzikostas, director of WoW, who said this in an interview for Games Radar.
The developer admits that Blizzard might be considering whether to "start everything from scratch." However, according to Hazzikostas, this is a matter of the distant future, because for now, the devs of World of Warcraft have a "huge, vibrant, and growing gaming community" to please.
WoW ship for renovation
The director pointed out that WoW is, in a way, the gaming equivalent of the ship of Theseus (in reference to the famous Greek paradox). For 20 years, almost every element of this MMORPG has been gradually "recreated and rebuilt" to modernize this age-old game.
According to Hazzikostas, the priority for the developers is to "enable" millions of players in WoW to have even more adventures in the vibrant world of Azeroth, while also receiving improvements for modern audiences. A testament to how much the game has changed since 2004 is the existence of WoW Classic.
We're constantly tearing out some old foundational system and replacing it with something that will scale to support our new server architecture, to support new graphics pipelines, to support new aspects of multiplayer interaction that the original game couldn't have imagined.
When we have this vibrant world full of millions of players, our priority is to keep serving them as best we can – to keep extending those journeys, the worlds we build, and every step along the way, we are making the improvements that we think suit the modern audience best.
Too conservative Blizzard doesn't want to overdo with generosity
Of course, this doesn't mean that the current World of Warcraft is better than the original in every respect (even disregarding purely subjective issues). The director of WoW addressed player complaints about the grind surrounding in-game events and admitted that Blizzard "didn't understand" the problem until players brought it to their attention.
At the same time, Hazzikostas denied that Blizzard intentionally requires excessive grinding to obtain rewards and plans in advance to speed up progression. He admits that after four different events, this may seem like a "pattern." However, as he points out, Blizzard simply prefers to focus on a more "conservative" progression of rewards and simply has trouble finding the golden mean.
If the team is "too generous," they won't be able to retract it without a strong reaction from the players. However, the developer can always quickly increase the pace of progression if it turns out that they were too stingy in the original assumptions.
We can always buff the rewards. We're never going to nerf the rewards, really, right? If things go out too fast and generous, we'll never pull that back.
