World of Warcraft's The War Within expansion has fans of the MMO eating pretty good right now. Blizzard's approach to storytelling is greatly improved, the grind isn't as oppressive, and the place is generally friendlier to solo- and alt-inclined players.
But that's not to say that things haven't been bumpy at times. World of Warcraft's new solo-friendly dungeons, called Delves, took a few patches to figure out, the 11.05 patch's balance pass had some players protesting in-game, and a $90 version of a mount that costs even more on the Black Market Auction House left fans divided.
And then there are the bugs. Just recently, Blizzard revealed that the reason some raid content became unplayable was that devs set about rebuilding "core parts" of the 20-year-old MMO.
Despite all that, game director Ion Hazzikostas is pretty happy with where World of Warcraft has ended up – even if he wished he had caught the odd scaling bug or two. "We have a lot of work ahead of us and a lot of exciting story to tell and systems and features to unfold," he tells GamesRadar+ in an interview. "But, reflecting on the first couple of months of War Within, honestly, at a very high level, there aren't too many regrets for me as a game director." He continues: "And, of course, yes, if I could catch that scaling bug.
I'd love to go back and fix a couple of scaling bugs and things like that. But at the high level in terms of how the big bets we made and planning out the feature slate and building this world and kicking off this ambitious new story, I think all of those have been paying off.