Preach Gaming got to sit down with Game Director Ion Hazzikostos to discuss Blizzard's changing development philosophy, how their storytelling will change, and address controversies with the World Soul Saga.
Preach's video contains much of how he feels about WoW and his personal opinions. This article summarizes the key points of what Ion discussed in his interview within the video.
- The focus on account-wide content like Warbands is Blizzard «letting go of old stubbornness». They re-evaulated their priorities mid-Shadowlands after seeing feedback and how modern players played Classic.
- Blizzard wanted to add features like Warbands sooner, but needed expansion-level work to implement them.
- The philosophy and values the WoW dev team held were inherited from the people who trained them, and they had to learn to let go of it. They learned to evolve their philosophy from player feedback and their own experiences playing the game.
- The World Soul Saga is not «Shrinkflation». The War Within and future expansions will have the standard 4 zones, 8 dungeons and a raid.
- The one and half year goal for expansions is due to the growing WoW development team. They are aiming to keep pace with the Dragonflight content release schedule.
- With the World Soul Saga, Blizzard is making a commitment to tell a story over multiple expansions, instead of previous self-contained stories in an expansion.
- This allows Blizzard to tell more interesting stories using foreshadowing and having the world reflect events in the story of other expansions.
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