Delves have given WoW's devs the confidence to put mandatory grinds firmly in the rear-view, says game director Ion Hazzikostas

pcgamer.com:

World of Warcraft, in case you haven't been keeping tabs since the mass exoduses of Shadowlands, has been on a bit of a self improvement kick lately. It hasn't all been roses, mind, but as an occasional dabbler, I'm feeling downright positive about the overall shift away from borrowed power systems and into things the players might conceivably have fun with.

Looking at it today, you wouldn't think this was once an MMO that suffered random content droughts. Instead, WoW players are getting mad about the usual things—perceived balance sleights, gulp frogs, and uh. Super-expensive FOMO mounts. Alright, maybe there are still some areas for improvement, but still, nature is healing, and the roadmaps are being stuck to with admirable consistency.

Speaking to both game director Ion Hazzikostas and associate design director Maria Hamilton at an event last week—celebrating the release of the goblin-themed major patch, Undermine(d)—I asked how they felt things were going. It's one thing to promise three expansions, and to commit to evergreen content like skyriding and warbands and delves. It's another thing to, well, actually be doing it for a few consecutive months. From the dev's point of view?

«Actually,» Hazzikostas says, «before you sat down, Maria and I were chatting about how much fun we've had as players, exploring and really jumping into that playstyle—the flexibility that it adds. I think our hope—my honest ambition—when we first started planning delves was that it would be able to take its place as a mainstay of our endgame ecosystem, a true new progression path alongside dungeons and raids and so forth … we were penciling in plans for [the next expansion, Midnight]'s delves and beyond.

»They've just been completely embraced in recent months, and there are tons of players who previously felt like their personal progression journey came to an end once they finished the outdoor world quest lines and campaigns, because [they] weren't looking to do organized group