IGN Interview with Ion Hazzikostas on Cross Faction Grouping - Less Focus on Faction War Going Forward

In an interview with IGN, Game Director Ion Hazzikostas shared his thoughts on the newly announced plan to enable cross-faction grouping for dungeons, raids, and PvP in Shadowlands Patch 9.2.5. Amid the discussion include talking points on why the decision was made, what it means for the future of World of Warcraft, and how community feedback can shape further features moving forward.Key Takeaways:

Cross-faction guilds may be considered in the future, but they want to take it slow and listen to community feedback. Applying cross-faction gameplay to outdoor content would be a mammoth undertaking due to the way quests are built. These changes are being implemented one at a time, in order to avoid having to undo and take away any of them in the future. Not ruling out the idea of applying it to Classic, but unlikely from both technical and ideological reasons. Open to hearing community feedback. Cross-faction grouping is a gameplay change which probably won't be acknowledged in the story, but the factions are currently in an armistice anyway. It's unlikely they'll do another «all-consuming faction conflict expansion again» like BFA; more likely they'll focus on a wider range of perspectives.

See the full interview on ign.com

Warcraft isn't Just About Alliance vs Horde Anymore

Faction War has previously been described as a foundational pillar of World of Warcraft, but Orcs versus Humans is no longer the world they want to build.

Ion Hazzikostas, via IGN«Part of the blog that we put out that laid the foundation for this was about looking at assumptions we've made about how character progression should work, about player versus account and all these other things. And really revisiting things we've said 'no' to that people in Read more on wowhead.com