World of Warcraft's director says the game is 'letting go of old stubbornness' after the fumbles of Shadowlands
World of Warcraft feels like it's entering a new era—Microsoft acquisition aside, Dragonflight managed to take a bite out of the design choices responsible for Shadowland's historic low point for the game.
Scuppering borrowed power, for one—and not having over 200 days pass between its release and its first major patch for another. Making bigger structural changes takes time, though, and we're just starting to see them come through in earnest.
There's a whole new approach to account-wide stuff with the warbands system, not to mention three expansions announced at once—a complete gear-shift from the throwing-spaghetti-at-the-wall approach to past expansion packs that led to a giant sword shoved into the planet. The gloves are off, and that's largely due to player feedback, says Game Director Ion Hazzikostas in a recent interview with prominent WoW YouTuber and streamer Preach.
«It really is letting go of old stubbornness … a mix of seeing reception to Shadowlands, [and] a mix of seeing how the modern playerbase played [WoW] Classic, over the course of like, 2019-2020, that made us rethink all of these assumptions about how WoW should be.»
Hazzikostas seems pretty relaxed and open here, which—as plenty are noting in the video's comments—is a far cry from the lockjaw umming-and-ahhing of interviews and panels past. He remarks that a lot of WoW's previous design choices were «handed down» from the people who trained him up as game director.
«Your job as game director is to 'safeguard this tradition: do it well.' Taking a step back and being like 'no, what if the tradition's wrong now?' … that can be a hard conclusion to come to, but we're there.»
Preach asks whether knocking down one design domino led to others falling,
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