Interview: WoW’s Game Director on the many lessons learned during 20 years of continuous development – and a bit about what the next 10 years have in store – World of Warcraft: The War Within

At a time when online games appear and disappear at lightning speed, it seems particularly impressive that a handful of games from the era of noisy dial-up modems and winding LAN cables still manage to not only survive, but thrive. Runescape is one example, Everquest another, but despite the continued success of these games, there is still no other game like World of Warcraft.

WoW, as it was soon called, may not have introduced the MMO genre, but it spread awareness of online role-playing games in an unprecedented way, making the genre mainstream and becoming a cultural reference point for an entire generation of Internet users.

Today, 20 years after its original launch, the game remains the uncrowned king of the genre. Although almost all other MMOs have long since switched to a free-to-play model, more than seven million players still log on to WoW and gladly pay the monthly subscription fee of €10.99-12.99.

What is the secret of the game’s success? At Nordic Game in Malmö, we had the chance to ask Ion Hazzikostas, game director of World of Warcraft, exactly that.

“First of all, a lot is due to the team that made the original game, of which I was just a player in 2004 and 2005. It’s one of the best games ever made that really created a huge community. It is a game that captured the hearts and dreams of a generation. But why are we talking about it here 21 years later? I think this is a testament to the team’s agility and hard work to evolve with our players.”

On Nordic Game, Hazzikostas spoke at length about how WoW had grown with its players. When the game hit like a hurricane in the mid-’00s, many of the players were teenagers or young students with plenty of time to spend in the new and exciting virtual world. Now the original players are adults – with jobs, kids and all – and this fact has greatly influenced how Blizzard has developed and adapted the game.

“It’s no secret that World of Warcraft was a game that initially demanded a lot from players in terms of their time. It was a game that took hundreds of hours to level up, and it was a game in which, if you only had 20 or 30 minutes to spare, it was frankly often not even worth logging in.

“We recognize that players, having moved on in their lives, find themselves in many different situations. Many want to maintain a connection to the game without necessarily spending hours on a large block of time. And so while there’s still tremendous depth to the game – there are still epic raids where groups will spend hours to work through on any given night – we also have content like Delves, a new feature we added in our War Within expansion, that are these little bite-sized adventures of 10 to 15 minutes, That you can do alone or in a group of up to five players. That kind of flexibility is something that the game just didn’t offer in the early days.”

When WoW was released in late 2004 (or early 2005 for us in Europe), the game quickly reached five million players – an unheard of player base at the time. Later, the game reached more than 10 million monthly active players, before Azeroth’s “population” (after a dip in the late 2010s) stabilized at around seven million.

While the player base has remained relatively stable in terms of size, the same cannot be said of its internal composition. Some players have been along for the entire ride; Some have recently returned to relive the magic of their youth; while others are brand new to WoW, the Warcraft universe as a whole, and even the MMO genre as such.

Of course, this places high demands on the game’s flexibility, which is one of the reasons why World of Warcraft today has two separate versions – the standard client with all new content and WoW: Classic for nostalgics or those who want to try out the original experience. But even two separate versions are not necessarily enough to satisfy everyone, which is why Blizzard spends a lot of time analyzing both feedback and the behavioral patterns of their players.

“To understand how the community feels about something already in their hands, we look at our forums, we look at social media and we look at the most popular videos and articles from content creators. Trying to capture the pulse of the community, you might say. But we also have a lot of data.

“I think it’s important to understand that most players don’t post on forums. Most players don’t give us feedback on social media, and we have to make sure that we don’t accidentally index too much on this very vocal minority. And so we also always look at how our players actually play the game, what content they return to, what content they don’t engage with. We also do some surveys that we send out to a selection of our players; again, to make sure that we understand what the silent majority is thinking and doing when it comes to features that we have yet to release.”

Although Blizzard constantly looks at feedback, organizes playtests and checks its own data, not all of their decisions are popular with the community. Game development is not an exact science, and Hazzikostas admits that the team has made some mistakes over the years. However, the ability to learn from these mistakes is an important part of growing with your players, he explains.

“There were definitely some missteps, some things I think the team regretted around the Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands expansions a few years ago. There were systems we offered players that more or less dictated how the game should be played, or how the game should be played.

“We asked players to make meaningful and difficult choices between building their character one way or building them another way with a lot of friction in changing those choices. These were things that seemed rooted in the original design of the games and our design ideas, but were clearly not serving our players at the time.

“It probably took us a year or two longer than it should have to really get that message out there. Around 2020, we realized that the path we had been on for the past few years was not really serving our current community as well as it should have. We really changed significantly after that – toward the end of our Shadowlands expansion and throughout the rest of the game since then – in a way that is truly player-centric at the heart and center of our design.”

When it comes to which expansion packs he is most proud of, Hazzikostas gives two examples.

“The Legion expansion will always have a place in my heart. It’s the expansion we released when I became game director, and it’s an expansion that breathed new life into so many core systems of World of Warcraft while telling this incredibly epic story that goes back to the roots of Warcraft III, the Burning Legion and all those characters.

“The other one I would mention is our Dragonflight expansion, which came out in 2022. I think that expansion was the culmination of a lot of the things I just talked about. When we began to realize that we were on the wrong track, we began to incorporate our new way of thinking into our patches. But Dragonflight was the first expansion that could be made with those philosophies as its foundation: respecting players’ time and taking a player-centric approach to all of its systems. I think the way it was received by players as kind of a breath of fresh air was really encouraging for the team and kind of started this new era of World of Warcraft.”

Finally, there was also time to look ahead a bit. In the short term, we already know that World of Warcraft: Midnight and later The Last Titan will conclude the Worldsoul Saga -trilogy that Blizzard kicked off last year with The War Within – the tenth expansion pack of the series. But there is also plenty to look forward to in the long term, as Hazzikostas reveals that the team currently has ideas for the next 10 years of WoW.

“I don’t see any reason why World of Warcraft has to end, and I certainly don’t see a fixed end point anywhere on the horizon. As long as players are excited to spend time in our world, we want to keep developing it for them, and you know we have so many great ideas. I can say with certainty that the next eight to 10 years are very, very bright.

“Our players sometimes ask if we’re ever going to make a World of Warcraft 2 or something like that. I would say in some ways we are already kind of playing World of Warcraft 10. The game has changed so much over the years and it will continue to change with our players. The fact that we have reintroduced classic versions of the game is a testament to how much the game has changed,” Hazzikostas concludes.