- Author: Spannah
- Date: November 2, 2021
- Updated: November 2, 2021
- Expansion: World of Warcraft
VentureBeat released an interview with Game Director Ion Hazzikostas, where they talk about the recent changes at Blizzard as well as the future of the game.
There have been quite a few changes happening to the game, like NPC names being changed, or emotes being removed. Many players have been upset about those changes, and Ion Hazzikostas explained the reasoning behind them:
These are changes that are coming from the team as a whole. In the discussions we began internally in the aftermath of the lawsuit and everything surrounding that, on many levels, trying to understand how we as the current leadership of the team could do better — better for our team, better for our community. One thing that came up is that there are pieces of our game that, over the course of 17-plus years now, that were not necessarily the products of a diverse or inclusive range of voices, that did not necessarily reflect the perspective of the current team and of many of our players.
As for Blizzard itself, Game Director Ion Hazzikostas talked about some changes happening internally, with more diverse hiring as an example:
Recognizing that the game industry has had certain skews — male-dominated is one obvious one, especially in design — we need to work harder to build and find the qualified candidates who are out there. We can’t just open up a position, take the first couple dozen resumes, look through them, and pick someone out of that pile, because we may just get a couple dozen white male resumes. And it’s not that we wouldn’t hire someone who’s qualified for the job. We will. But we’ll be limiting the range of perspectives that come to our team.
While many players are happy about the changes in patch 9.1.5, some parts of the community have been critical of the fact that it took this long for the changes to happen, and have speculated that this is just Blizzard “pulling the ripcord” to retain the playerbase, and not a change in design philosophy. The Game Director however stated that this is not a “one-off”, and that this is the team starting to move away from old design practices taught by their predecessors:
But a lot of what goes into 9.1.5 isn’t a one-off. It’s a reflection of us changing a lot of the underlying philosophies that have motivated our approach to designing WoW. A lot of these things, like I mentioned regarding conduit energy, are outgrowths of lessons that were taught to us by our predecessors, by the founders and the leaders of the team, about the importance of meaningful choice, the importance of preserving character investment, that may have led to us not being friendly to alt gameplay and people’s ability to get caught up on their alts. The reality is, the way people play the game has evolved. What was the right answer for the WoW player base and for the game 15 years ago may not be today. There’s some stubbornness, but clinging to those old lessons, some things are hard to let go of when your training and your education as a designer and a developer on the team led to having these things instilled in you.
Cross-faction raiding has also been mentioned. It’s no secret that the game has severe faction balance issues. With Europe as an example, it is much easier to find players to raid with in the Horde, and it’s the same problem with Mythic+. With each new raiding tier, more and more guilds decide to transfer, which keeps exacerbating the issue. Ion Hazzikostas has however shared that they are considering cross-faction raiding:
I’d say that is a bit more on the radar, yes. That’s one of those areas where, a lot of things to solve, a lot of things to figure out to make it happen, but at the end of the day, if Jaina and Thrall are working alongside each other in the raid, why can’t Alliance and Horde players also work alongside each other in that raid, especially when we know it’s going to solve a lot of the social problems people are grappling with? Particularly trying to keep a high-end Alliance guild together in North America or a Horde one in Oceania.
Many players have been speculating that we won’t be seeing a 9.3 patch this expansion, and that 9.2 will be the last major content patch before the next expansion. Ion Hazzikostas has given a somewhat cryptic reassurance, that there will be more after 9.2:
We’ll be talking a bit more about the conclusion to Shadowlands in more detail in the future. Yes, 9.2 is coming, you’ll be hearing about that more soon. We do have more planned after that. But it’s hard to say too much more without almost spoiling some of the story that’s going to come. We’ll have a lot of details on that soon, but we want to be able to explain it in the full context of what 9.2 is going to be.
There are more topics being discussed in this interview, such as older content being added back into the game, longevity, or the possibility of getting back to Azeroth, so make sure to check out the full interview.
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