Blizzard Is Ditching Two Decades Of Assumptions About World Of Warcraft, One Update At A Time

Certain ideas and assumptions about what World of Warcraft is, ranging from character progression to faction rivalries, have long felt set in stone, baked into the game from its earliest days. It may have taken close to two decades, but some of those assumptions are finally beginning to change.

Blizzard's landmark MMORPG is almost 20 years old. Plenty has changed in the 18 years since the game first released, both in-game and out. WoW has received eight expansions, new dungeon and raid difficulties, new classes, new races, cross-server play, visual updates, and more. But as much as various pieces of WoW have changed over time, much of the core design philosophy behind the game has stayed the same. Some of those core pillars that have long defined WoW are now changing, at what can only be described as a critical moment in the developer's long history. Amidst ongoing sexual harassment and discrimination allegations at Activision Blizzard and a planned $69 billion acquisition by Microsoft, the WoW team is looking to forge a new path, one that challenges long-held ideas on what WoW is, how it's played, and who it's for. So far, the results are promising.

There is no better example of old assumptions that in recent years have held the game back than the divide between the game's two factions: the Horde and the Alliance. For almost 20 years, WoW has been defined by the Cold War-esque battle between Azeroth's two superpowers, so much so that the WoW portion of Blizzard's annual BlizzCon convention would often begin with a competition among players in the packed convention hall to see which faction was the loudest. The faction rivalry, at least in Blizzard's mind, has always been one of the most essential parts of WoW's DNA. Never mind the fact that the Horde and Alliance teamed up in the game's story to defeat world-ending threats time and time again, dating all the way back to Warcraft III. Never mind the fact that the leaders of both factions regularly cooperate and are even friendly with each other. The war between the factions, and the divide between the game's two playerbases, needed to persist, because that's what WoW was all about when it first launched in 2004.

Only a few years ago, this made the idea of cross-faction play unthinkable. Developers even said as much. Humans and orcs fighting together? Off the table, despite the game's narrative supporting the idea and the fact that the game would benefit from a larger, connected playerbase when it came to enjoying endgame content. The idea was even popular with many players, but that didn't matter. There were certain ideas that couldn't be touched, and this was one of them.

Now, in 2022, it's finally happening. Cross-faction support is coming, allowing Horde and Alliance players to team up for dungeons, raids, and rated PvP. It's a monumental shift in the idea of what WoW is and can be. The initial response speaks for itself. Players largely seem ecstatic about cross-faction play, proving they are ready for change. While rethinking the iron curtain between the Horde and Alliance is just one assumption the team took a hard look at, there are other changes that have been made or are in the process of being made that reexamine other ideas that were once thought to be untouchable.

The seeds for this kind of change were planted months ago, prior to the release of the game's 9.1.5 patch (a patch that notably reworked or removed certain systems from the game's most recent Shadowlands expansion that were widely unpopular with players). It was around that time game director Ian Hazzikostas said the team has, at times, clung too closely to old traditions instilled in them by some of WoW's original creators.

"It's patterns we've been trained to think in and accustomed to think in," Hazzikostas said in an interview with GameSpot prior to patch 9.1.5. "Working on World of Warcraft this long, that can lead to what seems like stubbornness to the outside, and I get that and I get that is frustrating."

One of those patterns, the idea that progression in WoW is largely on a per-character basis instead of account-wide, is now being reevaluated.

"World of Warcraft at the start was rooted in the paradigm of 'you play your character,' and you switch to a different character, going back to Classic in 2004, nothing was account-wide," Hazzikostas said. "Everything lives on your character. If you played an alt, it was a brand-new journey, you'd have to earn everything and do everything from scratch. And that's pretty standard across RPGs, single-player or otherwise. You make a character, this is your character's journey."

However, as the game aged and new classes and races were introduced (and Blizzard began to offer level boosts both free and paid), more and more players had a number of characters to play. Having "alts" became less of a niche part of the game and something a majority of WoW players do. Despite that, few aspects of the game's progression carried over to multiple characters, resulting in players having to repeat pieces of content or reputation grinds that were not designed with repeated playthroughs in mind.

Whereas the WoW team once looked at most game-system decisions from a character-first perspective, only occasionally unlocking things account-wide, the inverse is becoming true. Evidence of this change in mindset is already evident in WoW's most recent patch, which introduced alt-friendly changes that were praised by the game's community.

"I think now increasingly we are asking the question in regard to almost every reward, every piece of content, is this something that holds up for multiple playthroughs?" Hazzikostas said. "Is this something that's going to feel meaningfully different on a different character? Or is this something, and depending on the answer to those questions, we'd like to make more and more things account-wide or easily accessible to alts from the start?"

As for what's next, the team has continued to update various elements of the game that could be seen as offensive, problematic, or that have otherwise aged incredibly poorly. These changes have ranged from reworking achievement names to altering quest dialogue, all with the mindset of creating a more welcoming and inclusive game world in the wake of the shocking allegations that have surfaced as part of ongoing investigations and lawsuits into Blizzard's workplace culture. Whereas altering older in-game content might have once been off the table, that is no longer the case, and Blizzard seems committed to making sure the game in its entirety is reflective of the current development team and playerbase's values. The current team taking ownership of what WoW is and should be in 2022 is a good thing, even if some of the changes made to older content may seem frivolous to long time players.

It's clear that Blizzard is looking to chart a new path forward for the MMO that made the developer a household name, one more informed by the modern needs of players and their feedback and less dictated by decade-old ideas about how the game must be. Whether Blizzard is able to chart that path successfully remains to be seen. Fans are still eagerly awaiting news of the game's next yet-to-be announced expansion, hoping that what Hazzikostas has said "is a new perspective going forward" for the team since patch 9.1.5 will translate into new ideas and a new era of success for the MMO. It's still unclear what the next year and beyond of WoW will look like, but if nothing else, it's refreshing to see Blizzard cast off old assumptions that have long held the game back, one update at a time.