There has been a noticeable shift in the developmental mindset of World of Warcraft throughout the course of the game’s current expansion, Dragonflight. After the franchise saw one of its weakest iterations in Shadowlands, the WoW dev team resorted to an incredibly simple strategy to revitalize the game: listening to the playerbase.
In Dragonflight, player feedback has been a crucial tool for Blizzard’s development process. In gameplay facets such as competitive balancing, narrative direction, and general quality-of-life changes, the WoW developers have made transparency and constructive criticism key pillars of the game’s evolution.
This new era in WoW’s player-developer relationship comes just one year after the game had been in one of the most downtrodden states in its 20-year history. Across the expansion, players complained that they often felt starved of content for months, and the content that did come out during Shadowlands often felt thin and underwhelming.
Not only is Dragonflight’s content coming out at a much faster rate than that of previous expansions, but Blizzard is making sure to carefully consider the wants and needs of WoW players at a much more increased clip now.
“What sparked it, frankly, was realizing that our old approach wasn’t working anymore,” WoW game director Ion Hazzikostas told Dot Esports in a group interview earlier today. “We were failing to connect with our playerbase and people were unhappy with elements of the game that we just saw as continuations of 20 years of traditions.”
So far in Dragonflight, it feels as though Blizzard has genuinely tapped into what makes the playerbase click. Players want more race-class combinations? Consider them added. Players are raising complaints about Mythic+ affixes? Consider them changed. Players are tired of “borrowed power” systems? Consider them gone.
“We definitely had a couple of wake-up calls along the way and realized at the end of the day, none of this matters if we’re not connecting with the playerbase, meeting them where they are and making a world that brings them joy and is inspiring to spend time in and return to,” Hazzikostas said.
And there’s no doubt the world of Dragonflight is one worth spending a whole lot of time in. The Dragon Isles—home to four of the biggest, most expansive zones ever created in WoW’s history—are not only massive by nature, but have explorative secrets hidden throughout. Additionally, Dragonriding (widely regarded as one of the best gameplay systems ever introduced to WoW) makes navigating the Isles feel intricate, immersive, and most importantly, fun.
Spending time with WoW is something more players are doing in Dragonflight because: one, the game is worth playing continuously, and two, Blizzard is feeding players content at a rapid pace. 2023 is scheduled to be the most jam-packed calendar year in WoW’s history, with six patches set to be released over the course of the year.
“The answer there is just a conversation to understand the things we were doing that weren’t landing the way we’d hope they would, working through possible changes, running those changes by the community, and continuing the conversation that hopefully also lands in a place where once it becomes the norm and people can count on its continued existence, maybe there’s a bit more room for us each to give each other the benefit of the doubt,” Hazzikostas said.
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Because Blizzard has placed a heightened level of emphasis on the relationship between players and devs, the company hopes, in the future, players will be more likely to keep communicating.
According to Hazzikostas, the main reason WoW has been able to cater to players’ wants so effectively during the first six months of Dragonflight is due to the trust built via communication between the two parties.
“We’re going to get things wrong. We’re not perfect, we’re going to make mistakes,” Hazzikostas said. “When we do, our hope is that through communication we can more quickly understand exactly how we’re off, but also build trust that it’s not going to be that way forever; that if we got something wrong, it’s because we’re fallible like everybody else, and that our greatest desire is to understand how and fix it.”
Patch 10.1, the third of WoW: Dragonflight’s six 2023 patches, will launch on May 2. The expansion’s second season, which will include a new Mythic+ dungeon pool, as well as the launch of the game’s next raid, will kick off one week later on May 9.
