Recap of the Preach Gaming Interview
Preach Gaming sat down with Game Director Ion Hazzikostos to talk about Blizzard’s changing development philosophy, how their storytelling will change, and the World Soul Saga controversies.
Preach’s video contains a lot of his feelings about WoW as well as his personal opinions. This article summarizes the main points of what Ion discussed in his video interview:
- Blizzard is “letting go of old stubbornness” by emphasizing account-wide content such as Warbands. After seeing feedback and how modern players played Classic, they re-evaluated their priorities in the middle of Shadowlands.
- Blizzard wanted to add features like Warbands sooner, but it required expansion-level work to do so.
- The WoW development team’s philosophy and values were passed down from those who trained them, and they had to learn to let go. They learned to evolve their philosophy through player feedback and their own game-playing experiences.
- The World Soul Saga is not a case of “Shrinkflation.” The War Within and subsequent expansions will include the standard four zones, eight dungeons, and a raid.
- The growing WoW development team has resulted in a one-and-a-half-year goal for expansions. They intend to match the Dragonflight content release schedule.
- Blizzard is committing to telling a story over multiple expansions with the World Soul Saga, as opposed to previous self-contained stories in an expansion.
- This enables Blizzard to tell more interesting stories through foreshadowing and having the world reflect events from previous expansions.