by theygamesFollowing World of Warcraft Dragonflight, Blizzard says that the studio’s change in approach to the fantasy MMORPG and its big return has been due to listening to player feedback, with communication at the heart of World of Warcraft matching up to both Blizzard and player standards.
This comes from current World of Warcraft game director Ion Hazzikostas, who acknowledges Blizzard’s relationship with its players, and what it should look like going forward.
“What sparked it, frankly, was realising that our old approach wasn’t working anymore,” Hazzikostas says of Blizzard’s change in approach to its WoW players. “We were failing to connect with our player base and people were unhappy with elements of the game that we just saw as continuations of 20 years of traditions.”
We at PCGamesN said in our World of Warcraft Dragonflight review that the newest expansion’s endgame content “fails to fill the void,” but according to Hazzikostas it looks like Blizzard knows what it has to do to better get WoW onto your level, which is definitely a good sign at least. Hazzikostas has also already said that the World of Warcraft legacy reputation grind will be seeing a big overhaul, but that it won’t be for a while.
“We definitely had a couple of wake-up calls along the way and realised, at the end of the day, none of this matters if we’re not connecting with the player base, meeting them where they are, and making a world that brings them joy, and is inspiring to spend time in and return to.
“We’re going to get things wrong. We’re not perfect, we’re going to make mistakes,” Hazzikostas adds in a group interview with Dot Esports. “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.”
Open communication between developers and players is always a good thing, not just for the long-term health of a game’s community, but to maintain a certain level of trust and understanding between both parties as well. The Wow Dragonflight patch notes for 10.1 also show a lot of the upcoming changes to the MMO, if you want to see exactly what Blizzard has planned for the game’s immediate future.
In the meantime, our WoW Dragonflight tier list tells you the best class for the latest expansion if you fancy starting fresh, while our look into the WoW Dragonflight talents system is sure to help clear up any questions you might have.