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Blizzard's new plans for World of Warcraft show why MMORPGs may have plenty of life left as a genre.
How is World of Warcraft still going?
In an age where online multiplayer games rise and fall sometime in the same year, it's a worthy question to ask. Its legions of beloved fans stick around even though its core gameplay hasn't changed much since 2004 (though it has been repeatedly overhauled and improved). Players pick a race, class, and gender, then set out into the world to complete quests, raid dungeons, and fight other players using unique spells and abilities.
What once pressed against the technical limits of online play is now quaint in an age of battle royales and co-op basebuilding games. And yet, it persists. And not merely persists—millions of players still log in regularly to raid dungeons, bringing in extraordinary cash for the studio and its new parent company Microsoft.
This Saturday, the venerated MMORPG officially turns 20. At Gamescom 2024, we asked production director Michael Bybee and game producer George Velev about the game's long-lasting appeal—and what its current stewards are doing to make sure it never goes away.
The team at Blizzard is fully aware it doesn't take much to drag someone away from World of Warcraft. "We're ultimately competing for everyone's attention and we compete with everything, including things like Netflix," Bybee said. "If we're not giving you something interesting or engaging to do, [players] are gonna go somewhere else."
That was a problem Blizzard ran into with the expansion Shadowlands, which released to positive reviews but soon saw a drop-off in players. (It didn't help that the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV, a dark horse competitor to World of Warcraft, was enjoying great word-of-mouth marketing).
Beginning with the next expansion Dragonflight, Blizzard began releasing content at what Bybee referred to as a "faster pace." Around this time, the company began shifting its production structure to support two expansion teams and one "live service" team. The company had always worked several expansions ahead, but the hope now was that Blizzard could plan expansions in a way that let them tease players about future content sooner and adjust that content based on player reception.
Image via Blizzard Entertainment/Microsoft.
Enter this year's expansion, The War Within. In it, Blizzard introduced a new idea for World of Warcraft, which is the idea of a story arc that will play out over multiple annual releases. The first one is called "The Worldsoul Saga," and its announcement came with the names of the next two expansions: Midnight and The Last Titan. "Our goal was to make sure that players always felt like there was something right around the corner," said Bybee. Creating expansions that end with a metaphorical "next time on World of Warcraft..." definitely tees up the game's future direction more than the climactic finales of Shadowlands or Legion.
But altering the structure of expansions wasn't Blizzard's only pivot point. Velev explained that beginning with a revamp of the talent system in Dragonflight, the studio began designing new "evergreen" features to be introduced in expansions that could be kept fresh with the help of the live service team. Another example would be the "Delves" of The War Within—dungeons that can be run quickly on a daily basis solo or with up to four friends.
That's a shift from the strategy found in previous expansions, whose big showcase centerpieces would be large raids meant to be run repeatedly by large groups of players. These expansions catered to players who wanted to run said encounters again and again—but Blizzard started getting the message this wasn't appealing to all of its subscribers. Raids are still a high priority for Blizzard, but players will now have endgame options that don't demand they and their friends all be available at the exact same time.
Delves also allow casual players to see story narrative cinematics that used only appear after completing high-difficulty dungeons—a boon for the broader World of Warcraft playerbase. So far it's been enough to keep them coming back over, and over, and over again...
Developers on games like World of Warcraft face a constant challenge: how exactly do you make sure content that's meant to be repeated on a daily or weekly basis doesn't become a boring grind?
The idea of re-running dungeons over and over again in MMORPGs sounds "dull on paper," Velev admitted, but it's been Blizzard's goal to provide variance in those features so they do not feel like the exact same encounter every time (one such tool is the decade-old "Mythic" dungeon system, which lets players tweak the difficulty of encounters before entering). But Bybee said it's the game's status as a social hub that's made these encounters stand the test of time.
Velev pointed out that there are player-led challenges like the "world first" competition, where groups assemble to be the first (or second, or third) to defeat a new dungeon on their server. External sites that connect with the World of Warcraft API track player stats for PvE and PvP competitions, and it goes on from there with streamers, player-written guides, etc.
Of course those elements are common to many online games. Bybee pointed out that World of Warcraft, unlike many other games, is one that's been a hub for friend groups, some who've been at it for the last two decades. "You're doing it with your friends—that's the kicker, is that you're doing it with other people [you know]," he said.
It's definitely something worth thinking about in an era of struggling online games. If your friends are wedded to one game, even if it's not as slick or fresh as a brand-new title, why would you want to leave them behind?
The pair declined to tell Game Developer if any plans for an Xbox version of World of Warcraft were in the works ("there's nothing new to announce about that," said Bybee). For now, it's just about focusing on "the community [they] have" and all the guilds, friend groups, high school pals, and families still playing together as the game enters its second decade.
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