Interview: WoW's Game Director on the many lessons learned during 20 years of continuous development - and a bit about what the next 10 years have in store

At a time when online games appear and disappear at lightning speed, it seems particularly impressive that a small handful of games from the era of noisy dial-up modems and winding LAN cables still manage, not only to survive, but to thrive. Runescape is one example, Everquest another, but despite the continued success of these games, there is still no other game quite like World of Warcraft.

WoW, as it was quickly dubbed, may not have introduced the MMO genre, but it spread awareness of online role-playing games in an unprecedented way, making the genre mainstream and becoming a cultural reference point for an entire generation of internet users.

Today, 20 years after its original launch, the game remains the uncrowned king of the genre. While almost all other MMOs have long since moved to a free-to-play model, more than seven million players still log into WoW and happily pay the €10.99-12.99 monthly subscription fee.

What is the secret to the game's success? At Nordic Game in Malmö, we had the chance to ask Ion Hazzikostas, game director of World of Warcraft, exactly that.

"First of all, a lot of it is due to the team that created the original game, which I was just a player of back in 2004 and 2005. It's one of the greatest games ever made that really brought in a huge community. It's a game that captured the hearts and the dreams of a generation. But why are we here talking about it 21 years later? I think this is a testament to the agility and the hard work of the team to evolve with our players."

At Nordic Game, Hazzikostas talked at length about how WoW had grown along with its players. When the game hit like a hurricane back in the mid-00s, many of the players were teenagers or young students with plenty of time to spend in the new and exciting virtual world. Now the original players are adults - with jobs, children and all that - and this fact has greatly influenced how Blizzard has evolved and adapted the game.

"It's no secret that World of Warcraft was a game that initially asked a lot of the players in terms of their time. It was a game that took hundreds of hours to level up in, and it was a game where, if you only had 20 or 30 minutes to spare, honestly a lot of the time it wasn't even worth logging in at all.

"We recognise, as players have moved on in their lives, they are in many different situations. Many want to maintain a connection to the game without necessarily having hours to dedicate in a big block of time. And so while there is still tremendous depth to the game - there are still epic raids that groups will spend hours trying to work through in a given evening - we also have content like Delves, a new feature that we added in our War Within expansion, that are these little bite-sized, 10 to 15 minute adventures, that you can do solo or in a group of up to five players. That sort of flexibility is something that the game simply didn't offer in its early days."

When WoW was released in late 2004 (or early 2005 for us in Europe), the game quickly hit five million players - an unheard player base at the time. Later, the game reached more than 10 million monthly active players, before Azeroth's "population" (after a dip in the late 2010s) stabilised at around seven million.

While the player base has remained relatively stable in terms of its size, the same cannot be said for its internal composition. Some players have been along for the whole ride; some have recently returned to relive the magic of their childhood; while others are brand new to WoW, the Warcraft universe as a whole, and even the MMO genre as such.

This naturally places great demands on the game's flexibility, which is one of the reasons why World of Warcraft today has two separate versions - the standard client with all the new content and WoW: Classic for nostalgics or those who want to try out the original experience. However, even two separate versions are not necessarily enough to satisfy everyone, which is why Blizzard spends a lot of time analysing both feedback and the behavioural patterns of their players.

"In order to understand how the community is feeling about something that's already in their hands, we are looking at our forums, we're looking at social media, and we're looking at the most popular videos and articles from content creators. Trying to capture the heartbeat of the community, you might say. But we also have a ton of data.

"I think it's important to understand that most players don't post on forums. Most players don't give us feedback on social media, and we need to make sure that we're not accidentally over indexing on this very vocal minority. And so we're also always looking at how our players are actually playing the game, what content are they returning to, what content they are not engaging with. We also do some surveys that we push out to a selection of our players; again to try to make sure that we understand what the silent majority is thinking and is doing when it comes to features that we've yet to release."

Even though Blizzard is constantly looking at feedback, hosting playtests, and monitoring its own data, not all of their decisions have been popular with the community. Game development is not an exact science, and Hazzikostas admits that the team have made some mistakes over the years. However, the ability to learn from these mistakes is an important part of growing along with your players, he explains.

"There were definitely some missteps, some things that I think the team regrets around the Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands expansions a few years ago. There were systems that we were offering players that kind of dictated how the game was meant to be played, or how the game should be played.

"We asked players to make meaningful and hard choices between building their character in one way or building it in another way with a lot of friction in changing those choices. These were things that felt rooted in the games' original design and our design thinking, but that clearly weren't serving our players at the time.

"It probably took us a year or two longer than it should have to really get that message. We had the realisation around 2020 that the path we had been on in those recent years was not really serving our current community as well as it should. We really pivoted significantly after that - towards the end of our Shadowlands expansion and into the rest of the game since - in a way that really has been player centric at the heart and center of our design."

When it comes to which expansion packs he is most proud of, Hazzikostas provides two examples.

"The Legion expansion will always have a place in my heart. It's the expansion we released as I became game director, and it's an expansion that revitalised so many core systems of World of Warcraft while also telling this incredibly epic story that goes back to the roots of Warcraft III, the Burning Legion and all those characters.

"The other one I would mention is our Dragonflight expansion, which came out in 2022. I think that expansion represented the culmination of a lot of the stuff that I just talked about. As we began to realise that we were on the wrong path, we started to infuse our new thinking into our patches. But Dragonflight was the first expansion that was able to be created with those philosophies as its foundation: with respect for players' time and a player-centric approach to all of its systems. I think the way it was received by the players as kind of a breath of fresh air was really heartening for the team and has kind of kicked off this new era of World of Warcraft."

Finally, there was also time to look a little ahead. In the short term, we already know that World of Warcraft: Midnight and later The Last Titan will conclude the Worldsoul Saga trilogy that Blizzard kicked off last year with The War Within - the series' tenth expansion pack. But there's plenty to look forward to in the long run too, as Hazzikostas reveals that the team currently have ideas for the next 10 years of WoW.

"I don't see any reason why World of Warcraft has to end, and I certainly don't see a fixed endpoint anywhere on the horizon. As long as the players are excited to spend time in our world, we want to keep evolving it for them, and you know we have so many big ideas. I can say for sure the next eight years to ten years are really, really bright.

"Our players sometimes ask if we're ever going to make a World of Warcraft 2 or something like that. I would say we're kind of already in the middle of playing World of Warcraft 10 in some ways. The game has changed so much over the years, and it will continue to change with our players. The fact that we have reintroduced classic versions of the game, it's a testament to just how much the game has changed," Hazzikostas concludes.