WoW: Dragonflight Is Flying High, But Can Blizzard Keep The Wind Beneath Its Wings?

World of Warcraft is currently the best it’s been in a long, long time. Reviews for Dragonflight, the game’s latest expansion released in November 2022, were positive. Player reception to the expansion seems to be, too. Content updates, even the smaller ones, have been substantial and frequent, with developer Blizzard so far delivering on its 2023 content roadmap promises. Add the fact that Blizzard seems more open and responsive to fan feedback than ever before, and WoW feels like it’s in a great place.

It’s a place that Blizzard has been before. Fans will likely think back to the game’s 2016 Legion expansion as the last time that Blizzard’s long-running MMORPG felt like it was firing on all cylinders. Legion received multiple major content patches and was well-loved by players. But Legion’s success in many ways came at the cost of updates for its preceding Warlords of Draenor expansion (viewed by many as one of the game’s lowest points) and the launch content for its subsequent expansion, Battle for Azeroth. Both expansions were heavily criticized and unpopular, but 2020’s Shadowlands expansion (despite strong initial sales) in many ways would encapsulate the worst aspects of both Warlords of Draenor and Battle for Azeroth. Too many mandatory “borrowed power” systems and huge amounts of time between disappointing updates meant that Shadowlands came to represent an all-time low in the history of WoW.

Blizzard isn’t looking to repeat those same mistakes with Dragonflight and whatever comes next. In an interview with GameSpot, WoW game director Ion Hazzikostas said the expansion of the WoW team in recent years and how it’s handling development in 2023 is built around the idea of keeping up with player demand for updates while also making sure the more frequent update schedule is sustainable.

Hazzikostas said the more frequent patch cadence is a great thing both for players and, surprisingly, the development team itself. In the past, team members may have overworked themselves trying to hit a deadline in order to get a particular part of a patch ready knowing that there wouldn’t be another patch for up to five or six months. Now, having a new patch every few months means that if the smaller aspects of an update aren’t ready, they can simply be added in the next update that’s right around the corner. A faster content cycle creates more flexibility for Blizzard. Hazzikostas said the team in recent times hasn’t needed as much overtime work, and the goal is to avoid overtime all-together across the team.

Including Fractures in Time, there have already been three significant updates in 2023 alone, adding things such as the Trading Post, two new zones, new story content, Heritage Armor for two of the game’s most popular races, additional class options for certain races, a new raid, and more. The game’s previous update, Embers of Neltharion, introduced a new gear upgrade system and brought much-requested changes to the game’s Mythic+ dungeons. Fractures in Time, arriving July 11, will add even more new content in the form of a new megadungeon and a never-before-seen support style DPS specialization for Evokers called Augmentation. It will also introduce a whole slew of casual-friendly, quality-of-life changes, like the ability to transfer gold and items between characters regardless of server, the unlocking of all allied races for players who have a level 40 character, and a “fresh start” option for players returning to play characters that haven’t been touched in ages, just to name a few.

Fractures in Time will be the halfway point of Blizzard’s 2023 content roadmap, with one more major update and one smaller one slated to arrive before year’s end. Even if Dragonflight has not sold as well as Shadowlands according to Activision Blizzard financial results, player retention is up, with more players staying subscribed for longer periods of time when compared to previous recent expansions.

“It’s a testament to the hard work the team has done to listen to player feedback and offer more and more flexible ways to play the game than ever before,” Hazzikostas said. “That was something we heard from players often in the past was that it could feel like if you didn’t have a pretty good chunk of time to dedicate to World of Warcraft in a given month or a given stretch, it wasn’t worth keeping the subscription going. The game felt like it was asking so much of you that you couldn’t just engage on a lighter level. That’s something we’ve worked hard to change. But also, of course, having regular content updates, having something always around the corner, is tremendously helpful there and exciting and energizing for the community.”

That isn’t to say that there haven’t been any controversies since Dragonflight’s launch. Blizzard received significant blowback for a community Discord program that would have required members to agree to a non-disparagement clause in order to participate. Blizzard later stated it would re-review the terms of the agreement and that it wasn’t its goal to “control conversations” on community Discord servers.

More recently, a controversial quest that was playable on the game’s public test realm sparked a major outcry from concerned players. The quest in question involved players traveling back in time to ensure one of WoW’s most prominent female characters, the dragon queen Alexstrasza, remained captive and endured her abuse in order to stay true to the game’s canon timeline. Though the quest was quickly removed, many fans were left wondering how such a problematic quest made it so far to be playable on the PTR, especially given all the sexual harassment and abuse allegations levied at Blizzard in recent years following a 2021 state of California lawsuit.

The answer, according to Hazzikostas, is that sometimes, due to the very nature of the game’s PTR, mistakes happen. Though there are internal reviews and internal playtests, Hazzikostas said players often see aspects of the game on the PTR before they’ve been fully reviewed by Blizzard. Feedback from the player community is part of the game’s “checks and balances” to ensure problematic quests or unbalanced aspects of the game don’t make it off the PTR and into the live version, Hazzikostas said, though Blizzard doesn’t want to overly rely on the community.

“The PTR cycle, our test realm, I would say is nearly unique in terms of other games out there, in terms of how fresh and how live a look at our development pipeline it is giving people,” Hazzikostas said. “That is to say, part of how we get done what we get done, part of how we make all this content, is by moving very nimbly, very quickly, and people do things and they get out there on PTR. That’s just how our process works. If we were to stop and vet and review everything before it could even go into a test build, it would grind the WoW machine to a halt.”

Blizzard was planning changes around the same time as player outcry over the quest began to build. In this particular case, Hazzikostas said the quest designer who initially worked on the quest wasn’t aware of its full lore implications.

“We have a lot of people working on the game that are passionate about World of Warcraft,” Hazzikostas said. “Warcraft lore is massive and expansive and there’s a lot of nuance to it, especially some of the ancient history. Honestly, the quest designer that did this work initially was under the impression that the lore was about eggs being stolen. That’s bad but not beyond the pale. Of course, as review processes happened internally, there was a correction and we realized, ‘Hey, wait a minute, this is much more than that. The implication here is something that none of us wants the countenance of, let alone put players in the shoes of doing,’ and so we had changes already underway.”

Blizzard has thankfully avoided adding another potential controversy to that list, this time involving the game’s Trading Post. Players after a recent datamine worried Blizzard would start selling the Trading Post currency, Trader’s Tender, as a standalone product, effectively turning the popular feature added earlier this year into yet another microtransaction store. Hazzikostas cleared the air in our interview and said that there are no plans to sell Trader’s Tender on its own, although some will likely be offered as part of expansion bundles or other promotions in the future.

With two major updates still on the docket to arrive in 2023 following Fractures in Time, there’s plenty for WoW players to look forward to. Blizzard has already confirmed that Dragonflight’s best new gameplay mechanic, dragonriding, will be coming to all of Azeroth in the future. Hazzikostas said the team is hoping to reveal more information “soon” about how existing player mount collections will work in a future where dragonriding can be used across the entirety of the game’s world.

“The thing we don’t want to do is take this vibrant ecosystem of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of mounts, and boil it down to ‘Well, this handful can dragonride, those are the only ones that count,”’ Hazzikostas said. “‘And none of your other mounts, some of your favorites…all that time you spent farming Invincible? Well, Invincible can’t dragonride, so you’re never going to use it.’ We want to make sure we are being thoughtful there and rolling this out in a way that’s going to support not just past content, but future content going forward.”

The future is something Hazzikostas seems excited about. Blizzard’s annual fan convention, BlizzCon, will return as a live-person event for the first time in four years this November. Though he didn’t state it outright, it certainly sounds like WoW’s next expansion will be announced there, as was once tradition. After discussing Trader’s Tender and Blizzard’s desire to include it as part of expansion deluxe editions, Hazzikostas teased that it wouldn’t be “too far-fetched” to assume there will be “significant bundles” later this year that might include the currency. The WoW team’s increased size has certainly helped it deliver more frequent Dragonflight content, but Hazzikostas said it also means that whatever comes next won’t come at the expense of Dragonflight’s success.

“The increased team size is also letting us make progress on later goals and objectives,” Hazzikostas said. “We just recently announced our BlizzCon plans for later in the year, and I think that’s going to be a very exciting one for World of Warcraft fans out there. I can’t wait to share what a lot of the team that hasn’t been working on our Dragonflight updates has been working on.”

WoW: Dragonflight’s Fractures in Time update arrives on July 11. BlizzCon returns to the Anaheim Convention center November 3-4, and will have all of its panels and announcements livestreamed for free for those who can’t attend in-person.