The massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft celebrates its 20th year in 2024, an incredible achievement for a game that still sports an estimated player base of millions.
Last week marked the launch of its 10th expansion, The War Within. We caught up with Holly Longdale, vice president and executive producer at Blizzard Entertainment, for a wide-ranging interview about the future of the game.
Heather Newman: As we look ahead now to the next 20 years of WoW, what would you hope people say is your legacy?
Longdale: I want to bring this game to everyone, to share it for all ages, people who’ve never played it, people who left it behind. I want people to say we always remained relevant. We always remained focused on the fun and bringing people together.
We have a lot of work to do. We’ve got to do more. We’ve got to be better. We’ve got to share and get out there.
Newman: What makes Warcraft special?
Longdale: We see how many people got married [because of WoW], they’ve got kids they named after WoW characters. I’ve got probably over 200 friends, I’ve lost count, that I met in WoW, and I’ve met them in person. They’re kind of part of my daily life.
Why would we not try to share that, especially in a time where I think the world needs it? People need some comforts and some places to just be. In World of Warcraft, there are so many generous human beings who share themselves there.
Newman: So how important is it to you to maintain the core of Warcraft as a social MMO? In today’s reality of fractured attention spans and the amount of time that people have, is it almost by necessity now at least a partially single-player game?
Longdale: That idea that you are better together is vital to who and what we are. It is a foundational pillar. We are fundamentally focused on that core. But even from launch, there were many players who could solo or bump into a player they didn’t know and build relationships that way—or not.
I know when I go into an expansion—let’s say Battle for Azeroth, I went in there with my husband and we played and then we got through the storyline. We are not the best at our classes because we play all kinds of alts. We’re like, we don’t want to raid because I don’t want the stress and I don’t want to download a bunch of stuff.
Newman: If you were still just a player, would you have stuck around?
Longdale: If you would’ve told me that I would’ve had Mists of Pandaria Remix on tap, or this weird Plunderstorm thing, or timewalking, we would’ve come back because it feels like lower friction for us to get in and just have fun.
I think the issue was [the team] focused on the core too much. Our team is larger, because we want to be able to focus and broaden that view of who our players are—and we’re not there yet. This is a journey.
Newman: What additional types of experiments would you like to see?
Longdale: Are there other social game modes, ideas that we can come up with that are really satisfying if you are not as hardcore? Some of those experiments will be hardcore or more “core.” What we are focused on is how do we build connections, whether it’s an emotional or you made a memory.
Newman: What was one of your favorite recent memories?
Longdale: I was in Plunderstorm and I was a gnome in the grass and nobody saw me. So I won, which was just the best day of my life. I also killed [game director Ion Hazzikostas] when we were prototyping. That was the second best day of my life.
Newman: Plunderstorm was the limited-time PvP battle royale event. What experiments like it can we expect to see in the future?
Longdale: I think it’s time for us to reach. I want them to experiment, but not super broadly. We’re going to keep the percentage low, because we know Plunderstorm was very polarizing. You either like PvP or you don’t.
We learned a lot from that, and that’s part of this. What does our audience want? We take some notes from what we see. We try something that feels good to us, and we don’t over-invest until we know it’s something players really want. We’re trying to broaden our thinking beyond what is sort of standard, understood, MMORPG 20-year-on game systems.
Newman: What did you learn from the Plunderstorm experiment?
Longdale: We were serving [a PvP] audience that frankly we could focus on more. PvE is the bulk of who we are, and we learned a lot. We may not want to attach rewards like that, that we know almost all players love: transmogs and collections.
I think we would absolutely bring it back again, but we would probably frame it somewhat differently. We don’t want anyone to feel like they have to go and have a bad time and feel shamed by super-awesome PvPers so you can get a mog—that doesn’t feel right.
Newman: To be fair, that may be true of any PvP-related reward. If I could snap my fingers and get that arena shuffle Obsidian Legend’s banner, or one of the PvP gladiator mounts, please, sign me up. There’s always going to be some element of that.
Longdale: But I think when you release something like we did with Plunderstorm, it’s a one-way funnel in a period of time. You can’t really escape it, for the hype and the momentum and all that. So the team has learned a lot from it.
Would we potentially release it again? Probably, but not the same. And that’s sort of our journey through all these things. [Mists of Pandaria] Remix is another one. Are there things we would do differently if we decided to do some other kind of Remix in the future? Yes, we learned a lot. It certainly was by no means perfect.
Newman: What are things you’d do differently in Remix? No more endless farming of frogs to get ahead?
Longdale: That was going to be my first one and the second, we have to be very careful about our currency systems and balance. These things are specifically designed to feel light and fun and rewarding and like a loot-pinata vibe. We didn’t hit that mark at first, and there’s probably a bunch of people that did not go back.
We want to make sure that we learn these lessons. We at least have the benefit of these finite periods of time, so that these are not long-lasting errors.
Newman: What do you feel went well in Remix?
Longdale: I mean I do come from the [Warcraft] Classic space, so the nostalgia and the love that people had for it. Just being able to do the tour of the expansion. The team is really excited to start seeing if there’s an opportunity to do another expansion like that.
Newman: I hear a lot of votes for Legion.
Longdale: Weird. I don’t know what you mean. [She laughs.] Yeah, no, we hear that too.
Newman: Both of these experiments were in Season 4, a typically slow time right before the launch of an expansion. Is that when they’re always going to happen?
Longdale: That is one of the reasons we created the Live team. We want the Expansion teams going, doing what they need to do. They collaborate, because the Live team will quite often take advantage of what the Expansion teams have done or are doing. But the intent is this is year-long.
Newman: Give me an example of how that works.
Longdale: Every year, we look at our calendar. Hey, they’re probably going to be finishing this content around this time. We should really do something here. This could be a small event, a large event or a massive event. If we look at Remixes, that’s a biggie.
They’ve done an amazing job at looking at, we’re underserving this player type here. Let’s say it’s solo questers. We’re underserving them around this time they’re going to run out of things to do. Let’s put something here. It’s very tactical.
Forbidden Reach was actually done by the Live team, but at the time they were crossing over from finishing off expansion work and then being fully dedicated to the Live team.
Newman: How do you balance the development cost of experimentation in things like Plunderstorm or Remix with the steady pace of content from patch to patch in the “core” game?
Longdale: Our Live team is tasked with seeing what our players are doing, research on what they enjoy, identifying our different player types and archetypes and crafting for them almost in real time. Both of those modes came together in months.
We want to get fun out there. We don’t want to spend a year and a half making something just to find out that we didn’t do it.
There are going to be things we know and love that we know players actually do love. We want to keep doing those, and then start iterating on these new things: social features, game modes, et cetera, we can release that start bringing people together.
Newman: What’s an example of a returning feature that is getting more love?
Longdale: We’re going deeper on some things we know players love that have maybe not had as much attention in the past. So you’ve seen more work on holiday [events], and so on.
Newman: What else do you want to work on as you look ahead to Warcraft’s next 20 years?
Longdale: We fully admit and acknowledge we have a long way to go to be really welcoming to new players who hear about us. Their friends are talking about Mists Remix, you should totally go do that—and then finding all these barriers to be able to just get in with your friends. So that’s part of our journey as well.
As we go forward, we are really looking at, yes, yay, 20 years. Awesome! We’ve got to set up for the next 20, and we’ve got work to do.
