Human beings love narratives. We love stories too, but narratives are like the arch version of that. You don’t need an elaborate story about how Thag had trouble finding food but then found a big dumb mammoth he could easily kill to feel satisfied and go, “Hey, good for Thag.” We want life to arrange itself in nice little sequences where we can establish a meaning, a narrative arc, a build. And we are kind of great at assembling these things after the fact, of looking back and building a narrative for things that have already happened.
The problem, of course, is that the real world is not scripted. Narratives, when handled well, are like a set of train tracks guiding the story in a direction; the real world does not have tracks, and we can determine the shape of things only after the fact by trying to make what already happened fit some sort of coherency. So it goes when people are asking if Dragonflight is the last chance for World of Warcraft to prove that the game can still deliver a tour de force, an expansion people want.
Is it the last chance for the game? No. But it is the last chance for something, and that’s what makes it interesting.
First and foremost, I want to establish that at this point I am not forecasting Dragonflight’s quality. I’ve talked about the problems it has and that it needs to solve many times, and the thing is that when we talk about chances in this context, it doesn’t actually matter one way or the other. Maybe it’ll be great, maybe it’ll be terrible, maybe it’ll just be all right. The important question in context is what happens attached to that.
Talking about this as a “last chance” is compelling and fits a pretty good narrative. After all, WoW is coming off of what is, at a minimum, a four-year slump: two unpopular expansions that were poorly received for a wide variety of reasons coupled with a studio that is in turmoil and still reeling from having its egregious sexual misconduct on the part of leadership revealed… yeah. If you’re trying to assemble a narrative, the start of 2022 was pretty easy to frame for Blizzard.
But remember what I said in the intro: As tempting as it is to treat real life like a scripted show (not a fan of the protagonist I am apparently watching, some of the video games look cool, cats are excellent, 2.5 stars), reality is under no obligation to fit into a narrative structure. It is entirely possible for Blizzard to go headlong into a third disappointing expansion without missing a beat, like hearing the Chariots of Fire theme blare as an athlete faceplants.
Yes, I have numerous videos I could use there, but I just did a video joke. Chill.
However, this is not about quality but about consequences. Is this WoW’s last chance? Of course not. The whole reason that it’s easy to think about it that way is because the narrative structure makes it feel that way. When the All Is Lost moment hits, you expect one last try to get things back on track because it feels very inspirational that someone recovers just as things go wrong.
This is why most biopics manufacture an All Is Lost moment when the narrative needs, usually one that didn’t actually happen or definitely did not have nearly as much riding on it as the narrative wants. Sorry to tell you this, but The Greatest Showman lied; P. T. Barnum actually lived a life where he succeeded with his venture early and basically just kept succeeding without a huge low point. But would you really watch a film that was just Hugh Jackman singing about how he can’t stop winning and then he never does? (Actually, don’t answer that.)
If Dragonflight is bad, well, that’s not going to be good for the studio. More subscription losses will come, more negative reception will happen, and then in a couple years there will be another expansion and we’ll do this dance again. Yes, it’ll be a significant blow, but we are realistically past the point where you can look at this as a last chance. The game is not one expansion away from shutdown. Sorry, but as dramatic as it would be, that’s just the reality.
But there is a caveat in there, and it’s one that is at least more interesting to me. Sure, I’m not really worried about the fate of the game as a whole based on this expansion’s performance. (Especially because if Dragonflight is bad but its follow-up is actually good, I really do think that all talk of “last chances” will evaporate into the mists of memory.) But I am curious about the fate of the person who has, for better or worse, embodied World of Warcraft’s design course for the past eight years: Ion Hazzikostas.
My feelings about Hazzikostas as a designer are not exactly hard to find, nor are they unique or really all that controversial. (I have no feelings about him as a person; I have no reason to think he’s not a perfectly decent human, and as I’ve said before, at least he doesn’t lie to the players.) But even the WoW apologia squad jealously guarding their game like Sméagol tends to stop shy of really defending the man himself, and watching the game from Warlords of Draenor to the present tells the story of why.
Under his direction, the game has had four separate expansions, three of which have been received with varying degrees of “poorly.” That is not a good batting average. It’s still not a good average if Dragonflight comes out and we’re at three out of five, but it’s at least within a somewhat more acceptable range. But what happens if Dragonflight comes out and it’s another case of, “Well, this is bad again”?
Companies take a long time to turn, but it’s hard to imagine – especially with the Microsoft merger – that’s going to look like a defensible stance. So Dragonflight is definitely not the last chance for WoW, but it may very well be the last chance for the leadership whose design principles have brought us to the point that people are openly asking if this is the last chance for WoW.
Of course, I can’t say that for certain, either. Everything I said about narratives from the article still pertains to this particular story. Sure, it seems pretty obvious to me that if this expansion is bad again, you start asking, “Who are we letting make all these decisions and why are we still letting them do it?” That sure feels like a comprehensible narrative arc, and it’s one that at least wraps up with a change that has long been needed.
But that doesn’t mean that life is going to work like that. Life is messy. It’s entirely possible that Dragonflight will come out and be well-received, and then Hazzikostas and WoW’s core leadership team will leave anyway for reasons that are not altogether clear amidst a whole lot of rumors. He might be shunted off to another Blizzard project. Or maybe he’s still there when we wind up for Try Number Six. Lots of things are possible, and as tempting as it is to fit real life into a narrative, that’s still just not how the world works.
Or so I thought, at the time. But little did I know that that very evening…
War never changes, but World of Warcraft does, with a decade of history and a huge footprint in the MMORPG industry. Join Eliot Lefebvre each week for a new installment of WoW Factor as he examines the enormous MMO, how it interacts with the larger world of online gaming, and what’s new in the worlds of Azeroth and Draenor.
