Yesterday’s announcement that World of Warcraft will, for the first time in its storied history, allow cross-faction raids, dungeons, and rated PvP sent shockwaves across the community. While most gamers appear to be cheering enthusiastically – albeit while issuing some much-deserved side-eye for the company, given how long players have wanted this change – a smaller group across social media have pronounced it to be the worst thing since an angry Elf lit a big treehouse on fire.
Such a profound change in design philosophy and the makeup of the game will need to be defended, and so Game Director Ion Hazzikostas popped out of his groundhog hole, declared six more weeks of winter, and addressed why the studio made such an abrupt decision.
“[We’ve been] revisiting things we’ve said ‘no’ to that people in the community have asked for,” he said. “And one of them has been the desire for cross-faction play. We frankly probably reached the tipping point a little while ago. But in a game like this, we’re stubborn and traditionalists and it’s scary to say: Let’s uproot this foundational pillar of what the game has been for over a decade. But it’s time.”
So what about cross-faction guilds? They’re not on the table right now. Hazzikostas said that such decisions are a “one-way process only,” so Blizzard is being conservative on what faction restrictions it is loosening, as outlined yesterday.
WoW Classic was addressed as well over on Wowhead by Lead Software Engineer Brian Birmingham. He spoke to the current Season of Mastery rollout and the difficulty of developing new content for an old MMO, acknowledging that some Classic players really want new raids and dungeons, but he was rather non-committal on the subject: “I think this is probably the biggest unfulfilled hope from Classic fans […] I wish we could just do everything, but there are always more ideas than we have time for.”
