I have a few different conflicting thoughts when it comes to the most recent interview with World of Warcraft game director Ion Hazzikostas, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I can think of a few different readings of the words that are actually on the page. One of those readings is worse than the other, and we can conceivably argue for a while over which of those readings is correct. Being as all that we have is the text and no access to the inner life of its speaker, the best we can do is guess.
This might seem like a rather wispy thing to devote a whole column to, but I promise that there’s more to it than that. And the crux of it all comes down to a reading of timing and implication when it concerns Blizzard listening to player feedback, especially with an eye toward the slow-motion disaster that was Shadowlands. So let’s go on a journey.
Our journey begins with a quote. PC Gamer writes, “Hazzikostas’ interview comments suggest there may be more of this radical listening to come. It took Blizzard some time to fully realize the shift in WoW’s audience, he said.” And then the interviewer quotes Hazzikostas directly.
I think it was beginning but definitely accelerated over the course of Shadowlands where, from a design perspective especially, we had a bit of a reckoning. We had built systems and leaned on what seemed like time-honored WoW principles like deep investment in your character and meaningful choices and differentiation.
There are two ways to read that quote. The first reading – and the one I definitely gravitated toward at first – was that Hazzikostas is specifically saying that Shadowlands represented a flashpoint for player distaste. This is… just patently ahistorical because the complaints during Shadowlands pretty much just rhymed with what players said during Battle for Azeroth. And a lot of the feedback even then wasn’t actually all that new. There were big chunks of negative feedback about the game’s design direction that had been in place ever since Cataclysm, if we’re being honest.
However, that is not the only reading of that quote, and it would be uncharitable to claim that Hazzikostas is claiming that everyone was happy in the expansion prior to Shadowlands. Rather, what he’s saying is that the player discontent and feedback was there for some time but jumped up to a more intense level. It’s a slightly more charitable reading on a whole, and it paints a picture of player complaints reaching a crucial volume whereupon it could not be ignored any longer.
Now, we could go back and forth here for a while and argue over specific meanings, but… as I mentioned, all of this is lacking the crucial element of actually being able to know what was meant, looking past the limitations of this particular interview format, and so forth. Because as you probably guessed from the article length up to this point, I’m about to hit you with an assertion of which one is correct based on other evidence.
And you’re partly right because the answer is actually that it doesn’t matter.
See, whichever reading you subscribe to – whether you think that Hazzikostas is trying to paint a problem with Shadowlands specifically or you think it was a change in how feedback is received – is neglecting something very clear. Blizzard did not change its way of engaging with players and designing based on game mechanics feedback received in Shadowlands per se. All of the negative feedback in the world isn’t why the development staff sat up and said, “Wait, we need to really change some of what we’re doing.”
If you don’t feel like looking at the financial data, just know that the investor reports from that era show the consequences of Shadowlands in a stark way. WoW (and its fellow Blizzard games) didn’t just bleed some users and level off; it bled users – subscribers! – and then kept bleeding in a manner usually reserved for patients on blood thinners who are warned to go to the ER in these scenarios. What had long been Blizzard’s consistent cash cow that could bankroll any missteps with sheer force of institutional inertia was now not just losing players but not recovering players the way it once had.
This is why, at the end of the day, our reading of that quote doesn’t really matter all that much. It doesn’t matter whether or not you think there’s any veracity to claims that the designers had tried to make something according to age-old WoW principles or whether or not claiming that was what Shadowlands offered was true because that wasn’t what actually led to the changing of the guard anyway.
When you view it in that light, the whole interview takes on a different tone. It even casts things like WoW’s Mystery Line in a different light, if I’m being honest. The game was not in dire financial straits insofar as I don’t think there was any real discussion about “could this be the End of WoW” behind closed doors, but the developers and their leaders were looking at the numbers (a damn sight more often than once every quarter, to be clear) and seeing a painting that was grim enough to justify overhauling the entire process.
Taken as a synthetic set of concepts, the MAU reality even paints otherwise fairly banal statements in a less flattering shade. Sure, it would be accurate to say that the developers have now changed their ways of iterating upon feedback, but is it really fair to say that they’ve learned a major lesson? If you’re still defending Shadowlands in some fashion as “we were just doing what always worked in WoW before,” is it fair to say if perhaps that’s part of the problem? Viewing the game as a content farm where you put in X number of challenges and you get Y players?
Of course, diving too far down that particular rabbit hole involves repeating the mistakes I just got done making fun of myself (and possibly other people) for engaging in. Ultimately, we can guess at intent. We can guess at what lies deep within Ion Hazzkostas’ heart of hearts. What we can actually judge on is execution.
None of this means that it’s somehow a bad thing that Blizzard is now prioritizing player feedback. These are good things. I’m not saying that things like Warbands are bad or even that the changes made to Mythic+ are bad things (sure, I may not enjoy the mode or the gameplay style it caters to, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be improved or improvements to it are bad). The idea of a Blizzard that no longer regards itself as a monolithic entity immune to criticism is a good thing.
We have, in the newsroom, long made fun of the idea that Blizzard acts as if it operates an MMORPG that is somehow a class apart from every other MMORPG. And to an extent that’s still there, as sometimes the devs appear to blithely ignore lessons that other games learned years or even decades ago. But that is changing, it seems, and that is a good thing.
It’s just important to note that contrary to what even the people in charge might like to imply, this is not a result of goodwill or a sudden realization about how passionate the fans are. What caused the change was good old-fashioned subscriber drops in substantial numbers, enough to make people flopsweat and realize that something about the formula was not working any longer. That is the motivation. Period end.
And yes, I will accept that motivation if it makes the game better for all players. But I think it’s still important to note and be aware of the disconnect. Sometimes when studios talk about “feedback,” they really do mean “money.”
War never changes, but World of Warcraft does, with almost two decades 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.
