GamesMMOWorld of WarcraftWorld of Warcraft’s executive producer says the game’s recent maverick events like Plunderstorm and MoP: Remix are owed to a squad of madcaps called ‘the live team’When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
GamesMMOWorld of WarcraftWorld of Warcraft’s executive producer says the game’s recent maverick events like Plunderstorm and MoP: Remix are owed to a squad of madcaps called ‘the live team’When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Blizzard)
If you’ve been paying any attention to World of Warcraft in the past year or so, you’ll have noticed that things are getting a little weird. Not in a bad way—in fact, while other MMORPGs would struggle with a content lull before their next big expansion, we’re only a few months out from The War Within and there’s never been so many ways to get your WoW fix.
Season of Discovery,severalflavours of Classic including theapproaching Cataclysm,Plunderstorm(to be soon replaced with the harebrained, private server energy ofMists of Pandaria: Remix)—oh yeah, and retail. There’s a lot to do.
Speaking to executive producer Holly Longdale in a group interview during a World of Warcraft: The War Within preview event, myself and several other journalists got to talking with her about WoW’s new era of experimentation—unsurprisingly, Longdale says there’s a whole team dedicated to throwing delicious gameplay spaghetti at the wall.
“The expansions for World of Warcraft—they did their job, they were relatively reliable, and they worked,” Longdale recalls. “And then they didn’t work as well, particularly in Shadowlands where the content drought didn’t work well for players.” She’s referring to patch 6.1, which took ahorrifying 218 days to arrive. Mercifully, Dragonflight has had a healthy roadmap that’s been, for the most part, stuck to religiously.
In particular, Longdale says that “we saw in our data that our casual and midcore players”—midcore being players who like a challenge, but are short on time—“were under-served—that’s where late last year, we created the ‘live’ team. Their job is retention of the players that are under-served.
“We started saying ‘okay well, let’s experiment for them’ … and a lot of the stuff we did outperformed expectations.”
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“Part of our ethos is—we’re 20 years on, how do we set ourselves up for the next 20? We wanna make sure we remain technologically modern. Like you probably noticed with Plunderstorm, it’s a bit more action-oriented combat, we definitely broke some WoW rules”, the best part? That innovation, Longdale notes, can be picked up or left as the team sees fit: “We may do something with it, we may not.”
TOPICSBlizzard Entertainment
TOPICS
PRODUCTSWorld of Warcraft: The War WithinWorld of Warcraft
PRODUCTS
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