World of Warcraft boss Holly Longdale says Blizzard has learned from its controversial Shadowlands launch, acknowledging the expansion “wasn’t enough” and “wasn’t the right stuff”, admitting the team should have “listened more” to its community.
Talking to PC Gamer, Longdale reflected back over World of Warcraft’s storied 20 years, partly as a player, and “as a very humble and lucky leader on this team”.
“I think we should have listened more to the player base,” Longdale said. “I think quite often in earlier times, game design wasn’t even a job, really,” she said. “It was a bunch of super incredibly passionate geeks figuring out how to make tabletop gaming into 3D. So, I think there was a lot of going on their best instincts.”
Acknowledging the changing shape of social media and community management, Longdale said the development team at the time “wasn’t really reflective”, so the team has learned to “listen more and observe”.
“So listening to the community, and being able to verify the discussions – now we have the technology and the data to be able to map those two, “Longdale explained. “Like, whoa, did we really miss something? And then checking to verify that, oh yeah, this is an issue.”
Talking specifically about class balancing, she said: “Like, oh, my class is a disaster. And you get a wealth of commentary and support for those ideas, and then you make a change and then it breaks everything else. Balance is a big example.
“It took longer to make [Shadowlands] content than we would’ve liked. We remained committed to get it out there, but it wasn’t enough, and it wasn’t the right stuff. And we looked at that very deeply and we still do to use it as guidance for where we’re going.”
World of Warcraft’s new expansion, The War Within, is now available in early access. For everyone else, the long-running MMORPG will launch soon, on 26th August.
Did you know that the entirety of Blizzard’s 500-strong World of Warcraft development team have unionised, making it the largest group within Microsoft’s gaming teams to do so thus far?
Around 1750 employees within Microsoft’s gaming teams are now unionised, including those working on Blizzard’s veteran MMO.