World of Warcraft is almost 20 years old. During that time, we've seen many other games trend from follow-ups and sequels to staying put and going down the path of expansions and updates. World of Warcraft has always done the latter, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, although Blizzard acknowledges that “at some long, distant point in the future” it may have to face more drastic changes.
Traditional sequels to multiplayer games like Halo and Call of Duty are pretty standard fare in the grand scheme of things, although in recent years we've also seen some live service games undergo major overhauls before being placed a '2' in the end to finish it off: Overwatch 2, Counter-Strike 2, etc. It's a topic that recently came up during an EA investor call, with the company's CEO Andrew Wilson rejecting an Apex Legends 2 hypothesis as “version 2 has almost never been as successful as version 1.”
With that in mind, I asked World of Warcraft game director Ion Hazzikostas about the long-term future of the MMO. After all, WoW is about to turn 20 years old. Will they ever need to wipe the slate clean to keep you healthy in the long term?
“In theory, at some point far and far away, that may be an issue we seriously address,” he says. “But for now, we have a huge, vibrant and growing community of players that we are excited to serve.”
Hazzikostas goes on to say that the “magic” of World of Warcraft is that the MMO “is a bit like a video game Ship of Theseus” as “every piece at this point has been recreated and rebuilt over time.”
“We're constantly removing some old fundamental system and replacing it with something that will scale to support our new server architecture, to support new graphics pipelines, to support new aspects of multiplayer interaction that the original game couldn't have imagined.” he says.
“When we have this vibrant world full of millions of players, our priority is to continue to serve them as best we can – to continue to expand those journeys, the worlds that we build, and every step of the way, we are making the improvements that I think best suit to the modern audience.
Hazzikostas praises WoW Classic as a “separate ecosystem” for players that is “a testament to the amount of change that has occurred and the amount of evolution in World of Warcraft during this time.” While some players dabble in both, Hazzikostas says that “for the most part,” fans have chosen one version of the game as their primary home.
“Technically, it's the same game that's now 20 years old,” he adds. “There have been an enormous amount of deviations in evolution over time, and that will continue.”
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