World of Warcraft boss Holly Longdale says Blizzard has learned from the controversial launch of Shadowlands. She admits that the expansion was “not enough” and “not the right thing.” She also admits that the team “should have listened to its community more.”
Speaking to PC Gamer, Longdale looked back on World of Warcraft’s historic 20 years, partly as a player and “as a very humble and happy leader of this team.”
“I think we should have listened to the player base more,” Longdale said. “I think in the past, game design was often not even really a profession,” she said. “It was a bunch of incredibly passionate geeks figuring out how to make tabletop games 3D, so I think they trusted their best instincts a lot.”
Longdale acknowledged the changing nature of social media and community management, saying the development team at the time was “not really reflective” and had therefore learned to “listen and observe more.”
“We listened to the community and were able to verify the discussions. Now we have the technology and the data to match those two,” Longdale explained. “So like, ‘Wow, did we really miss something?’ And then we verified that that was a problem.”
Specifically speaking about class balance, she said, “It’s like, ‘Oh, my class is a disaster.’ And you get a lot of comments and support for these ideas, and then you make one change and then everything else falls apart. Balance is a great example.”
“It took longer to create (Shadowlands) content than we would have liked. We really wanted to release it, but it wasn’t enough and it wasn’t the right thing to do. We looked at it very carefully and are still doing so to use it as a guide for our development moving forward.”
World of Warcraft’s new expansion, The War Within, is now available in Early Access. For everyone else, the long-running MMORPG launches soon, on August 26th.
Did you know that Blizzard’s entire 500-strong World of Warcraft development team has unionized, making it the largest group yet within Microsoft’s gaming teams?
Around 1,750 employees on Microsoft’s gaming teams are now unionized, including those working on Blizzard’s long-running MMO.
