World of Warcraft director is ready to lead the MMO’s future with The War Within

World of Warcraft has recently released its tenth expansion, The War Within, and the long-running MMO is entering this new era with some noticeable swagger.

After some missteps like 2020’s Shadowlands, 2022’s Dragonflight saw a largely positive reception from fans, as have recent experiments like Mists of Pandaria Remix. The War Within is also setting up a whole trilogy of expansions, dubbed the Worldsoul Saga. There’s an ambitious plan for this online game as it enters its 20th year.

During Gamescom last week, I had a chance to sit down with World of Warcraft game director Ion Hazzikostas. I asked him about World of Warcraft’s new expansion and ambitious plans for the future.

Swagging into a new trilogy

GamesBeat: World of Warcraft has a lot of passionate fans, and they let you know when they’re unhappy. Players seem to be generally positive more often these days, though. I imagine you must feel pretty good going into The War Within.

Ion Hazzikostas: I think so. Last time around felt like a bit of seeking redemption, convincing people to give us another chance. Now, without getting too cocky, we’re swinging for the fences here. We’re doing something ambitious. We’re excited to share it with the world.

GamesBeat: This is just part one of a trilogy of expansions. I remember when that was announced, I wondered if The War Within would still stand on its own. But it seems like there’s been an effort to make it still feel like an important stand-alone expansion.

Hazzikostas: Exactly. That’s the key for executing this. Each expansion still needs to feel like a satisfying expansion, the same way a season of a great TV show should feel like that season was satisfying. Not like it didn’t feel good until you made it to the finale. Otherwise, you’d probably never make it to the finale. The key thing is, and the question that we had in posing this to the community at BlizzCon, will it be okay to have an expansion where not all the questions get answered? Not everything is resolved. Some things need to be resolved, or it won’t feel satisfying, but it’s going to take some time for all of this to play out. Hearing reactions, people are warming to it. They’re excited by the idea. It opens up a lot of possibilities for us.

I don’t know if you had a chance to check out the Chris Metzen interview we released. As he said, we were originally beginning to conceive of The War Within and the story of the Worldsoul as a single expansion. As we started to tease out everything we wanted to do and all the boxes we needed to check, all the characters that needed to come into play, heroes and villains, it quickly became apparent that this was way too much for one expansion, or two expansions. Three, we could do it justice. That’s the plan.

GamesBeat: What has it been like to have Chris Metzen back and working with the team again?

Hazzikostas: It’s been awesome. Obviously we’re kicking off our third decade, which is also crazy. The challenge is coming up with new locations, new cultures, new characters, new villains that still feel like they belong in and are grounded in World of Warcraft. Who better to help with that process than the grandfather of Warcraft himself? He has that innate sense in his DNA.

Just being able to jam with him is super fun. It’s been amazing working with him directly. I had interacted with him in the past, in his first stint at Blizzard, but never had the chance to sit in meetings with him and help jam out story concepts. The team has loved it as well. Just energizing all around.

Heroes and villains

GamesBeat: You mentioned villains. It seems like you maybe have struck on a winner here with Xal’atath, a character who has this interesting history. Were the cogs moving back then that this would be something, or is it more of a response to how players reacted initially to that?

Hazzikostas: It was a slow burn. Certainly, back in Legion we never imagined that this was going to be a long term, transformative supervillain. But by the end of Legion, we definitely realized that people liked this character. We should do something more interesting with her. Over the course of BfA we learned more about her nature, wielded that dagger against N’zoth, and she was unleashed to uncertain results. As we were thinking about telling this big story that would touch on the cosmic forces of the Void, she was at the top of the list. Who can we bring back and put front and center as the big bad here?

GamesBeat: The expansion opens with the destruction of Dalaran. Is that a scary thing to do? There’s been some city destructions in the past that have been controversial. Is it tense to pull that off again?

Hazzikostas: A little bit. If you’re alluding to Teldrassil, there’s a couple of key differences there. There, we put the players in the shoes of the destroyers. We put half of our player base in the role of being the destroyers of the city. Here it’s a universal villain. It’s a threat to all of us.

At the same time, we need to do it carefully and purposefully. There should be stakes. There should be consequences in the world. If nothing can ever be destroyed, if no one can ever die because we’re not willing to risk consternation or backlash, then in the long run the story will feel shallower than it ought to. There need to be permanent consequences to the events that happen.

GamesBeat: It’s nice to see dwarves be an important part of this story. Is it fun to put the dwarven races in more of a spotlight this time?

Hazzikostas: Totally. We’ve done deep dives on variants of elves and trolls and others in the past. As we set out to start thinking — this is going to be an expansion that delves underground. Instantly, all right, this is dwarves. This has to be, dwarves dialed up to 11, shedding further light on their origin. The way the team built and fleshed out their culture is incredible.

GamesBeat: Another important hero here is Alleria Windrunner. This is an important Warcraft lore character. How does it feel to get a chance to, again, put her in the spotlight and flesh out her arc?

Hazzikostas: That’s also super exciting. As we’re talking about grappling with the Void, that’s a big part of her journey. Players who played Legion, who unlocked the void elf allied race, they’re familiar with it, but we also knew that we needed to do more to get everybody else caught up to speed. Thus, the animated short that we released last week. Making sure that people understand where she’s coming from. Her journey along with Anduin’s and one or two other folks is central to this through-line in War Within.

Remix and refresh

GamesBeat: How do you think the cadence of content updates is going to look?

Hazzikostas: Pretty similar to Dragonflight. We should be releasing a 2025 roadmap later in the year, similar to the last couple. Right now, we’re focused on launch and the anniversary around the corner that we’ll be talking about more in a couple weeks. Beyond that, everyone should know that War Within is going to be jam packed with content. It’s not just what you get this week and next week. It’s months to follow. Looking back at how expansions are viewed historically and appreciated by players, it’s as much about what the patches look like as it is about the day one experience.

Some people talk about Mists of Pandaria as well-remembered. That had lots of frequent patches throughout. Warlords was well-received up front, and then that faded over time because it turns out that when there isn’t much to do in-game, it’s hard to feel positive and connected and engaged in the game. With an approach that tries to offer as much variety as possible, we always want it to feel like there’s something around the corner, something on the horizon. This cycle we’re in with Dragonflight is one we want to continue. We release something and then just a few days later, you see what’s coming next on PTR around the corner.

GamesBeat: Mists of Pandaria Remix just wrapped up. I enjoyed having the experience of playing those zones a bit more in depth and getting all those cosmetic rewards that are usually so hard to obtain. What were the goals of the team with Remix? Now that we’re wrapping up, do you think you met them?

Hazzikostas: Passed with flying colors. The team just crushed that assignment. The goal, really, we’re always looking to make more use of the wealth of content that we have. No secret, we’re coming up on 20 years. If we’re only telling players to spend all their time in the last six months of what we’ve built and ignore the other 19 years, we’re not doing anyone a service there. Finding ways to freshen that up and make it relevant is something we always talk about. Time walking and other systems like that. But by making it a self-contained experience, we can also break a bunch of rules. We can do things that we could never get away with if we had to balance them and tune around them and support them forever and build on them for years.

When it’s a mode that’s just there for a few months and your character’s not going to last, it’s in some ways inspired by the way seasons work in a game like Diablo. You have this other character that can do some potentially weird stuff and then they move into an evergreen mode to go forward from there.

GamesBeat: It also worked well for the end of an expansion cycle. A way to get people some content to do while they finish up the expansion. Do you think this may fit into the cycle at the end? Will there be time to do another remix?

Hazzikostas: I’m hesitant to ever commit to a formula. “We’ve cracked the code. This is what it’s always going to look like.” There’s some staleness that comes with that. But I will say, we’re almost certainly going to do at least one more Remix experience going forward. We need to take some time to digest all the feedback that we’ve gotten, particularly now that it’s over, and think about where we want to go next. But it’s probably safe to say we wouldn’t drop a Remix right on top of another major patch and force players to choose. It’s a nice thing to help bridge a gap. Is that at the end of an expansion? Is it some point in the middle? Time will tell.

Looking back

GamesBeat: We’re coming up to the 20th anniversary of WoW. The game’s had a bunch of updates and content releases. Where do you feel you are now as a team? How can you keep momentum going into the next 20 years?

Hazzikostas: What we’re about to kick off with the Worldsoul saga is how we keep momentum up. I feel and see an upward trend coming out of some of the darker days, maybe, a few years ago. The team is approaching this — it’s a weird mix of humility and swagger. We’re humbled and appreciate the community’s trust, and in some cases giving us a second chance. We know we need to work hard to retain that trust.

At the same time, we’re taking some big swings. We’re trying something ambitious. We’re not playing it safe. We’re not just trying to keep delivering what players have come to expect. We want to be bigger and bolder and build a foundation for another decade of storytelling to come.

GamesBeat: First 20 years of World of Warcraft, what was the best dungeon? Or your favorite dungeon?

Hazzikostas: Vibe-wise … I could think about this all day. The first one that came to mind, I’m going to say Black Rook Hold from Legion. Classic fantasy vibes.

GamesBeat: Best zone in the first 20 years?

Hazzikostas: I’m going to say Hallowfall in War Within.

GamesBeat: And then best raid in the first 20 years?

Hazzikostas: Again, first thing that popped into my head. I could give you five answers and justify all five. Favorite raid that I’ve worked on at least was Blackrock Foundry back in Warlords of Draenor. What I like about it so much is that it was designed to feel like a real place that you were an interloper in, as opposed to a raid in a video game. The three-dimensionality, how it all fit together, with the shortcuts to unlock. There was the ore processing that happened here, and then a conveyor belt and a chute that led to where weapons were being built. From the start, we were able to execute something that we haven’t been able to pull off at the same level since.