In an interview with GameSpot, World of Warcraft Game Director Ion Hazzikostas hinted that another old-world revamp of Azeroth is “likely to happen”. The last time this happened was the 2010 WoW expansion Cataclysm. According to Hazzikostas, the development team would learn lessons from Cataclysm which got a lot of negative criticism for deleting parts of the 2004-era WoW that many players loved. The goal would be to use modern solutions to preserve currently existing pieces of the game.
“We are definitely open to it at some point,” Hazzikostas told GameSpot. “It is a shortcoming, if you take a step back and think about World of Warcraft as an ongoing living world, if we’ve kind of painted ourselves into a corner where we have all these iconic locations but we can’t really use them because they’ve already been used.”
Even though not everyone likes this sort of change, it’s definitely an understandable situation for WoW. The popular MMORPG turns 20 next year and much of the current game world exists on old technology and assets. However, with the popularity of World of Warcraft: Classic, it’s easy to understand why the hesitance is there. Even though the two games run separately from each other, a part of the player base prefers the old content.
New expansion on the horizon
Blizzard revealed the final update of the current expansion World of Warcraft: Dragonflight yesterday. The update will pave the way for the next WoW expansion which may get a reveal at BlizzCon 2023. The event takes place November 3-4 and the announcement is expected to come in the opening ceremony. Even though Hazzikostas didn’t confirm when the revamp will happen, we could see it as soon as this next expansion. However, it’s also possible we see the start of the revamp, but not the entire thing. The complete overhaul could take place over the course of the expansion or even several expansions.
Dragonflight has been one of the better expansions recently, so hopefully the new expansion builds upon it. Legendary writer Chris Metzen, one of the original creators of Warcraft, recently returned to Blizzard. Hopefully, he’s a large part of the creative process and can help build upon the positives of Dragonflight.
Looking back, Cataclysm was definitely not the greatest expansion. Other than visually, the world revamp felt like a downgrade as opposed to an upgrade in many ways. I wouldn’t mind seeing a more modern take on a complete overhaul though, using what Blizzard has learned over the last 20 years.
