Warcraft’s VP discusses the company’s future and the costs of experimentation

The massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft will celebrate its 20th anniversary in 2024, an astounding achievement for a game with an estimated player base of millions.

With the release of the game’s tenth expansion, The War Within, last week, we spoke with Holly Longdale, vice president and executive producer at Blizzard Entertainment, for a wide-ranging look at the future of the game.

Heather Newman: Looking ahead to the next 20 years of WoW, what do you want people to say is your legacy?

Longdale: We want to bring this game to everyone, to people of all ages, to people who have never played this game, to people who have stopped playing. We want people to say that we have never been outdated. We have always focused on fun and bringing people together.

We have a lot to do. We have to do more. We have to be better. We have to share and get out there.

Newman: What’s so special about Warcraft?

Longdale: If we look at the number of people who got married, [because of WoW]they have kids named after WoW characters. I have over 200 friends I met through WoW and counting. I’ve met them in real life. They’re a part of my everyday life.

Why wouldn’t we share that? Especially during this time when I think the world needs it. People need comfort and a place to just be. World of Warcraft is full of generous humans who are willing to share themselves.

Newman: So how important is it to you to maintain Warcraft’s core as a social MMO? Does today’s reality, with people’s attention spans and time lengths being so fragmented, make it more necessary to make it at least partially a single-player game?

Longdale: This idea that we’re better together is very important to who we are and what we are. It’s a foundational pillar. We’re fundamentally focused on that core. But even at launch, we had a lot of players who were playing solo or randomly bumping into players they didn’t know and were able to build relationships that way.

When I play an expansion pack, say “Battle for Azeroth,” I play with my husband and complete the story. We play different sub characters so I’m not the best at my class. I don’t want to do raids because I don’t want to get stressed out and download a bunch of stuff.

Newman: If you were still just a player, would you have stayed?

Longdale: If they’d told us we were going to get the Mists of Pandaria Remix, or this weird Plunderstorm, or Timewalking, we would have gone back, because that felt like less friction to participate and enjoy.

The problem is [the team] We put too much emphasis on the core. Our team is big, so we want to focus and expand the perspective of our players. But we’re not there yet. It’s a journey.

Newman: What types of additional experiments would you like to see?

Longdale: Are there other social game modes or ideas that you have that would be satisfying for someone who isn’t as hardcore? Some of these experiments will be hardcore or more “core.” Our focus is on how to build connections, whether that be emotional or creating memories.

Newman: What is your favorite recent memory?

Longdale: I was in Plunderstorm, a gnome in the grass, and nobody saw me. So I won. It was the best day of my life. I killed again. [game director Ion Hazzikostas] We were prototyping and it was the second best day of my life.

Newman: Plunderstorm was a limited-time PvP battle royale event. What experimental events like this do you plan on doing in the future?

Longdale: I think it’s time for us to branch out. I want them to experiment, but I don’t want it to be too widespread. I know Plunderstorm was polarizing, so I’m going to keep the percentage low. You either love PvP or you hate it.

We learned a lot from that. That’s part of the game. What does our audience want? We take some notes from what we see. We try what feels good to us, and we don’t overinvest until we know that it’s something that players really want. We try to stretch our thinking beyond the standard and understood game systems of MMORPGs 20 years later.

Newman: What did you learn from the Plunderstorm experiment?

Longdale: We were serving [a PvP] Frankly, that’s an audience we could focus on more. PvE is what most of us do, and we’ve learned a lot from it. We may not want to reward it with cosmetics, collectibles, etc. that most players prefer.

We would definitely bring it back, but we’d probably word it a little differently. We don’t want people to feel like they have to go and have a bad experience or get humiliated by super good PvP players just to get a Moog. It just doesn’t seem right.

Newman: To be fair, that could be true for all of the PvP-related rewards. If you can snap your fingers and get an Obsidian Legend banner or one of the PvP gladiator mounts in the Arena Shuffle, go for it. There’s always something there.

Longdale: But I think when you release something like we did with Plunderstorm, it becomes a one-way funnel within a period of time — you can’t escape the hype, the momentum, whatever. So the team learned a lot from it.

Would we ever release it again? Probably, but it won’t be the same. This is the journey we’ve been on. [Mists of Pandaria] Remixes are one of them. If you decided to do a different kind of remix in the future, would you have done anything differently? Yes, I learned a lot. It was by no means perfect.

Newman: What would you change in the remix? No more endlessly raising frogs to get ahead?

Longdale: That was my first piece, and the second was that you have to pay close attention to the currency system and balance. These things are specifically designed to be light, fun, challenging, and have a loot piñata feel. We didn’t achieve that goal the first time around, and there are a lot of people who probably never came back.

We want to make sure that we learn these lessons, or at the very least, use these limited times to make sure that these mistakes don’t last too long.

Newman: What do you think worked well with the remix?

Longdale: I [Warcraft] “It’s a classic space, so people have a lot of nostalgia and affection for it. To be able to take an expanded tour. The team is very excited to see if there’s an opportunity to do an expansion like this again.”

Newman: I’ve heard that Legion is getting a lot of votes.

Longdale: That’s weird. I don’t know what you’re talking about. [She laughs.] Yeah, no, we hear that too.

Newman: Both of these experiments took place in Season 4, which is typically the slow period right before an expansion release. Do experiments always take place around that time?

Longdale: That’s one of the reasons we created the Live team. We want the extended team to do what needs to be done. They work together because the Live team often leverages what the extended team has done and is doing. But we intend to do this throughout the year.

Newman: Can you give us an example of how that works?

Longdale: Every year, I look at the calendar. I think, “This piece of content is probably going to end around this time. I should do something here.” This could be a small event, a big event, a massive event. When I look at remixes, it’s a big event.

They did a great job exploring how they don’t cater to this player type. Let’s say the solo quest player. They don’t cater to them enough at this time of year because they run out of things to do. Let’s put something in here. Very tactical.

Forbidden Reach was actually produced by the Live team, but at the time we were in the process of transitioning from completing the expansion work to a full transition to the Live team.

Newman: How do you balance the development costs of experiments like Plunderstorm and Remix with the steady pace at which you continue to add content patch by patch to the “core” game?

Longdale: Our live team’s job is to understand player behavior, study what they enjoy, identify different player types and archetypes, and build for them in near real-time. These two modes have been perfected over the course of several months.

We want to bring joy to the world, and we hate spending a year and a half building something only to realize that it didn’t work out.

We know there are things that we know and love, and that players actually love, and we want to continue to do those and then release and iterate on new things that bring people together: social features, game modes, whatever.

Newman: What are some of the features that have been brought back that are becoming even more popular?

Longdale: We’re going to be taking a deeper look at some of the things players love that haven’t gotten as much attention in the past. With more work being done over the holidays, [events]and so on.

Newman: Looking ahead to the next 20 years of Warcraft, what other things would you like to work on?

Longdale: We completely acknowledge that we still have a long way to go to truly welcome new players who find out about us, hear their friends talking about Mists Remix, think you should give it a try, and then find all sorts of barriers to entry to be able to join with their friends. So this is part of our journey.

We’re really looking 20 years ahead. That’s great! We’ve got work to do, preparing for the next 20 years.