Several months ago, World of Warcraft turned 20 years old. Now, Blizzard is celebrating the 30th anniversary of the entire Warcraft franchise and has invited MeinMMO for an interview – with a strong leap headfirst into nostalgia and interesting new insights into the history of WoW.
Starting from February 22, 2025, the celebrations for the 30th anniversary of Warcraft will take place in London. With the tour, Blizzard will visit various cities worldwide to give fans the opportunity to meet the developers and celebrate together.
Even in advance, Blizzard invited us to conduct an interview with two WoW leads: Ion Hazzikostas, the Game Director of World of Warcraft, and Holly Longdale, the Executive Producer and Vice President of World of Warcraft.
The topic with the two was, of course, World of Warcraft and its history – and particularly the WoW Classic released in 2019, which still captivates players today. And this, although Blizzard initially adhered too strictly to the rules, and then not at all.
“We put work into introducing bugs into the game to keep it authentic”
Originally, Blizzard pursued a strict “No Changes” policy with WoW Classic, meaning: Everything in Classic should be as authentic as in the original WoW from 2004. Because that’s exactly what the fans wanted. So Blizzard adhered to it. Ion Hazzikostas reveals in the conversation:
To be completely honest, one partial reason why we stuck to “No Changes” in 2019 was that we knew players didn’t trust us to make changes. That was the consensus in the community. They said, “These modern WoW developers are just going to mess it up.”
So we then said: Okay, we will even recreate bugs that existed in the game back then. We change as little as possible. We put work into introducing bugs into the game to keep it authentic.
Ion Hazzikostas
However, shortly after, players noticed that this might not have been the best idea. They requested changes. Hazzikostas explains that they now had a basis with the original version on which they could work. The most important decision was made when they released The Burning Crusade with changes:
One of the biggest turning points was when we released The Burning Crusade. Players immediately understood that if we kept the original Paladin seals – one for the Horde and one for the Alliance – then the vast majority of people would play Horde, hardly anyone would play Alliance.
The servers would have been terribly unbalanced. Players supported our decision to make both seals accessible to both factions, even though that was exactly this combat mechanic change we had sworn we would never implement – and which players had demanded we would never implement. But the changes we made were almost exclusively supported by the majority of the player base.
Ion Hazzikostas
However, the WoW lead emphasizes that no single change occurred just because the team deemed it right. Everything was based on feedback from the community, and only what was well-received after suggestions was implemented.
“We thought we wanted that, but we really don’t want that.”
Vice President Holly Longdale elaborates further on the story. Creating WoW Classic was already a challenge back then, simply because the old engine no longer existed. Some features had to be recreated or developed differently.
However, in trying to restore the old feeling, it quickly became apparent that this might not be the best idea:
We were so focused on being authentic, I remember the team artificially slowed down the combat to mimic fights from 2004. So that it feels honestly authentic. And players were asking, “What’s happening here?” Because we were on the modern engine, with the security features we needed.
Players then said, “We thought we wanted that, but we really don’t want that.” Even then, we built the conversation with the community. The Classic team has maintained that relationship since 2019 and built trust in this conversation. That’s a strong bond, even though the community has changed over time.
Holly Longdale
Blizzard began experimenting with new ideas a few years later, considering what could still be done with WoW Classic and what would have happened if they hadn’t taken the path of expansions. The result is the seasons that have since revitalized the Classic servers: The ‘Season of Mastery’ shows that #NoChanges was a stupid idea
