Holly Longdale, Vice President and Executive Producer for World of Warcraft, talked at gamescom 2024 about mistakes made by Blizzard and the lessons learned for the future of WoW.
What did Holly Longdale say? In an interview with PC Gamer, the Vice President and Executive Producer for WoW discussed the 20th anniversary of the MMORPG, stating that there is one thing Blizzard should have done better all along: listening to the community and drawing the right conclusions from the feedback.
She also includes the eight years during which she significantly determined the direction of direct MMORPG competitors such as EverQuest and EverQuest II as a producer, experiencing World of Warcraft only as an enthusiastic player.
The early access for WoW – The War Within has started, here is the cinematic:
Never Again Something Like Shadowlands
Where does this realization come from? As a developer, it is never easy to balance the wishes of the players with what is best for the game. Especially in the early days, much was still uncharted territory. While designing WoW, they relied on their own instincts and experiences.
When Holly Longdale joined Blizzard, however, the balance was completely off. Valuable feedback from the community was ignored. Certainly also due to the pandemic and the working conditions at the time. Ultimately, it took far too long to respond to player criticism.
This came at a price. The subscriber numbers dropped drastically. WoW was said to be in serious danger. Therefore, the entire team, led by Holly Longdale, committed to giving community feedback significantly higher priority with the upcoming Dragonflight expansion, to ensure that something like Shadowlands never happens again.
The developers are also supported by new tools for social media, to effectively collect and evaluate all constructive feedback.
We listen to the community and are capable of verifying the discussions. Now we have the technology and the data to connect these two aspects. Did we really overlook something? And then we can check if it is indeed a problem.
Vice President and Executive Producer Holly Longdale via PC Gamer
What else went wrong with Shadowlands? This is, by the way, not the only lesson that Blizzard has learned from the Shadowlands expansion. Important insights for the future were also gained in the areas of “Story and Setting” as well as “Gameplay”. The Jailer, for example, was not a good villain for the Shadowlands because no player had a connection to the character.
The entire idea of “life after death” was also not accessible enough. Well-known characters were underutilized or written out of the story. There were ultimately too few contents, not enough variety, and the endgame systems around “Borrowed Power” were also not well received.
All of these are insights that Blizzard executives shared with the public at the Game Developer Conference 2024. At the GDC, for the first time since 2015, details regarding the development of subscription numbers for World of Warcraft were also shared: For the first time in 9 years, there are current details regarding WoW subscriptions – Then the MMORPG was particularly unpopular.
