The Game Director of World of Warcraft acknowledges mistakes in class design. Too many abilities were removed, and improvement has been promised.
Together with the announcement of Patch 8.2 Rise of Azshara , the Game Director of World of Warcraft also released a video. In a nearly 30-minute “Developer Insight,” he explains many aspects of the upcoming patch but also addresses general topics.
He faces criticism and even admits mistakes made in recent months.
Too many abilities have been removed: A significant portion of the video deals with the design of classes and their gameplay in the current World of Warcraft. Hazzikostas is quite open and admits many mistakes that have been made. One of those was the “Ability Pruning.”
The focus on reducing the number of usable abilities for many classes to a fixed value led to the disappearance of some cool abilities that were part of a class’s identity.
At the same time, it was a mistake to only offer many abilities to specific specializations or to add them retrospectively to the talent trees. This has taken essential abilities away from some classes, which players now miss and has taken a piece of their familiar gameplay feeling.
The idea was good, the execution not so much: The basic idea was good to remove certain abilities from some classes, so that not every class has a strong control effect and there are differences. However, in other areas, they have clearly overdone it.
Meanwhile, in many aspects of World of Warcraft, the choice of a class is no longer in the foreground, but only the specialization. It feels as if all 3 specializations of a class are actually standalone classes with different abilities that hardly share anything.
Classes need to become significant again: In the future, they want to take a different approach here. Blizzard has focused too much on “Spec Identity” in recent months and years and has neglected “Class Identity.” In the future, they want to create a common foundation for the respective classes that will then be refined through specializations.
Overall, Hazzikostas is quite insightful in the entire video, explaining the viewpoints from the developers’ perspective well. An important and correct step to communicate with the players.
What do you think of Hazzikostas’s admission? Was it about time that such things were finally acknowledged and a step in the right direction? Or is this just a drop in the bucket?
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