World of Warcraft: Midnight is right around the corner and, despite releasing just 18 months after its predecessor, The War Within, the expansion was developed with “no sacrifices to team health,” according to Game Director Ion Hazzikostas.
WoW: Midnight is the second part of the Worldsoul Saga – a string of three narratively-connected expansions that ushered in a series of notable changes to the MMORPG’s content delivery cadence –, and its shorter development cycle came as a result of internal shifts in team organization.
World of Warcraft: Midnight Developed With “no sacrifices to team health”
“Midnight will be the fastest expansion we’ve ever made in terms of the gap between expansions,” Hazzikostas told The Game Business. “We’ve had a regular eight-week content updates all along the way. No corners cut, no compromises in terms of what we’re delivering, and no sacrifices to quality.
“Most importantly, no sacrifices to team health. I can truly say, which may be a rarity in the industry that’s thankfully starting to change more, this is an expansion that was made without crunch. This was an expansion that was made without telling the team, ‘all right, we need to come in weekends and stay late.’ We did this smarter instead of pushing our team in unsustainable ways.”
Hazzikostas goes on to describe WoW expansion development as “a marathon, not a sprint,” with Executive Producer and Vice President Holly Longdale adding that “organizationally, the team changed a lot so we could bring focus.”
Each expansion has its own dedicated team, as does the live section of the MMORPG, and its housing component, one of the key new features added in World of Warcraft: Midnight.
“We have a core crew at the beginning of any expansion. [Expansion] 13 is already well underway, Last Titan [Expansion 12, and final part of The Worldsoul Saga] is well underway, and we’re thinking beyond that. It requires focus and planning in order to make this real so that people have the time and agency to create what they want,” Longdale added.
Hazzikostas also described the six-month drought that was a common occurrence in between WoW expansions not that long ago as “objectively unfair to our players.” One of the things that contributed greatly to successfully delivering content at a much faster pace, on top of “very rigorous planning and pre-planning” was investing in people that could better lead the studio’s teams.
“In the past we’ve tried to grow the team to deliver more content with fewer gaps, but we still ran into the same bottlenecks in terms of approval of creative direction, of game direction, of decision making,” Hazzikostas noted.
“Our focus in the last few years has been on building empowered, strong, creative leaders, people who understand the spirit of World of Warcraft and can make decisions and keep things moving forward so that we can work on multiple things in parallel.”
How well this new approach will work out for Blizzard in the long run is something we’ll have to wait and see. For now, World of Warcraft: Midnight is slated to release on March 2, with its 12.0.5 patch coming shortly after.
For the latest gaming news, follow GameWatcher on BlueSky, check out our videos on YouTube. We sometimes include affiliate links in our posts, which grants us a small commission, thank you. Please support independent Games Media. ❤️
