Daily Star Interview – Player HousingDaily Star Interview – Art Style & ConsolesDaily Star Interview – Building a Community & New Players
We highly recommend reading the full articles for additional context, but we’ve summarized the interviews below for easy reference.
Interview Highlights
Player Housing
Players have been clamoring for even the smallest detail about the recently announced Player Housing feature coming in the Midnight expansion. While we may have to wait to learn more, we did learn a little about what Blizzard intends for the longevity of Player Housing.
- The hype is finally real for the much-requested feature to finally be coming to WoW.
- Still too early to discuss details, but they’re excited and proud to show players how they’re making housing the WoW way.
Holly Longdale
“Housing is going to be a journey for the next couple of decades. It’s going to stick around and live with us. It’s your house, it’s your home, so we’re really committed and dedicated to it and we’ve built an entire team around it.”
Visual Overhaul of Art Style
WoW’s cartoon-ish art style with larger than life shoulders is often brought up in comparison to other more realistic visuals of some modern games.
- Development team is constantly asked when they’re going to update the graphics and it’s discussed frequently.
- Graphics have been updated over time, but they want the game to still feel uniquely WoW and they’re staying within that style.
- Blizzard is continually experimenting and exploring WoW’s visual style both in-game as well as through Rumble and Hearthstone.
Holly Longdale
“What we found is players of WoW don’t want something different. They want it to feel like WoW, and they appreciate the style that it is.”
WoW Accessibility & Consoles
Microsoft’s acquisition of Blizzard raised concerns regarding exclusivity of Blizzard games across platforms. Rather than restricting that access, it appears that Blizzard is committed to accessibility and is exploring the potential of WoW on consoles.
- Blizzard is committed to backwards compatibility and across different OS’s to ensure players of all types have access to WoW.
- The engineering team is constantly optimizing WoW to ensure support for a variety of devices and setups.
- When asked if WoW could come to consoles like Xbox in the future especially after the Microsoft acquisition, Holly said, “We have nothing to announce right now, but we’re always exploring… looking at opportunities in the future, to provide more access to more players.”
Holly Longdale
“We want everybody on the planet on whatever device they’ve got to be able to experience Warcraft in some way…we often say you could basically play World of Warcraft on a potato.”
Leave No Player Behind
- Blizzard is grateful to have cultivated such a huge community around WoW in the last 20 years and realize there’s a lot of responsibility in being one of the biggest, best, and firsts.
- They want to ensure that Azeroth not only a familiar home for returning players but a welcoming one for new players as well.
- Vision now is for WoW to leave no player behind with that being realized through features like Delves, follower dungeons, story mode raiding.
- Believe they can still do better for new players and there’s a renewed focus on that going forward.
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