Blizzard Is Ditching Two Decades Of Assumptions About World Of Warcraft, One Update At A Time

Certain ideas and assumptions about what World of Warcraft is, ranging from character progression to faction rivalries, have long felt set in stone, baked into the game from its earliest days. It may have taken close to two decades, but some of those assumptions are finally beginning to change.

Blizzard’s landmark MMORPG is almost 20 years old. Plenty has changed in the 18 years since the game first released, both in-game and out. WoW has received eight expansions, new dungeon and raid difficulties, new classes, new races, cross-server play, visual updates, and more. But as much as various pieces of WoW have changed over time, much of the core design philosophy behind the game has stayed the same. Some of those core pillars that have long defined WoW are now changing, at what can only be described as a critical moment in the developer’s long history. Amidst ongoing sexual harassment and discrimination allegations at Activision Blizzard and a planned $69 billion acquisition by Microsoft, the WoW team is looking to forge a new path, one that challenges long-held ideas on what WoW is, how it’s played, and who it’s for. So far, the results are promising.

There is no better example of old assumptions that in recent years have held the game back than the divide between the game’s two factions: the Horde and the Alliance. For almost 20 years, WoW has been defined by the Cold War-esque battle between Azeroth’s two superpowers, so much so that the WoW portion of Blizzard’s annual BlizzCon convention would often begin with a competition among players in the packed convention hall to see which faction was the loudest. The faction rivalry, at least in Blizzard’s mind, has always been one of the most essential parts of WoW’s DNA. Never mind the fact that the Horde and Alliance teamed up in the game’s story to defeat world-ending threats time and time again, dating all the way back to Warcraft III. Never mind the fact that the leaders of both factions regularly cooperate and are even friendly with each other. The war between the factions, and the divide between the game’s two playerbases, needed to persist, because that’s what WoW was all about when it first launched in 2004.