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After 20 years of WoW updates, will Blizzard ever need to wipe the slate clean? Maybe 'at some long, distant point,' but the MMO has already been totally 'rebuilt'
World of Warcraft, nearing its 20th anniversary, will continue its expansion and update model rather than traditional sequels, prioritizing its large player base and ongoing evolution, unlike other games opting for numbered sequels.
World of Warcraft is nearly 20 years old. Over that time, we've seen numerous other games trend from follow-ups and sequels to staying put and going the way of expansions and updates. World of Warcraft has always done the latter, and that's how it'll stay for the foreseeable future, though Blizzard acknowledges that "at some long, distant point down the line" it may have to confront more drastic changes.
Traditional sequels to multiplayer games like Halo and Call of Duty are fairly standard fare in the grand scheme of things, though over the past few years we've seen also a few live-service games undergo huge overhauls before slapping a '2' on the end to finish it off – Overwatch 2, Counter-Strike 2, and so on. It's a topic that recently popped up during an EA investor call, with company CEO Andrew Wilson batting away an Apex Legends 2 hypothetical since "the version 2 thing has almost never been as successful as version 1."
With that in mind, I asked World of Warcraft's game director, Ion Hazzikostas, about the long-term future of the MMO. WoW is, after all, about to turn 20. Will they ever need to wipe the slate clean to keep it healthy in the longer run?
"Theoretically, at some long, distant point down the line, that may be a question we grapple with seriously," he says. "But, for the time being, we have a huge, vibrant, and growing player community that we're excited to serve."
Hazzikostas goes on to say that the "magic" of World of Warcraft is that the MMO "is a little bit of a ship of Theseus of video games" as "every piece of it at this point has been recreated and rebuilt over time."
"We're constantly tearing out some old foundational system and replacing it with something that will scale to support our new server architecture, to support new graphics pipelines, to support new aspects of multiplayer interaction that the original game couldn't have imagined," he says.
"When we have this vibrant world full of millions of players, our priority is to keep serving them as best we can – to keep extending those journeys, the worlds we build, and every step along the way, we are making the improvements that we think suit the modern audience best."
Hazzikostas hails WoW Classic as a "separate ecosystem" for players that's "testament to the amount of change that's happened and the amount of evolution in World of Warcraft over this time." While some players dabble with both, Hazzikostas says that "for the most part," fans have picked a version of the game as their primary home.
"Technically, it's the same game now turning 20," he adds. "There's been a tremendous amount of diversions in evolution over time, and that's only going to continue."