Preach Interview with Maria Hamilton and Ion Hazzikostas - The Next Twenty Years of Warcraft

Posted 2025/09/27 at 1:00 PM by Archimtiros

Midnight Reveal

The cinematic represents the very start of the Midnight expansion. Xal'atath has made a beeline for the Sunwell, teeing up the initial defense of Silvermoon City, in which players and NPCs will arrive to defend the city.

WoW and Blizzard are Changing

One of many reasons for the new cadence of content comes from investing in the World of Warcraft development team, and changing its structure in order to parallelize more. There are less bottlenecks, with separate teams dedicated to making smaller patches, even or odd numbered expansions, and Classic content all at the same time.

When trying to speed up the release of content in the past, the developers found themselves constantly shifting resources, pulling everyone off one team in order to get another project done, resulting in a quick release followed by a long wait. The new staff and structure doesn't make those tradeoffs anymore, supporting continuous development not coming at the expense of future content.

As the team has grown, there are new responsibilities and a lot more delegation. Ion is no longer the sole Game Director, there are also designer directors, associate directors, and more individuals empowered to make calls, while Ion's role is ensuring consistency and continuity across all of the various teams. For example, Ely Cannon is the senior art director responsible for ensuring the art style remains cohesive across all the different versions of WoW, but The War Within and Midnight expansions also have their own art directors. This is all in an effort to reduce bottlenecks of one single person reviewing and approving everything.

The changes have also made communication much more important. Because not everyone is working on the same project at the same time anymore, there's greater risk of losing track of what each of the more independent teams are doing. This is where the top level directors come in, adjusting pipelines and schedules to ensure that there's enough time for localizations after voice work, and the like.

WoW's Future

Ion confirms that the juggernaut that is WoW is not stopping anytime soon. Rather than bolting more and more things onto the existing structure, they're overhauling the foundations in preparation for the next 20 years. With regards to housing, they've adjusted fundamental aspects of instances work, how things are saved on the servers, how pathing works, and how places can place persistent objects on the server in order to allow players to customize their own space.

Some of that is building incrementally on small things from the past, like making the garrison a seamless instance, so that unique decorations and building placements can be seen from across an open world zone. That same innovation allows players to walk past each other's homes and see how they've decorated their yards, despite each house being a personalized instance. The tech that's gone into housing has an incredibly powerful foundation that can be used down the line in future user generated content. What if in the future, instead of placing a table or a painting, you're putting down a persistent trap or a turret?

World Lag and Dynamic Events

There's a lot of room for improvement. There's something epic about the spectacle of the big world boss that everyone takes down together, but the reality is that they want to have hundreds of people in a given zone at the same time in order for it to feel populated, but the reality of calling all of those people to the same spot results in quadratic equations that slow everything else down.

They had a feature back in Argus which called players to enter invasion portals, spinning off miniature world instances capped at 20-players, which feel like an extension of the outdoor world while still allowing for a self-contained experience. Ultimately, that's likely the sort of the thing that the team would need to do more of.

"We'll see" about armor dyes in the future, but there are lots of furniture dyes coming with housing!

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Comment by fokers"When trying to speed up the release of content in the past, the developers found themselves constantly shifting resources, pulling everyone off one team in order to get another project done, resulting in a quick release followed by a long weight. The new staff and structure doesn't make those tradeoffs anymore, supporting continuous development not coming at the expense of future content."

Bullsh*t.Anyone can see that TWW is not even on maintenance mode at this point,even the janitor has gone home and that's why you're so happy to make 0 changes to classes,m+ or raid not even your favorite brand of super lazy,hardly effective fiddling around with aura buffs/nerfs.

Also SO much development time and effort going into f housing meanwhile all the actual "pillars" of PVE(m+,raid) will feel just as stale as every other expansion before if not more so.Not even trying to come up with new things at this point just let the suckers consoom.

Also with regards to the rest of his comment, as many people who are familiar with the game development space can confirm, the more people you tie up to any particular project the less effective every single person and the more tedious getting any single thing done becomes, as you have to jump through so much red tape and get approved by so many other teams that even the simplest bugfix/change becomes a logistical nightmare. So yeah that bodes very ill for the development of an already ailing company and game, no matter how positively he might want to spin it.Comment by 1931396Oh hey, the guy that quit wow. No thanks.Comment by FlynAh yes, good to know that blizzard fixed everything for the billionth time according to themselves.Comment by RaliathOh hey, the guy that quit wow. No thanks.Comment by Austeresthe next 20 years of wow should not include Ion HazzikostasComment by Dakan1Im all for a well oiled content pipeline, as long as they avoid a "too many cooks" situation.Comment by jthm91Getting to play wow in the retirement home. Lets go! 20years!Comment by Mormerothey say they dont have to make tradeoffs anymore in order to speed up release of content, but we all know its not true..Comment by PandalariaHe looks fing crazyComment by CaptainRelykAnd yet still nothing on dracthyr armor supportComment by GlorinssonFokers is an expert developer now.

Let’s see your LinkedInComment by markdalli WaS rIgHtpaidThere are less bottlenecks, with separate teams dedicated to making smaller patches, even or odd numbered expansions, and Classic content all at the same time.don'tGaspand that's okay and it's reasonable for me to not want to pay for dev time on stuff I am not interested inComment by fokersFokers is an expert developer now.

Let’s see your LinkedInComment by KardaghCan we get some actual people who play the game and aren't just streama divas or paid yes men doing these kinds of interviews?Comment by DrakhulisCan we get some actual people who play the game and aren't just streama divas or paid yes men doing these kinds of interviews?Comment by FlynFokers is an expert developer now.

Let’s see your LinkedInComment by BluesnakeCan we get some actual people who play the game and aren't just streama divas or paid yes men doing these kinds of interviews?Comment by Keepbanningme2Blizzard will never change, wow will never change, it will be forever an open beta bugfest game with 80% timegating trying to milk the last survivors of it's community.Comment by stcandywarholNo more long weight!Comment by dancharveyThat "I was right" thing is so infuriating. MFer can't even properly figure out what's going on in a cinematic let alone figure out the next two decades of the game.

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