Ion Hazzikostas, Senior Game Director for ‘World of Warcraft’, Talks About What Makes This MMO Special, Even 20+ Years After Release (Interview)

The cultural force World of Warcraft carries behind its name is incredible. Even growing up in the middle of rural Wisconsin? There was nothing more I wanted to do than try this particular MMO. There’s always been something electrifying about it. My journey into this world started much later than I would have liked. But, I can’t help but enjoy my time spent in Azeroth. That’s why I was excited to chat with Senior Game Director Ion Hazzikostas about what makes World of Warcraft special all these years later.

‘World of Warcraft’ has been running strong for over 20 years at this point. What goes into making a game like this still feel fresh after all this time?

Constant innovation, flexibility listening to our community, and evolving with them. If we were the same game we were 20 years ago, I don’t think we would still be around in the same form today.

Obviously, Classic is still going strong. But, I think that’s a testament to the enduring power of the game and the hold it has over people who have spent, in many cases, years of their lives in Azeroth. Connecting with people around the world and having grand adventures. With each new expansion and major patch, we’re changing aspects of the game. We’re adding new adventures — we’re adding new features and systems.

And speaking of Classic, the fact that we’re able to release Classic in 2019 and have it immediately stand as a strikingly different experience than what modern World of Warcraft offered is a testament to the amount of change that has happened incrementally over each of those years. So, I think we see ourselves as developers of World of Warcraft. As curators of a living world that really belongs to our players.

And we watch and listen to what they want more of. What they want less of. How they’re spending their time in our world. And we continue to evolve the experience accordingly.

‘World of Warcraft’ is not technically considered a “Cozy Game” by default. But, I’ve learned it’s been much more relaxing than I could have ever imagined. Did you envision this type of shift when working on the game? 

Forgive me for questioning the premise of the question to some extent — or challenging the premise, I’ve worked on World of Warcraft since 2008 — for just over 16 years — but I’ve also been playing World of Warcraft since day one. And I would argue there have been cozy elements to it from the very beginning. For many people, back in 2004, or 2005, it was the most immersive chat room the Internet had ever seen for a generation that had spent time in AOL chat rooms. Or on IRC or ICQ, if you were a real geek.

This was a virtual, graphical world. Voice chat tools were starting to come online and come into favor. I can’t count how many times I would log into World of Warcraft without a particular goal of running a dungeon or doing anything to slay enemies and advance my character’s power. But rather, just to socialize. Just to see what was going on. To explore, to maybe chip away at some reputation I was working on while chatting with people from around the world I had just met.

Honestly, ‘World of Warcraft’ has some impeccable vibes

And I think it’s probably fair to say the original developers certainly didn’t have that as their primary motivation when crafting the game’s content and systems. But, I think it was quickly recognized as emergent behavior. As I mentioned earlier in the context of the experience evolving. Systems that came online like more reputations, achievements, cosmetics, and pets to collect and earn. All these other avenues of progression that aren’t power-based or competitive. Some are just about carving out your identity in the world — filling out your collections and making your character look like the expression of who you want. 

That’s part of the magic of World of Warcraft. That it can be so many different things to so many different people. And for every person who comes home, sits down, and logs into World of Warcraft because they want to set a new personal best in a mythic plus dungeon or climb to the top of the leaderboards, there are just as many people who are looking to unwind after a stressful day and go to their favorite zone, listen to the music, and just chill. We love it all.

The art style of ‘World of Warcraft’ has to be one of my favorite parts of the game. While it’s graphically “simple,” it has continued to evolve and is just a constant joy to look at. What is one of your favorite areas the team has crafted? 

I can’t say enough glowing praise about our art team, now and over all 20 of these years. I think that one of the best decisions World of Warcraft made was settling on a more stylized, painterly art style that really has stood the test of time.

Even with the original graphics from back then. As people are streaming and playing Classic and Hardcore today. They still stand up, are still engaging, and still have a charm and appeal to them. We’ve continued to add fidelity and make use of all the modern bells and whistles of graphics cards and computer hardware. Broadly speaking, it’s that core of the feel of World of Warcraft that has made it so enduring as we now enter our third decade with many more years to follow.

Simple and Clean is how ‘World of Warcraft’ Likes To Be

As far as favorite zones are concerned, the first one that comes to mind — I could name many here — is a zone from the “Mists of Pandaria” expansion. The Valley of the Four Winds. It’s one of the most peaceful zones in World of Warcraft. It is just this beautiful, inviting, agrarian society with a village and a market at its center. And unlike so many other places in Azeroth, there isn’t an immediate tragedy or source of strife that is ruining life for everyone. They have problems and, of course, there are nuisances. There are quests to complete, certainly. There are a bunch of monkey-like creatures named Hozen that have gotten into the local brewery and are wreaking havoc.

Menacing creatures are digging up local farm fields — with some darker shadows lurking beneath the surface. But at its core, it’s just an inviting, nice, welcoming place. And I think a lot of players still have their Hearthstone set to return there to this day to check on their little farm they built up years ago and just enjoy the vibes.

Getting into an MMORPG can be a difficult task. But I’ve found that ‘World of Warcraft’ has been one of the easier ones to learn and play. How do you balance the difficulty ratio to make sure it’s accessible for players of all skill levels?

That’s the balance we have to strike on an ongoing basis. Continuing to serve our loyal veteran players who’ve been with us for a few or many years while still making sure we’re keeping the game approachable and accessible. The way we do that is just making a point to always be mindful of what that new or returning player experience is going to be like, even as we add a bunch of new features and end-game content.

In each major expansion, we also do things like create the new player experience of “Exile’s Reach,” which was actually added a few years ago. Or change the way the leveling flow works as we just did in The War Within so that the “Dragonflight” expansion is actually what players are leveling through coming out of “Exile’s Reach” prior to that. You would have been seeing much older content that was less representative of the game as it stood today.

I will say we have much more we need to do in this area. I’m glad to hear you found it approachable. But I think we’d like to do much better in a scenario that we’re going to continue to work on. Even as we continue to add depth once you reach the max level.

‘World of Warcraft’ recently made me tear up after watching ‘The Remarkable Life of Ibelin’. The Reven Pack was such a wonderful way to honor Mats Steen’s memory. What went into creating this particular pack, and why choose a Fox for the mascot?

This is such a touching, heartbreaking story. The way this all came about was we learned of the story when the folks working on this documentary reached out to us to both ask for permission to use World of Warcraft footage and assets and to see if there’s anything we could do to help with some of the Machinima recreations. 

The more we learned about this story, the more moved we were by it. We’re happy and honored to have been able to collaborate in the creation of such an amazing piece in this documentary and kind of retelling the life of Mats. And we also, through this, learned about Duchenne as a disease, as a disorder.

‘The Remarkable Life of Ibelin’ Left A Lasting Impression on Many Players, Myself Included

We worked with the Cure Duchenne Foundation. And we saw the incredible work they were doing and wanted to do our part to help raise funds to find a cure. Or at least aid people with the same condition Mats faced. The pet, in particular, was called “Reven” — which I believe is actually Norwegian for “fox.” It was a symbol he adopted as part of his identity in his roleplaying world. He was self-styled as a detective, solving mysteries for others. Thus, the little Sherlock Holmes-style hat on Reven gives the detective vibes. We really were just trying to capture as much of the personification as we could. 

Again, it’s such a touching story and is a humbling reminder, as a developer on the game, of the work we do. I feel so fortunate to be able to work on a game that has the power to touch lives in all of these ways. And have layers of meaning that go far beyond the moment-to-moment gameplay we envisioned. It’s the social connections that bring the world to life.

The lore in ‘World of Warcraft’ has quickly drawn me in as a new fan. How does the team continue to expand on something they’ve been building up for over 20 years already? 

That is a great question. It definitely comes with challenges. For probably the first decade or so of World of Warcraft, the majority of the lore of the places we visited and major characters we met had been introduced in the real-time strategy games that originated the Warcraft franchise — Warcraft III, in particular. Those games sketched out the contours of a world that the MMO excitedly went to fill in the blanks on and bring to life.

But of course, as we — and time — moved on, we have run out of those older stories to tell. We’ve had to create new locations, new villains, and new heroes while keeping older major characters around. We try, with each expansion, to introduce enough that’s new and to ground it in universal themes so that it doesn’t feel like you need to know the full story of what’s happened over the last eight expansions.

There Are Still More Stories To Tell

We created things like a cinematic that plays when you first log into The War Within. That’s sort of the “last time on World of Warcraft” summary of the events regarding some major characters to help people get situated. But with a new player experience, it’s about striking a balance between adding depth and catering to players who’ve known these characters for years. And also making sure the stories we’re telling remain approachable with that depth beneath the surface.

There are a lot of different races and classes available. So I have to ask; what is your personal favorite go-to?

I’ve played a number of characters. But I think the one closest to my heart is definitely the very first character I made back in 2004 before I worked at Blizzard: an orc shaman. That still feels like my WoW character.

The cultural impact ‘World of Warcraft’ has made can’t be understated. From the classic “Make Love, Not Warcraft” ‘South Park’ episode to its mention on other programs, what is the ‘WoW’ team’s favorite piece of media representation? 

This may be cheating, since it’s referring to a previous question. Honestly, I have to say The Remarkable Life of Ibelin. I think as fun as the South Park episode was — and it really was because it kind of captured the essence of jumping into Azeroth and chasing your goals there, particularly at that moment in time. However, the Ibelin documentary shines a light on a part of the game that all those other media representations haven’t necessarily captured. And that is just the extent to which it fosters human connection and that sense of belonging. That sense of place and meaning it has offered over the years.

Not long ago, when everyone was on lockdown at the height of the pandemic, games like World of Warcraft gave people a chance to adventure and journey to far horizons and connect with people even as they were physically unable to do so. That’s part of the enduring power of this game that we’re humbled to work on.

It was surprising to find out that ‘World of Warcraft’ has great controller support. I’m a convert from other console MMOs. Are there any plans to bring ‘WoW’ to Xbox or PlayStation consoles in the future? 

No current plans to announce on that front, but we’ve definitely done work to support a wide variety of peripherals. There are not just standard controllers, but also things like Microsoft’s accessibility controller that uses a lot of the same interfaces some of our disabled players can use to play the game along with other inputs. We want WoW to be as broadly playable as possible. Whether you want to have a mouse and keyboard, or whether you want to take a PC tablet like a Surface on the go. We’d like to support as much as possible there, but we don’t have any plans for Xbox or PlayStation currently.

Even back when I was in High School (2010 Graduate here), the Alliance versus Horde argument was culturally relevant. I need to find out; which side you are on?

I hate to disappoint. I’m on the “For Azeroth” side in the eternal war between red versus blue. I’m not going to pick a side in this one — that would be unwise.

---

I would like to thank Ion Hazzikostas, Senior Game Director of World of Warcraft, for taking time out to speak with me. World of Warcraft is available to play now on PC.