In a world where live service titles can struggle to find an audience, it's always impressive to see a game make it to a decade - let alone two.
World of Warcraft has done just that, bringing MMOs into the mainstream and celebrating 20 years since launch. While the Warcraft Direct has promised there's plenty more to come, we had the chance to sit down with executive producer and Vice President of World of Warcraft Holly Longdale about the potential for more players to jump into Azeroth on platforms other than PC and Mac, as well as the chances of a graphical overhaul.
Here's what she had to say about the possibility of each.
Will it ever come to consoles?
World of Warcraft's visuals are iconic, with a sort of 'homely' feel lacking in many other titles. Still, I was curious if the team looks to other MMOs that offer decidedly more modern visuals, or that have updated their visuals like Final Fantasy XIV. WoW does tend to see updated textures and lighting, but never a major overhaul, and I was curious if it's something Blizzard would consider given the incredible polish of the team's cinematics.
"It's a conversation we have a lot on the team," Longdale exclusively reveals. "We get asked, 'when are you going to update the graphics?' but to your point, we have - we're just staying within what is our style".
"What we found is players of WoW don't want something different" she explains. "They want it to feel like WoW, and they appreciate the style that it is."
"We've done experiments, and we probably always will do experiments, but we build this for our community and we don't want to go in a direction that will make it not feel like WoW for them. But certainly, in the future, who knows what we'll work on?"
"We'll look for all kinds of opportunities to explore what it might look and feel like, but I think it's always maintained its style to some degree, like Warcraft Rumble on mobile it's and Hearthstone, you know, their variations, but it feels like Warcraft."
"We want everybody on the planet on whatever device they've got to be able to experience Warcraft in some way., We do have a central division and our engineering team is constantly optimizing all the time, and we often say you could basically play World of Warcraft on a potato."
"That's one of our commitments, that we make sure we are as backward compatible as we possibly can be and even across different OS's because the ability for a player, no matter the device they're using has access to World of Warcraft is really important to us."
As part of Blizzard's 'no player left behind' mantra, I was curious if there's any side of that discussion that involves the game finally coming to console - especially since Blizzard is now owned by Microsoft, manufacturers of the Xbox platform.
"We have nothing to announce right now, but we're always exploring," Longdale said.
"We're always looking at opportunities in the future, to provide access to more players."
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