“We should have listened more to the players.” Blizzard criticizes itself with World of Warcraft and what happened after the Shadowlands expansion. World of Warcraft boss Holly Longdale says Blizzard has learned from the release of the Shadowlands expansion.

Remember when Blizzard released World of Warcraft‘s eighth expansion, Shadowlands, in late 2020? It’s been a while since then, but the community was far from satisfied with that expansion for a number of reasons: a polarizing and confusing story, little endgame content, and other aspects caused frustration for many players. Community discontent was widespread, but it seems the company has learned from its mistakes.

At least that’s what World of Warcraft boss Holly Longdale tells PC Gamer. Blizzard has been self-critical following the launch of Shadowlands and the company’s management has acknowledged that they should have “listened more” to their community and that said content “wasn’t enough.” This is confirmed by Longdale: “I think we should have listened more to the player base. I think that, often, in earlier times, game design wasn’t even a job,” she explains.

“It was a group of incredibly passionate geeks who were figuring out how to translate tabletop games into 3D. So I think they relied heavily on their best instincts,” she says (via Eurogamer). The WoW boss says the development team at the time “wasn’t really reflective,” but now the studio members have learned to “listen more and observe.” As a result, they now have more tools to receive good feedback. “Listening to the community and being able to verify discussions – we now have the technology and the data to be able to map both,” she says.

Blizzard criticizes itself for WoW Shadowlands

Although the aforementioned expansion was not Blizzard’s best, Longdale acknowledges that they put a lot of work into it. “It took us longer than we would have liked to create the content for Shadowlands. We were determined to get it out, but it wasn’t enough and it wasn’t the right material. And we analyzed it very thoroughly and we continue to do so to use it as a guide for where we are going,” she explains. One of the keys to expansions is, apart from content, balance. “‘Oh, my class is a mess.’ And you get a lot of feedback and support for those ideas, then you make a change and it breaks everything else. Balance is a great example.” Remember that the MMORPG will launch the WoW expansion The War Within on August 26.

Source: 3djuegos