I love World of Warcraft, but I wish Blizzard would stop looking backwards
Job's done?
How is it that the most exciting thing about Warcraft in 2024 is old Warcraft games from the mid 90s? I can't have been the only one watching the Warcraft Direct broadcast this week hoping for a glimpse of the future, and of something new - to hear what director Chris Metzen has been doing since he returned to think about the future of Warcraft a year ago. Instead, all we got was remastered versions of Warcraft 1 and 2, and Classic servers for World of Warcraft Classic - Classic Classic - and a tease for player housing in WoW. That was as good as it got: player housing, which, admittedly, is exciting, but it's still a niche development for a 20-year-old game. How many people, besides WoW players, are excited to hear about WoW expansions in 2024? They have become as predictable as winter.
Ironically, all the Warcraft Direct did was remind me how exciting Warcraft used to be, which I know is partly the point of a 30th anniversary broadcast, but isn't it also about setting up what's next? We used to hang on Blizzard's every word, eager to see what it had been making for us. Warcraft 1, Warcraft 2, Warcraft 3 - the latter rewrote the rules of the RTS. Then of course there was World of Warcraft, which really did seem to captivate the world. But how long has it been since it can claim to have done that? It's telling that the most exciting thing to happen to WoW in recent years was the launch of Classic, five years ago. The future seems to have become about reliving the glory of the past.
It's not just Warcraft that's tiring. Look across Blizzard more broadly and ask, "When was the last time it gave us something new?", as in actually new, not Warcraft Rumble new. Diablo 4, as much as I enjoyed it, wasn't much of a surprise. Do we really have to go back to Overwatch in 2015 to find the answer?
What a renaissance moment for Blizzard productivity that was. Finally, as if freed from a kind of perfectionist paralysis, not one but two experimental and unfinished games were released: HearthStone and Overwatch. Both were enormous, company-changing successes, and they seemed to usher in a new age, one of creative transparency, as well as a willingness to try things and, perhaps, fail. Where did that go? HearthStone, as we were repeatedly reminded during the Warcraft Direct, is now 10 years old, and Overwatch is unironically having a Classic moment of its own, reinstating 6v6 play in a call-back to the game's original launch. Where is the new?
Look, I know none of this exists in a vacuum and that Blizzard has had more on its plate than creative concerns in recent years. It was embroiled in allegations of workplace misconduct for years, and trapped in web of will-they, won't-they Microsoft acquisition complications for just as long. Then, it was rocked by layoffs. Clearly, life at the studio hasn't been easy, and I have every admiration for the people who've stuck it out and are the new face of Blizzard, and who've turned out games like Diablo 4 and the World of Warcraft expansions we see now. Evidently a lot of really important structural work at the company has been done. The Blizzard we're presented with in showcases now seems more diverse, and the dialogue between game teams and their audiences feels more natural and open than ever before. Detailed road-maps lay out the path ahead, blogs detail upcoming features in depth, and videos document changes and design philosophies in ways Blizzard never used to do. There's also experimentation and risk being taken on existing projects. Vital progress has been made.
But when is Blizzard going to excite us with something new again? It's as though, in being tossed around a bit, the company lost some of its nerve. In clinging to former glories in the way it does, it comes across as shackled by them, because no matter how exciting a World of Warcraft expansion gets - or a trilogy of them, as we're getting now - it's never going to make the game as exciting as it once was, in that moment when it first arrived, when it was new. Reliving it over and over again in Classic isn't the same thing. It's true of Hearthstone and of Overwatch too - there's no escaping the diminishing returns; there's only so much excitement one game idea can naturally give.
Perhaps this is the curse of extraordinary live game success, an eternal clinging to a previous high and reluctance to do anything that might upset the audience and recurring paycheck. But for how long is that sustainable? When you're pulled in several directions by several games, where do you find the time and creative space to do something new? Moreover, where do you find the desire and the appetite to take the risk?
What's doubly worrying is that Blizzard does seem to have been trying. That "brand new survival game" set in a "whole new universe", codenamed Odyssey, sounds like it was exactly the kind of 'new' I'm talking about. But it was canned - canned after six years of development amidst Microsoft-mandated layoffs earlier this year. It's as though the suits came in, saw the risks involved, and only the risks, and thought better of it. Better to have a nice stable income from tried and tested brands instead. A rumoured StarCraft shooter led by former FarCry boss Dan Hay doesn't sound anywhere near as interesting by comparison; it's an idea Blizzard has been toying with for decades - remember StarCraft Ghost?
It's a shame. Blizzard has produced some of the games I remember most fondly of any that I've played, and I've no doubt there's the talent there to make more of them - to give us experiences we haven't even conceived of yet. But does it want to? That's the question. In looking to the past, it's in danger of living in it and being hemmed in by its own success. I don't want Blizzard to become a Greatest Hits band; I want to hear something new.