BlizzCon 2023: World Of Warcraft's Development Pace Is Faster Thanks To Dragonflight As Devs Looked To Address Shadowlands Feedback

During BlizzCon 2023, the World of Warcraft team announced that the next few expansions would be releasing at a faster pace than players are used to, highlighted by the fact that the MMO developer showcased the next three expansions on stage. The team's development process to do so apparently is a result of feedback from Shadowlands' glacial pace of content releases, according to the developers in a group interview over the weekend.

BlizzCon 2023's Opening Ceremony was a hit with many fans as Chris Metzen energetically took the stage to showcase the future of WoW. Part of that future, the Worldsoul Saga, will unfold throughout the next three expansions, all of which were also announced during the ceremony. This glimpse into not just the immediate future, but the distant one is a sea change for the Warcraft team, and it was accompanied by the announcement that these release cycles for the Worldsoul Saga will unfold at a faster pace than players are typically used to.

During a group interview with media over the weekend, Lead World Artist Kristy Moret wouldn't commit to any specific timeline or cadence with which players can expect to see these expansions all hit. Still, she did mention that while the team is working on the first expansion in the new Worldsoul Saga, The War Within, they are already working on the second release, World of Warcraft: Midnight. 

"We can't speak to any specific numbers, but yes, it will be faster than, you know, two years - we'd like to make sure that folks are not finishing up the Worldsoul Saga in 2030, right? We want to get it a little faster clip than that. So we've worked on restructuring our teams and our development pipelines so that we can parallelize a lot more work and make it so that we're already working on Midnight. We're working on The War Within, we're working on Midnight; we're full steam ahead on building all these expansions to create this whole saga."

Part of that more streamlined and more efficient so the team could tackle all of this at once comes from feedback about the slower pace of content releases in Shadowlands, something that the most recent expansion, Dragonflight has most definitely not suffered from.

When asked if the announcement of three expansions on stage was the way things normally are developed behind the scenes and we're just seeing farther into the future than normal or if things have changed internally, Associate Design Director Maria Hamilton told media gathered that things have definitely changed.

"I think Dragonflight is where we said, 'Okay, we know we didn't get things out fast enough in Shadowlands,'" Hamilton told media during the group Q&A. She continued, stating that while Blizzard had its reasons for the slower pace of content during the Shadowlands cycle, the team knew it would be important to find a way to streamline development to make things faster and more efficient.

"That's why we committed to a roadmap, and I am very proud we hit every single one of them. Guardians of the Dream comes out Tuesday; the next thing will be on the PTR a couple of days later. That was a change, Dragonflight made us reassess how we build things and figure out how to do this. And so we are working on multiple things at once. And that was not something we did very well previously. It was just not a way we worked previously.

"So being to do that and being able to make sure that we had the oversight that was necessary to make sure everything was flowing and everything else - you know, so we didn't have something that felt like 'odd man out' - and make sure all that content was flowing, we were able to take story and put prologues into those smaller content update. Which were traditionally systems adjustments or something, we were able to put story in there." 

Hamilton goes on to explain that with these development process updates behind the scenes, it's why the team is now able to work on these upcoming expansions in parallel because they are simply faster behind the scenes. 

"That's what we plan to use to build these three in a row. And when we say they're faster, I mean we're faster because we know how to do this now. We know how to keep things coming and keep things rolling and not have big gaps. We know how to make sure this is rolling along the whole way. So yes, absolutely things changed, but it was for Dragonflight, actually, that it happened."

The War Within is the first of the three expansions coming to Warcraft next year, and the team dove deep into what players can expect in both a "What's Next" panel and a Deep Dive at BlizzCon 2023.