A Word on World of Warcraft for 2025

[Lumy]

A Word on World of Warcraft for 2025

Greetings, citizens of Azeroth!

As many celebrate the Lunar New Year all around the world and in Azeroth, we want to take a moment to pause, reflect on 2024, and share more of what we have planned for 2025.

Another year has gone by, and we are so thankful for all of you who have joined us in Azeroth, no matter what flavor you prefer: whether you enjoy Classic Era, Season of Discovery, Cataclysm Classic, The War Within, or more recently, the World of Warcraft Classic 20^th Anniversary Edition, we are thrilled that you are here with us.

We were also moved by your immense generosity when you came out in support of CureDuchenne by welcoming the Reven Pack into your collections and raising over USD $2 million! We saw you wearing your adorable backpacks and bringing this curious little companion with you throughout your adventures in Azeroth, and we are deeply grateful for your care and kindness!

Learning and Growing with You

2024 has provided us many opportunities to learn and grow this past year thanks to your steadfast support and feedback. This year, we plan to continue to build upon what we’ve learned, improve the game, and experiment with new ideas to invigorate and bring new twists to Azeroth.

We see you too, Classic WoW players! No matter what Classic game mode you enjoy, the development team is dedicated to continuing to listen to your feedback and adjusting—all with an endless passion for bringing you more great experiences ahead.

We remain committed to always being in conversation with you, listening, watching, and being as transparent as possible as we cook up new adventures for you wherever your journey takes you in Azeroth.

There’s No Place Like Home

The road ahead couldn’t be more exciting for us as we move ever closer to the next chapter in the Worldsoul Saga— World of Warcraft: Midnight. We have so much more to share with you as we continue to move through The War Within (and everything else we have planned!) as we progress through the year.

During Warcraft Direct in November we released a teaser for just one of the new features we’re looking forward to bringing to you: Housing. Believe me, we all found it so hard to keep it a secret! But seeing your excitement at the reveal made it all so worth it.

Housing is more than a feature to us. No matter what we create, it’s the community that will help to define how Housing gives everyone a place in Azeroth to truly make their own. Our passionate and dedicated Housing development team will be working alongside the community to bring you something truly special. Our eyes and ears are always open to you, as the journey home begins with you.

Check back on the official World of Warcraft news site to get an eye on the blueprint for Housing today—we can’t wait for you to get your first look!

Getting the Classic Experience

For those looking forward to World of Warcraft Classic: Mists of Pandaria, the Classic design team is setting the stage for your return to the isle of Pandaria and the monkey business we know you’ll get up to.

There’s also more to come in Season of Discovery now that Karazhan Crypts is here with Phase 7 and Naxxramas opening its doors soon. Cataclysm Classic continues to fire on all cylinders, alongside our fast-paced release cadence for the Classic 20^th Anniversary realms.

As always, the Classic development team is dedicated to delivering experiences for everyone who wants to dive into the nostalgia of World of Warcraft.

Where WoW is and Where it’s Going

The development team has embraced a lot of the feedback we’ve received from the community, and we have spent a lot of time reflecting on where the game is today. There are a few areas we want to improve on over time, and we have already begun taking our first steps toward setting the foundations for those improvements.

First, we want to make World of Warcraft more approachable for anyone who wants to join the adventures we have available to them. In introducing the New Player Experience with Exile’s Reach, we wanted to create an easy way for new players to begin their first journeys into Azeroth, or bring back returning players in a way that would help get them up to speed. We know the experience can be better and are working toward new improvements to the feature to streamline the experience in the near term and expand upon what it can be in the future.

We know that being truly welcoming requires a lot of work around our new and returning player experiences in modern WoW. We are committed to that work, and we will be making some improvements in Midnight and The Last Titan. I’ll be honest—this will be a long-term, ongoing journey, as the game evolves and changes with each expansion. There is no quick fix, but we are here for it.

We are also looking at how World of Warcraft is played by different kinds of players so we can make improvements for everyone. Our UI/UX has been going through steady changes and improvements since Dragonflight, and that will continue as we learn, research, and evolve. New features like Delves, Warbands, Follower Dungeons, and even Housing naturally teaches us a lot. More to come on this soon! ™

An area we want to double-down on in a big way is our community. You are what brings Azeroth to life, and you make our game truly unique. To properly commit to this fundamental aspect of World of Warcraft, we now have a dedicated Social initiative within our development team. Social stands alongside our other initiatives (like Expansions or Housing) to provide solutions and features—like, for example, rewards for positive behavior, easier ways to connect with like-minded players, roleplaying , and more. As an even more specific example, we’re looking at improvements to how we connect in-game Friends, Group Finder, and better integration to common external social platforms that we know the community uses regularly. The team is working on Social projects now that we hope to be able to share more about over the next year.

It’s been 20 years of World of Warcraft and while time may have flown by, the memories we all continue to make together are priceless. We want to continue to help create and share these memories, and we can’t wait to share more with you in the year ahead as we build the foundations for the next 20 years— and beyond!

With sincere gratitude and a hopeful eye to the future,

Holly Longdale

[doledippers]

"Check back on the official World of Warcraft news site to get an eye on the blueprint for Housing today—we can’t wait for you to get your first look"

oh man, housing preview today!

[VikingBarbie]

"Check back on the official World of Warcraft news site to get an eye on the blueprint for Housing today—we can’t wait for you to get your first look"

oh man, housing preview today!

BUT WHERE?! I can find it.. am I an idiot?

[Val the Moofia Boss]

A very corporate post.

A "social initiative" will accomplish jack all given the fundamental nature of Retail WoW where you solo to level cap having never made a friend. The game has to be hard enough from the get go to force you to talk to other people to form groups and then guilds to continue levelling up and condition players to be talkative. So long as retail remains the way as it is, everyone will continue to be a passive loner who only uses PUGs for the latest content and goes into it with a mercenary mentality of treating everyone else as a replaceable or as an obstacle to getting their arbitrarily ilevel increase that will be powercrept by catchup gear introduced in the next patch anyway.

[doledippers]

BUT WHERE?! I can find it.. am I an idiot?

it says "check back" so its later today...

[micwini]

curious on housing

[Unlimited Power]

I appreciate that they have a team the size of the expansion and feature (housing) teams dedicated just to work on improvements and initiatives for the social aspects of WoW. I just hope something tangible comes of it.

[exochaft]

A very corporate post.

A "social initiative" will accomplish jack all given the fundamental nature of Retail WoW where you solo to level cap having never made a friend. The game has to be hard enough from the get go to force you to talk to other people to form groups and then guilds to continue levelling up and condition players to be talkative. So long as retail remains the way as it is, everyone will continue to be a passive loner who only uses PUGs for the latest content and goes into it with a mercenary mentality of treating everyone else as a replaceable or as an obstacle to getting their arbitrarily ilevel increase that will be powercrept by catchup gear introduced in the next patch anyway.

It will run into two problems.

1.) As you mentioned, much of the game is designed in a way to where the social aspect isn't promoted or doesn't work. They'd have to do some fundamental reworks of the game's design to make headway there, and I already know there are quite a few hills Blizz will die on that won't help them out in this regard.

2.) Their own player base may not want or need what they're offering. If we're talking about socializing in general, we've had Discord for ages (and I'm sure other older programs still exist for comms) or even in-game comms if one is really desperate. This will lead Blizz try to compete with what's already out there for players that is likely superior. This is assuming players even want, need, or use the changes to begin with as many have already been institutionalized to how things have been and are now.

Now the optimistic side of me says they could be trying to implement something like the Leaf system that FF14 has to help guide new players and incentivize helping the new players. Maybe they'll try to do Discord integration of some kind (although I wouldn't be shocked if they just said "We're going to do Bluesky integration because we're not welcoming the 4th Reich!" or something silly like that). The whole 'incentivizing good behavior', although altruistic, sounds pretty relative to me... and sounds like the punishment route doesn't seem to be working, but this could also mean that their current playerbase just really doesn't want the socialization experience they're touting. I could generously say they want to try to tackle people treating each other as NPCs, but a lot of this is their own faul to begin with and ties back to how they design their game.

However, as mentioned before, everything is predicated on revamping how the game works if they're trying to raise the socializing in the game beyond what it currently is along with players wanting/needing to use the new socialization tools. It's like giving cell phones phones away for free to a community where they don't have cell service nor internet/wifi in an effort to increase socialization in the community, and most of the community doesn't want to get interet or install a cell tower either because they're used to not having it now or just don't care.

...it could also just all be corpo-speak, which is a fair assumption too.

[sam86]

A very corporate post.

A "social initiative" will accomplish jack all given the fundamental nature of Retail WoW where you solo to level cap having never made a friend. The game has to be hard enough from the get go to force you to talk to other people to form groups and then guilds to continue levelling up and condition players to be talkative. So long as retail remains the way as it is, everyone will continue to be a passive loner who only uses PUGs for the latest content and goes into it with a mercenary mentality of treating everyone else as a replaceable or as an obstacle to getting their arbitrarily ilevel increase that will be powercrept by catchup gear introduced in the next patch anyway.

isn't that where SoD/classic servers exist?
if i knew there will be classic+, i'd played it no doubt, i'm stunned with classic+ that blizz actually doing
i think blizz realized how much they fucked retail, yeah it has a LOT of QOL added, but it killed the MM part of MMO, and the RPG is also semi-dead with trainers no use or reagents or many things

[Relapses]

It's always interesting when you see Blue posts written from a first person perspective. I guess that's just how Holly rolls. It's always nice to get unexpected updates like this from the dev team as there have been spans of this game's development where "no news is good news," was the prevailing mantra. I'll be interested to see where they're planning to take housing as even though the feature doesn't appeal to me, I'm willing to give a shot. I've warmed up to the idea quite a bit in the last few years as for awhile I was one of its biggest detractors.

[Alayea]

There are a few areas we want to improve on over time, and we have already begun taking our first steps toward setting the foundations for those improvements.

Doubtlessly, competent coders are not on the list. Or making right by those affected by the guild bank data loss that occurred when Patch 11.0.2 went live last year.

[Ratmi]

I appreciate that they have a team the size of the expansion and feature (housing) teams dedicated just to work on improvements and initiatives for the social aspects of WoW. I just hope something tangible comes of it.

Rest assured it won’t. Longdale is just a suit who reads off cards with no passion at all.