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Warcraft General Manager John Hight and Executive Producer Holly Longdale shared their strategy to speed up World of Warcraft expansion releases. They plan to create extra teams to work on two expansions simultaneously, aiming to meet player expectations and deliver a more cohesive storytelling experience, as announced at BlizzCon.
In a recent Bloomberg interview, Warcraft General Manager John Hight and Executive Producer Holly Longdale shared their plan to speed up the release of World of Warcraft expansions during Worldsoul Saga. They’re putting together extra teams to work on two expansions simultaneously, while another team keeps churning out new live content.
Confirming their commitment to quicker expansion releases, John Hight and Holly Longdale dropped a major bombshell at the opening ceremony of BlizzCon. Instead of just one, they announced three new World of Warcraft expansions in the works, all telling a connected story over the next few years. After previous efforts to hire more developers for team expansion, Blizzard has now set up the necessary infrastructure to develop two expansions at the same time.
This work is being carried out in their offices in Irvine and Boston (formerly the Spellbreak studio Proletariat), while a dedicated live team remains focused on creating patches for the ongoing game.
“We have essentially the makings of two expansion teams and a live team,” Executive Producer Longdale said. “We’re doing things right now on 12 [World of Warcraft: The Last Titan] that under normal timeframe we would not be doing,” added by Warcraft General Manager John Hight
Both aren’t giving away Blizzard’s plans, but they mention leveraging the company’s wealth of player behavior data to identify what players desire in ongoing game updates: “We don’t want to rush people to the next expansion, But we also don’t want to drag things out longer than necessary.”
Longdale mentioned that the team’s hard work on building foundations is already showing positive results.
