World of Warcraft executive producer and vice president Holly Longdale is letting fans know to not worry following Microsoft’s acquisition of Blizzard. Longdale has been speaking with multiple media outlets as World of Warcraft’s next expansion, The War Within, gets closer to launching. The upcoming expansion, called the Worldsoul Saga, is to be the beginning of a new trilogy for the nearly two-decade-old franchise. In speaking with VGC Longdale acknowledges the challenges of keeping interest from players for such a long-running franchise along with concerns about the after-effects of Microsoft’s purchase of Blizzard.
Per VGC:
“Alongside expansions like The War Within, Blizzard has established a cadence of updates every eight weeks designed to give players enough content between expansions to keep them coming back.”
A different era
When World of Warcraft arrived in 2004 it quickly became one of the most-played MMOs of the time and maintained its dominance for many years after. However, at the time the gaming ecoscape was quite different as MMOs were more or less exclusive to PCs. While some consoles, PS2/Dreamcast/Xbox featured an ethernet port or adapter most owners wouldn’t make use of it then due to bare minimal online support from developers or hardware manufacturers. This would change when the PS3 and Xbox 360 launched and online console support began to grow.
Now in 2024, there are many big-name MMO franchises that console owners can join in playing but WoW is still not one of them. Platform exclusives have growingly become less exclusive as well and are for many just a timed release strategy. All this continually leads to the question of when WoW will arrive on consoles. The World of Warcraft executive producer will not give a date but is consistently giving the same answers to multiple media outlets. Essentially it is not an impossibility but Longdale will not say more, at least for now. The question has become even more pressed given that Blizzard is now under the same roof as Xbox. On that note, Longdale assures fans that Microsoft is merely giving support and not making the team make any changes.
Per VGC:
“There’s no one asking us to do anything. World of Warcraft is doing very well and they’re very proud of what it’s been able to accomplish, so it’s almost like just let it be, and let it keep being awesome, they’ve been tremendously supportive and it’s like ‘let Blizzard be Blizzard’.”