WoW: Blizzard would like a harder open world in The Last Titan

In an interview published on 18 September, World of Warcraft game director Ion Hazzikostas said he thinks the team would like to offer something like the Heroic World Tier in The Last Titan, the expansion after Midnight, for players who want "a more challenging, rewarding outdoor experience", with more friction and more purpose. This is an intention, not an announcement: he did not say how such a mode would work or what it would reward. It comes from this single interview, and Blizzard has not confirmed it in its own posts. Blizzard's own announcement of The Last Titan says little beyond a return to Northrend, and promises more early next year.

Blizzard tried a Heroic World Tier in Legion Remix, a limited-time event: an optional setting that made enemies in the open world much tougher and gave better rewards in return. Hazzikostas called experiments like this promising. He was asked whether players should stop expecting the modern game to get things that are more interesting in Classic, such as a more engaging open world. He said no: these are real problems in the modern game that the team wants to fix, and an open world with no threat or excitement is missing something. Blizzard would never tell players to go and play Classic for that, he said, because every version of WoW should have it.

He also spoke about new players, in remarks the interviewer summarised rather than quoted in full. Reworking the modern levelling route the way Blizzard did in Cataclysm would be a hard sell, he said, because it asks players to spend dozens of hours levelling to catch up with their friends. He added that Blizzard knows it has a lot more work to do on the new player experience, to help players get into the fantasy of their class and learn the story.

Asked why the modern story is the same for Horde and Alliance, Hazzikostas said it is partly about resources: writing a separate levelling story for each faction means giving players half as much story, twice. It is also about feedback: if most players asked for faction conflict, Blizzard would lean into it, but what the team hears is a wish for more cross-faction play. To some extent, he added, it is also about the story making sense, with Horde and Alliance fighting each other while the whole world is under threat. He said Blizzard wants to keep each faction's identity and long history of conflict, which the current story pushes aside a little, and that he thinks the team intends to make it more central again later on. He gave no timing.

On WoW Forever, Hazzikostas called it a third pillar next to retail and Classic, and said Classic, with its original and Burning Crusade versions, will carry on. According to the interviewer's summary, Forever keeps Classic's ideas, such as a more grounded story and more focus on building communities than on automatic group finding, but rebalances talent trees and specs with the aim of making every class viable, and removes the chore of farming world buffs for raids. Hazzikostas said top-level play such as Heroic and Mythic raiding and pushing Mythic+ keys is not what Forever is going to be about.