WoW wants to bring more content than ever before, makes smaller expansion

World of Warcraft promises to satisfy fans’ hunger for content. But apparently Dragonflight is getting much smaller.

The mood in the WoW community can currently be described as “cautiously optimistic”. As we have already analyzed in our podcast, there is relatively little that can go wrong with the dragon theme. Dragonflight reflects on the strengths of World of Warcraft in its fundamentals. Return of the talent trees, revised crafting, a large new game world with many secrets and an interesting new class.

Added to this was the big announcement that Blizzard had swallowed the Studio Proletariat. Almost 100 new employees should primarily ensure that WoW gets more and faster content. More precisely, John Hight, the general manager of Warcraft, said:

We know you’re really hungry for new content and I’m really proud of how our development teams are working to meet and exceed those expectations – there’s more happening in World of Warcraft than ever and that’s just that Beginning.

That’s an announcement. One that is difficult to talk your way out of later.

Bobby Kotick, the CEO of Activision, also confirmed this. He doesn’t have the best reputation among the players, but his word carries weight. He explained:

Over the next two years, we plan to hire hundreds of the best developers to meet the needs of our World of Warcraft players. Proletariat’s outstanding team will be a key component in our efforts to hire new talent.

It may seem strange that the next WoW expansion, Dragonflight, has so far turned out to be rather small and inconspicuous.

Dragonflight is – at least at first glance – absolutely no experiments and dispenses with parasitic systems.

Anyone just taking a broad look at World of Warcraft might frown at the announcement of “more content” because it doesn’t quite fit what Dragonflight promises:

• No big new system like Covenants, Torghast, Islands or Warfronts
• Only 4 new areas (For comparison: Battle for Azeroth had 6 new areas, Shadowlands had 5)
• 8 new dungeons is also the lower standard of an expansion

Of course there are also a few fresh features, such as the new class of Dracthyr callers or dragon riding. But at first glance, kite riding appears to be more of a sideline that will later be superseded by traditional flying, and while a new class is welcome, it’s also nothing entirely unexpected.

What does “more content” actually mean for WoW?

If you ask the World of Warcraft players what kind of “more content” they absolutely need in the future, then the answers could hardly be more varied.

While for many players “more content” primarily means new dungeons, raids and battlefields, World of Warcraft is much more than that. There are numerous fans of small niche tasks in the game that PvE or PvP professionals just roll their eyes at because from their point of view this is not “real content”.

But when you add up these smaller groups interested in content like pet battles, transmogrifications, toy collections, achievements, new character customizations, or roleplaying, that’s quite a number of players with very different interests. But together they make up a not to be scoffed at part of all active players.

New employees in the WoW team should not only help to satisfy the content hunger of PvE junkies, but also serve such niche content. After all, it was this variety of content that has attracted many loyal fans to World of Warcraft over the years. Mike Ybarra, the “President of Blizzard Entertainment” seems to agree, speaking of the creative freedom the team needs when he says:

We put players at the forefront of everything we do and we work hard to meet and exceed expectations. […] A critical part of taking care of players is taking care of our own team – we need to make sure we have the resources to create experiences for our communities that they’ll love while we build ours Give teams freedom to explore even more creative possibilities in their projects.

Of course, this is again formulated quite openly and leaves a lot of room for interpretation. But “creative freedom” can actually only mean creating more and different content, which sometimes only appeals to a certain niche of players – but these players in particular have often had to hold back in recent years.

New employees will probably only be relevant after the Dragonflight launch

Even if that is of course a bit of a look into the crystal ball: Pretty sure not for the launch of Dragonflight. Although the beta hasn’t officially started yet, Blizzard has most likely been working intensively on Dragonflight for the last 2 years and has already completed most of the expansion. That may sound strange without a started beta, but there is no other way to realize a release date in 2022.

Beta versions of World of Warcraft are usually extremely advanced and it’s all about fine-tuning. Even if not all features are playable at the beginning of a beta, most of them are already included in the game data and only have to be “switched on”.

The approximately 100 new employees of Proletariat, who are now supposed to work on World of Warcraft, will probably have little or no influence on the release of Dragonflight – but beyond that. Because World of Warcraft wants to “bring content faster and more often and even exceed the expectations of the fans”.

Maybe all this also means that Dragonflight will be a more compact and generally shorter expansion, which will therefore have fewer features in order to slow down the entire World of Warcraft cycle – before it then goes into the next expansion with a significantly larger team.

However, it is clear that Blizzard is once again leaning quite far out of the window with the claim to bring more and faster content to the fans – because Blizzard has promised that more than once in the past decades. And very slowly but surely, these promises bring out nothing more than a weary smile from the long-time players.

However, the sheer size of almost 100 new employees stands in the way of this. If this surge in manpower isn’t able to create either more frequent or more extensive content, a hell of a lot would have to go wrong. And Blizzard simply can no longer afford that in relation to World of Warcraft.

However, the fact that Blizzard is hiring so many new employees right now could also aim for much later success – namely with the next expansion. Because as soon as an addon is about to be launched, active work on the next extension begins. While players were still in the Shadowlands beta, the work was slowly but surely shifting to Dragonflight. It’s only logical to assume that the same will be the case with Dragonflight now.

Even if Blizzard is already making big promises, we will probably only see the effects of this clearly after the launch of Dragonflight. But then it could be a glorious time for all content-hungry heroes in Azeroth.

Or how do you see it all?

Read more about Blizzard here: Because Blizzard is making it really hard to like her again right now