World of Warcraft Dev Says Its “Painful” to Support Legacy Content, Still a Priority

Many players, including the author of this story, are currently exploring all new areas in Azeroth thanks to the latest World of Warcraft expansion. Though Battle for Azeroth offers an incredible spotlight on the tumultuous faction war between the Horde and the Alliance, this fourteen year old MMORPG has so much more to offer yet.

The downside to so much content, and such huge content updates, is that the team over at Blizzard have to be very careful about what makes its way into the game to make sure that older content drops don’t pose a hazard to the gameplay mechanics or narrative. A perfect example of this is the artifact traits that were an amazing incentive to grind with the previous Legion expansion. Though those were amazing, they didn’t have a place in Battle for Azeroth, so they went away to make room for new content.

But looking at how many expansions this massive title has had and with all of the intricate lore evolutions, gameplay mechanic additions, and more – it’s a tough job to be a World of Warcraft dev. In a recent interview with GamesIndustry, Technical Director Patrick Dawson let us know just how hard it can be.

“World of Warcraft doesn’t shy away from doing difficult things by any means,” the Director told the site. “It is difficult to support legacy content. Every time you release a patch or expansion you still have to make sure Ragnaros works, and Onyxia works, because there are people that still go back and do that. So the challenge is, how do you support legacy content while developing new content?”

“We’ve gotten a little smarter about things over the years,” he continued. “For example, there are features that are relegated to just one expansion now. The Artifact system for Legion is a good example of that. That’s been sunset. We don’t need to support that going forward. And what we’ve done is been able to take that and learn from it, figure out what’s worked and what hasn’t, so we can apply that to future expansions and not have to support other features like that going forward.

Dawson added, “However, there are a ton of features we do have to support. One of the most important things from a tech end is we always look at modernizing wherever we can. When World of Warcraft shipped it was on single realms that were completely independent from all other realms. Now we’re on a much more cloud-based infrastructure, which didn’t exist in 2004 and is now the industry standard. We’ve modernized our game to make use of that, so we have a lot more resources we can share between different realms and a lot more connectivity we can provide to our players in their gameplay experience.”

Because of that, looking for new ways to modernize content is key to make the process of caring for Legacy content a more natural and fluid process. It’s not easy but with 5 million players still even after 14 years, they are doing something right!

As for World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth, the latest expansion is now live and ready to be enjoyed!