World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth – Ion Hazzikostas Interview

Ion Hazzikostas, World of Warcraft’s game director, recently participated in an interview with PC Gamer where he talked about the upcoming Rise of Azshara update for the MMORPG’s Battle for Azeroth expansion. He briefly went over the update’s new content, and after that, he focused on the expansion’s somewhat controversial Azerite system and the planned changes to it in the near future.

A few sample questions:

What about the Heart of Azeroth, though? You said you’re making some changes in 8.2, can you elaborate what those are?

I don’t want to fully spoil all the details, since Rise of Azshara is so close to being on the PTR. But there’s a lot of fun customization in armor pieces for the Azerite System, but having to re-earn access to those traits whenever you get to a new tier of gear, that’s something that we’ve heard a lot of negative feedback about from players and it’s something that we want to move completely away from.

Going forward, we’re going to keep making new Azerite traits that are unique to Azshara’s raid or to Mechagon that complement the existing pool of traits, but armor will just have those traits fully unlocked and players can choose what they want most for their playstyle. Instead, there will be a progression path within the Heart of Azeroth itself, so as you level up your Heart you’ll be able to earn access to and choose among a variety of new active and passive powers. And when I say active that includes being able to select an active ability that’s a key-bind kind of like your Artifact active that really will meaningfully change your combat rotation immediately. That was something that was missed from what Artifacts offered in Legion that we wanted to reintroduce.

So the Azerite system in general has been a huge point of contention for players this expansion. It must be really frustrating to have launched Battle for Azeroth and have people not like a major system, and then spend all this time just playing catch-up to fix it. Are you happy with how long it took to respond to that feedback and implement changes? Is there more you wish you could’ve done quicker?

I’ll let you know in a few weeks once we see how the next round of changes are received. But overall I’m very proud of the work the team has done. We’ve been listening from the start and acting where we could. Identifying the early round of problems based on feedback and our own experiences playing the game and seeing how things were unfolding. We made a bunch of targeted improvements in Tides of Vengeance, which was our first opportunity that we had to do things like adding a second ring of Azerite traits that made getting individual traits much more accessible, adding customization … so that people can mix and match. We’ve seen a lot more depth and engagement of the system and good feedback about the mechanics of having the armor itself as a result of that.

Now, addressing the core concern that I alluded to of having armor for the delivery system for these traits and then having new tiers of more powerful gear feel like a step backwards, forcing you to re-earn the things you once had, that was beyond the scope of Tides of Vengeance for a solution. This is something that we’ve been working on that we knew we’d be working on for months now but Rise of Azshara is going to be our first chance to deliver that. But it’s been a journey that began in the weeks immediately after Battle for Azeroth’s launch, and we look forward to seeing through to its conclusion in the very near future.