World of Warcraft Classic – Holly Longdale Interview

Holly Longdale, who you may know as the former executive producer on EverQuest and the current vice president on World of Warcraft, recently had a chat with VentureBeat. The conversation primarily focused on the Classic version of World of Warcraft, its recently-released Wrath of the Lich King expansion and the differences between WotLK then and now.

Here’s a sample question to get you started:

GamesBeat: Have you noticed any differences between the audience for Wrath of the Lich King Classic and the original Wrath of the Lich King?

Holly Longdale: One thing that’s been an ongoing education for our team is that gamers are different. They have a lot more skill and a lot more knowledge than they did then. And of course there are a multitude of guides and webpages and sites of information on how to tackle the content. There’s all kinds of things that weren’t so important to the community then, but are an element now.

Just as in original Wrath and now just in the past week or so, a lot of new players, which is fantastic — we can determine when we have a bunch of new accounts. It’s so exciting to see the people that may have missed it the first time and heard all about it finally get to go in and see it with our launch. There’s a healthy amount of returning players who were there originally, with original Wrath. People who started in Classic and are now going along this journey, who’ve been with us through Classic Burning Crusade and now Wrath. And then we have these beautiful new players coming in to join us and be part of the community. It is different.

It is a really interesting world of nostalgia, how people take joy in reliving that nostalgia. And then that blends with people being inspired by seeing new areas for the first time, like getting on a boat or a zeppelin to Northrend with literally hundreds of other players as it opens. It’s incredible. We’ve been watching all the feedback. It’s why we do game development, to be able to take part in that joy. It’s awesome.