World of Warcraft doesn’t need any help staying relevant 20 years on

World of Warcraft heads into its next expansion, The War Within, due Aug. 22, in the best state it’s been in years — for the simple reason that the developers at Blizzard seem to be having fun with it, using older versions of the game to try out surprising and experimental new ideas. The updates have come thick and fast, and they’ve been creative and unexpected. The predictable rhythms of an online game that is fast approaching its 20th anniversary have been pleasantly disrupted. It’s fragmented, with its players scattered across several different versions of the game, each with its own pocket community. But it’s a much more vibrant one.

Most of this positive change has happened within the last 18 months or so. And there can be no doubt about the source of the creative energy and good vibes: World of Warcraft Classic. This version of WoW emulates the way the game was at launch in 2004, takes players on a tour through classic expansions, and more. It sits alongside modern WoW under the same subscription fee but has its own distinct community (itself divided into a series of pocket communities) and its own team of developers. Those developers have been taking some wild risks with their ancient charge, much to players’ delight. And now their infectious spirit of experimentation seems to have caught on with the rest of the WoW staff.

What World of Warcraft as a whole seems to be learning from WoW Classic is that MMOs don’t have to be monolithic, contiguous experiences at all — and when they reach WoW’s ripe age, perhaps it’s better if they’re not. They can be broken up, scrambled, reassembled, and rebooted within themselves. They can offer a tasting menu of different experiences rather than one giant banquet of content. They can lean into nostalgia but also use looking backward to look forward, experimenting with the MMO form itself.

Nearly 20 years in, WoW and its players are deep into uncharted territory. Other online games have been in operation for longer — EverQuest, WoW’s chief influence, celebrated a quarter century in 2024 — but it’s hard to think of any examples that have stayed at or near the top of their chosen genre for so long. WoW’s advancing age presents a lot of interesting challenges for Blizzard: How does a game that operates continuously for decades relate to its own history? How does it respond to outside trends? How does it refresh itself in ways other than just adding more content? How does it stop familiarity from tipping into boredom?

A talk at the Game Developers Conference in March given by John Hight — who was general manager of the Warcraft franchise at Blizzard until very recently — showed, with surprising candor, the extent to which WoW was stagnating and losing players because Blizzard was struggling to answer some of these questions. During the talk (reported by Korean site Inven and summarized by Wowhead), Hight showed a graph of WoW subscriber numbers over the past eight years that charted steep drops between the biennial expansions and spikes of dwindling size when the expansions launched.

The first sign of real trouble was subscribers falling to an all-time low after the release of the unpopular Battle for Azeroth expansion in 2018. This was quickly masked the following year when World of Warcraft Classic drove a huge spike in popularity which was sustained by the pandemic gaming boom in 2020. When the eighth expansion, Shadowlands, came out at the end of 2020, all initially seemed well. But soon after, Blizzard reported seeing “historically high churn” (the rate at which subscribers leave) that wasn’t effectively countered by the release of two Classic expansions. Then, disaster: The launch numbers for 2022’s well-received expansion, Dragonflight, were low even by pre-Classic standards. WoW was in decline, and if you took Classic out of the picture, it was in serious trouble.

Image: Blizzard Entertainment via Inven

Image: Blizzard Entertainment via Inven

Hight pointed the finger of blame at the Shadowlands expansion. Blizzard has come to agree with fans that Shadowlands’ setting in the disconnected realms of the afterlife was alienating, that its story didn’t do right by certain characters, that its “borrowed-power” mechanics weren’t very memorable, and that the gaps between updates were too long.

But Hight’s final graph slide showed an astonishing turnaround. When he was speaking in March 2024, World of Warcraft subscriber numbers were higher than they had been at Dragonflight’s launch, and climbing. Hight boasted “record post-launch stability and growth.” What went right? In the modern game, as YouTuber Bellular pointed out, Blizzard knuckled down and worked on the basics, providing a steady stream of updates and a popular revamp of gear progression. But it was Classic updates, starting in August 2023, that prompted Hight’s graph to start trending upward. It was Classic that presented two daring new ways to play the game that broke up the time-honored expansion-to-expansion schedule, and even contained new ways to structure a massively multiplayer online game.

Image: Blizzard Entertainment via Inven

First came Hardcore: a simple but riveting permadeath mode that started as an unofficial community challenge and was quickly co-opted by Blizzard into an official variant of Classic server. Permadeath in a glacially slow-paced MMO like classic WoW should not work under any circumstances, but it does; it injects both risk and a sense of community spirit into an aging game’s time-worn rhythms, making them feel new again.

The WoW Classic team followed Hardcore just a few months later, in late 2023, with Season of Discovery, a new server variant that messed with the venerable game even more radically. Like Hardcore, it took its inspiration from stablemate Diablo, which regularly reboots itself with game-altering seasons that invite players to roll new characters and start again. Season of Discovery seeded Classic’s familiar world with new secrets, added collectible powers that opened up new possibilities within WoW’s class design, and, most innovatively of all, broke progression through the game into phases, with temporary level caps and remixed mini endgames. It was still the same old game but rearranged and restructured.

Image: Blizzard Entertainment

With Hardcore and Season of Discovery, the Classic team made two bold choices. First, they decided that WoW’s design wasn’t sacrosanct, and they could mess about with its core ruleset if they wanted to. Secondly — and perhaps most significantly — they decided not to care about audience fragmentation. There are currently no less than five ways to play WoW Classic: the original game, the Cataclysm expansion, Season of Discovery, and two Hardcore variants. But the simplicity of WoW’s payment model — one subscription fee covers everything, except the latest expansion for the modern game — means it doesn’t really matter. As long as you’re engaged and playing, it’s all good as far as Blizzard is concerned.

As 2023 rolled into 2024, it didn’t take long for the modern WoW team to learn from Classic developers’ example. As it neared the end of Dragonflight’s brisk update schedule, Blizzard started to drop surprise, one-off experiments on its audience. First was Plunderstorm, a pirate-themed, time-limited, and entirely self-contained battle royale mode with separate character progression. It wasn’t very refined, but it showed a willingness to experiment and to offer players new diversions outside of the main sandbox.

Image: Blizzard Entertainment

What came next went much further. As a kind of palate cleanser between the end of the Dragonflight saga and the arrival of The War Within, Blizzard offered something clearly inspired by Season of Discovery: Mists of Pandaria Remix. Players were invited to create new “Timewalker” characters and replay an altered version WoW’s fourth expansion with new features, new abilities, accelerated leveling, and infinitely scaling loot that allowed them to drive themselves up an exponential curve of power. A monthslong event ending just before the release of the new expansion, Mists of Pandaria Remix has been a wild ride. As a different way to revisit a past expansion and a kind of power-leveling fantasy, it’s been a lot of fun, if arguably a less sophisticated and thorough reimagining than Season of Discovery. Still, it’s done the job, driving conversation and keeping players engaged at a time when the game would otherwise be slowing down, as players sat out the long gap between Dragonflight’s last update and The War Within’s launch.

Image: Blizzard Entertainment

Right now, World of Warcraft is buzzing. That’s normal: the pre-expansion patch for The War Within has already hit the game, bringing refreshing changes with it, as these updates usually do. It’s a particularly nostalgia-inducing patch for long-term players like me — Blizzard knows it’s just as important to serve those who’ve been in it for the long haul as it is to keep the game streamlined and accessible for newbies. It’s always fun to come back to the game and see what’s changed.

What’s different this time around is that this has been a regular feeling for WoW players for the past year at least — especially those who dabble in both Classic and the modern game. It’s not just that there have been plentiful updates, although there have. It’s the sense of renovation, of experiment, and of plain old fun that’s been threaded through so many of them. At the point in its life when you’d expect it to slow down, WoW is speeding up; when you’d expect it to consolidate, it’s splintering into multiple new possibilities. Even more remarkably, it’s the culture around Classic, which you would expect to be so staid and backward-looking, that has driven this change. The spirit of adventure hasn’t left the old girl yet.