The developers of "World of Warcraft" have abruptly changed course after allowing little to no player feedback during the "Shadowlands" expansion, nearly killing off the game; with the MMO's 10th expansion, "The War Within," just around the corner, game and director Ion Hazzikostas told PC Gamer that Blizzard wants to rethink WoW's basic systems more than ever to be in tune with what players want.

"The last few years have been a time of introspection and re-examination of all of WoW's components and design DNA. We turned over every stone, held it up to the light, examined it, and asked ourselves questions." This has obviously served us well for a long time.

"And in many cases the answer is yes, put the stones back and continue. In other cases, it's time to rebuild some foundations."

Recent examples prove the point.

Mythic plus difficulty dungeons have followed a long established pattern in WoW. Each week, a different affix adds a new challenge to existing dungeons. Some of these mechanics are more demanding for certain role players in the five-person groups that regularly run the dungeon. Some weeks are life-threatening for tanks and healers, while others are considered "push weeks" to increase the difficulty, sometimes so difficult that even top-end teams limit their playing time.

When beta testing began for the Mythic Plus dungeon in the next expansion, The War Within, players immediately reacted harshly to the minor changes to Afix's balance. The high-end team, in particular, again expressed dissatisfaction with the affix system in general and with the fact that it inhibited their enjoyment of attacking the higher tier Mythic Plus dungeons.

And Blizzard responded. The affixes no longer affect "push keys," i.e., levels 12 and above on the infinitely variable difficulty progression. The four existing unpopular affixes have been completely removed. In addition, four affixes that were in testing have been eliminated: the Fortified (an affix that buffs "trash mobs" in dungeons) and Tyrannical (an affix that buffs bosses), which will be added to all dungeons above level 10, effectively taking them off the table removed.

The goal was to keep a variety of affixes for lower level players to keep the dungeons interesting, while still allowing hardcore push teams to fight on raw difficulty alone, as they had been asking for. This is frankly a wild series of changes, and we are only two months away from the launch of the expansion.

Hazzikostas' comments in an interview suggest that this radical listening may continue.

It took Blizzard some time, he says, to fully understand WoW's changing audience demographic.

"I think it started, but definitely accelerated over the course of Shadowlands, where we did a bit of a reckoning, especially from a design perspective," Hazzikostas said. We were building systems and leaning into some of the old WoW principles of deep investment in character, meaningful choices, differentiation, etc."

This led to choices such as placing players and characters in specific in-game factions and preventing them from earning rewards and cosmetics from other factions.

"But what we heard from players was, 'That's not what we want anymore. I don't want this power connected to cosmetic choices.'

According to a presentation at GDC earlier this year by former Warcraft General Manager John Hight, Blizzard's failure to address these issues caused a significant exodus of players during Shadowlands. With the subsequent expansion, Dragonflight, Blizzard finally did the work to recognize this growing problem and faced it head-on with great success.

"It's like starting a process like (asking yourself), 'Is this a lesson that was taught to me by my predecessors as a designer and developer on the team, but I'm going to blindly cling to it? Hadjikostas said.

"Or do we face the reality that the players have changed and the way people approach WoW has changed? Our duty as stewards of this world is not to stubbornly cling to our original vision, but to evolve, to meet them where they are, and to ensure that Azeroth remains the place they want to be."

Warbands is a good example of how WoW is evolving in War Within. The problem of character-locked progression will disappear. Almost everything you earn or achieve will apply to every character you choose to bring into Warband, fundamentally changing the way you interact with the MMO, and Hazzikostas said in a recent interview that this is not just for individual characters, He explained that the system is for the player behind the keyboard. It's a feature that probably would have worked well a decade ago.

However, the overwhelmingly positive response to the Mythic plus changes, and other changes made along the way with this philosophy in mind, seem to suggest that Blizzard may be moving in the right direction.

WoW's tenth expansion, The War Within, will be released on August 26 (with early access for pre-orders available three days in advance).