World of Warcraft promises to satisfy fans’ hunger for content. But apparently Dragonflight will be much smaller.

The mood in the WoW community can currently be described as “cautiously optimistic”. As we have already analyzed in our podcast, you can do relatively little wrong with the dragon theme. Dragonflight reflects on the strengths of World of Warcraft in its basics. Return of the talent trees, revised crafting, a large new game world with many secrets and an interesting new class. In addition, there was the big announcement that Blizzard has swallowed the studio Proletariat. Nearly 100 new employees are mainly to ensure that WoW gets more and faster content. More specifically, it was said by John Hight, the general manager of Warcraft:

We know you’re really hungry for new content, and I’m really proud of the way our development teams are working to meet or exceed those expectations – there’s more happening in World of Warcraft than ever before, and this is just the beginning.

That’s an announcement. One that will be hard to talk your way out of later.

Bobby Kotick, the CEO of Activision, also confirmed this. He may not have the best reputation with the gaming community, but his word carries weight. He stated:

Over the next two years, we plan to hire hundreds of the best developers to meet the needs of our World of Warcraft players. Proletariat’s outstanding team will be a key component in our efforts to hire new talent.

So it may seem odd that the next WoW expansion, Dragonflight, has so far turned out to be rather small and unimpressive. Dragonflight – at least at first glance – does absolutely no experiments and does without parasitic systems.

If you only take a rough look at World of Warcraft, you might frown in surprise at the announcement of “more content”, because it doesn’t fit at all with what Dragonflight promises:

• No big new system like pacts, Torghast, islands or warfronts.
• Only 4 new areas (For comparison, Battle for Azeroth had 6 new areas, Shadowlands had 5).
• 8 new dungeons is also rather the lower standard of an expansion

Sure there are a few fresh features, like the new class of the Callers of the Dracthyr or the dragon riding. But dragon riding seems at first glance to be more of a sideline that will be replaced by traditional flying later on, and a new class is welcome – but nothing completely unexpected.

What does “more content” actually mean for WoW?

If you ask the World of Warcraft player community what kind of “more content” they absolutely need in the future, the answers couldn’t be more varied. While for many players “more content” means new dungeons, raids, and battlegrounds, World of Warcraft is much more than that. There are numerous fans of small niche tasks in the game that PvE or PvP pros can only roll their eyes at because, from their point of view, that’s not “real content”. But when you add up these smaller groups that are interested in content like pet battles, transmogrifications, toy collections, achievements, new character customizations, or roleplaying, it does add up to a sizable number of players with very different interests. Together, however, they make up a not insignificant portion of all active players. New recruits to the WoW team should not only help satisfy the content hunger of PvE junkies, but also cater to just such niche content. After all, it was this variety of content that has kept World of Warcraft loyal fans for years. Mike Ybarra, the “President of Blizzard Entertainment” seems to see it that way as well, because he talks about the creative freedom the team needs when he says:

We put players at the forefront of everything we do, and we work hard to meet and exceed expectations. […] A critical point if we wanted to take care of players is to take care of our own team – we need to make sure we have the resources to create experiences for our communities that they’ll love, while giving our teams freedom to explore even more creative possibilities in their projects.

Of course, again, that’s pretty open-ended and leaves a lot of room for interpretation. But “creative freedom” can really only mean creating more and different content that sometimes only appeals to a certain niche of players – but it’s those players who have often had to take a back seat in recent years.

New employees probably won’t be relevant until after Dragonflight launches

But when will the new developers come to fruition? Even if this is of course a bit of a look into the crystal ball: Pretty sure not at the launch of Dragonflight. Although the beta hasn’t officially started yet, Blizzard has most likely been working intensively on Dragonflight for the last 2 years and has already completed most of the expansion. This may sound strange without a started beta, but there is no other way to realize a release date still in 2022. Beta versions of World of Warcraft are usually already extremely advanced and it’s just a matter of fine-tuning. Even if not all features are playable at the beginning of a beta, the majority of them are already included in the game data and only need to be “turned on”.

So the 100 or so new Proletariat employees who are now expected to work on World of Warcraft will probably have little to no impact on the release of Dragonflight – but just beyond that. Because World of Warcraft wants to “bring content faster and more often, and even exceed fan expectations in the process.”