Gaming: World Of Warcraft's Add-on Changes Aren't Over: 'there Will...

A 12.0.1 patch will bring more changes after this week's Midnight expansion prepatch made dramatic changes to mods, character classes and the game's UI.

This week marks perhaps the largest change to World of Warcraft's core game since the MMO's original release.

Dubbed the "addonpocalype" by some players, Tuesday's pre-patch for the new Midnight expansion (which launches March 2) brought with it:

Those changes aren't over. A mini patch, 12.0.1, will arrive in the next month and will continue to improve core WoW features, senior game director Ion Hazzikostas told us in an exclusive, wide-ranging interview. And other tweaks will happen as players figure out how to evade the limitations Blizzard has placed on their favorite combat add-ons, particularly those that simplify raid combat.

Hazzikostas chatted for nearly an hour in a broad interview covering the history and role of player-developed add-ons from Warcraft's beginning in 2004 until today.

"Add-ons have been part of the game since literally day one, since beta," he says. "What we started to see 10 years later in Warlords of Draenor was increasingly bespoke add-on solutions that were designed to simplify and solve specific mechanics."

Hazzikostas says that the race for world first in the Hellfire Citadel raid in that expansion was determined by one guild having sophisticated add-on authors and the other not. One had a system that drew precise lines on the screen for a boss tactic, while the other didn't. It made all the difference.

"That was just the beginning," he says. "But it wasn't one specific function we could clamp down on, and add-ons had been such a ubiquitous part of the WoW ecosystem for so long, that we just said, 'Okay, I guess this is how it's going to work now.' But we've seen this become more and more pervasive as this trickles down… to tools that pickup groups are expected to use and configure."

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The final straw was a slow but steady drumbeat of player complaints about having to set up increasingly complex third-party tools to succeed in Warcraft's raids. Blizzard developers considered whether this was how they wanted the game to be played, and decided it was worth the complexity of making a major course correction, he says.

Source: PC Gamer