Sitting in the press room, watching the BlizzCon 2023 opening ceremony this year as returning Warcraft Executive Creative Director Chris Metzen take the stage to reveal the next three World of Warcraft expansions, I was reminded of Marvel’s Kevin Feige announcing entire new slates of movies coming to the Marvel Cinematic Universe at Comic-Con.
This level of transparency is rare in the video game world, and it wasn’t just Metzen’s Warcraft team embracing it, either.
For Overwatch 2, director Aaron Keller announced not only one new hero, Magua, but also the next hero, Venture, and even the concept for the hero after that, codenamed “Space Ranger.” During the Diablo 4 segment the team teased the first expansion, Vessel of Hatred, just six months after the launch of the base game. Hearthstone was demoing a co-op Duos mode on the show floor — months before a proper 2024 launch, and World of Warcraft announced the next three expansions as part of the newly christened “Worldsoul Saga.”
Across all of Blizzard’s main, existing properties, the devs have pursued a strategy of transparency it seems. Beyond just announcing the next big thing, they shared details on things that are some way off, even if they were in incredibly early states like Overwatch 2’s third announced hero, who doesn’t even have an official name yet. It’s a radical departure from the shroud of secrecy that usually envelops the games industry.
“Yes, a hundred percent,” says World of Warcraft executive producer Holly Longdale when asked whether this transparency is a new company initiative. During an interview with IGN at BlizzCon, Longdale tells us, “at the end of day, we exist because of the communities we have, and our fans are so dedicated as you’ve probably seen here at BlizzCon. They just want information, they just want to know what we’re doing and what’s coming.”
“We want to rebuild trust, honestly, with our players.” – Overwatch 2 Director Aaron Keller
In recent years the Blizzard name has seen some of its sheen wear off. From the diminishing review scores of the last couple World of Warcraft expansions to Overwatch 2’s community backlash over the high-profile, public cancellation of a previously announced PvE mode, questions have been raised over whether or not Blizzard was still committed to the “Blizzard Way” — a standard of quality control that rivals only Nintendo’s.
“I had the singular distinction for a while of being the game director of the worst-reviewed game on Steam for a while,” says Overwatch 2 director Aaron Keller tells IGN about announcing the cancellation of the PvE mode despite knowing full well the negative consequences the news would have on players. “I would still go back and make the decision, to be honest with our players. I want them to know what it is that we’re making and I think that’s going to be… It’s been our guiding light for the past year and it’s going to be our guiding light for the future of Overwatch.”
During our interview at BlizzCon, Keller was upfront about the drawbacks canceling Overwatch 2’s planned PvE mode would have on player morale. But that moment, as well as another time when Overwatch 2 announced that heroes would be included in the battle pass, would help spark this new path for the Overwatch 2 team.
“At the time we thought it was best to just be radio silent there because anything we said, the players would just kind of twist into something. And we’ve kind of come 180 [degrees] from that,” Keller explains. Since then Keller says the team has done more than ever to be transparent about Overwatch 2, even showing very early and rough gameplay footage of Venture at BlizzCon, and putting out biweekly director’s blogs for the game.
“We really want to show them all of this, and the reason why we want to do that is we want to rebuild trust, honestly, with our players,” Keller says. “Even if it’s something that might be taken negatively, we would like to get out in front of it and just be honest with those players.”
Diablo 4 associate game director Joseph Piepiora echoed the sentiment to IGN, telling us, “We want to surprise players, but we want them to understand that we remain committed to the experience and we’re releasing regular infusions of content.”
“They just want information, they just want to know what we’re doing and what’s coming.” – Warcraft Executive Producer Holly Longdale
Video games is an industry built on secrets and hype. Look at the website formerly known as Twitter and you’ll find anonymous accounts online that gain huge followings because they claim to know about some unannounced secret, like a Grand Theft Auto 6 trailer that never comes, preying on the starved masses desperate for any news from their favorite game studios.
But secrecy can be a double-edged sword and the backlash to unchecked hype can be ferocious. Look at Cyberpunk 2077’s original launch, which promised so much and delivered a fraction of what CD Projekt Red claimed would be in the game. Following that mess, CDPR also took a 180, embracing a clear-eyed approach to marketing by being more open about what to expect from the studio, including announcing multiple new projects like a Witcher sequel and spin-off, and promising to be more honest about what players should expect from each new game.
Blizzard is possibly even more vulnerable to the consequences of failed communications because of all the live games the studio operates, and silence could signal to a fanbase who’ve grown up playing its games that the developers do not care about the health of its community, and only the profits they generate.
At the same time, keeping cards close to the chest can be beneficial to developers given how making games is often messy and imperfect. This new level of transparency can have consequences. “We can lower the cone of uncertainty of what our roadmap is going to be. I think the worst case scenario was if we did communicate some really incredible plans and we weren’t able to actually deliver on those because we had to pivot for whatever reason to work on other things,” says Diablo 4 production director Tiffany Wat, not intentionally referencing Overwatch 2’s canned PvE mode, but certainly something that came to mind during our interview.
There absolutely needs to be a healthy boundary between what players want and what developers envision for their game, but at the same time, that relationship doesn’t have to necessarily be antagonistic.
“I think we really like it,” Keller says when asked how this new transparency has gone over with his team. “It is hard for a team to hold on to something and it’s hard to feel like you’re being inauthentic with players.”
He admits that being upfront with players about such early plans can be scary, but adds, “I think it’s great for the game and it does feel liberating to not have to be feeling like you can’t be talking about these things.”
What’s clear is that this move towards transparency appears to have predated the news that Xbox has successfully acquired Activision Blizzard for $69 billion. Instead, this new style of messaging is something Blizzard approached organically after years of faux pas, like asking audience members whether or not they have phones to play games like Diablo Immortal.
For now, however, the transperancy appears to be something embraced by all teams at the company, from Overwatch 2 to Warcraft.
“It was a little while ago, but really, the philosophy shift really started back for us in, I would say, around the Shadowlands era,” reveals WoW associate director Morgan Day, who says the team took a “huge step back” following the launch of Shadowlands to reassess how they’d communicate with their players.
It feels partially like a new chapter for Blizzard after years of being lost in the wilderness. Warcraft General Manager John Hight tells me that it could be even considered a reboot for the developers, saying, “I think we have moved, at least for [Warcraft], I think we’ve moved from being very product-centric where we think of this game, to being very player-centric.”
While I understand the unique circumstances behind secretive game reveals — from carefully planned marketing plans to, again, the unpredictable nature of game development — I’ve also often wondered what would happen if game reveals were treated more like movies, where roadmaps could resemble an entire MCU Phase when they’re announced. Now, we finally see a version of that from Blizzard.
Time will tell whether this approach can work for video games the way it does for films, but Blizzard is certainly embracing a new direction for itself right as it’s about to begin possibly one of the biggest changes the company has ever faced since merging with Activision in 2008.
Matt T.M. Kim is IGN’s Senior Features Editor. You can reach him @lawoftd.
