World of Warcraft director reveals timeline for Midnight expansion and beyond as series turns 20

World of Warcraft has recently turned 20 and it's full steam ahead on updates and expansions during the series' china anniversary.

Siren Isle has just been added to The War Within, which has brought about a plethora of changes in itself and Blizzard, the studio behind the video game series, has published a deep dive into its upcoming update Undermined.

"Players will travel deep into the goblin city of Undermine, the capital of the goblin's trade empire!" an update on Blizzard's website said.

"It is a city like none other seen before in World of Warcraft and stands as a testament to goblin intelligence and creativity as experts in both technology and alchemy."

With that in mind, speaking to indy100 as part of World of Warcraft's 20th anniversary celebrations, game director Ion Hazzikostas offered a glimpse at the upcoming timeline of the hugely popular MMORPG.

"There aren't any specific dates on Undermined yet but we want to pace out the story so each beat has time to breathe and we want to be reactive to what we're seeing and hearing from our players," he said.

"When we announced the trilogy as a whole at BlizzCon in 2023, we indicated we wanted to get through this faster than the two year cadence of past expansions, we don't want to leave players hanging for six years to see how it ends.

"Midnight, our next expansion, is on the horizon, there's going to be a Player Housing feature and system, and over the course of 2025 we'll be sharing more details of what that's going to entail - next summer we're going to pull back the curtain and reveal what it's all about."

And as for anything like World of Warcraft 2?

Hazzikostas said: "We view it as we've currently got World of Warcraft 10 or whatever it is now.

"The game has evolved in so many ways I think if we ever reached a point if it felt like we can't do the things we want to do, if we have a vision for what an MMO should be that we somehow can't realise within the confines of World of Warcraft as it stands today, that's the thing that would get us to talk about it seriously.

"We're so far from reaching any of those limits though.

"There's never been a point where it's been a thing and we were developing World of Warcraft 2, obviously the general question has come up over the years by journalists and even members of the team internally.

"Ever? Who can say. But the answer has always been the best way we can serve our players right now is to do the things we want to do to add more life into World of Warcraft and the millions of players who call Azeroth home today.

"As for what the future holds? We'll see."

Undermined is an upcoming expansion in World of Warcraft / Blizzard

Hazzikostas has been playing World of Warcraft ever since it released in 2004. He's been working on the game for Blizzard since 2008 and reflected on how the game has "shaped" his life.

"It's incredibly humbling and we've had an introspective couple of months on the journey the game has taken and I've taken over the course of my life," he said.

"I've been playing World of Warcraft for 20 years and I've been at Blizzard for 16 of them, this game has really shaped my adult life in so many ways. What an honour it is to be able to carry that legacy into a third decade."

Hazzikostas shared what made him try the game out in the first place and what got him hooked.

He said: "I went in not knowing much about it other than it was an MMO from Blizzard set in the Warcraft universe and I was immediately blown away by the richness of the world.

"I sometimes joke I was hooked on the game when I hit spacebar for the first time and just jumped and felt the weightiness of my character's animation.

"It wasn't unusual for single-player games to have that but for online multiplayer game to have that level of fidelity, satisfying movement and interaction with the world, it got everything going on the right path.

"I had just graduated from law school, I was a practicing attorney, I would get home from law school and jump into Azeroth - I was a lawyer by day, raid leader by night.

"Multiplayer gaming used to be playing with friends you knew on dial-up, on LAN whereas in World of Warcraft, in my second month in the game, it was the first time I got onto voice comms.

"I was living on the east coast of America at that point and I was on with someone from the UK, where it was 3am their time, someone in Texas with a thick accent and we had a blast but it was my first time realising there are all these different people from different ages, backgrounds, perspectives that are all coming together in Azeroth.

"I had never met people like that in gaming before that moment."

20 years on, it's crazy to think that's second nature to players now and the ability to chat to anyone in the world at any time while playing is so widely available...

World of Warcraft Classic 20th Anniversary recently released too / Blizzard

The game has constantly evolved and been shaped through player feedback and changes in player habits, with its most recent full expansion The War Within arguably the biggest change the game has seen in its 20 year history.

"We added a feature called Warbands that for the first time, creates a framework for progression and achievement that spans multiple characters the players play in the game," Hazzikostas explained.

"It's your progression as a player instead of an individual character and that's a tectonic shift from how the game was originally conceived 20 years ago.

"The way players approach the game and play it has evolved tremendously over the years, players are looking for more flexibility in choice in how they spend their time in the game.

"After years of players telling us they've already done certain things on one character and are not interested in doing the same things again and want to hop into what they enjoy, we retrofitted the foundations of how our game is architected and set up going into our 20th year.

"It's one of the biggest single changes we've made in terms of how people experience the game and how World of Warcraft is likely to unfold going forward."

Here's to the next 20 years of World of Warcraft - let's hope we get many more Leeroy Jenkins moments (if you don't know what that is, search for it, it's the best thing you'll see today) for years to come.

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