World of Warcraft: Shadowlands interview — Fixing Battle for Azeroth’s biggest problems

Shadowlands is taking World of Warcraft‘s players to the afterlife, but it’ll also be a journey to the past when it comes to game design.

Blizzard Entertainment is rethinking many of the gameplay tenants that served as the foundation of WoW during its current expansion, Battle for Azeroth. This includes a focus on character specializations (specs) rather than their broader classes, systems designed to make leveling new characters inconvenient, and the pruning of abilities in an attempt to not overwhelm players with too many buttons to press. Battle for Azeroth came out in 2018, and many fans criticized the expansion for these same reasons.