World of Warcraft’s finally pulled the trigger on its combat-based UI mods, also called addons—something that’s had such a large impact on the game that I (as a writer duty-bound to provide context) am having a hard time laying out the situation without simply repeating myself.
But it’s a tectonic shift in how the game is designed and played. Players have been used to comprehensive and game-warpingly powerful combat addons for over 20 years at this point, so of course it’s kicking up a fuss. Game director Ion Hazzikostas, who talked to PCG contributor Heather Newman recently, has spent a lot of his time dutifully reassuring players, reiterating intentions, and trying to disarm panic.
“I was surprised, and I learned a lot about exactly how many of our add-ons are written in the first few weeks of alpha … We realized pretty quickly that a ton of these add-ons were written in ways that relied on many of the functions that we had now restricted.”
I was actually sceptical at the time—while the spells in question did seem like something a WeakAura (a powerful, customisable addon, now fallen, which could keep track of 70% of some specialisation’s resource tracking for them) would traditionally be targeted to solve, I figured Blizzard was simply allowing homebrew solutions for things it hadn’t cracked with its own cooldown manager yet.
Personally, while I still think players are going to be savvy and find workarounds—something Hazzikostas acknowledges in Heather’s full interview—I’m far from my initial skepticism where I called the effort “misguided”. As a matter of fact, I’m already preferring this new normal.
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