Blizzard's not been 'backtracking' on its combat addon plans for World of Warcraft, says game director Ion Hazzikostas: 'This was always the intent, to swing the pendulum to the other end and then creep it back'

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.

Now the conversation's shifted in another direction: Has Blizzard gone soft on addons, by walking back some of the changes and specifics? No, says Hazzikostas, that was always the plan. As a matter of fact, when Midnight went into alpha testing, the strategy was to first go scorched-earth and see how much broke.

"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."

However, as Blizzard has performed the next phase of developing a WoW that can be free of mandatory combat addons, the question's come up as to whether Blizzard's gone all soft. One particular recent example that kicked up this kind of chatter was a 'whitelisting' of certain spells.

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.

While Hazzikostas doesn't comment directly on the granular details, it sounds more-or-less like the same philosophy: "I see discussion in the community to the effect of, 'Blizzard's backtracking on this. Blizzard's walking back their plans.' This was always the intent: to swing the pendulum to the other end and then creep it back in a measured way."

Hazzikostas continues: "Our goal was never to stamp out the add-on ecosystem. It was to move away from it being something that feels like a required competitive aspect of the game."

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.