World of Warcraft is changing. I'm nervous about what that means. | Opinion

• World of Warcraft's upcoming expansion, Midnight, will introduce wide-ranging changes to the 21-year-old game.
• The expansion will add a new player housing feature and rework core systems like combat and the user interface.
• WoW Game Director Ion Hazzikostas acknowledges the risks of the ambitious update but believes the changes are necessary for the game's future.
• Developers are removing reliance on community-made combat add-ons to regain control over the player experience.

Some of you read books. Some of you go out with friends. I think a handful of you might actually like stuff like that. I know this because my coworkers keep telling me I should do more of it, in some weird attempt to get me to actually go outside my house every so often.

It's because they know I don't do any of that boring stuff. I game. Specifically, I play video games every chance I get as a way to decompress and escape from whatever childhood trauma and adult responsibilities that still haunt me.

For almost 10 years, that has primarily meant playing World of Warcraft, a wildly successful online game that millions of players have invested time and money in. I've spent countless hours playing across many of the game's major expansions and find myself nervously watching as the iconic game's development team sprints toward the March 2 full release of the next expansion, named Midnight. 

That gaming anxiety was the backdrop for my conversation with Ion Hazzikostas, World of Warcraft's game director, after which I left feeling hopeful that the developers would be able to pull off what is undoubtedly the most wide-ranging and game-changing chapter of a game that is celebrating its 21st year of having a chokehold on the massively multiplayer online genre.

World of Warcraft's Midnight will change everything

Players who preordered the new expansion will get access to housing on Dec. 2. I was able to test it in beta phase, and I can report it’s shaping up to be a great experience that the developers promise will both reward players for previous achievements and motivate us to accomplish more in-game, knowing our housing and neighborhood environments will reflect all of it. You can read more on that here.

What remains to be seen, though, is whether everything else this new expansion introduces will build on the housing feature’s success or undermine it. Just about every aspect of the game is changing or being tweaked. Things like the skills players use to fight, the user interface we can customize, and how we interact with the bosses in the game are all being reworked. 

If you don’t play the game, it’s hard to describe just how massive and consequential these changes are going to be, without even getting into the next chapter of storytelling that’s coming. Midnight could set the game up for success for the next several years under a new foundation of systems and features. Or it could all collapse if the players reject it.

World of Warcraft's director knows the risk being taken

That was the set of questions I had for Hazzikostas, the person in charge of shepherding the game through this generational expansion. 

“I owe the game a great debt, and I feel humbled by making sure that I’m repaying it as best I can,” he said. “And yeah, I also don’t want to be the guy who ruins WoW. That would be terrible.”

I can report that the friends I play Warcraft with are, let’s say, skeptical. They worried that the team is taking on too much and that things like the combat system will suffer. They’re upset that the development team decided to neuter community-driven combat add-ons that have become fundamental to the game’s enjoyment. They’re nervous about playing the game, filled with boss fights and dungeons, using only what it provides natively. 

It didn’t take long to realize that Hazzikostas understands and embraces the risk the developers are taking with one of the entertainment industry's most successful franchises while also being certain they will pull it off, and believes it was time to usher in changes.“There’s absolutely a risk,” he said. “I mean, I think part of ambition is taking risks. The safe play would be to keep doing it like we’ve always done it. Why not just carry forward what has been OK so far?”

Early signs suggest there is reason to expect success

I've played with aspects of the new expansion for more than a month now, first in the alpha testing and more recently in the beta testing. There are a few things that are, currently, undisputable for players and the development team. In my opinion, of course.

First, many of the game's classes we use to fight and explore are getting changes that will redefine the overall experience. The team's stated plan is to streamline combat abilities and related features to make them more approachable and leave room for the better players to shine. That manifests as abilities being purged or reimagined so completely that players will have to learn a new playstyle.

I'm not overjoyed with the combat reworks on beta, if I'm being honest. But I expect the team to make more tweaks as the full release nears.

“Our goal for all of our designs is that they be easy to learn and very hard, if not impossible, to master,” Hazzikostas said. “We want to keep that depth. We want to keep that skill ceiling, but we want to try to raise that floor.”

Another truth is that the community features we're leaving behind have taken control of the game's design. Essentially, add-ons have made the game easier to play and to overcome its combat challenges. As a result, Hazzikostas said, the team had to keep designing boss fights, knowing the community would create ways to trivialize the encounters.

So what we ended up with was a game with many layers of community-driven assistants to counter whatever the developers would create. That will no longer be true when Midnight launches. The developers will have full control of the encounters and the tools we use to face them. Success will be all theirs. Failure will be all theirs.

Hazzikostas said, "That's part of the gig."

“We really want to swing for the fences," he said. "We want to make sure the best years of WoW are ahead of it. And that’s going to mean, you know, taking some risks. It’s going to be making some changes, but I think that’s the only path forward if we want to accomplish those goals as opposed to the alternative of just kind of coasting.”

It's a path players will be able to walk soon enough. I'm kind of excited to see where it leads.

Louie Villalobos is the director of opinion for USA TODAY Co. You'll find him playing as a healer in World of Warcraft. If you don't know what that means, that's OK. Thank you for reading this far.