Blizzard recently announced World of Warcraft: Dragonflight, marking the eighth major expansion for the 18-year-old MMORPG. With Microsoft and Xbox seeking to buy up Activision Blizzard in the near future, there's been some renewed attention on the game in the wider gaming conversation.To get more news about Buy WoW Items, you can visit lootwow.com official website.

WoW was namechecked by Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer in a previous interview, saying that he'd like to see Blizzard games grow again. Indeed, Blizzard has lost millions of monthly active users across its properties, with games like Overwatch, WoW, and Hearthstone struggling from stiff competition and a string of poor strategic decisions from the top down. Is there a world where that might even be possible?

With WoW: Shadowlands done and dusted (for the most part), Blizzard has an opportunity to reset its developer priorities for Dragonflight. Blizzard has been marred by Activision's culture of chasing short-term shareholders gains to the detriment of the long-term health of its titles, and one can only hope that this will be a thing of the past under Microsoft. As such, there's a real opportunity for Blizzard to find the magic that made WoW a powerhouse again with Dragonflight, and there's evidence already that they may just be looking to do that.

I wrote previously that World of Warcraft needs a new philosophy if it's going to grow, and it's hard to ignore how vastly Blizzard's goals and aims have changed between Dragonflight and the past few expansions.

Dragonflight is bringing a range of new features as is typical for Blizzard's big boxed expansion packs. There's a whole new continent to explore, set on the mysterious Dragon Isles. There's a new story arc starting, with much of Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands' story threads resolved. There's even a new class and race combo, in the form of the draconic Dracthyr Evoker. It'll also have a new flight system called Dragonriding, which modernizes the way flying feels.

In a range of interviews, Blizzard and its lead developer Ion Hazzikostas repeatedly discussed how it was retiring some of WoW's most controversial aspects in recent years, that of borrowed power. For the past few expansions, rather than upgrade core systems that carry through across multiple expansions, Blizzard has relied on temporary systems that disappear when the expansion ends. In Legion we had artifact weapons, which granted special abilities, and admittedly, first time around, this system was incredibly cool. Blizzard however used it again in Battle for Azeroth, in the form of a necklace. And, once again, in Shadowlands, in the form of Covenant powers. Each and every time, these features expire through plot elements at the end of the expansion, coining the phrase borrowed power.
Blizzard initially began exploring these kinds of systems to get away from the power creep that was developing. It became standard to some degree that in each expansion, classes got a new spell or two to add flavor. As a feature, it undoubtedly has diminishing returns, since there are only so many spells and abilities a person can track before the cognitive load becomes unwieldy. Shifting the metagame around is standard in service game development to keep things fluid and interesting, but the borrowed power system has undoubtedly become formulaic within WoW's wider structure.

Beyond that, Blizzard is also re-examining some of its other systems that have begun to feel like a chore. World of Warcraft's endgame typically consists of doing quests for certain factions. Since Legion, these systems have built up layers upon layers of progression systems that reset either daily or weekly, at the same time day in, day out. To make matters worse, a lot of these mechanics have been time-gated, which I've argued contributes to the sensation that the game becomes more of a job, than fun.

Time gating is useful to some degree, as it allows the community that plays at different speeds to maintain pace with the hardcore players who may have more time. And daily quests aren't bad in of themselves either. The problem has become the abundance of intersecting content that seems to act as a barrier to what made WoW popular in the first place: class fantasy, gear progression, and epic battles.