World Of Warcraft’s Ion Hazzikostas On Cross-Faction Instances: ‘It’s Time’

Yesterday, Blizzard Entertainment announced their plans to introduce cross-faction instances in World of Warcraft, a feature that players have been requesting for since time immemorial. For the first time in the game’s nearly twenty-year history, players from the Horde and Alliance factions will be able band together to run dungeons, take on raids, and even team up with each other in PvP battles.

The news was mostly well-received by the community but, as with most game-changing feature announcements, there are some players who would rather leave things just as they are. In an interview with IGN, Game Director Ion Hazzikostas explains their reasons for wanting to blur the cross-faction divide considering that whole Alliance vs. Horde conflict has and probably will always be the focal point of the entire Warcraft franchise’s narrative. When confronted with the question of “Why now?” Hazzikostas simply answered with “Why not?”

“Part of the blog that we put out that laid the foundation for this was about looking at assumptions we've made about how character progression should work, about player versus account and all these other things,” he said. “And really revisiting things we've said 'no' to that people in the community have asked for…And one of them has been the desire for cross-faction play in some form…The answer had always been well, it's Warcraft, it's orcs versus humans. It's Horde versus Alliance. It's what defines our whole IP.”

“You're born Alliance, you're born Horde. That's not a choice you make. That's something that's assigned to you and that predestined fate isn't necessarily something that we want to necessarily stand by,” he continued. “The idea that your lot in the world because you were born an elf, you must hate trolls and nothing can change that. And because you were born a troll, you're their eternal enemy.”

“That's not the world we want to build, but it's also not the world we really have been building or the story we've been telling for the last 20 years and going back to Warcraft 3. At the end of the day, it was about the factions coming together to defeat Archimonde to stop the major threats to our world.”

Hazzikostas also points to how technology has changed the way players communicate with each other as another reason behind their decision. Hazzikostas says that when WoW first came out 17 years ago, players met their friends in-game and through their respective factions but that’s changed drastically over the years.

“It was just kind of one of those accepted rules back then if you meet a friend, and you discover that you play on different servers, oh well, you're never going to get to play with your friend. That's just how WoW is. Whereas those boundaries have increasingly been torn down and tons of communities have formed and there are Discords and WoW communities and people who are friends on Twitter and other places. The downside of maintaining that hard line grows with each passing year.”

“We frankly probably reached the tipping point a little while ago. But in a game like this, we're stubborn and traditionalists and it's scary to say: let's uproot this foundational pillar of what the game has been for over a decade. But it's time,” said the game director.

Cross-faction instances are slated to arrive with Patch 9.2.5 which will be rolling out sometime after Eternity’s End comes out.