Holly Longdale wants spell combos between classes

Holly Longdale wants spell combos between classes in World of Warcraft. The Executive Producer said so at PAX Australia, in a Q&A with Clay Stone. WoW Forever, she said, was the right thing to do from the first pitch.

Longdale was this year’s Storytime speaker at PAX Aus, on 9 October. After her talk, Clay Stone, Associate Production Director of WoW Classic, joined her on stage. The whole keynote is on the Twitch channel of PAX. Some of her answers below were condensed.

From EverQuest to Blizzard

Longdale grew up with fantasy, science fiction and arcades, and studied journalism. In her late twenties she started playing EverQuest. A guildmate turned out to be a developer on the game and told her to apply. She got the job.

Her biggest lesson there, she said, was that a game belongs to its players and not to its developers. After a detour at Disney she returned to EverQuest 2 as a Senior Producer, and the team started releasing “vanilla” versions of its games.

Then Blizzard called. It was preparing WoW Classic and asked her what to expect when old content comes back. Soon after, she joined the Classic team and became its Lead Producer. When Ion Hazzikostas became Game Director, she got his old job as Executive Producer.

WoW Forever from the first pitch

Asked how a team looks when it is on to something, Longdale called it “a vibe”. With WoW Forever, she said, that was it. She remembered sitting through the pitch, and called it “1,000% the right thing to do”.

The team was not sure it had enough time or people for Forever, she said later. Her answer was that they would figure it out. She closed that answer with this line.

I’m not a suit, is what I’m saying I guess.

Spell combos and listening to players

Clay Stone asked which mechanic she would take from another game. Longdale wants spell combos between classes, which drew cheers from the crowd. She joked that Ion Hazzikostas should get the video. Whether such combos are planned, she did not say.

On feedback, she said the team does not listen to the loudest people in the room. It looks at data and research behind a trend, and accepts that a game for millions cannot please everyone. A choice has to be made about what the game is and who it is for.

She has no hill to die on, she added. If a whole room were angry about one of her opinions, she would drop it. She ended with the hope that every player finds a community that feels like home.