Past Midnight: building the next era of World of Warcraft

Published: July 8, 2026

Game Director Ion Hazzikostas is, perhaps, the perfect person to ask about World of Warcraft. Having joined Blizzard in 2008, he's spent almost 18 years working on the game, with ten of them as its Game Director. His tagline is 'Watcher,' and it makes a lot of sense: he is the backbone of WoW; its caretaker and its driver.

It makes an equal amount of sense, then, that when we chose to relaunch PCGamesN, we set up a chat with Hazzikostas. World of Warcraft is a seminal PC gaming experience - it's still limited to Blizzard's Battle.net client, and while rumors swirl that it'll appear on Xbox Game Pass at some point™, it remains a PC staple. It's also a game that spans across every iteration of PCGamesN - in 2024, WoW turned 20, and the Warcraft franchise hit 30. World of Warcraft is a game that's older than a lot of people, but in the same vein, it's a game that unites generations.

Yet, in 2026, it feels like the MMO is in somewhat of a transition state, akin to how Dragonflight felt following Shadowlands. It's not a bad thing - Midnight is the Worldsoul Saga's middle child, and we've still got The Last Titan to go. It does, however, feel like the perfect time to check in and ask how Hazzikostas believes things are going.

I think there couldn't be a better time to jump in than right now.

Ion Hazzikostas - WoW Game Director

Midnight, you see, feels like the meeting point of OG World of Warcraft and modern Retail. Gone are the celestial, multiversal themes of Shadowlands; Azeroth and its plight take center stage here, and we've spent a lot of time revisiting old, iconic zones like Quel'Thalas. Yet, in terms of features, Midnight - and the Worldsoul Saga as a whole - has ramped things up to eleven. We finally have player housing - something Blizzard certainly took its time with, but that I'd argue has paid off massively. The War Within also saw the introduction of Delves, single-player-oriented content that has helped expand the solo experience. It's a meld of the familiar and the unfamiliar, wrapped in a coat of violet paint.

I ask Hazzikostas about Midnight's launch, as well as that fusion of old and new. "Overall, we're really happy [with Midnight]," he says. "I'm very proud of the team's hard work and what they pulled off. It was really exciting to return to the lands of Quel'Thalas, Silvermoon, and Zul'Aman, and to see players' enthusiasm for returning to some iconic locations.

"I think that [returning to the past] was something that was a little bit of a question mark - like a little bit of slight doubt or concern on the team's part," he confesses. "[We wondered] whether the players would embrace returning to familiar locations that have been reimagined, or whether they would see it as just 'oh, this is rehashing old stuff.' We're very excited to see them embrace it, because it opens so many doors in terms of our ability to revisit, update, and reimagine iconic locations that are so central to World of Warcraft's history, and tell new stories in them.

"The story of modern World of Warcraft, for many years now, has been about broadening our approach to try and offer for all the different types of players that have decided to make Azeroth their home. Midnight takes that to an all-new level."

Midnight, however, hasn't been without its faults. The launch of Patch 12.0.5, Revelations, marked one of the most bug-ridden periods in the game's history, with housing being taken offline entirely due to a glitch that saw decor snap to the floor and save there. The bug - which Hazzikostas explains was the knock-on effect of a change to Mists of Pandaria's Siege of Orgrimmar - is one of the ugliest in WoW history, and that's without mentioning drops in performance in Silvermoon, among myriad other trials and tribulations.

In a separate interview, I asked Hazzikostas about the team's learnings from 12.0.5, and how the upcoming 12.1 update plans to continue squashing bugs. The TLDR is that Blizzard knows Revelations' lack of polish wasn't up to snuff, but that it has streamlined and refined its internal processes to catch issues quicker. "We're only going to do absolutely critical bug fixes because of the risk that has to the stability of the product," he says.

"That's not to say that we're not going to fix things once we're live - we're constantly rolling out fixes and updates to the service. But that risk of doing something that messes up a release isn't really fair for us to take."

Where Midnight has also made waves, however, is with its UI. WoW addons have been a part of the game's community almost since its inception, as players attempted to plug the holes in Blizzard's UI with their own creations. WeakAuras, GTFO, BigWigs, Deadly Boss Mods; we've all heard of them, and we've all used them at some point in our WoW career.

While most addons simply provide missing, trackable information, Blizzard has taken aim at the ones that give you a little too much of a helping hand. Hazzikostas admits that addons were having an impact on encounter creation, with the team often having to "design [instances] around the addons." He stresses that mechanics have never been created "with the intent that addons would be used to solve them. Instead, "players have been looking for ways to solve in real time the different challenges we were throwing at [them], and that was not leading the game's encounter and class design down a good path."

As such, WeakAuras has bit the dust, as have myriad other community-made creations. It's an attempt by Blizzard to "level the playing field" for newer players, while ensuring that we're not getting too much behind-the-scenes information.

It's a move that's divided the community; addon creators have seen years of work collapse, while longtime players have lost some of the core systems that they've been reliant on. I ask Hazzikostas about this decision - it's not as damning as Final Fantasy 14's no-addon policy, but it's a huge step for WoW's UI.

"I know this may be a controversial statement, but I will say that, overall, [the new UI] has been successful so far. It's not done, it's not perfect; there's more work to go, and we are continuing to undertake that work. But I think that, by and large, the vast majority of people are completing the same level of content that they were before, and far more are doing it without feeling like they need to seek out external tools. There have been some exceptions to that where the community has figured out ways of making some computational logic work, and we didn't want to keep breaking things in the middle of a patch.

"The 12.1 update has what we think is a more comprehensive overhaul of the security backend of our addon interface, which should make it a little easier for addon authors to write addons, but also close some of the loopholes we've seen pop up here and there. Alongside that, we're continuing to improve our base user interface.

"All of this has been in service of a more approachable experience and a more level playing field," he says. "It was a challenging concept to explain in some ways. In the lead up to Midnight players took it as 'Blizzard is killing addons, they're getting rid of all addons,' and that led to a very understandable, very negative reaction around that idea because addons have been a part of WoW for 20 years. We're looking forward to them continuing to be a part of WoW for many years to come.

"I think, while it's certainly been a transition with its challenges, we're excited to have this new baseline and foundation, and things will only continue to get better from here, both as we continue to add functionality to the base UI, and we continue to empower addon authors to add customization options," he continues. "And as we, frankly, internally relearn some aspects of how we can build encounters in this new world. I think that's going to open up new doors and possibilities for players in raids, dungeons, Delves, and everything in between."

As I mentioned at the beginning of this article: Ion Hazzikostas has worked on World of Warcraft for 18 years. He's seen WoW in so many different states, times, and iterations; he's watched the game grow and evolve. I ask if he's happy with the state the MMO has landed in, and more generally why a player should play WoW in 2026, even if they've never stepped foot in Azeroth before.

He gives a nod to WoW Classic, where you can "revisit where it all began." But in terms of Retail, he notes that Blizzard "has been learning for 20 years, and refining [its] ability to serve players, tell stories, offer depth, offer meaningful rewards, and offer increasing flexibility.

World of Warcraft today, in 2026, is still a game that will absolutely give you as much as you put into it

Ion Hazzikostas - WoW Game Director

"World of Warcraft used to be known as a game that would consume your life, and as a game that, if you didn't have tons and tons of time to play it, you shouldn't even bother picking it up because it required tons and tons of time to get anything out of it. World of Warcraft today, in 2026, is still a game that will absolutely give you as much as you put into it; that you can sink a ton of time into if you're looking to really go deep and immerse yourself in a game. It's also a game where you can log in for 20 minutes or so after lunch and accomplish something meaningful.

"It's a game where you can play solo; it's a game where you can play with a large group of friends. We haven't moved away from something we used to be into something new; we've broadened and expanded our focus so that it's all of those things and more. With an epic story going on; an updated new player experience to get them right into the latest content; a wide variety of ways to adventure, progress, collect, decorate, roleplay, PvP and so forth, I think there's something for everyone in WoW today.

"I'm biased," he says with a smile. "But I think there couldn't be a better time to jump in than right now."