Blizzard let its UI mods 'go farther than we should have', says game director Ion Hazzikostas, but 'the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, the second-best time is today'

World of Warcraft: Midnight has now officially ripped the bandaid off—as of this week, many UI mods (addons) have been disabled and prevented from functioning, and even non-combat addons are required to update to Midnight's new infrastructure. Thus ends the two-decade reign of interface addons, with many functionalities now replaced by Blizzard's homegrown systems.

As for the reason? Turns out, if you build an entire game around requiring 12 separate WeakAuras (programmable UI elements) and nameplate mods, that's not the best experience for anybody. Even as an experienced player, I spent ages futzing around to get my WeakAuras just-so.

Speaking to PCG contributor Heather Newman, director Ion Hazzikostas admits that it could've been done sooner, but the longer they waited, the more painful it became to uproot everything. "Addons had been such a ubiquitous part of the WoW ecosystem for so long that we just said, 'Okay, I guess this is how it's going to work now.'

"But we've seen this become more and more pervasive as this trickles down… to tools that pickup groups are expected to use and configure." Pick-up groups basically mean any group of randoms—which, yeah. If a complete newbie decides to get started on Mythic+, only to be chewed out for not having DBM, I can see how that's a problem.

"We've probably let this go farther than we should have," Hazzkostas adds. "But we really just boiled down to the question of, do we want this to be what WoW is forever? We probably should have done something sooner, and it would have been a less-jarring transition for the community."

It's not like there won't be speed bumps. Blizzard's constantly working to try and make sure every functionality—some of which were important for accessibility more than just providing raw mechanical advantages—are covered.

More to the point, the shift has required a complete redesign of the game's roughly 40 specialisations, many of which had gameplay fiddliness that was made far easier with addon usage. My own spec, the Outlaw Rogue, was one of them.

However, it's not like the issue goes away if you just ignore it. Or, as Hazzikostas tells Heather: "The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second-best time is today."