World of Warcraft: The War Within is out later this year, and at launch will be trying something new for a WoW expansion: a three-day, paid early access period. When this was announced, a lot of people were pretty upset! But in an interview with IGN ahead of the game's alpha launch, game director Ion Hazzikostas defended the decision, calling it an "experiment."
Essentially, World of Warcraft as it currently exists has a number of price gates. It's entirely free to try up to level 20, and for a $15/month subscription, you can play most of the game's past expansions and reach up to level 50, and you'll also get access to World of Warcraft: Classic on top of that. For an additional $50, you get access to the current expansion, Dragonflight, and will be able to play World of Warcraft: The War Within whenever it officially launches.
But Blizzard is offering multiple versions of The War Within for purchase. There's a $70 version that includes some bonuses like character cosmetics, but a $90 version will get players not just into the game's eventual beta release, but also into the proper full launch three days before everyone else. It's this three-day head-start that players are upset about. Some are frustrated that people who want to be on top of the game's raiding scene are effectively being taxed to start on time. Many others are pointing out that this just means the game's release date is effectively three days earlier than advertised, but if you don't pay $40 more, you're stuck playing late.
We spoke to Hazzikostas in a big interview about everything we saw in our preview of the game's alpha, and at the end, we threw in a question about why the early access option is even on the table. Hazzikostas explained a bit, calling the whole deal a "bit of an experiment."
"We are looking to see how we can maximize the value of each of the different expansion tiers," he said. "It used to be that you needed to get the Heroic Edition to get a boost, for example, in Dragonflight. We actually now make a boost part of the baseline offering. We haven't raised the overall prices, but when we added more value to the baseline, we were looking for things that we can add to the higher tiers to keep them a compelling value proposition."
Hazzikostas doesn't believe the three-day headstart will meaningfully impact the competitive community or in-game economy, pointing out that they're holding back endgame weekly quests, mythic dungeons, profession cooldowns, and other elements until the first weekly reset, so everyone will have at least a week to level up to new cap and get started before endgame content becomes available for all simultaneously.
"So if you're someone who maybe doesn't have as much time to play during the week, but you have a bit more time on weekends and you've always felt like some of your guild mates are racing ahead and jumping into dungeons, and you're still pokily leveling your way along as you're hearing them performing dungeon groups, this is a chance for more people to get leveled up, get to that shared starting line on the Tuesday when the endgame content unlocks and be able to all do it together," he continued. "Our goal in tuning all of this is to make sure that two, three weeks in, there should not be any perceptible difference between someone who had early access and someone who didn't in terms of what they're capable of, what their gear is, anything else."
Regardless of how players feel about the paid early access, it's clear we're stuck with it at least for The War Within given that Blizzard has already begun selling this version of the game to people. Its ultimate impact when The War Within launches will likely determine if we see a similar upsell for the following expansions, Midnight and The Last Titan.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
