World of Warcraft: Dragonflight is performing well in terms of player retention numbers, Blizzard has revealed thanks, in part, to its fairly ambitious roadmap.
The MMORPG’s ninth expansion launched at a time when fans were disappointed with both the narrative choices of its predecessor, Shadowlands, and the content drought that marked its post-launch support. Dragonflight managed to be the opposite of it, thanks to a regular cadence of content drops, and it seems to be paying off.
World of Warcraft: Dragonflight Player Retention Numbers
“The way our charts look are unlike any other time in the past, in a good way,” World of Warcraft Vice President and Executive Producer Holly Longdale said in an interview with Gamespot.
“Which continues to blow us away and which has us believing we are doing the right thing. We just have to fine tune and keep trying stuff out.”
This is backed up by a recent Activision Blizzard financial report, in which the publisher noted that content for the MMORPG is being released “faster than ever before” and that “subscriber retention in the West remains higher than at the equivalent stage of recent Modern expansions.”
World of Warcraft: Dragonlfight’s roadmap promised six major and minor updates throughout 2023 and Blizzard has, so far, successfully released them on schedule.
This meant that players didn’t have to wait long before there’d be new quests to complete, raids and dungeons to run, customization items to collect, and new public events to partake in.
The final push to keep Azeroth alive throughout 2023 is patch 10.2 which is expected to go live at some point in the following months.
A rich and steady content cadence is not the only thing Dragonflight does differently than Shadowlands.
Narratively, it returns to more familiar territory, being set on Azeroth. The story revolves around a rather traditional conflict for the series, which saw the Dragonflights battling against new antagonist faction the Primalists.
Furthermore, it dropped the ephemeral borrowed power systems that had been introduced since Legion, focusing on improving the core of the experience.
This meant bringing back detailed talent trees, vastly improving the UI and its customizability, while also introducing a new traversal method in the shape of Dragonriding.
It will be interesting to see if WoW: Dragonflight’s player retention numbers will remain at a similar level as the expansion nears the end of its lifespan.
An announcement about where the MMORPG is headed next is expected later this year during BlizzCon.
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