WoW’s game director says they don’t want combat AddOns to do anything the base UI doesn’t: ‘The overarching goal of the changes in Midnight is to level the playing field’

World of Warcraft: Midnight is doing something pretty huge—with Blizzard taking aim at the game’s combat mods, also known as AddOns, by making changes to the API (which feeds them the info they need to work). Other UI mods will stay untouched, but anything that gives you an overt advantage in a fight? It’s being sent to the void.

I can’t say I blame Blizzard for this, even if I was hesitant at first. I still think the studio’s taking on a huge task, given it’s also having to completely redesign its classes to exist in an AddOn-less world, but assuming Blizzard can pull it off? I think the game’ll be better for it.

That’s not to say there aren’t bumps in the road. For example; some of those proposed changes note that Blizzard “will NOT be allowing AddOns to support timer emphasis”. Say, for example, the ‘three, two, one’ audio cue that often comes with AddOns like Deadly Boss Mods (DBM). That’s per an interview game director Ion Hazzikostas had with the authors of two major mods, Bigwigs and DBM.

Hazzikostas, later wanting to clarify his statements in a thread posted to the game’s subreddit, writes: “We’re working on a blog that can be a single source of truth there. The overarching goal of the changes in Midnight is to level the playing field and do what we can to make it so that while addons can still thoroughly personalize your experience, they aren’t giving you an objective competitive advantage over people using the base UI.”

Hazzikostas then goes on to say that “it’s not that we view a spoken countdown as a form of automation or as inherently problematic; rather, we feel that it would be inappropriate to allow only addon users to have that functionality.”

Blizzard has the unenviable task, then, of “designing our Midnight encounters to have both clear telegraphs ahead of time, and sufficient time to react.” And here’s where a problem arises. MMOs are never going to have a 100% track record, especially when it comes to people with disabilities.

One of the major boons that WoW’s current UI has is its ability to let players with, say, visual processing issues or colourblindness issues to make the difference.

For instance, I have protanopic colourblindness. If Blizzard showed a countdown by indicating a magic aura shifting from dark blue to purple, I’d be screwed—because my eyes are less sensitive to red, which is mainly how you tell those two colours apart. If I have an audio countdown, though? I’m good.

There are other ways to circumvent this. A lot of games with colour-based telegraphs will also include a shape-based element, too. But also, Baldur’s Gate 3’s spell slot UI is absolutely god-awful for me and Larian, despite putting a colourblind filter in the game, has never moved to fix it. I am forever destined to squint at my pips because someone innocently forgot that some people, like me, might have a hard time differentiating between white and very light red.

This is not to dunk on Swen & Co. for not understanding my specific needs (though that filter is basically useless) but to point out that devs can never pre-empt all accessibility concerns. Accessibility is complicated, and each individual needs something different to help them along—which is what the modularity of the API helped out with.

Still, Hazzikostas acknowledges that they could get it wrong, and are open to audio countdowns in the future: “If it turns out that we’re unable to hit that mark, we’re definitely open to adding an audio countdown solution to help, but we’d want it to be available in the base UI rather than requiring an addon.”