Ion Hazzikostas was fairly certain that Blizzard had broken World of Warcraft. He and his guildmates were deep in the ancient sanctum of Ahn'Qiraj, face to face with the delirious cosmic gaze of the eldritch god C'Thun. The dusty tomes of the Warcraft legendarium imply that C'Thun is one of the most powerful beings in the universe; he commands an army of obsidian golems and routinely devours raid members whole with one of his many toothy maws. Still, the amount of damage he was soaking up seemed a bit overtuned. Hazzikostas spent endless evenings getting blown to bits by this grim divinity, and his guild had little progress to show for it.

Recently, I've spent quite a lot of time pondering what an orc would look like with an afro. This, naturally, led to contemplation of an axe-afro-comb combo, and whether such a contraption would fall under blacksmithing or engineering. That's because I've been playing Shadowlands, the eighth expansion to World of Warcraft. For Warcraft fans, there's a lot to be excited about: the new game allows players to explore the afterlife – reviving classic characters such as Kael'thas Sunstrider – and introduces a new style of play in Torghast, a deliciously punishing dungeon that changes each time you visit. There's also a clear recruiting drive for new players with a simplified introduction, more straightforward questing and reconfigured character growth, all aimed at making this venerable and complex game less daunting.

"Games are very rapidly solved these days," says Ion Hazzikostas, the game director of World of Warcraft. Hazzikostas, known to the World of Warcraft community as Watcher, has developed the 16-year-old massively multiplayer online role-playing game since 2008. On a call with WIRED, he reminisced about how, early in the history of games, before raid walk-through videos, data-mining dumps, and Easter egg maps, opacity was a double-edged sword. To explain, he swerved over to Street Fighter. "You'd have a whole competitive hierarchy in a local arcade, a local video game store, where there was some character that was perceived as the best or the strongest because some person in the neighborhood was great with them," he says.

With August 14 approaching fast, fans of World of Warcraft are eagerly awaiting the release of Battle for Azeroth, the seventh expansion in the mega-hit MMORPG. WoW was first released in 2004, and in the fourteen years since, expansions and patches have introduced iconic features like flight (Burning Crusade), the dungeon finder (Wrath of the Lich King), transmogrification (Cataclysm), garrisons (Warlords of Draenor), and artifact weapons (Legion). Battle of Azeroth will introduce two new continents, as well as gameplay features like island expeditions, in which players can compete against artificial intelligence bots in fulfilling objectives. "Each new expansion we add to the game, we're looking to expand the core of the game the players have come to know and love over all these years, but also add brand new ways of playing the game, new features, new types of gameplay, new challenges to undertake, and a fresh look at a game that seeks to reinvent itself every couple of years," says Ion Hazzikostas, the game director on World of Warcraft at Blizzard Entertainment. But that's not always easy to do.

Today's surprise installment in the World of Warcraft end-of-expansion story for Legion means that time is truly running out for the things you want to do with your characters before Battle for Azeroth launches August 13-14. Today's events set the stage for major changes in the game, including the expansion pre-patch, which will include all the game systems, cosmetic and other changes for the new expansion - basically, everything but the content in the expansion's new zones. There has been no official announcement of the prepatch launch date, but if I were a betting woman, I'd say July 10 looks awfully likely. That gives you in the neighborhood of two weeks to get your undone achievements and other Legion-era goodies done before the game changes and they go away. Fortunately, today's storyline quests charge your weapons up to 126 Artifact Power, so you're in better shape than ever before to take them on.

World of Warcraft game director Ion Hazzikostas held a live Q&A to answer fan questions recently about the upcoming Battle for Azeroth expansion. As part of an extended interview, we quizzed him in more depth about some of those topics and threw in a few of our own. Why is Blizzard replicating some of the features of Discord voice/text chat in its popular massively multiplayer online game? What did developers learn from the difficulty of tuning Seat of the Triumvirate for Mythic groups? And can we get cross-server mythic raiding a little earlier? Today marks the first installment of the two-part interview.