WoW UIs Trends: 2004 vs 2024
/I’ve long attributed World of Warcraft addons as being the thing that got me into not just UI design, but game development as a whole. The freedom to customize my UI so extensively really got me thinking about how I could use it to be a better player. It taught me a ton about things like information hierarchy, signs & feedback, and attention economy - long before I had any idea what those things were.
Since the game’s launch in 2004, players have been able to customize just about any part of their UI using LUA scripts - a quality that remains relatively uncommon in big budget games to this day. Perhaps the more impressive part though, is the community support that has emerged in the decades since.
The people are really dedicated to customizing their World of Wacraft experience, and there aren’t many games that give you quite as much control as WoW does. We’ve come a long way since the days of Perl Unit Frames and KTM Threat Meter, so let's talk about where we’ve come from, and where things are going.
A beautiful UI from simpler times
2004 was a long time ago, but I think the biggest differences in the last 20 years basically fall under 2 main categories:
The tools available, after 20 years of community development
The design of the game, now that players have access to such powerful UI
Back in 2004 the game was very simple, and for a long time the biggest UI barrier was just finding the functionality you were looking for. While anyone could download an addon, you effectively had to be a programmer to create one. This meant that the scope of what one could do with addons was somewhat limited by other players’ ideas. Generally most addons would have one specific purpose, be made by one person (probably a coder / not a designer), and include little fluff or customization.
The UI meta back then mostly revolved around just having all the “good” addons, like BigWigs and Recount. With how simple the game was, you couldn’t go too far wrong as long as the important stuff was on your screen somewhere. People mostly just wanted to move and resize existing UI elements, look at the damage meter, and see timers for important fight events.
But of course, even back then, addons like the OG Decursive pushed the bounds of how much power Blizzard would allow addons to wield. Ever since the beginning, it’s also been an arms race between the players’ creativity, and what Blizzard will allow the WoW API to do.
An example of AVR, yet anoter addon that was too powerful to be allowed
These days the power of addons is a hotter topic than ever, and some players will even go so far as to call for their removal entirely. In 2024, the game is more complicated than it’s ever been - partly because of this UI arms race.
Modern WoW can actually be pretty hard to play with just the base UI. What’s more, Blizzard themselves have said that they design content assuming dedicated players will have a full suite of custom UI alerts, timers, and trackers - and they kind of have to.
Part of this comes from the fact that, in 2024, you can now find basically any UI functionality you can imagine. Thanks to the WeakAuras addon, even people with 0 coding ability can pretty easily create completely new functionality from just an idea. More likely, you don’t even need to download anything - someone probably had that idea already, so just hit up https://wago.io/, find a text string to import, and you're done almost instantly.
Type “!ui” into your favourite player’s Twitch chat, and the chatbot will feed you a professional UI overhaul with all the bells and whistles, and it takes less than 10 clicks to set up.
The playerbase just has so much access to powerful UI now.
The amount of information availble to modern players is crazy
Even after Blizzard overhauled the base UI and introduced an “Edit Mode” to allow player customization, I think most dedicated players turn to addons to replace almost every part of it. A player who is accustomed to playing with addons hasn’t really changed how they build UIs, or reduced the number of addons they use.
A player trying to use the base UI without addons will really miss things like buff tracking, encounter timers, and nameplate mods - all of which are pretty integral to the information hierarchy of modern WoW. “Edit Mode” has basically no answer for any of these things, and so players still have to look outside the game to find 3rd party solutions.
Which also leads me to a personal bugbear: In modern WoW, the UI meta quickly homogenises around whatever top players and streamers are doing. The most prominent players often also have the best access to programmers, and the tools they make often end up becoming the community default.
Every patch, within weeks of the new content being released, top guilds will drop hundreds of fight timers and alerts that blip and bloop at all the right times. Every patch, people wait for updates to popular packages like ElvUI or AtrocityUI, which popularised the “cockpit” style UI that’s so prevalent today.
An example of a cockpit style ui
When everything trickles down from the top players, everyone kind of ends up doing the same thing. It’s easy, and it’ll absolutely get the job done, but I can’t help but feel like something more personalized to your specific needs is probably more ideal.
Of course, not everyone wants to think that hard about their UI. I think part of the reason Blizzard enabled UI addons decades ago, was to empower the community to create their own solutions for things - which has clearly been very effective!
The problem is, the gulf between base-UI-users and addon-users has just become way too lage. WoW’s content is designed for tools which the player has to go outside of the game to obtain - so of course we’re going to be influenced by what everyone else is doing!
Blizzard has chosen not to create UI solutions to a lot of things which the community is very eager to solve via UI. We’re at the point where one of the biggest performance bottlenecks for even running WoW is having enough CPU to run all your WeakAuras.
An example of a weakaura assigning the player to a position, and drawing them a graphic indicating where to go
Addons are definitely a bit of a Pandora’s Box, and at this point I think many players are going to use addons no matter what happens to Edit Mode - but I think we clearly need to close the gulf going forward.
Blizzard certainly seems to agree, with the advent of Private Auras - and yet most of these Private Aura mechanics still seem to be solved by WeakAuras anyway. Just add it to the list of mechanics that WeakAuras can solve, but the base UI cannot, I suppose.
While I do think we can close the gulf by hamstringing addons, I really think a more powerful Edit Mode also has to be an important part of moving forward. Sure, maybe it doesn’t move the needle very much if, say, a player doesn’t need an addon to track their class timers - but I think the point is to encourage players to use their own brain as a first line of defense.
We want players to feel like they can solve problems by themselves, without having to go outside the game. Every time the base game fails to offer them a solution, players will defer to what everyone else is doing - because that’s what’s easiest, and that’s probably what’s “optimal”. Maybe solving things in the base UI is a lofty goal when it’s competing with the likes of WeakAuras that can auto-assign mechanics for an entire raid team - but it can only move things in a good direction if Johnny the Paladin doesn’t need an addon to tell them if their set bonus is working.