LFG: How World of Warcraft Is Tempting Lapsed Players Back to Azeroth

Running one more dungeon, praying to the RNG gods that the final boss will drop the best-in-slot headgear you're after. Or chasing that dopamine hit of reaching the top of the DPS metre during your guild's raid night. One-shotting kobolds in Elwynn Forest, just because you’re a great person and want to help out some new players. 

For a generation of players, these are the memories that World of Warcraft is made of. And yet, for millions of people now into their adult years, they are precisely that: Memories. Kids and teenagers who grew up in the snowy peaks of Dun Morogh, the rolling plains of Mulgore, and the gloomy shadow of Tirisfal Glades are now into their late 20s and 30s, swapping exp grinding for the daily grind of adult life. But the spark remains; in every former adventurer, there’s a restless spirit just waiting to be set free again. 

That’s a feeling which World of Warcraft is seeking to capture in a new campaign to run alongside its newest expansion, ‘The War Within’. Alongside a set of ads already popping up across socials and TV, an innovative digital platform is helping former WoW players to reconnect with their old characters. To find out more, LBB caught up with Scott Friedman, ECD and co-founder of Wildlife, a digitally-focused production studio which helped bring the campaign to life. 

“With the franchise coming up on its 20th Anniversary, an entire generation of players has moved into a new life stage – with less time for gaming – but still yearning for those days of glory in Azeroth. To help reach these huge groups of lapsed players, we created a half dozen live action spots to speak directly to that player”, he says. “In each of them we find regular folks who used to play the game, frustrated by their daily lives, tired, bored etc – surprised by a magical letter – a call to return to the world of Azeroth and unleash their inner warrior”. 

Above: One of a series of six ads for socials and streaming promoting the latest expansion for World of Warcraft, ‘The War Within’.

Three iconic letters, LFG, adorn the letter – a reference both to the popular question ‘Looking for Group’ and, of course, a nod to the more modern ‘Let’s Fucking Go’. 

“Along with the letter is an iconic weapon from the game, the weapon these players used to use in battle”, says Scott, “rekindling incredible feelings and transforming each of them back into their heroic selves ready to dive back into the game world”. 

The spots are set to run heavily online, as well as streaming services such as Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video. But as well as the more traditional spots, there’s another component to the campaign – an innovative digital experience leveraging data and storytelling to connect with former players on a personalised level. 

“In ‘Warcraft Story’, players simply enter their character name and generate a custom shareable video highlighting some of their past exploits and stats, before X'alatath, the game's newest villain harshly judges their qualifications, taunting them about their accomplishments and challenging them to face her”, explains Scott.

Above: The ‘Warcraft Story’ digital experience offers personalised content to WoW players new and old. 

The result is a neat, shareable, Spotify Wrapped-style piece of video which should spark delight and nostalgia for players. Pulling together all of the necessary information and processes, however, was no mean feat – as Scott goes on to explain. 

“We built a system bringing the game's API together with their ACTUAL player character model, pulling in the game's data into our own cinematic engine to combine custom VO, dynamic backgrounds, visual effects, and motion graphics sequences”, says Scott. “As a result, we’re delivering custom videos to each of the millions of WoW players on demand, with different attributes, stats, and voiceover highlighted each time a character video is generated”. The results were over 400,000 videos generated in the first week of the launch alone.

For the lapsed adventurers of Azeroth, the campaign could just be the clarion call needed to reinstall the game. With 'The War Within' having released on August 26th, there's no more waiting left for eager gamers to endure as they jump into the iconic MMO's latest expansion.