Holly Longdale

Holly Longdale is the executive producer of World of Warcraft and a vice president at Blizzard Entertainment. She spent most of her career on Sony Online Entertainment's and later Daybreak's EverQuest games, rising from writer and designer to executive producer of the franchise, before joining Blizzard in 2020 to lead production on World of Warcraft Classic. She was promoted to executive producer of all of World of Warcraft at the end of 2022.

Early career

In a 2019 interview for David L. Craddock's oral history of EverQuest, published by Shacknews, Longdale said she gave up on becoming an artist as a teenager and studied journalism at a university in Canada instead. After graduating she worked as a freelance writer, then moved into internal communications, where she taught herself scripting and database tools to build internal websites. She later did internal communications work at Microsoft in the Seattle area.

EverQuest

Longdale played Ultima Online and then EverQuest, where she spent about two years as an officer in the guild Mythic Legion. A guildmate who worked as an apprentice designer on the game, Akil Hooper, told her the team needed writers who could also script, and she was hired after an in-person interview in Seattle.

Her first project was the 2003 expansion Lost Dungeons of Norrath. She designed the system it used to deliver lore and wrote the text, storylines and camp dialogue for five of its dungeons, and created the in-world Wayfarers Brotherhood organization as a way to tell the expansion's story. On the team she became known as the "lore lady," the keeper of the game's lore bible.

She later left EverQuest for a stretch that included work at Disney. She returned to the franchise in 2015, first as a senior producer on EverQuest II, and went on to become executive producer of the EverQuest franchise at Daybreak Game Company, the company that took over Sony Online Entertainment's games. When Daybreak split its games into smaller studios, she was named head of Darkpaw Games, the studio responsible for EverQuest and EverQuest II.

Blizzard and World of Warcraft Classic

In March 2020 Longdale resigned from Darkpaw, calling her next job a "once-in-a-lifetime" opportunity. In April 2020 MMOs.com reported that her LinkedIn profile listed her as a principal game producer on World of Warcraft Classic at Blizzard. She has said that Blizzard approached her about the Classic team and that she became its lead producer.

Executive producer

In his end-of-2022 update, Blizzard president Mike Ybarra announced that Longdale had been promoted to executive producer of World of Warcraft, overseeing the whole game, modern and Classic, after leading the Classic team. She later also took the title of vice president. She works alongside game director Ion Hazzikostas, who leads the game's design.

In public she has talked openly about the game's past mistakes. In a PC Gamer interview around the game's 20th anniversary, reported by Icy Veins, she said the team should have listened more to players during the Shadowlands era. In a June 2024 Xbox Games Showcase segment for The War Within, she said she had been playing World of Warcraft for twenty years and that while she plays "kind of everything," she leans toward elves.

World of Warcraft: Forever

Longdale presented the World of Warcraft announcements at BlizzCon 2026, including World of Warcraft: Forever, Blizzard's new Classic-style game, which is scheduled to launch on November 4, 2026. She also gave the Storytime keynote at PAX Australia in October 2026, a talk Blizzard said would cover her two decades in the industry, the evolution of the Warcraft universe and the role of player communities in online games. In coverage of that talk, she described WoW Forever as having grown from a much smaller original pitch.

Sources

• Holly Longdale, Warcraft Wiki
• Better Together: Stories of EverQuest, Chapter 9, Shacknews (2019)
• Former Darkpaw Games Head Holly Longdale Is Now Working For Blizzard Entertainment, MMOs.com (2020)
• End-of-Year Blizzard Update, Blizzard Entertainment (2022)
• Blizzard's Reflection on 20 Years of WoW: "We Should Have Listened More", Icy Veins
• "I'm Not a Suit": Holly Longdale Q&A at PAX Australia, Icy Veins (2026)
• Watch Holly Longdale and Clay Stone's Keynote Presentations Live from PAX Aus, Blizzard Entertainment (2026)
• World of Warcraft Forever had a much smaller original pitch, Massively Overpowered (2026)
• Xbox Games Showcase Deep Dive: World of Warcraft: The War Within, Xbox (YouTube, 2024)