Only the WoW team. The Starcraft, HotS, Diablo, Hearthstone and Overwatch teams have been able to stay consistent with content releases and keep the community informed.
Why the WoW team is the only outlier, though, I can't say for sure.
-
Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.
It has been a full year since WoW's last content patch - 6.2, Fury of Hellfire
- Thread starter MetroidPrimeRib
- Start date
Only the WoW team. The Starcraft, HotS, Diablo, Hearthstone and Overwatch teams have been able to stay consistent with content releases and keep the community informed.
Why the WoW team is the only outlier, though, I can't say for sure.
MetroidPrimeRib
Banned
Bad as it was wrath had ruby sanctum. You're right though.
Velcro Fly
Member
how long was ICC the only significant content during wrath? i'm not talking about gated progression or whatever crap raid was released after ICC.
they don't put out enough good content and they are excellent at ruining whatever fun niche that people find and enjoy in the game. so many people i know quit because what they found fun was being changed or taken away or ruined.
glad i quit and i'm never looking back.
they don't put out enough good content and they are excellent at ruining whatever fun niche that people find and enjoy in the game. so many people i know quit because what they found fun was being changed or taken away or ruined.
glad i quit and i'm never looking back.
The odd thing is, I actually like the long end-of-content periods. Mind you, the recent ones have been a little overdrawn, but I don't think 8-10 months between the final raid and the next expansion is necessarily a bad thing, if only because it gives you time to take care of things that would otherwise fall through the cracks.
KLoWn
Member
That's the dumbest thing I've heard all day. The game is still fuckin great as far as I'm concerned, why would I want it to die?
Seriously, let it die already.
Every time they release a new expansion I'm having a blast with it for a month or two before I've done everything I want to do and unsub.
I can't wait for Legion. It's going to be awesome.
They kind of don't. The subscriber numbers hit nearly an all-time low before they stopped being disclosed. There are probably less active players right at this moment than during any other period of the game's history (excluding the initial growth phase).
And for the majority of the people who do play it's either largely due social connections like guilds, or just some weird addiction where they actually hate the game but are just used to playing it as their default activity.
Seriously, let it die already.
Shitpost of the year, truly. The game doesn't have to be bad, in fact it's very close to being great. Blizzard just needs to think a little more about the changes they make and their ramifications, as well as work to produce content faster.
MetroidPrimeRib
Banned
I'm still playing because racking up gold is piss easy.
Midsummer was also the last holiday I needed for the achievement for all holidays
Midsummer was also the last holiday I needed for the achievement for all holidays
Aztechnology
Member
It's the answer they've needed for 5 expansions now. The amount of content in most of them was fine, but by planning for 1 year of shit and then missing their date for the xpac you end up with a huge drought. Drawing the same content out and pacing it better would be an infinitely superior solution.
enkaisu
Banned
Yeah, I'm in the same boat. I have very little MMO experience besides XIV, it's the only one I've ever been able to get into. My jaw dropped today when I read that WoW hasn't added anything substantial to their game for a full year. That's just terrible.
That will definitely be their rationale until someone makes another MMO which surpasses WoW's subscribtion numbers and shows that quality, passion, and engagement are what sell.
The biggest, vaguest problem with WoW now is that it has no central design goal anymore. There isn't one word or phrase anyone on the design team could say which quickly informs someone of what WoW is all about, it's just a patchwork of all these sporadic ideas they have had over the years. This is compounded by them chasing their tails over the years trying to placate fans who ask for things, and then implementing in uninteresting and thoughtless ways.
Garrisons are the prime example of that - a long-requested feature that virtually everyone hated and that made the game perhaps the loneliest, most isolated version of itself that it's ever been.
The whole game has a great core, and so many great people working on it. But it needs someone who can come in and just take charge, and just say "fuck it, I'm going to make this into a game I would want to fucking play."
It's so true. They were so focused on bringing in new players and growing their numbers that they pushed away the dedicated players that were already there, in effect achieving the exact opposite of what they set out to do. I was such a huge WoW fan, but the focus on adding pointless feature after pointless feature instead of providing new content drove me away completely. I still haven't even hit max level in WoD, which kind of blows my mind. That expansion was terrible down to its core concept.
It's sad, Legion is the expansion I wanted and expected after Cataclysm, yet it's now to the point that I just can't give a damn. At this point only two things could bring me back, legacy servers, or a completely revamped fresh start on consoles.
FF14 adds less in the same amount of time, to be totally fair. It's not like wow releases 1 raid boss at a time every few months like FF14 does, instead they release like 13 bosses and then another bunch too quickly after, and then the expansion ends and you're like 'couldn't you have spaced that more?'
For example, the current zone that we've been on for a year has more bosses than the entirety of heavensward, including the stuff like bismarck etc that aren't in alexander.
Nonsense, levelling i nwod was fantastic, it's why it jumped to such a huge sub count out the gate - the part everyone and their mom played on beta (levelling) was fucking phenomenal. Problems weren't obvious until you played it a lot. Even the basic gameplay of garrisons was pretty engaging and cool as a side activity. the problem was when you hit max level and garrisons became the game instead of the game part. That's the kind of shit that is REALLY hard to test because not many people actually play betas beyond what they think they need to learn for live.
MetroidPrimeRib
Banned
With the success of Destiny and Division expect more pseudo mmos with shootbangs made for consoles
80% sure that's what borderlands 3 will be
TharpDaddy
Member
YUP. Fuck garrisons. Single handedly killed my desire to play the end game. I just couldn't bring myself to log in every few hours to assign my missions and do the grind multiple times once I got another character to 100. If they had let you assign missions from the phone app it would have been so much better. I'm all ready to go for Legion but WoD is my least favorite xpac so far.
I absolutely hated the entire concept and setting of the expansion, so the drive to level just wasn't there. Setting and story has played a big part in my enjoyment of each expansion, and the one two punch of Mists and WoD broke me. Mists didn't feel like WoW at all to me, and WoD felt like pandering to BC fans with very poorly thought out story reasoning. Both expansions felt like they existed to delay the true progression of the story.
The good news is that the WoW token (gold -> game time) combined with the Garrison (~10 minutes a day to make ludicrous amounts of gold via Simpsons Tapped Out-esque menu clicking) means that it's free for me to play even if I don't put much time into the game.
But yeah, I've been playing on-and-off since Vanilla. Only part I really missed was the beginnings of Cata and MoP. This is undoubtedly by far the worst the game's ever been.
HFC is an average-quality raid that's been dragged out for way too long. Garrisons remove any fun that the world of Draenor might have. Class balance is terrible. My raid group was progressing on Mythic Archimonde (the very last boss), but motivation is at an all time low. People look for every excuse to not raid, and no one is ever on outside of raid times.
At least they're setting expectations low for Legion.
But yeah, I've been playing on-and-off since Vanilla. Only part I really missed was the beginnings of Cata and MoP. This is undoubtedly by far the worst the game's ever been.
HFC is an average-quality raid that's been dragged out for way too long. Garrisons remove any fun that the world of Draenor might have. Class balance is terrible. My raid group was progressing on Mythic Archimonde (the very last boss), but motivation is at an all time low. People look for every excuse to not raid, and no one is ever on outside of raid times.
At least they're setting expectations low for Legion.
KLoWn
Member
Mists is in the running for best WoW expansion for me. So fuckin good. And if anything the story progression in MoP was the shit. Loved it.
But opinions etc etc.
Let me guess,y ou didn't actually follow the story in either then? Aside from being in 'outland' warlords has nothing to do with BC really. they look so completely different. It's more important that it's in the past than that it's in outland. Similarly, MoP has by FAR the most relevance to the ongoing story of wow out of any expansion prior to now. Their storytelling has improved by leaps and bounds and mop led directly into warlords which leads directly into legion.
The overarching story for mop was entirely about preparing the alliance and the horde to face the legion who were coming back in force (and now that has come to pass as of the last patch of wod and now Legion is the full invasion).
AnathemicOne
Banned
As a follower of Overwatch it was clear that alot of resources were put into the failed-project Titan with senior developers on WoW moving to said project.
MetroidPrimeRib
Banned
Mists fucking owns. Too bad its sandwiched between two poor expansions With death and rage and black and red as their tones. The new lore and aesthetic for Mists owned
I'm in this camp. I still love WoW and I'm constantly made fun of for it, but whatever. I'm excited for Legion and all the new changes too.
Yep. in my experience the only peopel that didn't like mists are the people that didn't play it or just ignored everything happening because LOL KUNG FU PANDA. Mists was fucking great. The fact that people pine for shit like vanilla and tbc in terms of setting and lore is ridiculous at best. Those essentially had none.
Mechanized
Member
They should make a WoW 2. New engine, same size as a current expansion, new characters, world and lore. Still do Alliance/Horde so there is an over-arching war. Make the story more immersive and involved. Stop treating the player character like THE hero, and more like A hero. I feel there is a lot they could do but they are joined at the hip to a dried husk on life support with the current model of the game.
MetroidPrimeRib
Banned
the east Asian influence in mists is 100x more interesting then the BC zones
True, but that was a long time ago. When Titan failed and development on Overwatch began, many developers were put on the WoW team.
The WoW team now has 200+ developers and is supposedly the largest it has ever been. Again, doesn't really explain the content drought. Maybe poor management?
TharpDaddy
Member
I really liked BC. Always loved Outlands and Blood Elf architecture. I'd take BC any day over MoP zones. MoP is 2nd place though.
For the record, I liked Mists a lot and still don't really like the Pandaren. The setting and world of MoP are interesting, but Pandaren having such a large role in the world didn't do it any favors. imo the expansion would have been better if A. Pandaren weren't playable (Blizzard's did nothing to integrate them into the factions and seem to be trying their best to forget them) and B. Pandaren had a smaller role in the MoP world, leaving more space for the Mantid, Yaungol, Jin'yu, and other races.
AnathemicOne
Banned
I think so, Titan was officially canned in 2014 with WoD also launching in 2014. Then there was the whole statement on yearly-expansions which thankfully they retracted on but I'd imagine such a plan for yearly-expansions would change the management structure a bit.
The story has only gotten more immersive and involved over time. Your opinion is fine, but it reads like someone who is critical of modern wow without playing modern wow. There are bits of lore that treat you the same as everyone else (storytelling aspects almost dictate that in things like scenario instanced bits of the game for example). But the game has never treated you as "the hero" - the players are heroes that band together. It makes far more sense to acknowledge your power than it does to pretend the players are literal scrubs like vanilla did pretty often.
Vanilla - game acts like you're the same as anyone else, while you're murdering Kel'Thuzad and old god C'thun....k
TBC - game still treats you like a scrub despite you going and doing stuff like reviving the sunwell and beating back Kil'jaeden. Some dialogue and scripts during the raids themselves tends to make you sound powerful, but the rest of the game ignores that.
Wrath - This is where they started calling you hero and champion and such, you still do a lot of menialshit but where appropriate they treat you like you're not a bullshit rando. Note, a hero and a champion are not THE HERO or THE CHAMPION. You are part of Tirion's army of light and bring Arthas' reign to an end. Tirion still is the main character and does the final deed, but you support him in it.
Cataclysm - Same deal as wrath, you're a hero or a champion, major characters from WC3 now know your name and acknowledge your contributions, you help Thrall and the dragon Aspects end Deathwing and the dragon soul.
This is basically how it's continued since then. Yes, for the purposes of like, your garrison or your class hall for example, it's YOURS and everyone has their own that is 'theirs', but the game never says "Oh you're baby jesus" - that's thrall, instead you're part of the powerful army that represents the best of what azeroth has to offer. It would be patently ridiculous not to refer to players in this way in some fashion, we literally do every major feat of strength the planet has to offer.
Pandas have been in since 3 and have always been a background neutral race, it makes sense they wouldn't take a HUGE role in the horde/alliance even after taking sides. I thought they were a great choice.
And how many did Vanilla have? The game felt massive back then (and everything took longer). I have no desire to play WoW in his current state, however im willing to play Vanilla with some friends.
AnathemicOne
Banned
Vanilla WoW began development roughly when WC3 was in development, I'd imagine the game had fewer developers back then but they also had alot of time to develop and polish the game.
I guarantee that legion will again have a year long wait from the last content patch and the next expansion
Vital Tundra
Member
Crazy stuff, but thats what happens when you plan incorrectly. They lost sooo many subs with this last expansion. Heck they gave me WoD for free about a month ago to try and get me back.
Hm I don't think so. It does the opposite of TBC in terms of gameplay and progression.
MetroidPrimeRib
Banned
I should rephrase that - there are parts I like about BC zones. The infernals falling down in Shadowmoon Valley, the general aesthetic of Zangarmarsh and Netherstorm, how Blade's Edge looks. But when it comes to actually questing and traversing in those zones? No thanks.
Yeah, but FFXIV gets about a quarter of what WoW adds, so it's a wash.
I don't. If the interviews they're giving are any indication they've finally gone from "No we'll do it faster next time REALYL" to "Hey, this is the right timing/pacing for xpacs, we're just releasing the content too quickly at the start and leaving a huge gap". Which is what I've been saying for years. Wod is thin but every other expansion has PLENTY of content, they rush you through it for a year in the hopes of releasing the next xpac sooner and that never works.
I'm probably alone in this, but I sincerely hope it's something akin to Darkness Falls from DAoC.
Here's the content plan outline from the Legion Press Release:
-There are three raid tiers coming in Legion! Two raids are are coming with release, another raid in Patch 7.2 and one more raid in a later patch.
-There are solid plans for at least three content patches in Legion already.
-Patch 7.1 contains a new dungeon and will go on the PTR around the time that Legion is shipping. It should be released fairly quickly.
-Caster animations are on the list to improve. The team wants to use feedback on the melee updates to inform the caster animation changes.
-Improved social features won't be in at release, but hopefully soon afterwards.
-The devs recognize that BRF came out too quickly and release pacing in Warlords wasn't great. There is a plan in place to make it better in Legion.
-Another stat squish is coming in the expansion after Legion.
-There are three raid tiers coming in Legion! Two raids are are coming with release, another raid in Patch 7.2 and one more raid in a later patch.
-There are solid plans for at least three content patches in Legion already.
-Patch 7.1 contains a new dungeon and will go on the PTR around the time that Legion is shipping. It should be released fairly quickly.
-Caster animations are on the list to improve. The team wants to use feedback on the melee updates to inform the caster animation changes.
-Improved social features won't be in at release, but hopefully soon afterwards.
-The devs recognize that BRF came out too quickly and release pacing in Warlords wasn't great. There is a plan in place to make it better in Legion.
-Another stat squish is coming in the expansion after Legion.
BRD and BRS was both the best and worst the genre had ever offered.
Pewpewlazors99
Member
https://twitter.com/Pewpewlazors/status/746155927980515329
Probably won't get answered, but man this is disappointing.
Probably won't get answered, but man this is disappointing.
BabyFaceKillah
Member
when are they gonna make a sequel?
im surprised they didnt make a game to go along with the movie hype.
im surprised they didnt make a game to go along with the movie hype.
Blizzard's second attempt at an MMO (Project Titan) went horribly for them and they'll probably never try it again as a result.
Similar threads
- Rösti
- Gaming Discussion