Happened for RuneScape while the playerbase was dwindling a bit. I can't see Vanilla not happening at some point in the future, but not quite yet.
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World of Warcraft at 5.6 million subs (was 7.1M, 10M), Diablo 3 has sold 30+M copies
- Thread starter Nirolak
- Start date
Happened for RuneScape while the playerbase was dwindling a bit. I can't see Vanilla not happening at some point in the future, but not quite yet.
Not yet seems Blizzard has limited who has that info.
Vincent Grayson
Member
The real reason a console port won't happen is that it's just way too late in the game's life to bother. It'd taken a good chunk of time and R&D money just to make everything work on the consoles in terms of controls and such, and unless they stumble on some genius method, it'd still be clunky.
FFXIV manages console gameplay pretty well, but I still feel like I'm struggling to map all my abilities to easy-to-use shortcuts on PS4, and IIRC, WoW's got a lot more abilities for many classes.
40 man raids, endless attunement quest's, low money. Yeah, it was great.
The last two quarters seem to have been the anomalies. 5.6 is right in line with the decline that's been there since 2011.
Remember everyone hyping up Wildstar claiming it'll be the return to vanilla WoW?
Yeah that went well...
Yeah I loved farming for months to get the 1000 gold for an epic mount.
It would make money. It's not about saving anything.
Flintty
Member
Unless you were a warlock or Paladin. Mounts were easy for us!
I lie, but at least the Dreadsteed quest was epic
Vanilla was fun for levelling but a ballache for end game. TBC massively improved it for me but the sweet spot was probably LK.
Not anymore. WoD pruned a lot of classes down. WoW, on average, has less active abilities you use in battle than FFXIV does now.
I doubt there would be a console version but I would absolutely love if they added controller support.
Console version seems very unlikely. That's a lot of work and adding maintenance/update of a whole other build of the game.
Steam Controller to the rescue!
A Serious Man
Member
We're nearing that magical day when Hearthstone has more players than WoW.
The Lamonster
Member
oh god. yeah the early days were magical but could be quite tiresome at the same time.
Nowadays the mounts practically fall in your lap.
helloresolven
Member
It's pretty fucking impressive how they've managed to not have anything really leak.
(Someone needs to make a new thread for the announcement.)
(Someone needs to make a new thread for the announcement.)
Hmm, Wildstar's issues are more complex then it trying to recapture WoW 2.0. I'd actually argue the issues Wildstar had.
It's true that the end game was something to be left desired in setup, but where things went wrong I wouldn't actually attribute to try being like WoW.
Dungeons (one of the best in the mmo space btw) had a very toxic medal system that rewarded you with better loot if you pretty much perfected the difficult dungeons. So one wipe and your chance at good loot was gone. Taking too long, same deal. Missing an objective, same deal. It made the experience for puggies extremely unpleasant and downright toxic. It's something they've turned around. Furthermore, Raid content was definitly not ready for release as it was rife with progression blocking bugs. The attunement quest was also bugged in various parts so it was a mess.
Bugs were also the biggest issue of Wildstar, they had promised monthly big updates which they DID deliver one but at the expensive of the content being bugfree. They kept releasing new content whilst the old content was still bugged. Performance was also really bad in areas.
I don't believe the focus on the hardcore content was the biggest contributor. Did it contribute? Sure, but I think people overestimate how much of an impact it had. Ncosft forced a release date, which Carbine wasn't happy with but had to oblige and that's what happened.
Wildstar did have a lot of gameplay issues, but I don't think the issues would have been as major if the game had been less buggy. I also believe Wildstar can make a strong comeback with F2P as the cash shop is looking rather fair and it has a lot of strong points. (housing, customization, combat, dungeons, raiding)
Wildstar aside, I do think opening a vanilla server would be really interesting for players to see how much the game has evolved since then. We've been playing WoW for so long we sometimes forgot that the changes/additions to areas kinda blur out in our minds.
It's maybe subtle, but in vanilla, the camera was different then nowadays and it made everything feel larger/more epic then it does today. It's probably just an fov change that occured during one of the expansion transitions but it did take some things away from the 'world' feel.
Interfectum
Member
Hunter coming to Heroes as well. Trifecta of domination.
Depends on what you consider more. More players lifetime? Concurrently? Per month?
They did it with Overwatch as well. Reaper of Souls too, I believe... Blizzard aren't quite Valve when it comes to protecting leaks (HL2 hack aside), but they're good at it.
Interfectum
Member
One thing I'd like to see them bring back, and it's hard to explain but... as someone said earlier the "Grind to 1000g to get a mount" was annoying back in the day. But what I liked about that grind was you could be creative about it and do what you wanted. Current WoW is layered with so many systems on top of systems I feel like any creativity as a player is gone. You log on to WoW now and instantly flooded with a bunch of busy work.
Vanilla, BC and WotLK made me feel like I was in a "world." Current WoW makes me feel like I'm in one of many funnels they've provided.
Well you're also leaving out the more important part in that WoW is literally 100% faster than FF14. Default GCD in FF14 is 2.5 seconds, GCD in WoW is 1.5 for about half the specs and then 1 second for the rest of the specs (and this is not including stuff like haste lowering caster GCD further, abilities that lower gcd further, or skills outright not on the GCD). Dealing with flipping through ability sets on a controller when you only have 1 second before you can attack again leave a much bigger room for error.
This is all also not including the fact that controllers only allow for tab targeting and at the higher levels of WoW pve and pvp tab targeting vs. mouse targeting is the difference between life and death a lot of the time.
Overwatch was only sort of not leaked. We had this right before which gave us a pretty good sense of what the game would be beyond the logo: http://kotaku.com/heres-what-blizzards-titan-actually-was-1638632121
It wasn't anything like an EA leak though where you have the entire concept pitch trailer or complete featureset for the game.
RPGCrazied
Member
This is a first time an expansion wasn't announced at Blizzcon? Surely this means its going to be a big deal. Of course they could just blow smoke up our ass again.
While I don't think that announcement is ages away (or buy 2 play, more specifically), I am not expecting it with this expansion pack.
First they have to prove that simply putting out a better expansion pack on a fast schedule isn't enough, and add a third f2p game into their revenue structure with Overwatch, so that if the transition blows up their revenue for a while it's less painful.
I think they're announcing the expansion earlier because it's supposed to release at the end of the year (or shortly after) and Blizzcon is too late.
I think they're finally going to follow through with the annual expansion plan they've talked about for the last 5 years or whatever.
I think they're finally going to follow through with the annual expansion plan they've talked about for the last 5 years or whatever.
Or it's an admission of failure. They're either so desperate to keep players around that they're announcing it early - which naturally means WoD did more harm than good, or they're saving the big reveal at Blizzcon for another game - which means WoW's not a headliner anymore and gets to play in the shallow end with SC2.
SDCowboy
Member
I sure hope it's coming out this year.
I hope not, it would be the buggiest thing ever. Their internal testing teams are terrible. Any raid boss they've kept away from PTR testing has released bug ridden and some completely broken. They need the community to test their games for them.
I'm expecting the usual 12-16 months of no new content before the expansion releases nest fall.
silvermember
Banned
The people who wish for vanilla wow are probably the same typea that wish for a good open world game mmo, the problem is whenever such a game comes out they find excuses why they dont play it.
Also remember all those vanilla wow people simply have a idealize version where everything us perfect, even if blizzard was to give into those vocal minority they wont play it.
Like you said wildstar is a great case study. It had ecerything for vanilla wow except combat and all those ppl did not play it.
Unlikely. My money is on May 2016 at the earliest.
Probably August 2016.
Do we have a countdown timer for the live stream somewhere? I need to know whether I have to dash home or whether I can watch this thing at work.
Interfectum
Member
Blizzcon 2015 seems like Overwatch + Starcraft XP party with maybe a surprise D3 XP2 announcement.
Exactly, it required lots of grinding and such. which hardcore players loved. Epics felt like Epics and took time to get. I remember doing the Grand Marshal grind, took me over two months doing nothing but PvP.
RPGCrazied
Member
Ew, no. I never want that again. Loot drama in Molten Core, not fond memories at all.
Historically I would say it's unlikely too but I don't know...
They did a lot of background stuff for WoD. Like changing the file system and stuff like that. I can see them at least trying for that annual release schedule.
http://www.mmo-champion.com/ has a countdown timer
They did a lot of background stuff for WoD. Like changing the file system and stuff like that. I can see them at least trying for that annual release schedule.
http://www.mmo-champion.com/ has a countdown timer
SDCowboy
Member
Can't tell if you're being serious or not. That would be absurd. lol
Yeah I could see Diablo 3 getting an expansion announcement this BlizzCon. Other than that there should be a strong focus on Overwatch and SC2, with LotV confirmed for 2015 launch likely shortly after the convention.
Nothing worse than rose-tinted glasses. I was a proletarian in WoW vanilla. BALANCE druid, only getting one crafted epic in my whole playtime (required TONS of farmign in EPL/WPL and god knows where else), constantly running T.05-capable dungeons (strat,scholo,ubrs,lbrs, whatever), constant PVP ganks everywhere, imbalances in faction presence, lack of epic mount, lack of money...
Burning Crusade was a godsend. It lifted me up and allowed me to play the game for what it was. Anyone saying otherwise had the luxury of picking a proper, Blizz-approved build for start, or simply was way more clever/resourceful than me
Burning Crusade was a godsend. It lifted me up and allowed me to play the game for what it was. Anyone saying otherwise had the luxury of picking a proper, Blizz-approved build for start, or simply was way more clever/resourceful than me
Do you think that they will have another Diablo expansion? I mean it sold well so I would hope so but they have been so silent on the subject also as a side note since they seem to enjoy injecting each of their games with other games in Diablo I think we might see some legendary weapons that come from WoW
I expect Blizzcon to basically look like Gamescom with possibly a Diablo 3 expansion pack, since I think the new Warcraft product is still too early.
New Hearthstone expac for December (they've had one every four months), the next X heroes/maps for Heroes of the Storm, some new Overwatch characters, maps, and probably a new mode or two, Legacy of the Void will almost be out and they've shown every mode so I expect not all that much there, and of course a lot more on the WoW expac.
Slackerish
Member
Shortest expansion beta so far has been 4 months. Would be pushing it to make release it end of the year.
Hence why some of us want the option to have a Vanilla realm. I'd gladly go back to WoW with this option available, BC was enjoyable too, but nothing compares to Vanilla.
PeskyToaster
Member
Vanilla through WotLK was pretty good but you could see the signs in WotLK. Looking back it was a good balance though.
fluffydelusions
Member
Will there be a stream of the announcement. If so, what time?
SDCowboy
Member
I could easily see a holiday release still. Early December would be awesome. Who knows, though.
yes, 12pm EDT (just under 2 hrs from now)
fluffydelusions
Member
Cool. Link to stream?
hellmonkey
Member
That is one of my fav memories of vanilla. It felt great getting that done. I also made some extra gold running others through it.
There are parts of vanilla I desperately miss, like the difficulty and exploration. Actually having to read quests to know where to go instead of a point showing up on a map. There are things I absolutely do no want back like:
No gold
rune cloth farming for rep. ( I don't want to know how much I used getting exalted UC on my troll)
weapon skills
reagents and very limited inventory
no flying (I love flying)
soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo much trash in raids. Doing MC for the mount was excruciating during the 10 yr anniversary.
There are parts of vanilla I would love to see come back, but there is no way in hell I would be happy on a pure vanilla server. This is coming from someone that had 4 60s when having 2 was tough.
SDCowboy
Member
While I think the product is infinitely better and more streamlined now than back in Vanilla, I agree there should be a vanilla server for those wanting it. Question is, how long would a vanilla server with no new content stay populated? What would you do in it?