WoW's next expansion - Lesson's unlearned.

[Worgen]

Alright, I know "different strokes, different folks" is a thing that exists, but the claim that Blizzard sucks at everything...that really isn't born out by any objective look.

I mean, leaving aside any personal thoughts, let's look at some objective facts:

-Warcraft: One of the most successful RTS series of all time, especially Warcraft III, which by itself gave rise to the ARTS genre. Look up any list of top RTS games, and you'll see WC3 there somewhere.

-StarCraft: THE most successful RTS series of all time that single-handledly kickstarted the e-sports scene in South Korea, not to mention that SC more or less pioneered its style of sequential campaign storytelling and asymetric factions. SC1 is still played professionally to this day for a reason, and SC2 is in similar company. Similarly to WC3, look up any list of top RTS games, and you'll see SC1 and/or 2 on said list guaranteed.

-Diablo: Practically invented the ARPG genre. D2 built off that, D3 is one of the best-selling games in history. There's a reason why even close to 20 years after its release, you could still find D2 on store shelves (and SC1 and WC3 for that matter).

-World of Warcraft: The most successful MMORPG in history, period. This isn't a statement of subjective quality, this is fact by any metric, including sales, subscriber base, and the influence it had on the genre.

-Hearthstone: One of the most popular, if not THE most popular electronic card games on the market right now.

-Heroes of the Storm: Actually a bit of a blip, but still, one of the most successful MOBAs ever released. It never reached the likes of LoL or Dota 2 in popularity, but it still carved out a niche for itself, and is still going today, albeit in maintenance mode.

-Overwatch: One of the most popular and most successful hero shooters ever, both in terms of sales, pop cultural influence, genre influence, etc.

Again, this is me leaving out any personal thoughts on the matter - no-one's obliged to like any of the games I just mentioned, but to say all of that is garbage...well, that's a pretty big statement. It sort of reminds me of the contrast between "I don't like Sonic games" (perfectly reasonable) vs. "Sonic was never good" (um...). If we assume Blizzard "sucks at everything," then there's presumably a reason why everything I listed was as successful as it was despite the "suckiness."

I never said they weren't hugely successful, also I was being hyperbolic with saying "they suck at everything" I should have added the qualification that they are good at gameplay also. Keep in mind I have played most of those and enjoyed most of those, but it really feels like part of blizzards success comes from them being successful. Like they have a rep for polish and even with all the crap they have pulled, they have pretty rabid fanbase that will shout them from onhigh. The visual polish they put into their games also makes them extremely interesting to just look at. Even if I was still willing to give Blizzard anymoney I wouldn't play hearthstone or Heroes of the Storm, but they can be fun to watch streams of, same with Starcraft 2 despite the fact that even though I really like RTS games, I never liked Starcraft, really I would say the only really good Warcraft rts was the expansion for Warcraft 3. WoW became what it was because it had a really great asthetic that was able to age gracefully and it wasn't as hardcore as most MMO games, or at least as hardcore as they were perceived, plus they managed to have the community sweet spot when it launched, you needed just enough communication to talk with and make friends with people, but not enough for it to be a huge pain and not so little that you could totally ignore it. They are not only great at graphics but also aesthetics and making games pretty playable. Never underestimate how far that can take you, even if you look at the graphics for the original Warcraft, they are still very appealing, I like C&C better, but the colors in Warcraft really pop and attract your attention more then the more realistic colors of C&C.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

...and the reveal of the new race and hero class I take it.

New race? Huh....

(research noises)

...the Dracthyr? Basically Worgen 2.0, with one exclusive class? Sheesh, even the pandas got more variety.

 

[09philj]

For a good long time the most beloved expansion for Final Fantasy XIV was Heavensward, which heavily involved dragons. A coincidence I'm sure. Heavensward came out... blimey, seven years ago.

I never get the impression that WoW's dev team think about what they want the next expansion to be before it's actually time to start work on it. They just keep doing fragmented bits and re-treading a lot of similar ground.

 

[CriticalGaming]

For a good long time the most beloved expansion for Final Fantasy XIV was Heavensward, which heavily involved dragons. A coincidence I'm sure. Heavensward came out... blimey, seven years ago.

I never get the impression that WoW's dev team think about what they want the next expansion to be before it's actually time to start work on it. They just keep doing fragmented bits and re-treading a lot of similar ground.

They've said that they work two expansions in advance. Which I think is a fucking lie because the expansions would be better thought out if that were the case. But that's what they claim.

 

[Samtemdo8]

On Tuesday Blizzard had a livestream about the next expansion for World of Warcraft called Dragonflight. In this new expansion players will be traveling to the Dragon Isles, a location long referenced in the lore, where they will join the Dragon's in controlling the reawakening of this ancient land.

For years now WoW has been on a downward spiral for a lot of reasons. Borrowed power being a giant problem, which basically is a system of growth the players use to gain power in a given expansion that is then tossed away and forgotton about in the next. Legion started this problem by giving players a legendary weapon they would empower for the entire expansion only to have to throw it away at the start of the Battle for Azeroth.

Dragonflight did not reveal any borrowed power system, which is good. The problem is.....the reveal didn't show us anything. It's a few new zones, a new level cap, and a trainable dragon mount that you can use to fly around and do tricks with. That's it. No new features were presented, no talk about new dungeons or raids, no new battle grounds or pvp modes. Nothing.

Blizzard has never ever not shown a bucnh of features coming in an expansion during the reveal. NEVER.

Shadowlands was a fucking failure, so much so that the final patch for the expansion has been cancelled in favor of getting this new expansion out faster. This is not the first time Blizzard has done this, Warlords of Draenor was famously ass and it too also got it's final patch cut in favor of pushing out the next expansion. But never has an expansion been revealed and it shows us nothing, like they completely run out of tricks and have no ideas on what to offer the dropping playerbase to stick around.

Despite the shit Blizzard has been in legally over the past couple years, WoW was a big part of my life and there is still a part of me that wants the game to be good. Everytime WoW news pops out I want to scream as it just doesn't seem like there is anyone left at that company that knows what the FUCK they are doing. Players give feedback that is ignore for no reason other than the dev turning a blind eye to it. And it's just frustrating because it doesn't have to be like this, they have the money and the talent to make the game good again and they just fucking aren't. How can the higher ups not getting pissed off at the teams for not producing? Because the longer this garbage goes on, the more subscribers and overall playerbase they loose.

It just sucks man because it's like watching them make the same mistakes expansion after expansion.

I don't need a controversy to keep me off Blizzard games, Blizzard being genuinely garbage at making games is doing that on it's own.

Part of me wonders if now is the time to have a WOW 2 at this point. New Engine and New gameplay possibilities....like Player Housing

 

[Hawki]

Like they have a rep for polish and even with all the crap they have pulled, they have pretty rabid fanbase that will shout them from onhigh.

Um, really? Because generally the fanbase is much harsher on the games than anything else, including, but not limited to:

-World of Warcraft: People loathed Mists of Pandaria when it was released (since then, it seems to have been re-evaluated), Battle for Azeroth was generally disliked, Shadowlands seems to be universally loathed.

-StarCraft II: General consensus on the game seems to be generally positive, but on the plot elements, things got nasty. REALLY nasty. I say that as being on the receiving end.

-Diablo III: Absolute universal loathing when the game was released, including personal attacks on the developers.

-Warcraft III: Reforged: Do I even need to explain?

-Diablo Immortal: Absolutely panned when it was announced, and a fair bit of panning went to the devs.

My personal thoughts on each of these games aside, there's certainly no shortage of Blizzard fanboys out there, but the idea that people automatically drool over their games? Not really. If anything, I think a parallel can be drawn to the Star Wars fanbase. There's people who are fanatically loyal, and another group that will engage in the most vicious, hateful, spiteful attacks you can imagine, ranging from directors, to actors, to everyone else. There might be some overlap between those groups, but, yeah.

Part of me wonders if now is the time to have a WOW 2 at this point. New Engine and New gameplay possibilities....like Player Housing

Didn't EverQuest try that, and fail? Spectacuarly?

I guess you could point to Guild Wars 2, but it seems redundant to have two concurrent MMOs, especially for the same IP.

 

[Worgen]

Um, really? Because generally the fanbase is much harsher on the games than anything else, including, but not limited to:

-World of Warcraft: People loathed Mists of Pandaria when it was released (since then, it seems to have been re-evaluated), Battle for Azeroth was generally disliked, Shadowlands seems to be universally loathed.

-StarCraft II: General consensus on the game seems to be generally positive, but on the plot elements, things got nasty. REALLY nasty. I say that as being on the receiving end.

-Diablo III: Absolute universal loathing when the game was released, including personal attacks on the developers.

-Warcraft III: Reforged: Do I even need to explain?

-Diablo Immortal: Absolutely panned when it was announced, and a fair bit of panning went to the devs.

My personal thoughts on each of these games aside, there's certainly no shortage of Blizzard fanboys out there, but the idea that people automatically drool over their games? Not really. If anything, I think a parallel can be drawn to the Star Wars fanbase. There's people who are fanatically loyal, and another group that will engage in the most vicious, hateful, spiteful attacks you can imagine, ranging from directors, to actors, to everyone else. There might be some overlap between those groups, but, yeah.

The fanbase turning against them is a new thing. They still have a rabid fanbase but the detractors are getting louder. There were dissenting voices earlier, but it really wasn't till reforged and Immortal that they really started getting really loud. Before those 2, it was mainly grumbling, especially with the D3 real money auction house, although there was bitching about the art style also.

Blizzard has always been rather crap at plots and they tend to copy plot beats from their other games. Warcraft and Starcraft have a lot of the same plot beats. Doesn't help that Blizzard has the same issue as Square where they love to have these massive intricate plots that are complete nonsense, at least Square tends to keep their plots isolated to a single game, Blizzard's nonsense keeps getting more and more bloated.

 

[CriticalGaming]

Part of me wonders if now is the time to have a WOW 2 at this point. New Engine and New gameplay possibilities....like Player Housing

A pipedream.

What they need is a whole new mindset in the aproach of making the game. It very much feels like the devs do not play WoW, and they really should. However they should also be playing other games like ESO, GW2, and FF14 to get a feel for what other MMO's are doing and how they are moddernizing the MMO to attract new audiences as well as keep exsisting ones.

Blizzard's biggest problem is that they still haven't let their arrogance go, despite the huge staff migration and allegations, they cling to the idea that they are the hottest shit on the block, and it simply isn't the case anymore.

Wow Dragonflight will not do much to revitalize WoW because they aren't doing anything to shake the game up and make people interested in seeing what's new. For now it's a LONG way off and i would expect a release sometime late 2023 or early '24. Hopefully they show something surprising in the beta but we'll see.

 

[Samtemdo8]

Didn't EverQuest try that, and fail? Spectacuarly?

I guess you could point to Guild Wars 2, but it seems redundant to have two concurrent MMOs, especially for the same IP.

You fail to see the context behind Everquest 2. Everquest 2 lost because it came out in the same year as WOW, along with changes to the game that didn't reflect what Everquest 1 used to be.

 

[Samtemdo8]

Um, really? Because generally the fanbase is much harsher on the games than anything else, including, but not limited to:

-World of Warcraft: People loathed Mists of Pandaria when it was released (since then, it seems to have been re-evaluated), Battle for Azeroth was generally disliked, Shadowlands seems to be universally loathed.

-StarCraft II: General consensus on the game seems to be generally positive, but on the plot elements, things got nasty. REALLY nasty. I say that as being on the receiving end.

-Diablo III: Absolute universal loathing when the game was released, including personal attacks on the developers.

-Warcraft III: Reforged: Do I even need to explain?

-Diablo Immortal: Absolutely panned when it was announced, and a fair bit of panning went to the devs.

My personal thoughts on each of these games aside, there's certainly no shortage of Blizzard fanboys out there, but the idea that people automatically drool over their games? Not really. If anything, I think a parallel can be drawn to the Star Wars fanbase. There's people who are fanatically loyal, and another group that will engage in the most vicious, hateful, spiteful attacks you can imagine, ranging from directors, to actors, to everyone else. There might be some overlap between those groups, but, yeah.

World of Warcraft: You will be surprised how much the WOW fanbase has lionized MOP in recent years, forgetting that MOP gameplay wise only got REALLY good when Patch 5.2 came out, Throne of Thunder. I didn't think Battle for Azeroth is the worse thing ever. Shadowlands was as dumb as I predicted it would be.

Starcraft II: The Mary Sue-ifaction of Sarah Kerrigan is the biggest culprit.

Diablo III: People hate Blizzard now, but almost every Normie gamer lost their interest in Blizzard after Diablo 3, the only ones left were Blizzard fans. The Normies only came back when Overwatch came out and now they are leaving Overwatch after it went downhill in popularity. As for Diablo 3 itself, it managed to pull off a No Man's Sky redemption before No Man's Sky did it. Only blemish is the always online requirement for the PC version still in effect even when you play Single player.

Warcraft III Reforged: I still have my Pre-Reforged version of the game.

Diablo Immortal: The hate for the game and the devs is blown WAY out of proportion and I think that Red Shirt Guy went out of line. That was the verbal equivalent to the Will Smith slap to me.

 

[Silvanus]

I really don't understand the love in here for WoW's graphics. I mean... they're pretty basic and blocky, even compared to other MMOs.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

I really don't understand the love in here for WoW's graphics. I mean... they're pretty basic and blocky, even compared to other MMOs.

WoW's strength has always been more in graphic design than in visual fidelity. Sure, the models aren't super-detailed, but you can easily tell what they are and what they're doing at a glance.

 

[Worgen]

I really don't understand the love in here for WoW's graphics. I mean... they're pretty basic and blocky, even compared to other MMOs.

The simplicity is what works for it, its not realistic, its stylized. That allows it to punch higher then its graphical weightclass since more realistic graphics age much more poorly then stylized ones, plus, they allow it to run on less powerful hardware and still look decent. Although, keep in mind, I am talking about when the game came out up to before the launch of the second expansion, I have no experience with the graphical overhaul they did, but from what I have seen of the tauren, I think they may have fucked up.

 

[BrawlMan]

I really don't understand the love in here for WoW's graphics. I mean... they're pretty basic and blocky, even compared to other MMOs.

WoW's strength has always been more in graphic design than in visual fidelity. Sure, the models aren't super-detailed, but you can easily tell what they are and what they're doing at a glance.

Honestly, I can name plenty of games from the early to mid 2000s that have better visual fidelity than WoW.

 

[Silvanus]

The simplicity is what works for it, its not realistic, its stylized. That allows it to punch higher then its graphical weightclass since more realistic graphics age much more poorly then stylized ones, plus, they allow it to run on less powerful hardware and still look decent.

That's all good, sure. Art direction beats graphical fidelity 9 times out of 10, it's far more important. Its just not usually what I think someone means when they praise a game's "graphics".

Though honestly the art direction never struck me as particularly special or unique; just a fairly standard fantasy setting. Stereotypical dwarves and elves, and D&D-style drows for the dark elves. The idea of an undead playable race is cool, I admit.

 

[Worgen]

That's all good, sure. Art direction beats graphical fidelity 9 times out of 10, it's far more important. Its just not usually what I think someone means when they praise a game's "graphics".

Really I would say praising graphics is more about aesthetics then pure graphical fidelity. Well, I suppose its a combination that varies based on game and when it was released. Like, you will still have snes games that have great graphics, but unless its a 2d game, probably not many psx games.

 

[Worgen]

Honestly, I can name plenty of games from the early to mid 2000s that have better visual fidelity than WoW.

Can you name many mmo games that do?

 

[Silvanus]

Can you name many mmo games that do?

If we're talking purely in terms of graphical fidelity here, I'd say FFXI, LOTRO, and GW1 were quite a lot better.

 

[BrawlMan]

Can you name many mmo games that do?

No, I don't care. I was referring regular, non-mmo games. I should have been way more specific.

 

[Hawki]

The fanbase turning against them is a new thing.

Not sure how twelve plus years is "new."

They still have a rabid fanbase but the detractors are getting louder. There were dissenting voices earlier, but it really wasn't till reforged and Immortal that they really started getting really loud. Before those 2, it was mainly grumbling, especially with the D3 real money auction house, although there was bitching about the art style also.

I really disagree. The backlash to D3 in its entirety was far, FAR more than "mainly grumbling." We're talking about direct attacks on developers level doxxing.

Diablo III: People hate Blizzard now, but almost every Normie gamer lost their interest in Blizzard after Diablo 3, the only ones left were Blizzard fans. The Normies only came back when Overwatch came out and now they are leaving Overwatch after it went downhill in popularity. As for Diablo 3 itself, it managed to pull off a No Man's Sky redemption before No Man's Sky did it. Only blemish is the always online requirement for the PC version still in effect even when you play Single player.

Sorry, I don't follow. First, I'm not sure how there's a link between D3 and Overwatch, since both are very different genres. Second, if we're talking about "normies vs. Blizzard fans," then I'd have thought that for D3 it would be the other way round. The normies would be able to take D3 on its own terms, Blizzard fans would be comparing D3 to D2. D3 sold over 30 million copies, so if anything, the "normies" seem to have carried it. You can actually draw parallels between D3 and Fallout 3, IMO, in that both sell extremely well, but there's a segment who liked the older games who really, REALLY hate F3/D3.

As for Overwatch going downhill in popularity?

How many people play Overwatch 2? Player count tracker (December 2024) - Dexerto

Overwatch 2 has made quite an impact since its launch, and we’ve broken down how many people are playing the sequel as of December 2024.

www.dexerto.com

TL, DR, there isn't really a measurable decline.

I'm actually really surprised, since I was under the impression that Overwatch did go down in popularity, but if we're looking at raw numbers? Not so much.

Diablo Immortal: The hate for the game and the devs is blown WAY out of proportion and I think that Red Shirt Guy went out of line. That was the verbal equivalent to the Will Smith slap to me.

I agree, but it kind of proves my point. These are the people who paid actual money to go to BlizzCon, and then went into a rage, and it was rage that was reflected in the wider community.