Did Blizz Ever Explain WoD's Content Drought Debacle?

[Matthias]

Seeing how so far there is a steady stream of updates in Legion, and MoP was similar.....WTH was teh joke in WoD inbetween? I mean Blizzard learned in Cata how disasterous content droughts could be, and the reason I always put Cata ahead of WoD is because it at least looked like they were trying. The ZA/ZG revamps sucked, but it was something to tide us over while they rushed out Firelands. Then in MoP they had two teams one for big raid tiers and what not, and another for smaller content patches.

There was so much cut in WoD such as the content the Shatt Raid. I mean there were rumors that Activision was willing to let the game sink due to it's age and not invest in it. Was is getting the new team up to speed? Did Blizz just cut their losses and say "screw WoD onwards to Legion"?

There is a chart in this article that shows just how little content there was in WoD compared to other expansions.
https://www.polygon.com/2016/8/25/12...on-burned-fans

Such a shame since Draenor is the most gorgeous continent imo, and I was holed up in a Garrison the whole time.

[Usagi Senshi]

I think the ideas they wanted to use in WoD got too ambitious and time intensive and thus they just cut their losses and said fuck it (which was a huge FU to the paying customers and showed clearly when 5+ million people quit the game). Which is too bad as I feel they could have made it more absurd and interesting than what they did do.

[kalaratic]

my conspiracy is that the movie being delayed twice fucked their whole content plan and the dev team had no idea it was going to happen. it feels like wod was supposed to be the movie tie-in expac instead of legion. it's too much of a coincidence to me that khadgar, guldan, durotan, garona are all big characters in the movie and played important roles in wod.

[Hctaz]

Well there's a couple things I can see being an issue. It seemed like their story wasn't set in stone and they flip flopped it a few times to adjust for that. They also seemed to actually cut content due to the Garrison thing which is crazy when you realize how scaled back that feature was. They also only planned for the expansion to be out for a year instead of two but then realized that a yearly expansion cycle is never going to happen.

So... basically it was an expansion that was released before important future content patches were finalized, content had to be scrapped or altered in order to fit in other content and make deadlines, and it was only designed to last a year but ended up taking two years.

[Vorecien]

They addressed that WoD didn't have a ton of content because they were working heavily on Legion.

[Thelxi]

It was probably min/maxing of budgets and testing out exactly how far their customers will tolerate them going.

[Aeluron Lightsong]

Yearly expansions. They thought they could do it and well they didn't. Never wanted that anyways.

[potis]

The content drought was because BRF released too early along with the fact that they fucked up with the garrison.

BRF released what? Not even 2 months after Highmaul?

Sure, amazing for the better Mythic raiders but i remember seeing and reading how people wanted to finish Mythic Imperator for the achievement but they couldnt get their raiders to come, why go wipe when HC BRF has better gear and sets?

Thats why EN lasted so long this time and NH was delayed, raid wise at least.

I know there are other "content" but i consider them irrelevant when it comes to WoW.

Yeah they cut back a lot of stuff but Draenor wasnt so bad as people make it seem, i dont remember many complains up to HFC releasing, the complains came after cause they gave 3 raid tiers in 6 months and then do what?

Also as people mentioned the movie, it was obvious they were tied together, Draenor would provide familiar faces with the movie for the new wave that would restart/start cause of the movie.

[McNeil]

I think it can either be 2 things:

They had a massive reformation going on with the original team, where they placed some devs to the Overwatch team and maybe some other games. And they had to learn in all the new employers who just came in at a bad time.

The Warcraft movie could also play a role. I think they originally intended to make WoD as a tie-in expansion to the movie, but the movie got delayed so many times that they couldn't hold WoD back much longer as we already had 14 months of SoO.

Or a third reason is that Blizzard still wanted to do 1 year expansions, they tried to do so with WoD but then realised that it doesn't work out in their favor. They made a lot of players mad and are still bleeding from the results.

[bmjclark]

I don't think they've said much outside of the fact that yearly expansions was a mistake. WoD seems like it was very mismanaged though and that they really had no idea what they were going to do with it. Tanaan was meant to be in at launch, didn't make it in. There was a scenario where kilrogg died datamined early on in alpha (which happened in tanaan i believe). Medivh made a small appearance early on in alpha. Kargath originally survived his encounter, ect. I think only 2 raid tiers was decided sometime just before launch and they had to take a hatchet to a bunch of things they were planning and then they just gave up and focused on legion.

[Swalload]

my conspiracy is that the movie being delayed twice fucked their whole content plan and the dev team had no idea it was going to happen. it feels like wod was supposed to be the movie tie-in expac instead of legion. it's too much of a coincidence to me that khadgar, guldan, durotan, garona are all big characters in the movie and played important roles in wod.

The movie was delayed twice? What for? To add more shit in it?

[Barnabas]

I don't think they've said much outside of the fact that yearly expansions was a mistake. WoD seems like it was very mismanaged though and that they really had no idea what they were going to do with it. Tanaan was meant to be in at launch, didn't make it in. There was a scenario where kilrogg died datamined early on in alpha (which happened in tanaan i believe). Medivh made a small appearance early on in alpha. Kargath originally survived his encounter, ect. I think only 2 raid tiers was decided sometime just before launch and they had to take a hatchet to a bunch of things they were planning and then they just gave up and focused on legion.

Yep when they realized they couldn't deliver what they said and showed at blizzcon they rewrote much of the story to fit the workload they could muster.

[Jamie081]

Yeah they cut back a lot of stuff but Draenor wasnt so bad as people make it seem, i dont remember many complains up to HFC releasing, the complains came after cause they gave 3 raid tiers in 6 months and then do what?

BRF and HM were the same tier (just like NH is the same tier as EN), they just delayed its release, albeit not long enough. It probably wouldn't have been bad if HFC wasn't the 2nd and final tier but a lot of people left after that became clear.

World content was also next to non-existant, a quest a week for the garrison campaign and a world just full of trivial treasures that you looted when leveling anyway weren't going to hold people over.

[RobertMugabe]

I assume that WoD lacked content, simply because some of the new features they wanted to implement took way too much time and/or some new features didn't really turn out to be good so they redid them (afaik they've pretty much "reimagined" garrisons in mid of development. Same thing with Ashran.)

btw. "Shatt Raid" isn't scrapped contennt. It was never announced or really planned. It was just shown on a "concept map"(= basically it was an early idea, but this idea never came to the "planing stage")

[Ozyorkbourne]

I don't think they've said much outside of the fact that yearly expansions was a mistake. WoD seems like it was very mismanaged though and that they really had no idea what they were going to do with it. Tanaan was meant to be in at launch, didn't make it in. There was a scenario where kilrogg died datamined early on in alpha (which happened in tanaan i believe). Medivh made a small appearance early on in alpha. Kargath originally survived his encounter, ect. I think only 2 raid tiers was decided sometime just before launch and they had to take a hatchet to a bunch of things they were planning and then they just gave up and focused on legion.

Hatchet job is an apt summary. If they'd had Tanaan ready earlier and been prepared to do Shattrath as a raid (I know it wasn't 'announced' but it was right there and discussed about a lot) and maybe shifted gold away from the mission table to being active daily quest rewards (along with follower armor tokens, garrison customizable stuff ect) I think it would have been more of an expansion, rather than 2-3 patches of sub-par content. This along with capital cities >.<

[RobertMugabe]

The movie was delayed twice? What for? To add more shit in it?

The movie was delayed because of Star Wars, which is understandable.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

Wod was filler they didn't care to give it content.

[primalmatter]

WoD had a massive amount of content.

People just didn't like the content that was offered enough to leave their garrisons.

- - - Updated - - -

I assume that WoD lacked content, simply because some of the new features they wanted to implement took way too much time and/or some new features didn't really turn out to be good so they redid them (afaik they've pretty much "reimagined" garrisons in mid of development. Same thing with Ashran.)

btw. "Shatt Raid" isn't scrapped contennt. It was never announced or really planned. It was just shown on a "concept map"(= basically it was an early idea, but this idea never came to the "planing stage")

It was scrapped... the story even has a hole in it that they never could explain. Like why we saved rather then murdered helscream.

[SupBrah]

Most of their devs were focused on HotS and Overwatch most likely.

[Coconut]

In my opinion, the new character models were a major factor. Art is one of the biggest time constraints, and it has to be finished before they start making content around it and testing encounters. Cataclysm also suffered because they had to take resources from new content to polish the old stuff. Garrisons contributed to this as well, everything was very detailed and complex, but ultimately people didn't get much use out of the art that was sunk there.

That being said, I always thought they could have at least salvaged the expansion by using their art assets better. Their best looking mounts were CE and store exclusive; they could have added recolors in game to give people more of a reason to grind the existing dungeons and apexis quests. No idea why they didn't.