WoW Dev Team Now and Then (The reason WoW changed?)

[Mormolyce]

Now, while WoW is still a good game (arguably better in many ways), it doesn't excite me or anyone I know as it used to.

So how many of these kinds of threads until you realise you're older, the game is older, you're bored of it?

No game is entertaining forever, my son.

---------- Post added 2012-09-21 at 11:21 AM ----------

You think that WoW is exactly as immersive as it used to be then, if viewed objectively? I think there's more to it than me getting bored with the game. The game was fairly old in WotLK already, and I had put loads of time into it as I played a lot more back in 2004-2008 than I do now. Still, WotLK excited me loads, and remained a fun expansion throughout its lifetime. It wasn't until ICC and later Cata that things began to feel off.

Actually I think it's a lot more immersive than it used to be. The revamped low level content is lightyears ahead in that respect.

[Deleted]

You bring up linear dungeons and raids. Dare I mention Firelands? That is not a linear dungeon, at all. Black Temple was more linear than Firelands. I don't think there's a raid which beats Firelands to that. Could be Molten Core. Then again. Rest of the dungeons are pretty linear.

Change isn't bad. Change is always good. If it turns out to be bad, you get the experience from it, that you wont do it again. But by not putting in new people, and just keep on going, that is bad, that is really bad.

Then again Molten Core was never that good a dungeon in the first place. Sure, it felt awesome then because we hadn't seen anything else, but it was more or less one big cave with a few crevices here and there for bosses. I think the other Vanilla raids were vastly superior to MC in terms of intricacy and detail of level design. MC was sort of like the pilot episode of a TV show, or an experiment to see where to go with raid design. It also served obvious tutorial purposes for us as players, as we hadn't really raided before in WoW, thus it needed to remain simple in its layout.

Change is refreshing, but not always good. The developers who rotate in and out of Blizzard's HQ certainly learn from it, but what about us players? I think that all the way from the early stages of Vanilla's production and until the planning of WotLK, there was a shared and unified vision that lead the design in one direction. Sure, there was bad design to be found here and there, but that's always the case with any game. The vision was intact, and it was the vision which built WoW and created its success.

While designers today may be just as good or even better than previous ones, they lack that unified vision which was held together by the team who built the game in the first place. That's why we see decisions like the Theramore scenario being made, the lack of real world events, streamlined and simplified dungeons and so on.

[ShimmerSwirl]

So how many of these kinds of threads until you realise you're older, the game is older, you're bored of it?

No game is entertaining forever, my son.

Funny how many millions of people seemed to 'get bored' right when the design philosophy switched to ez-casual-mode. Pure coincidence i'm sure.

[Deleted]

So how many of these kinds of threads until you realise you're older, the game is older, you're bored of it?

No game is entertaining forever, my son.

That's a valid theory, but I see no reason for why that is more likely to be the cause than changing designers.

I never said WoW isn't entertaining any more. I said its developers lack a unified vision nowadays. Or at least they have a different vision than that which made WoW a success in the first place.

Actually I think it's a lot more immersive than it used to be. The revamped low level content is lightyears ahead in that respect.

This is subjective. Nothing wrong with that, but its subjective. The revamped low level content has more to do with technical upgrades, polished writing and graphics, and so on. They're fun for about three playthroughs, whereas I dare say the old ones were fun for a couple of years at least. They didn't point you in a single direction the way content does now. It was more about you finding your own route through Azeroth.

[Tehterokkar]

There may have been one or two slightly more than average linear dungeons in TBC, but it was hardly the trend. Think of the Black Temple or the Coilfang Reservoir. Labyrinths, I tell you!

It's a fact that devs left and positions were filled. The thing I'd like to know is to what extent.

Examples:

Cory Stockton has only been lead content designer for Cata and MoP.

Lead designers for WoW used to be Rob Pardo, Jeffrey Kaplan, and Tom Chilton - only one of whom remains a WoW designer since after WotLK. Kaplan is on Titan, Chilton is still on WoW I believe, and Pardo is some sort of executive vice president of design, which probably means he pulls a lot of strings but has to deal a lot more with all the games and less with direct WoW design.

Black Temple or Coilfang Reservoir are hardly any "Labyrinths", just raids with many wings. There are no sidepaths, just paths to boss(es)

[Hotsforyou]

Except you are both wrong. Wow now is not a MMORPG ist a Social network with few arcade style mini games you queue for.

Hmm that pretty much sums it up as well. Really wish they would revert back to TBC style gameplay. Really miss having to put a LOT of effort into one character. Loved the farming for mats and gear. I am one of the few that does not like fish feasts and cauldrons because it creates lazy players who have no clue what an MMO is about. Miss those days. Luckily the raiding is still decent or i would have been gone in wrath when they killed the community off with LFG then in Cata with LFR.

LFR/LFG and Arena. THe 3 biggest mistakes the devs have made IMO.

[Deleted]

Black Temple or Coilfang Reservoir are hardly any "Labyrinths", just raids with many wings. There are no sidepaths, just paths to boss(es)

What I mean is that they were beautiful and immersive dungeons. It looked and felt as if the naga / Illidan's pawns actually operated in those places.

Nowadays you go from one hallway to another, most looking pretty much the same, and there isn't much decoration, furniture, weapons, and so on to speak of. Mostly it's just walls and floors.

[Deleted]

It went from an open-world focused sandbox style game to an instance-based themepark ride. This change was driven by the players who wanted easy, convenient content that could be quickly accessed and completed.

Unfortunately this is what made the game slide deeper and deeper down the shitdrain...

[Wildmoon]

BC was the xpac that started shitty linear dungeon system so what's your point? If you are talking how beautiful raids were back in the day then look at how beautiful MoP's raids are.

[Whitney Houston]

In essence, Blackwing Lair was a single winding hallway as well.

---------- Post added 2012-09-21 at 01:10 PM ----------



WOW was never SRS BUSINESS. That onliner was used jokingly.

In essence, AQ40 was a single winding cave as well. Maraudon, which you were forced to grind endlessly for AQ "progression" was a cave too. OP likes caves?

[khalltusk]

Having played this game since release I will say its a LOT better in every single way. There have been a few bumps along the road though.

The feeling of exploration went a way a bit in cata as the zones were disjointed. In wrath I enjoyed the exploration as I was grounded until stormpeaks. Outland was similar for me lots of places to see.

Lets compare some things, (huge wall of text apologies some of it is incomplete)

Vanilla - raiding 40 people for the main content.
- 20 man raid for aq20 and ZG (good raids though to be fair)
- 15man for UBRS changed to 10 then 5, Strat and scholo 10 - then changed to 5
- attunements for onyxias lair MC bwl and nax. Ony was by far the longest and most annoying. MC and bwl were just short dungeon runs. Nax was rep with argent dawn then getting the key pretty easy by its release as most of us who raided it were exalted with them anyway.
- 1 spec for most classes was the norm in raids. Frost mages in mc/bwl Resto shamans and druids, affliction locks prot warriors (some hybrid or fury ones to be fair). Holy paladins.
- silly grinding for raid materials, felwood anyone? No easy way to respec had to go to trainer and fork out 50g for most raiders if you wanted to change specs often.
- no queuing for battlegrounds from where ever you are. You had to GO to the bg entrance. this was changed i think either at end of vanilla or during TBC to have a NPC to queue from at your home city.
- AQ world event, loved it. even nax had a world event to show its release loved that as well.
- You could not fly from org to silithus, you stopped at each wind rider and had to click for the next location this was changed much later to do a joined flight path.

TBC - Attunements, karazan shattered halls, SSC, TK, hyjal and BT (when it was released) also for heroics you needed revered rep as well I think with each faction that represented that dungeon.
- hybrid specs brought in to help us shamans etc have more than 1 role.
- tier tokens expaned upon from aq40 and nax. this helped guilds distribute loot easier and waste less items.
- world bosses existed still not as much pvp for them though as their loot quickly became useless unlike the vanilla wow world bosses.
- like vanilla you had to click an ore node to mine it then loot it and then click it again to mine it again, the amount of times someone would swoop down and wait for me to loot the ore and ninja pick the next stack....
- raids to 25man starting with a 10man raid first ZA came along late as a 10man raid.
- daily quests introduced on a large scale, with the ogres and bird people.
- Sunwell isle dailies quest with a server wide phasing of the zone. brilliant.
- heroics in general offering raiders and none raiders a challenge and character progression.
- Arenas introduced.
- Badge gear introduced to help players gear up.

Wrath - bring the player not the class introduced. Hybrids now doing on par damage with dps classes (there was a lot of balancing to be done on this and a lot of qq on both sides)
- more phasing done with content, stormpeaks you saw how the zone changed as you quested.
- wrathgate, need I say more?
- raid attunements gone. hardmode introduced in first tier on sarth 3d. then expaned upon in ulduar, and changed in totc and icc.
- 25man raids and 10man raids, 10 had lesser loot and difficulty.
- mining and other gathering changed so you loot the item in one goes. (issues with phasing and mining nodes which got fixed later)
- some rehashed content in nax good for players who never saw it though.
- DKs made <3 and their starter zone made the drenai and belf zones look like a poor attempt.
- Tabard system changed slightly you can gain rep via dungeon runs if you were their tabard.
- Later on we had the LFD system. lovely little tool <3
- Badge gear became a mess with each tier of content. Still a big upgrade for players who wanted to gear up characters quickly. LFD system giving you badges for the top tier of badge gear also helped (along with each boss giving you the normal badges)


Cata - While tbc and wrath had one continent Cata split the zones around the world, hyjal and uldum in kalimdor. Maelstrom in the middle with deepholme beneath it. Vasjhir off the cost of EK and ofc twighlight highlands. Firelands added later. I disliked the disjointed feel and the use of teleporters to get to each zone made it feel less fun than it should be for me.
- Phasing, heavily used some loved it some hated it. I loved it same with cinematics loads of them I enjoyed them some hated.
- Talents revamped.
- 10man and 25man put on same lockouts and gear levels. Difficulty was balanced but there was and always will be some differences between the two.
- Heroics in tbc were hard, in wrath made a lot easier and in cata again were put on a harder setting. I personally enjoyed this. I can see why random groups failed though as the initial heroics unless you were raid geared were fairly tough
- Badges put to two sides, Justice and valour. Valour being the higher tier and Justice being the initial dungeon gear then when a new tier comes that old tier moves to justice.
- LFR introduced. Great for really casual players. Had issues with top guilds running it for set bonuses. Hopefully partially resolved in mop. Main issue for me was not back compatible. (I know its a lot of work but would have been GREAT)
- LFD had call to arms put in to help get tanks and healers into dungeons to reduce queue times. (got baron rivendare on my first CTA farmed strat for years.... and get it now? XD)
- ZG and ZA retuned to 5man heroics with new story, I was both sad and happy to see this. Sad that the raids were gone but happy to see new troll stuff.

I won't comment on mop, not played it yet. Raid mechanics have changed over the years and there have been some STAND out raids (Kara ulduar you two can sit on your thrones. you earned it) While some raids are best left forgotton. Yes TOTC I am looking at you. Mop I hope will enhance the features of wow. World bosses I am certainly looking forward to. Been a while since we got to contest for some content that wasnt just pvp related.

[Imhotep]

Same reason diablo 3 is shithouse, new developers took over who had the vision of Stevie Wonder.

[fizzbob]

about 20% of the people who made vanilla wow are even working for blizzard now. a lot have went to other companies (red5, arenanet, etc).

GC was hired in 2008 and had no MMORPG experience, was given considerable power and had a lot to do with post-ulduar WOTLK. most of the replacements were working on WOTLK from start to finish

i think it had more to do with the activision merger and GC's lead than the people/artists. we get less content per expansion now, a lot is rehashed, a lot is change for the sake of change (like talents 2 expansions in a row), etc

all that said, if MoP loses 3,000,000 more subs wow will be in trouble. i hope they know this because if not, people will play other games more than they already do.

[MoanaLisa]

I think it a possibility that the game might feel more 'soulless' to you simply because you've played it for years.

Often people think the game has changed a lot when it's really themselves that have changed.

When you know the game down to every detail, it's easy to point at tiny changes and believe that they are big deals. Overall though, the game has changed really very little up until MoP except to grow bigger. To mention a few things, there are quests, dungeons, professions, battlegrounds, arenas, and raids. All of those things are variable quality but they are all recognizable and all have existed for years.

[Deficineiron]

What I mean is that they were beautiful and immersive dungeons. It looked and felt as if the naga / Illidan's pawns actually operated in those places.

Nowadays you go from one hallway to another, most looking pretty much the same, and there isn't much decoration, furniture, weapons, and so on to speak of. Mostly it's just walls and floors.

The artwork in dungeons has certainly been tremendously reduced, from what I have seen. Places like BRD, BRS, Scholomance, DMines, others, and karazhan, appear to have had a LOT more work done on art and detail than later content. Many BC dungeons already had the early signs of linearization of art sections in some areas. The only blatantly cntl-v dungeon in vanilla that comes to mind was sunken temple, which was a single vertical section cut/pasted 6 times around a cylinder (maybe I forgot one? there were some caves, of course....)

[Fojos]

Well it's either this, "the games age" or special snowflake that people usually grab for in regards to threads like these instead of actually acknowledging the persons view.

And the only reason you say that is because you basically agree with the OP, what's your point?

The truth is people generally change more than the game does. The number one reason people get bored is because there's no mystery any longer, that's because they have played it for long. You can't expect to get that tingling new feeling all the time.

[Elementalkin]

Like all MMOs, WoW is not good at anything in particular that any non-MMO focused on wouldn't be better at. Overall, it's a decent game and arguably the greatest MMO of all time (though not for me), but the fact is that its individual aspects are lacking. The quality of the game has done nothing but improve over the years, but I think long time players are getting burnt out on what is essentially the same thing over and over again, and have been for some time now. It's nearly eight years old, why can't people just admit it's not as amazing as it was when it was released?

[Deficineiron]

Then again Molten Core was never that good a dungeon in the first place. Sure, it felt awesome then because we hadn't seen anything else, but it was more or less one big cave with a few crevices here and there for bosses. I think the other Vanilla raids were vastly superior to MC in terms of intricacy and detail of level design. MC was sort of like the pilot episode of a TV show, or an experiment to see where to go with raid design. It also served obvious tutorial purposes for us as players, as we hadn't really raided before in WoW, thus it needed to remain simple in its layout.

Change is refreshing, but not always good. The developers who rotate in and out of Blizzard's HQ certainly learn from it, but what about us players? I think that all the way from the early stages of Vanilla's production and until the planning of WotLK, there was a shared and unified vision that lead the design in one direction. Sure, there was bad design to be found here and there, but that's always the case with any game. The vision was intact, and it was the vision which built WoW and created its success.

While designers today may be just as good or even better than previous ones, they lack that unified vision which was held together by the team who built the game in the first place. That's why we see decisions like the Theramore scenario being made, the lack of real world events, streamlined and simplified dungeons and so on.

I think your points generally agree with my own views, but I would offer that the game was designed by gamers originally (and as far as I can tell this philosophy informed all through the design of release wotlk content, though wotlk was released undertuned (blizzard has explicitly said naxx wasn't tuned as hard as they would have liked)) has been totally subverted and game vision and design is almost completely about the numbers, particularly the dollar-signs, and many decisions are filtered first through this prism. Why else would GC have to say that 'we would fight that' if there was a decision to nerf challenge dungeons? because the decision won't come from him.

To put some fair perspective on my view, wow is a once-in-a-lifetime dream product for any company - it has returned literally billions of dollars in profit to the property owners (first vivendi, now activision-blizzard, which vivendi retains a majority stake in) and has to have exceeded their original projections by several multiples. Once you start talking about this kind of potential profit, and particularly once it is put into a publicly-traded structure as a major component (rather than a small piece of a much, much bigger conglomerate), there is no way to reasonably expect the owners not to exploit it to the last possible penny. It is interesting to speculate on whether, if wow had remained a 1-2million western sub game rather than what it became quickly, if 1) vivendi would have merged their game unit into activision (and if activision would ahve agreed to it) and 2) if not, if the design philosophy would continued to be allowed to inform future content and tuning. For people who enjoyed wow's design more in earlier versions, it can be argued that THAT game became a victim of its own success.

I would bet that a lot of the former gamers involved in wow design either dislike the game as it is now or are/have been opposed to many of the mass-marketing changes to make the game vastly less involved/more simplified, particularly those whose compensation isn't tied to meeting revenue/other targets with wow. Everyone likes both being employed and increased income, but in terms of the game itself, i wonder how many of that original team truly like the game itself as something they would enjoy playing now vs. earlier. I realize that name-recognizable blizzard people would never, ever say so if this were how they felt, of course. From time to time I read an interesting comment from a named person at blizzard which sounds like they are saying something they don't believe themselves about the game.

I have wondered if a lot of the push in blizzard for classic servers was in part a subconscious (or overt) manifestation of desire on the part of some of the people there to play on said servers. I believe Chilton (maybe not, but it was a prominent name who said it) said that it had been seriously considered a few years ago. However, when a simple pony model can make a couple of million, it is hard to see when the resources needed for such an undertaking would ever be allocated. (I do think as the game diverges more and more from older versions, there is an increasing potential market for such a game, certainly enough to cover coding/dev/maintenance costs associated). By definition, I think the former western playerbase is a much greater pool of potential subscribers for such servers than the current playerbase - it is both MUCH bigger and the game as it is has filtered out many of the players who preferred the older game design.

(people may dispute this notion, but I would note that the game had more western subs mid-way through tbc (pre-2.3 badge gear) and possibly more even at the end of classic than it does now, was more profitable than it is now based on what numbers are available (product development is hard to sort out, but on an operating basis it certainly was more profitable), and was a vastly less 'accessible'casual game)

[Lilly32]

OP : you will only get flamed and tortured for even thinking of criticizing Blizzard on these forums. You're warned.

How is wanting the best Devs still working on WoW a bad thing.

[Grevie]

Except you are both wrong. Wow now is not a MMORPG ist a Social network with few arcade style mini games you queue for.

What makes you think you re right? I mean you re wrong, because i said so.