I think this is a good think for Pardo. He is a great game designer, I would like to see him making fresher games, not being stuck in Blizzard and WoW forever.
It would be awesome if Jeff Kaplan leaves too and join Pardo into new adventures.
I think this is a good think for Pardo. He is a great game designer, I would like to see him making fresher games, not being stuck in Blizzard and WoW forever.
It would be awesome if Jeff Kaplan leaves too and join Pardo into new adventures.
Spot on and I hope it is being read by those posters who blame a Holding and Game Companies for making money... As such ANY game maker is seeking to make a successful product to conquer "the world".
Pardo leaving can only have 2 reasons: a personal one or an internal Blizzard conflict.
What did strike me personally though (and that's purely subjective) is the burn out feeling I got from several panels at the latest BlizzCon. Chris Metzen looked and spoke as if he could use several months of vacation. GC clearly stood pathetic (explained a few weeks later) and the only ones REALLY excited were the HS and HOTS guys.
I posted about that back then and I think it is a question of burn out indeed. Oddly enough Pardo did not seem to suffer from this overall noticable "fatigue" in his interviews. But a very small remark hinted at some friction within: he alluded to the fact that HS was the first Blizzard product that was actually launched in the same year as it was announced ...
Perhaps they are all a bit tired.
I've sometimes wondered if Cataclysm was Kotick giving the "HARDCORE RAH!" faction inside Blizzard enough rope to hang themselves. If he wanted to get more control over the design decisions there, the best way to do that would be to discredit those who stood in his way. (BTW, in no way am I suggesting this would be "evil" behavior.)
Last edited by Osmeric; 2014-07-07 at 09:58 AM.
"There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
"The bit about hardcore players not always caring about the long term interests of the game is spot on." -- Ghostcrawler
"Do you want a game with no casuals so about 500 players?"
It does not make sense from a business point of view to damage your incredibly lucrative product in an effort to prove a point. I have a feeling that Activsion's handling of Blizzard has been very hands off so far.
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You do not get into a position like Kotick's or achieve his level of success by doing that.
My feeling is that at the time of merger, whilst they would have had no say in whether it went ahead or not, Blizzard were in position of power where if they felt something was bad for their business that would be the end of it and considering Kotick's admission that they ran the Guitar Hero series into the ground I think Activsion would have been wary of doing the same to WOW. Thus I think Blizzard were behind or at the very least willing partners in increasing the amount of value added services.
The actual merger took place a few months after the release of 2.4 so it would appear that this was a direction that Blizzard were already moving in. Also despite it becoming much easier to acquire high level gear it still required running heroic dungeons which for many remained just as inaccessible as ever. Whilst Wrath was a massive step down in difficulty overall there were still many challenging parts to heroics, Loken in the Halls of Lightning, Xevozz in the Violet Hold, Anub'arak for example the trash in CoS, The Oculus and the Old Kingdom were no push overs to an inexperienced group with low level gear. But as I said before I think that bringing heroics to masses was a natural progression in the game's development.
I think it is nonsense to imply that merger/no-merger the march towards accessibility and monetization of the game would have been nearly identical. Essentially, it implies the senior management team blizzard was placed under had zero input or direction. I don't know a single publicly traded company in the world where new a newly acquired division isn't going to feel the mark of its new masters. I know that a lot of folks on this forum feel blizzard to be an example.
i am not sure you appreciate how different it is to be a small part of a massive conglomerate mostly not even understanding what you do (vivendi was not a specialist in game development), versus becoming nearly half the revenue and profit of a much smaller publicly traded combined company that ONLY makes video games.
Authors I have enjoyed enough to mention here: JRR Tolkein, Poul Anderson,Jack Vance, Gene Wolfe, Glen Cook, Brian Stableford, MAR Barker, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, WM Hodgson, Fredrick Brown, Robert SheckleyJohn Steakley, Joe Abercrombie, Robert Silverberg, the norse sagas, CJ Cherryh, PG Wodehouse, Clark Ashton Smith, Alastair Reynolds, Cordwainer Smith, LE Modesitt, L. Sprague de Camp & Fletcher Pratt, Stephen R Donaldon, and Jack L Chalker.
I think blizzard was in a much, much greater position of 'power' than they are now, to be sure. This isn't the same as them not having to work with and for the ATVI management team.
Heroics in wrath were a joke from the start. A few hard bosses that actually required you to know how they worked is a rather severe departure from bc. Nearly everything in wrath was being aoe-cleared and most bosses you could just dps/heal through whatever gimmick they brought to table. Unlike the tbc heroes on this forum, I actually said this in a thread in 3.0.8 and can link it.
Authors I have enjoyed enough to mention here: JRR Tolkein, Poul Anderson,Jack Vance, Gene Wolfe, Glen Cook, Brian Stableford, MAR Barker, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, WM Hodgson, Fredrick Brown, Robert SheckleyJohn Steakley, Joe Abercrombie, Robert Silverberg, the norse sagas, CJ Cherryh, PG Wodehouse, Clark Ashton Smith, Alastair Reynolds, Cordwainer Smith, LE Modesitt, L. Sprague de Camp & Fletcher Pratt, Stephen R Donaldon, and Jack L Chalker.
But you see, if this hypothetical scenario is at all close to reality, then Kotick would have thought that he was helping, not damaging, the product. He would have viewed the hardcore-oriented faction inside Blizzard as designing the game for themselves, not to maximize the value to the corporation. Maneuvering to discredit that faction in the eyes of the board would have enabled him to steer Blizzard in a more profitable direction, as he saw it. And discrediting that faction in the eyes of other Blizzard employees would have enabled him to press more without risking a mass revolt.
Activision's handling of Blizzard has been hands off because of how the deal with Vivendi was structured. Kotick could not do various things to Blizzard (like, change compensation, fire people, or redlight/greenlight games) without written approval of the board. This is written into ATVI's corporate bylaws. Now, of course, Vivendi's control of the board is over, and Kotick probably has much more control.
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Blizzard's position of power, in my view, was that if they were mistreated then the big brains behind WoW would bail out. Creative talent has to be coddled to some extent. It would have been in Kotick's interest to break down the solidarity of the team, so they wouldn't quit en masse if pressed.
"There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
"The bit about hardcore players not always caring about the long term interests of the game is spot on." -- Ghostcrawler
"Do you want a game with no casuals so about 500 players?"
worth noting that, on the first part, Kotick would have had every reason, from his point of view, to believe he was improving the value and return on wow. It is what he does. He was very vocal about it around the time of wotlk release in interviews (acessibility/broadening market beyond traditional gamers, speaking about an atvi title, not wow)
Other comments in interviews about wow with him imply pretty directly (I think he basically said so, hadn't even heard of wow etc.) he didn't understand how mmo's 'worked' in terms of getting and hooking/keeping a core playerbase that treated them like second lives, often working weeks or months to overcome, progressively, very long-term goals. What I took from that interview was that he didn't 'get' mmo gamers and how their motivations/investment in the game is a bit different than the major titles he had at activision at the time. It wouldn't surprise me at all for his reaction to 2.3/2.4x wow to be to look at completion metrics, difficulty hurdles, and ask 'why on earth don't they accessibilizie this thing and broaden the market?'
Last edited by Deficineiron; 2014-07-07 at 12:23 PM.
Authors I have enjoyed enough to mention here: JRR Tolkein, Poul Anderson,Jack Vance, Gene Wolfe, Glen Cook, Brian Stableford, MAR Barker, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, WM Hodgson, Fredrick Brown, Robert SheckleyJohn Steakley, Joe Abercrombie, Robert Silverberg, the norse sagas, CJ Cherryh, PG Wodehouse, Clark Ashton Smith, Alastair Reynolds, Cordwainer Smith, LE Modesitt, L. Sprague de Camp & Fletcher Pratt, Stephen R Donaldon, and Jack L Chalker.
The most important metric would have been the churn rate. We can't really say if he was right or not without knowing that. If the game was churning through casuals at a high rate, it was on an unsustainable path anyway, and would have begun to decline when the supply of fresh sheep was exhausted.
"There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
"The bit about hardcore players not always caring about the long term interests of the game is spot on." -- Ghostcrawler
"Do you want a game with no casuals so about 500 players?"
Authors I have enjoyed enough to mention here: JRR Tolkein, Poul Anderson,Jack Vance, Gene Wolfe, Glen Cook, Brian Stableford, MAR Barker, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, WM Hodgson, Fredrick Brown, Robert SheckleyJohn Steakley, Joe Abercrombie, Robert Silverberg, the norse sagas, CJ Cherryh, PG Wodehouse, Clark Ashton Smith, Alastair Reynolds, Cordwainer Smith, LE Modesitt, L. Sprague de Camp & Fletcher Pratt, Stephen R Donaldon, and Jack L Chalker.
Do you not think we have reached that point already?
I know I do.
It was mentioned a good while back that blizzard took in more subs than it lost and the game moved on like that through WoTLK it seems or near it's end. For whatever reason, more people came and stayed to play wow than left. We reached 12+ million subs with that consistent influx being greater than the gamers leaving.
However, for the past 2 expansions we have been slowing losing subs and not gaining enough new ones to replace them.
As of now, we are somewhere between 4.5 and 5.5 million lost subs that have not been replaced and not taking into account the current sub loss due to there just not being ay new live content for nearly a year. I think we have reached that "churn" point where wow is not longer gaining enough subs to compensate for the ones leaving.
The reason why I'm sure are numerous and varied.
Last edited by quras; 2014-07-07 at 01:45 PM.
Authors I have enjoyed enough to mention here: JRR Tolkein, Poul Anderson,Jack Vance, Gene Wolfe, Glen Cook, Brian Stableford, MAR Barker, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, WM Hodgson, Fredrick Brown, Robert SheckleyJohn Steakley, Joe Abercrombie, Robert Silverberg, the norse sagas, CJ Cherryh, PG Wodehouse, Clark Ashton Smith, Alastair Reynolds, Cordwainer Smith, LE Modesitt, L. Sprague de Camp & Fletcher Pratt, Stephen R Donaldon, and Jack L Chalker.
Yes, I think it's quite possible we have, and that this, not casualization, is what has caused WoW to have peaked.
It may be that market exhaustion occurring concurrently with Wrath confounded the devs into thinking that making Wrath easier is what stopped growth, leading to Cataclysm's poorly received attempt to move back to a more hardcore endgame.
All of this remains speculation until some insiders tell us what really happened. So, getting back on subject: I am hoping Pardo (or GC, or others, for that matter) lets slip some hints about all this.
"There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
"The bit about hardcore players not always caring about the long term interests of the game is spot on." -- Ghostcrawler
"Do you want a game with no casuals so about 500 players?"
At this point, I would bet a majority, possibly large majority, of new wow license sales (e.g. battlechest or all-in-one specials) are bots and/or goldsellers. Who (aside from people who were too young) has still not tried wow, of the population likely to ever try it in na/eu?
They need to get wow in on that monster beverage cod promo
Authors I have enjoyed enough to mention here: JRR Tolkein, Poul Anderson,Jack Vance, Gene Wolfe, Glen Cook, Brian Stableford, MAR Barker, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, WM Hodgson, Fredrick Brown, Robert SheckleyJohn Steakley, Joe Abercrombie, Robert Silverberg, the norse sagas, CJ Cherryh, PG Wodehouse, Clark Ashton Smith, Alastair Reynolds, Cordwainer Smith, LE Modesitt, L. Sprague de Camp & Fletcher Pratt, Stephen R Donaldon, and Jack L Chalker.
Soul Reaver was no Blood Omen IMO
It was pretty good but... it's a pity they never truly finished it.
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Not that many zones were half-assed, Arathi Highlands maybe.
Cataclysm contained the best quest zones in the game. The revamped zones are top notch for the most part. The endgame zones were pretty solid as well. In fact I remember bowling down leper gnomes in Uldum and thinking to myself "this is my favourite quest zone of all time". Not kidding.
Also, serious nostalgia goggles re: linearity of quests. WoW was always linear, in the old days quests just didn't link or flow at all, and there were huge gaps in zones with no quests (eg, all of Azshara). This criticism is ass-backwards. They actually made questing WORK and people complained about it. Vanilla questing was horrendous. And since when has there been anything between heroic and raid? Until MoP...
You guys and your conspiracy theories.
It's like you don't remember how all through late Wrath these forums were wall to wall bitching about how easy Heroics were. Then they go and make them difficult again and what happens? Exact same amount of bitching, only now about how they're too hard.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UnpleasableFanbase
"There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
"The bit about hardcore players not always caring about the long term interests of the game is spot on." -- Ghostcrawler
"Do you want a game with no casuals so about 500 players?"
Authors I have enjoyed enough to mention here: JRR Tolkein, Poul Anderson,Jack Vance, Gene Wolfe, Glen Cook, Brian Stableford, MAR Barker, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, WM Hodgson, Fredrick Brown, Robert SheckleyJohn Steakley, Joe Abercrombie, Robert Silverberg, the norse sagas, CJ Cherryh, PG Wodehouse, Clark Ashton Smith, Alastair Reynolds, Cordwainer Smith, LE Modesitt, L. Sprague de Camp & Fletcher Pratt, Stephen R Donaldon, and Jack L Chalker.