Blizzard's focus shift should mean longer expansions (three years of Legion probably)

[Deleted]

As Watcher discussed yesterday (in case you missed it), there was a period where our main focus was faster expansions

So with their focus on faster expansions it still always took them two years to get it done. In the future they will not focus on faster expansions, which will mean that Legion will probably last three years minimum.

[Low Hanging Fruit]

I wouldn't mind as long as patch content flowed tbh.

[Deleted]

So with their focus on faster expansions it still always took them two years to get it done. In the future they will not focus on faster expansions, which will mean that Legion will probably last three years minimum.

What they said was that they had been aiming for an expansion per year and that it wasnt working out.

Nowhere did they say anything that resembles 3 years for an expansion(not saying if that woiuld be good or bad, just that you have no evidence to suggest this)

[Alvito]

3 years seems highly unlikely. None of them have gone anywhere near that long. Expansions also give Blizzard a nice boost of money from the millions of them they sell. Take anything that Blizzard says with a grain of salt. They have fed us the sorter final tier or shorter expansion nonsense for over 6 years and they never came close to making that happen. We might not want to go all in on the stuff they say now.

[Tinykong]

A long expansion is fine. If there was another full raid, plus another full content patch with a dungeon, WoD being 2.5 years would be fine.

The problem is the long, long, long final patches.

[Zandalarian Paladin]

So with their focus on faster expansions it still always took them two years to get it done. In the future they will not focus on faster expansions, which will mean that Legion will probably last three years minimum.

Three years is probably exagerated. If they space content patches more equally, we may just assist in several smaller patches rather than big content dump. I don't think it'll change anything about the overall duration of an expansion.

[Deleted]

I personally think they shouldn't do expansions like now at all. They always brake game down too drastically, new talent trees, abilities, stats. Huge mopups and prunings. BUT at the same time they introduce lots of new bugs, questionable features and garbage, even some old fixed bugs come back again. So the overall quality goes even down at some point before everything is fixed.
I wish they could evolve, add new stuff and optimize, not brake down, re-do and make some features obsolete, and bring half finished new features, millions of bugs, broken add-ons. Build on that what they have - world of something, not make different game each time. There should be some fixed baseline things what never change, but now it seems anything can be gone next expansion.

[Zequill]

So with their focus on faster expansions it still always took them two years to get it done. In the future they will not focus on faster expansions, which will mean that Legion will probably last three years minimum.

I think they tried different way of getting their expansion done within a year and they always fail. After 5 times, they now know there is no way getting those expansion in one year and they know they need 2 to make it. They didn't said exactly the number of months but they said 3 Tiers and no drought. No way we will get a tier by year.

This time they aim at 2 years and I'm pretty sure they will get pretty close of that mark. 2 years is close to what we have receive. If we see a beta around the time the final tier is release, we will know they have succeed.

[Fathr]

I personally think they shouldn't do expansions like now at all. They always brake game down too drastically, new talent trees, abilities, stats. Huge mopups and prunings. BUT at the same time they introduce lots of new bugs, questionable features and garbage, even some old fixed bugs come back again. So the overall quality goes even down at some point before everything is fixed.
I wish they could evolve, add new stuff and optimize, not brake down, re-do and make some features obsolete, and bring half finished new features, millions of bugs, broken add-ons. Build on that what they have - world of something, not make different game each time. There should be some fixed baseline things what never change, but now it seems anything can be gone next expansion.

I disagree. I get where you are comming from, and find some of the things that they do as beign silly. But things have to evolve and for instance ability prunings are necesarry otherwise they cant add even more features or abilities. Just think of how many silly things a hunter would have to deal with if they've been given all the new abilities from each expansion on top of what they had in vanilla. Talk about a 50 plus ability class with way too many options and abilities where half of them wouldn't be usefull anyhow. Better to trim like they do right now. I would like though if they could make the old content somehow usefull even in the future patches, there is too much of left overs in the game and massive as it is, it seems like a waste of production time, to have so much just lying there.

[Thage]

I wouldn't mind as long as patch content flowed tbh.

This. If they keep a MoP-like patch cadence, we'll probably see two and a half or so years of Legion, with the prepatch and event for 8.0 hitting around 8 months after the final Legion patch. Assuming that giving up on the yearly/faster expansion plan and using two teams to leapfrog the expansions (the new-expac team does the groundwork for the next expac, then hands it to the current-expac team to get it ready for release and patch content) pans out the way they want it to. Otherwise, at least there will be enough meat in the expansion from patch content to keep it interesting during the drought, something that hit WoD really hard due to the lack of patch content.

[Ehrenpanzer]

A long expansion is fine. If there was another full raid, plus another full content patch with a dungeon, WoD being 2.5 years would be fine.

The problem is the long, long, long final patches.

The actual problem is the idiots they have put in charge have no idea what the word "pacing" means

[Puri]

So? As long as they provide steady content I am absoutely fine with longer expansions.

[Deleted]

The actual problem is the idiots they have put in charge have no idea what the word "pacing" means

I'm pretty sure they never meant for those patches to be so long. Its more likely that the expansions simply took longer to finnish then they anticipated.

This is backed by them wanting to make 1 expansion per year but taking several years between each expansion.

Its an idea they are moving away from and instead focussing on delivering content more often. Which is a good change, so no reason to be so salty

[anon5123]

I don't care about how long expansions last.

I care about the amount of time between major content releases, and how much content there is.

If an expac lasts 1 year but has plenty of content and you never run out of things to do, that's great.

If an expac lasts 3 years but has content drought and you run out of things to do, that's terrible.

And vice versa.

[Otimus]

TBH, with steady content, I wouldn't even mind something as insane as a 5 year expansion.

All I care about it is new and fun content

[Blur4stuff]

let's speculate and argue about speculation

[Mrbubbles17]

So with their focus on faster expansions it still always took them two years to get it done. In the future they will not focus on faster expansions, which will mean that Legion will probably last three years minimum.

I have no problems with longer patches so long as the gameplay is fun and the content is kept relevant through constant and frequent updates to the game via large content patches. Vanilla WoW ran for 3 years and 2 months without the release of it's first expansion and their was always something to do and their were so many content patches to keep the game up to date that it ran just fine.

Legion is off on the right track with weekly "pre-launch" patch updates that add new scenarios and more frequent Legion Invasions throughout Azeroth. They've already shown us a sneak peak at patch 7.1 "Return to Karazhan" as well.

I like the direction they've taken so far and hopefully they don't let take their foot off the gas and lose momentum as the months go by.

[SirBeef]

A long expansion is fine. If there was another full raid, plus another full content patch with a dungeon, WoD being 2.5 years would be fine.

The problem is the long, long, long final patches.

Which was a result of them shifting focus on the next expansion after the final raid tier is released.

[AmericanCynic]

I wouldn't mind a three year long expansion. Before, expansions used to feel long as though they were eras. I would always get super excited for the new expansion announcements and releases because we were changing the theme. Now it's just kind of .. "Oh, a new flavor, we got this like a year ago and it sucked."

So long as we get content consistently I'm all for it.

[Ehrenpanzer]

I'm pretty sure they never meant for those patches to be so long. Its more likely that the expansions simply took longer to finnish then they anticipated.

This is backed by them wanting to make 1 expansion per year but taking several years between each expansion.

Its an idea they are moving away from and instead focussing on delivering content more often. Which is a good change, so no reason to be so salty

If this was a one expansion issue, I would be inclined to agree with you... but its not...this is a 8yr+ problem that every xpac they repeat the same crap, and the problem never seems to get fixed