Is Blizzard rushing BfA?

[Heeresman]

Rushing things.....

to know that you need to know their schedule

[Aggrophobic]

You must have a pretty bad memory then if you think legion has so much more bugs than previous expansions...

Not at all.

[Sarevokcz]

The developers already said they're not overhauling all the classes again this time, only a few ones that were clearly badly designed in Legion such as Survival and Demonology. So that's a lot of work saved.

feels like theyre overhauling demolocks every single expansion since cata tbh

And not sure about rushing things, but seems like beta will be significantly shorter this time? might not be a bad thing, it was previously used more as a PR tool anyway, while getting very little changes in the last two months and gamebreaking bugs making it live regardless...

[OneTripleZero]

I think the game is further along than most people are imagining.

[ReD-EyeD]

There is at most a few months left till the Beta. By then:
- 36 specialisations have to be finalised

Finalized specs? They are already pretty finilazed and maximum need some pretty basic tweaks at best.

Only not finished specs are survival and demo. And they're already being tested right now.

[Revamp Man]

I don't see how a quality expansion can be released given the timeline Blizzard has to work with.

There is at most a few months left till the Beta. By then:
- 36 specialisations have to be finalised
- 10 dungeons tested
- 6 zones tested
- raid testing starting

All this on top of the new systems coming with BfA:
- warfronts
- islands
- PvP overhaul
- stat squish
- AP 2.0: Azerite

How in the world is there enough time to fully flesh out these systems in a few months so they can be fine tuned for Beta? I think that Blizzard has once again bitten off more than they can chew and as a result BfA will be rushed out in order to meet thr September deadline they cornered themselves into.

you do realize that stuff gets tested in beta right???

the way you are talking you seem to think the beta is early access but this is blizard not some crappy dev on steam

[Grenzstein]

Armchair developers at work here I see.

You guys have no idea what is ready or not - if you base it just off what the alpha content that is playable right now you are pretty stupid.

Yeah, i love those guys trying to teach a billionaire company how to run their games. It's just the usual "doom & gloom" in this forum. WoW has been dying since 2004.

[Deleted]

I don't see how a quality expansion can be released given the timeline Blizzard has to work with.

There is at most a few months left till the Beta. By then:
- 36 specialisations have to be finalised
- 10 dungeons tested
- 6 zones tested
- raid testing starting

All this on top of the new systems coming with BfA:
- warfronts
- islands
- PvP overhaul
- stat squish
- AP 2.0: Azerite

How in the world is there enough time to fully flesh out these systems in a few months so they can be fine tuned for Beta? I think that Blizzard has once again bitten off more than they can chew and as a result BfA will be rushed out in order to meet thr September deadline they cornered themselves into.

the very first time Ion EVER talked about legion, he also mentioned that the expansion after was already in the works. by the time they release it, theyve been working on BfA for over 2years

[Spryte]

I don't think Blizzard really cares. WoD shows that no matter what they spew out and how little effort they put in people will still buy it and play it. There seems to be enough dedicated players with subs as well as whales that buy constant race changes, faction changes, character boosts or wow tokens that they can still make a profit.

[Northy]

They've been working on BfA since the start of Legion. people make the mistake of thinking they only begin work on next expansion at the end of the current one. That's silly.

[Deleted]

Is it even certain there will be a beta? Didn't blizzard have heroes of the storm just go through a 'technical alpha' before launch

[Rotted]

I hope so,

I was genuinely disappointed at the theme when it was announced at blizzcon, I'll be playing it regardless. Just it seems we've had this great big lead up to the void then dropped.

That being said its entirely possible the name Battle for Azeroth doesn't refer to just the horde vs alliance conflict and we'll see a big bad in the 2nd half, it could be applied to defending it, mind you this could of also been applied to Legion, Mists, Cataclysm, Wrath and Classic.

Anyways, rambling,

[Nnyco]

There's not many things to rush though.

Warfronts will be glorified Garrisons (may you accept it or not, "build stuff, send troops to missions, blablabla is nothing more than Order Halls/Garrisons).
Islands are glorified MoP Scenarii
Stats Squish will be faster to put in place than the first time it was implemented (MoP), 1) because they know how to do it now, 2) because they're also squishing ilvl and all this time, so they'll be able to manage the curve more efficiently
Artifact/Azerite seems to be an unglorified Legion Artifact (less impactful talents, probably a bit fewer farm too)
PvP balance lel, nobody really cares anyway
36 Specs to finalize is a non-issue, as they will not revamp all of them, only a few. For most of them, that's tuning/small refinement at best.
New zones are probably 95% finished right now.

So, beyond the raids/dungeons (which will be time-gated as always anyway), there's nothing to be really afraid of in terms of development.

warfronts are a 20man pve raid, dunno where you read that its a garrison but it isnt

[Cracked]

I'm just gonna say that with this much time left to release, legion already had most raid testing completed with absolute majority of specs fleshed out and systems working.

No, I don't believe that BfA will be very high quality expansion.

[Grenzstein]

I don't think Blizzard really cares. WoD shows that no matter what they spew out and how little effort they put in people will still buy it and play it. There seems to be enough dedicated players with subs as well as whales that buy constant race changes, faction changes, character boosts or wow tokens that they can still make a profit.

Yeah, i guess Blizzard doesn't care about getting more money! You must be right! They are content in sitting on what they have. Makes perfect sense! No company in the world wants to grow, it's nonsense, all they want is to release "bad products".

This "I hate WoW but i spend my life in a fansite complaining" gets old kinda fast.

[Deleted]

I don't see how a quality expansion can be released given the timeline Blizzard has to work with.

There is at most a few months left till the Beta. By then:
- 36 specialisations have to be finalised
- 10 dungeons tested
- 6 zones tested
- raid testing starting

All this on top of the new systems coming with BfA:
- warfronts
- islands
- PvP overhaul
- stat squish
- AP 2.0: Azerite

How in the world is there enough time to fully flesh out these systems in a few months so they can be fine tuned for Beta? I think that Blizzard has once again bitten off more than they can chew and as a result BfA will be rushed out in order to meet thr September deadline they cornered themselves into.

I don't think the WoW team consists of 2 devs and 4 testers. Besides that it's not even that much .. it's like they're gonna completely re-design all specs.

[Kaleredar]

I think the OP profoundly misunderstands what about "development" takes the majority of time.


Art and programming. It's art and programming. Things like "gameplay balance" and "rewards" (numbers stuff, which is what the OP is concerned about) can be tweaked on the fly as need be. That's what we have beta for as well.

Meanwhile, things like modeling, texturing, rigging, animating, and coding new systems are the things that take up the bulk of development time because so many people are involved in the pipeline process. The "numbers" that people like the OP are concerned about might be difficult to get "right," but they aren't difficult to change.



So let's check what we've seen from the expansion so far... the art assets and gameplay systems seem to mostly be in place. So... no, I don't think it's going to be rushed, because all of the real time consuming factors have been largely taken care of.

[owbu]

There is at most a few months left till the Beta. By then:
- 36 specialisations have to be finalised
- 10 dungeons tested
- 6 zones tested
- raid testing starting


All this on top of the new systems coming with BfA:

- stat squish
- AP 2.0: Azerite

All of those should be no problem to get done in 6 month. Its pretty standard stuff, they got tons of experience testing this by now. As long as beta starts in a couple of month, it should be fine.

- warfronts
- islands

Those two might honestly crash and burn. They use a lot of new techs, they are new concepts and they didnt seem to be super sure how they will actually work. So those might either pop up on the test realms at some pont and be awesome and functional or they might be a terriblle mess. No way to know, yet, I guess.
I just hope that if they are terrible, that they dont spend all their energy on rescuing them.

- PvP overhaul

I refuse to speculate about server tech stuff. This is already armchair designery enough^^

So, I guess we will know how rushed it is, once the critical features are actually in a playable state.

[huth]

All of those should be no problem to get done in 6 month. Its pretty standard stuff, they got tons of experience testing this by now. As long as beta starts in a couple of month, it should be fine.

Given that they had to do work of roughly this magnitude for every single expansion, i have no idea why the OP is worried about it. Though my guess would be ignorance.

[TheGrimsey]

They've already done the stat squish on the alpha... Might just need a bit of testing & tweaking but that's what the alpha is for.

2 Zones and 2 Dungeons are being tested.

Specs are just being tweaked a bit(except for survival(already being tested) and demonology)

We've already seen that a ton of the models have been made from the datamined stuff so that's probably not gonna delay it.