Where did all the development effort go? Legion vs BFA feature comparison

[Jngizu]

Nah same stuff, do Suramar WQ, return in 12 hours/full day to respawn them. It was even less grindy, we were doing Suramar quests and Withered army training in between - both gave rep.

Mate, it was a lot worse, and on top of that it wasn't account bound in the beginning. You only need 7k Honored for Siege/King's Rest and then finish your faction's main storyline for the other (no rep/grind required, just do the loremaster basically). While IIRC, for Arcway and CoS you needed Revered, but I might be wrong on that.

Thanks for your post and insights.

Its hard to measure scale of zones vs Legion, although I will challenge the leveling timelines and breakdown.

At launch of BFA, it took me all 3 zones -- without heirlooms, boosts, or rested XP -- to get to max level. I was about 75% through Zuldazar when I dinged 120, and then spent another half day completing all the quest lines and unlocking King's Rest.

In Legion, it took me roughly 3 zones (out of 4 leveling zones) to hit the level cap; Highmountain i did entirely at the level cap and the same obviously for Suramar.

But you are right -- one design mistake I think they made, was segregating the quest load across factions. 20-30% faction specific adds flavor, but by splitting 50/50 they really penalize alt leveling. And if people don't play both sides of the divide, they will miss half the content from the expansion.

In terms of design, you're entirely right... warfronts might have ended up more complex than expected and sucked up more time. perhaps the zone size was a non-linear growth to development effort,

I feel something that we don't notice is that BfA seems to have a lot of backend changes. Developing the technology for both Warfronts and Islands must have taken quite a while. Same for the automated stat/ilvl squish, Warmode, etc, etc,...

And I feel like going forward, Blizzard will need to spend more and more time each expansion to re-write their engine. I do agree that there is a lack of things to do at max level compared to Legion. At least, I miss a reason for playing/leveling alts. Class campaigns were great for that. However, the content we do have, is WAY better than Legion for me.

[Romanesca]

Honestly, the start of legion was just as bad if not worse than BFA to me. The order hall and illidan quest line / suramar I believe were all time gated in some form or another, but could be wrong about that, as I quit legion early on because class design felt terrible without legendaries, and we all know how terrible legendary farming was.

I would say overall there's less content, but they also probably spent a significant amount of time developing their engine for the new systems we have, which absolutely need to be fleshed out way more. I think a lot of people think of the second half of legion in terms of the overall quality of the expansion, as I took a break after about 6 weeks from launch and came back and played for a good 6 months without stopping because there was so much to do. But obviously, the expansion didn't start out that way.

I think we should give it a few months to see how the expansion shapes up to be, as most expansions don't start out with tons of content. (Although cata starting out had the most raids at launch, and they were solid raids. It also launched with 9 dungeons and released 5 more over the course of the expansion, even though some were rehashed and dragon soul was an abysmal end to the expansion)

[wysimdnwyg]

Professions aside from herbalism and alchemy are mostly useless, but that was a problem since WoD.

Add in JC and you can go all the way back to BC that everything else has been useless. That was the last time you could reasonably make gear that was a good as anything you could get in the first raid. JC has been spotty in its usefulness the whole way. The real problem with it now (and from WoD on) is that sockets are so inconsistent. In BC, pretty much everything had sockets, including quest gear from the first day's questing. Admittedly, that was a bit excessive. However, having sockets on raid gear should be a given, which would make JC useful again. Now you have to hope that your gear drops a) give the right secondary stats to make it an upgrade, b) potentially gets WF/TF to make it an upgrade, and c) procs a socket at all.

[probert]

I feel something that we don't notice is that BfA seems to have a lot of backend changes. Developing the technology for both Warfronts and Islands must have taken quite a while. Same for the automated stat/ilvl squish, Warmode, etc, etc,...

And I feel like going forward, Blizzard will need to spend more and more time each expansion to re-write their engine. I do agree that there is a lack of things to do at max level compared to Legion. At least, I miss a reason for playing/leveling alts. Class campaigns were great for that. However, the content we do have, is WAY better than Legion for me.

The new guild manage and voice chat feature means this is the first time since launch that my guild has been able to retire 3rd party voicecoms. Team Speak became Ventrillo became Discord became in-game chat. Also a guild log makes moderation and planning much easier.

Stat squish wasn't a one time thing, but a mechanic they've implemented... so perhaps its front loaded effort. Given how much class mechanics change expansion to expansion, I question whether it will be simple in future..but at least they have a strategy.

Warfronts and Islands might be proof of concepts for technology they'll use later. This is the OPTIMISTIC view, but I feel that, ultimately, these game modes will fail as the AI / bots are never good in these types of games.

Its a good point you make; this might have been a maintenance/upgrade/investment release where we don't get to see the benefits in the short term.

Doesn't excuse crap mechanics (GCD changes; ability squish; gear drops; reputation grinds; azerite) but it does explain why there's less content this time around.

[Vulcanasm]

My question is... where did the development resources go for all of Legion's new features, versus what was delivered in Battle for Azeroth?

You want a serious guess? I think it was pushed forward several months due to shareholder pressure. They were able to code rudiments of working systems but no time to refine them.

Legion: Class Order halls (8 class quests & NPCs)
BFA: A reduced mission table + faction campaign (about 2 hours of quests)

The mission table and "advancement" research wouldn't exist if there had been adequate time to respond to player feedback. They have literally no impact on the game. None. In fact, their vestigial presence could be taken as evidence that Blizzard weren't given enough time to carefully consider features.

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Doesn't excuse crap mechanics (GCD changes; ability squish; gear drops; reputation grinds; azerite) but it does explain why there's less content this time around.

The mechanical changes were idiotic, and I don't consider those an artifact of the inadequate development time. Those have the reek of a stubborn developer who goes all-in on a stupid idea, then doubles down against a flood of negative feedback, calling themselves an "artiste" and talking about their "vision".

[Khallid]

the next details showcase how thin the content becomes. Bold represents objectively superior content.

Legion: New Class (Demon Hunter)
BFA: 6 new allied races, reskins of existing character models, require Legion achievements of varying complexity

Legion: Class Order halls (8 class quests & NPCs)
BFA: A reduced mission table + faction campaign (about 2 hours of quests)

Legion: Artifact Weapons (including skins, abilities, artifact power, and quests)
BFA: Heart of Azeroth (including 3 pieces of armor with randomized abilities and random drops)

Legion: Tier sets for each raid, for each class
BFA: Armor types

Seems pretty biased if you ask me.

It's a known thing that Blizzard has never released 2 classes in two expansions back to back. DKs were introduced in Wrath, Monks in MoP, DH in Legion. There's no surprise or effort or anything. This time they went for races. It's comparing apples to oranges.

Class order halls were indeed better, but it was content that you would only see a tiny fraction of if you played a single character. Blizzard purposely went away from making class-specific quests from the flop of patch 7.2, where the so-called "massive content patch" looked extremely weak because it was all class-specific stuff. So all that effort was considered wasted effort back then. I agree that the War Campaign should've been better, since it's not class-specific, but I think you're downplaying it on purpose, or exaggerating how good the class hall campaign was. It seems like the war campaign is going to continue with future patches, so I hope you're not comparing all of Legion patches against the release patch of BfA.

Artifact weapons were indeed better, but it's not a matter of resources. It's clearly a matter of design. There's a lot of resources put into making a lot of azerite traits, balancing them and all that crap, they just ended up being boring. Comparing resources doesn't seem adequate.

I agree with tier sets. Having fewer transmogs does sound like less resources, no argument there. Azerite pieces are different for each class so there's no reason why there couldn't be different sets for each class.

And if you really want to harp on resources, the time gap between WoD's end patch and Legion release was vastly longer than the time gap between Legion's end patch and BfA release. So expecting equal amount of resources is odd.

[Ithrowmagicz]

And yeah, IDK what happened with the team that brought us Legion. It makes no sense this abyssal drop in quality and quantity

I read somewhere that Blizzard switches between 2 dev teams every expansion

[Celarent]

To be fair to any developer, these are creative endeavors. If you've ever designed anything that has to appeal to the senses you'll know that there's no perfect formula. Factor in scale and complexity of something like WoW and you have an enterprise where many, many elements don't shape up the way you wanted.

Also, from the outside we don't see day-to-day corporate realities. There's turnover, there are transfers, there are promotions and there are reorgs. Influence waxes and wanes, and somebody new grabs the megaphone. Did you know Hazzikostas did class design for Cataclysm? I didn't until his PAX speech. Wondering if I should thank him for the most fun state of Arms, but the point is we don't see the human element that changes everything.

[TheEaterofSouls]

Legions "extra" effort came at the expense of Warlords. BFA didn't come at the expense of Legion.

[Jngizu]

The new guild manage and voice chat feature means this is the first time since launch that my guild has been able to retire 3rd party voicecoms. Team Speak became Ventrillo became Discord became in-game chat. Also a guild log makes moderation and planning much easier.

Stat squish wasn't a one time thing, but a mechanic they've implemented... so perhaps its front loaded effort. Given how much class mechanics change expansion to expansion, I question whether it will be simple in future..but at least they have a strategy.

Warfronts and Islands might be proof of concepts for technology they'll use later. This is the OPTIMISTIC view, but I feel that, ultimately, these game modes will fail as the AI / bots are never good in these types of games.

Its a good point you make; this might have been a maintenance/upgrade/investment release where we don't get to see the benefits in the short term.

Doesn't excuse crap mechanics (GCD changes; ability squish; gear drops; reputation grinds; azerite) but it does explain why there's less content this time around.

Even if they don't re-use the AI in the future, Warfronts took a lot of work to allow them to update entire zones. People just see the scenario, but it's much more than that.

Same for Islands, being able to procedurally generate content is something completely new to WoW and that they will be able to re-use in the future. Even if the Islands concept dies.

Then if you look at 8.1, it has way more content than 7.1.

My biggest complain is that compared to Legion, there are a lot less incentive to play alts at max level. But in terms of sheer amount of content, BfA definitely has more.

[Hyral]

Legion: New Class (Demon Hunter)
BFA: 6 new allied races, reskins of existing character models, require Legion achievements of varying complexity

New classes skip expacs, by now you should have noticed the pattern.

Legion: Class Order halls (8 class quests & NPCs)
BFA: A reduced mission table + faction campaign (about 2 hours of quests)

And also a ton more quest hubs in every zone and zones being much larger than before. You can finish the main storyline in a zone (which imo feel longer than the Legion ones) and only be halfway through the entire zone's content.

Legion: Artifact Weapons (including skins, abilities, artifact power, and quests)
BFA: Heart of Azeroth (including 3 pieces of armor with randomized abilities and random drops)

Skins? We have actual weapon drops now. Abilities? That's the traits. Artifact weapons literally had tons of traits that were just "your Blade of Justice does X% more damage 3/3". And many of the golden traits/on use abilities were made into talents. You are technically getting more now since the old relevant stuff is being added baseline or in talents.

Legion: Tier sets for each raid, for each class
BFA: Armor types

One of the worst decisions of BfA was this, removing class armor sets. And I guess removing the set bonuses to make the generic trait of Uldir drops have Uldir specific traits is meant to be a replacement but everyone knows it's literally not. Set bonuses could often completely change playstyles. With that said, EN didn't have tiers so...

Legion: Transmography 2.0, Mythic+ dungeons, World Quests
BFA: Expeditions (see: heart of azeroth), a Warfront, voice chat 2.0

But here's the meat of the topic. They wasted their time coming up with features that really nobody cares about because they completely lack focus. Expeditions were meant to be like old scenarios while giving you the opportunity to explore, and then they made them small and put a timer on them, meaning they are nothing like the old scenarios that were more like 3 man dungeons and you have no time to explore... And warfronts? They need to be PvP and all would be fine.

Imo the development was wasted with bad management. They created new systems to generate content with no clear goal of what that content was meant to accomplish. In Wrath they spent a lot of time working on phasing, with the clear goal of using it as a storytelling tool, that system has evolved immensely . In MoP they worked on item level scaling and used it to deliver challenging end game content in the form of Challenge dungeons, that system is clear to see how far it's gone. They also worked on creating events and world objectives with the Timeless Isle, and all those advancements led to Legion, in which they created a system of progression after level cap, in obtaining a secondary set of experience in AP and bringing back the old talent tree system of chosing and leveling traits. All the previous systems they've developed and improved have had a clear goal and purpose to the game. But now a system to randomize mobs and zones? A system to gather wood and iron? When will that even be used again? Utterly wasted development time.

[Siq1ne]

Really can't judge until it's all over. Damn sure am not judging an expansion by the first patch. We'll see if 8.1 fixes a bunch of issues, because it's not going to be feature rich and it probably shouldn't. The game really just needs to polish and fix in 8.1

If rewards continue to be this bad though, I'm worried for the rest of the expansion. I don't understand how anybody could cry about grinding in BFA because there is nothing to grind. The "grinds" are extremely underwhelming in terms of reward (other than M+) as all the best things come from very casual content (granted RNG) like weekly caches, weekly events, weekly, weekly, weekly, every 10-14 days warfronts.

The developers of WoW can't play WoW like most people play WoW. Or there would be no WoW. If the developers want to play WoW it has to be accessible to them to. Anybody ever think about that? So either the devs don't play the game at all, or they make the game playable casually. Both things may be true in light of recent events.

Sorry I went on a tangent. I'll show myself out.

[WowIsDead64]

My question is... where did the development resources go for all of Legion's new features, versus what was delivered in Battle for Azeroth?

Several guesses.
1) Blizzard just can't produce one good xpack once in two years, as it was in the pas, when Lich Kind had new dungeons in every content patch. They have to make every 2nd xpack filler one.
2) They have two teams, that develop two xpacks at the same time. Team A and team B. Now it's turn for team B or even C, that is so inexperienced, that is repeated all possible mistakes from several previous xpacks.
3) They have moved resources to another project. They say, that it's impossible or that every game has it's separate team, but there is one common factor - budget. You need to pay for development. And if you have some new game on horizon, that doesn't earn it's own money yet - you have to move some resources to it. May be not developers, but money from common budget.

[Kithelle]

Legion had 10 dungeons, 2 mythic only like BFA.

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And yeah, IDK what happened with the team that brought us Legion. It makes no sense this abyssal drop in quality and quantity

Perhaps the rumors are true of the A team and b team...

[plaits]

They make twice as much revenue in quarters where they have expansion releases compared to others. That's the simple fact. It doesn't matter at all if it was ready or not. Shareholders don't give a shit if your game is buggy or if you like your dumb digital necklace or not. They want to see big fat $$$ and that's what expansion release quarters get no matter what.

Look at the historical data going back a few years - you have to dig into the excel spreadsheet they supply every time they do their quarterly reports - they make half as much money in quarters when games don't have a release. And while no quarter during Legion dropped as low as during the lowest period in WoD (when honestly, shit actually looked pretty bad for Blizzard - they barely made more than their expenses one quarter) it was also trending pretty low pre-BfA.

I realise their reports do not separate out WoW from other games, so you can only base it off general trends, but the trend is most definitely there and very obvious.

[El_Diabl0]

Unannounced project? Maybe?

[Burning4]

I'm assuming it is because they had a smaller budget because the company now views WoW as a legacy title and it is only going to get enough time and development as it needs to sustain itself. Legion may have been the last expansion that they considered an important project. This is all baseless assumption so don't take any thing I'm saying seriously. It makes enough sense to me to consider it.
What I'm really hoping it is is that this whole expansion was done by a sort of B team while majority of everyone worked on the next expansion because it is going to be larger than Cataclysm with how much they are going to redo and change the world. Everything updated and synced up to the same point in the story. Maybe change the factions, make 4 of em, or make none of em. But this is also baseless but I want to dream.

[plaits]

Unannounced project? Maybe?

They are definitely throwing tons of cash at those.

There's three that are known - the Diablo project is considered unannounced, plus a mobile game plus a game that is unknown, though they have been looking for people with FPS experience.

They also have an incubator - who knows what's happening in there right now.

[Musta]

Perhaps the rumors are true of the A team and b team...

Im not gonna lie, I believe this a little more every day.

[Soon-TM]

blizzard scraped an entire wod patch which gave them time to make more stuff for legion

Wasn't it the patch that would have included Farahlon and the Zangar Sea (which was supposed to be a sort of mini-Vash'jir)?