Why did Blizzard blow their load on Mechagon?

[Rorixis]

I think story wise and content wise Mechagon would have been great as a 8.2.5 kinda thing but because of the essence and itemlvl stuff they kinda had to put it with the other gear systems to not make it either last too long or be pointless in terms of power lvl.

[kranur]

Why not? It was nice, it felt different, I liked it. If you didn't, well, sucks to be an eternal hater.

The only load that was blown anywhere went into the dungeon, and even that's pretty poor.
Like, fucking Mechagon, and all we're getting is a zone that looks like Tiragarde with a bunch of cogs and scrap and a dungeon that showcases like 1% of what is supposed to be an entire kingdom... basically the exact same as Nazjatar/Eternal Palace. An actual joke compared to what it was supposed to be.
The idea and the actual activities in the zones might be top notch, but the actual zones are just pathetic - and 8.3's Nzoth stuff is no different from that. There's lore and potential for an entire expansion... and all we're getting is a joke of a slice of like 5% of what it could actually be.

Lol, cities are kingdoms now? What should they have been? The new continent of Nazjatar? lol

[Dommie530]

1. I know this is subjective....but for me, Mechagon was a POS dungeon. We used a saved ID to run last boss until we had the essence at rank3, then never came back. None of my friends wanted to play that dungeon. When we first entered it we hoped for something similar to Karazhan 2.0.....but what a surprise! Half of the Dungeon is reusing the outworld that you already know...and what comes after that is absolutely PITTIFUL. A tunnel leading into a single large room with 3 shitty houses you stealth through and then another room with a ramp before it that has the last Boss in it. Wow. Just wow. What an incredible disappointment.

2. This expansion did not start to suck somewhere in the middle...it was sucking hard right with the prepatch. The one-time events were lackluster compared to Legion. Classes felt gutted without the Artifact abilities. Fewer class changes than ANY of the Legion patches had. The entire Darkshore "campaign" (+ 2 Novels) was a nonsensical POS just to spit into the faces of Alliance players and get them worked up for absolutely NOTHING. The entire expansion was void of ANY kind of satisfactory counter attack. It was just shitting on the Alliance for the sake of shitting on the Alliance. Story? What Story was there? Saurfang was against Sylvanas from the start and did not change at all until his duel 2 years later. What a shit-show of a story. Azerite armor was also sucking rightr from the start. Not getting any kind of new class mechanics while leveling up sucked. With the exception of Drustvar and maybe 3 quests in Stormsong the Alliance questing content also sucked major ass. Horde was ok, though.


I firmly believe that the decision to have totally split content for both factions is what killed this expansion, Making two cities the scale of Boralus+Zul'Dazar was too much for Blizzard. Those cities are gigantic in WoW terms and actually quite well done - just that ~80% of both is never used in any meanigful way...so they spent MONTHS of the BFA dev time on creating two dead cities. You can argue that they used parts of those for a dungeon+raid+cinematics...but still...think about the time it took them to design those places down to every last ladder, ever hud, every NPC standing in a corner that says something when somebody walks by...those two cities are actually amazing. But at what cost?! I would have gladly traded Boralus and used fucking Stormwind as ahub for the expansion if that meant better gameplay + gearing mechanics and 1/2 dungeons more.
The same is true for leveling zones. BFA had 50% more leveling zones than Legion - but offered everybody who actually wanted to level in this POS expansion 25% LESS zones to actually play...let alone the complete absense of a max-level zone. Suramar was what kept Legion going strong after the first 2 weeks. BFA had no max-level zone....BFA also featured no interesting new systems to unlock while leveling. NOTHING. And then ontop of that it took almost twice the time to get patches out.

Knowing what you can pull off and what you cannot is the mark of a good developer. Only amateurs try and force a project far beyond their resources to then fail miserably. And that is exactly what Blizzard did with this expansion. They wasted their gun powder on ultimately meaningless faction-exclusinve-RP-scenery (noteven CONTENT, jst scenery!) and Saurfang HD cinematics only to run dry when they had to actually create something that was fun to play.

It was just a complete disaster of a project in every way.

And the situation will just get worse when most players won't have anything to do 6-8 weeks from now, with no Tier-Sets or PvP-Sets to collect...and still >6 months to go until Shadowlands (which so far does not look like a huge improvement in terms of gameplay!!!).

I really don't know what happened to the leading dev team. Are those really the same guys that designed Legion 7.0/7.1 content? It's hard to believe.

It’s realy not hard to believe, people make legion out to be some masterpiece, whilst in reality it realy was one of the worst expansions to be created.

Dungeons were great and carried the entire fucking expansion, then the mage tower kept the intrest later on. The raids were boring and realy awefull. The theme the entire expansion was just boring and overused, nothing felt good. We slayed titan afther titan. But now people are suprised we face an old god?
Artifact weapon was the most retarded system ever created, making your farm way way way longer then our current neck with all essences rank 3. U couldnt play an offspecc, alts were a no gogo.


Legendaries lets not even start there, first year with those things were bullshit. It litterly destroyed offspeccs alts and the entire fun of your charcter expierence, as a cutting edge raider this legion expansion where people are so fund off is for me my personal fucking nightmare, its the first time i quit in 14 years.

Suramar? Realy hated that place, but fine. I personnaly liked mechagon/nazjatar

[Nathasil]

It’s realy not hard to believe, people make legion out to be some masterpiece, whilst in reality it realy was one of the worst expansions to be created.

Dungeons were great and carried the entire fucking expansion, then the mage tower kept the intrest later on. The raids were boring and realy awefull. The theme the entire expansion was just boring and overused, nothing felt good. We slayed titan afther titan. But now people are suprised we face an old god?
Artifact weapon was the most retarded system ever created, making your farm way way way longer then our current neck with all essences rank 3. U couldnt play an offspecc, alts were a no gogo.


Legendaries lets not even start there, first year with those things were bullshit. It litterly destroyed offspeccs alts and the entire fun of your charcter expierence, as a cutting edge raider this legion expansion where people are so fund off is for me my personal fucking nightmare, its the first time i quit in 14 years.

Suramar? Realy hated that place, but fine. I personnaly liked mechagon/nazjatar

You can like or not like Legion. A lot of people say Dazar'alor is actually a good raid, too, while i believe it is the greatest stain on the WoW raid journal.

In my book:
Legion gave you 4 zones to level in + a max level zone that actually CHANGED while telling you an actual STORY for weeks.
BFA offers everybody 3 leveling zones and has jack-shit-nothing for max-level.

You may like or not like the artifact system but unlocking your first golden trait on it was something most players actually enjoyed. The neck/Azerite had this kind of enjoyment at exactly NO time.

Building up your Class Order Hall actually unlocked new stuff. Equipping a Bodyguard to give you 3times the resources felt rewardning. BFA just gives you a table where every single thing told by it is BS and the rewards are laughably low - yet somehow they STILL managed to gate some unlocks behind it.

Dalaran was a better hub than BOTH of the new cities combined.

Legendaries gave you a reason to actually DO THE FUCKING RAIDS. BFA's raids may be better...who knows? Nobody plays them. Why would you waste your time on that content that rewards LESS than a M+ dungeon and simply takes more effort in every regard? No Legendaries, no Tier, less loot/time than M+. Maybe you like to run raids for absolutely no reason at all...i don't know! Maybe! But i don't. None of my friends does. And with the exception of the "exclusive" PvP+M+ community that always hated Raids awarding something worthwhile i do not see a lot of people happy with the only guild-content in this game dead in the water. And it's not like people are playing more PvP/M+ than in Legion either.

Also, Legion being superior - FAR SUPERIOR - to BFA may even be subjective....that has very little to do with the TL: DR of the post you quoted: BFA wasted all of its gas on faction-exclusive-scenery and ran out of steam when the actual playable content needed dev-time.

[DemonDays]

Seems like a waste to put so many resources on Mechagon with the big dungeon and world content when that could have been used for Nzoth stuff instead. Besides giving the alliance an allied race that barely anyone wants to play what was the point? Mechagon is so isolated from the rest of the story that BFA wouldn't have really been affected if it didn't exist. Why not just do Mechagon in another expansion?

Blizzard was already chewing on too many themes in BFA already. Sargeras sword stuck in azeroth, wrathion/dragons, Horde vs Horde&Alliance, the drust, Ghuun, Azshara, Nzoth, Voljin & Bob Salami, Azerite, Sylvanus plans, exploring Zandalaar & Kul'tiras and then amputee gnomes out of nowhere?? Blizzard lost focus with this expansion and just tried to throw everything in the can and shake it up and see what holds. This led to us feeling like there's little to no resolution on many of the core themes BFA tried to explore. Why does it feel like the thing they put they most effort into this expansion was the side story?

8.2 was their attempt to save and Revitalize BfA. We got Essences after the failed Azerite too.It didn't work. They made a conscious decision after 8.2 to abandon BfA to work on Shadowlands.


I don't know how much more obvious this could be after seeing that terrible end of expansion cinematic. As if 8.3 wasn't bare bones enough as it is.

[owbu]

I think they were planing Mechagon to be the diversion moment of the expansion. Like the troll raids in the middle of a burning legion expansion or the old god raid in the middle of an undead expansion and so on.

Which work great to combat "too many X" fatigue in a normal expansion, but fall apart when used in an expansion that is all over the place anyways. If we would have gone Uldir - Nazjatar - Nzoth, some whacky gnomes would have been fun. The same goes for an expansion which would have had 3 Siege of Dazaralor type raids fighting each other.

But since we were already starting out with more themes than the game could possibly handle, even with good storytelling, mechagon just felt like another distraction in a sea of distractions.

[Mightytasty]

Doubtful, none of the layoffs were from the Dev team, it was almost all just customer service and QA. No 8.3.5 is fine i just wish 8.3 would of ended better, so i hope there is an earlier prepatch.

You realize QA is a part of production, right? They can only release content as fast as they can QA test it.

[slime]

Those Mechagon and Nazj meta achieves are something else....

[Dommie530]

You can like or not like Legion. A lot of people say Dazar'alor is actually a good raid, too, while i believe it is the greatest stain on the WoW raid journal.

In my book:
Legion gave you 4 zones to level in + a max level zone that actually CHANGED while telling you an actual STORY for weeks.
BFA offers everybody 3 leveling zones and has jack-shit-nothing for max-level.

You may like or not like the artifact system but unlocking your first golden trait on it was something most players actually enjoyed. The neck/Azerite had this kind of enjoyment at exactly NO time.

Building up your Class Order Hall actually unlocked new stuff. Equipping a Bodyguard to give you 3times the resources felt rewardning. BFA just gives you a table where every single thing told by it is BS and the rewards are laughably low - yet somehow they STILL managed to gate some unlocks behind it.

Dalaran was a better hub than BOTH of the new cities combined.

Legendaries gave you a reason to actually DO THE FUCKING RAIDS. BFA's raids may be better...who knows? Nobody plays them. Why would you waste your time on that content that rewards LESS than a M+ dungeon and simply takes more effort in every regard? No Legendaries, no Tier, less loot/time than M+. Maybe you like to run raids for absolutely no reason at all...i don't know! Maybe! But i don't. None of my friends does. And with the exception of the "exclusive" PvP+M+ community that always hated Raids awarding something worthwhile i do not see a lot of people happy with the only guild-content in this game dead in the water. And it's not like people are playing more PvP/M+ than in Legion either.

Also, Legion being superior - FAR SUPERIOR - to BFA may even be subjective....that has very little to do with the TL: DR of the post you quoted: BFA wasted all of its gas on faction-exclusive-scenery and ran out of steam when the actual playable content needed dev-time.

Nobody cares to level its doesnt hurt the game at all; its end game that where people either stick or leave, barely anyone leaves cause trhe leveling is shit, the leveling has been shit for years, yes legion had 4 zones, and i definitly did not like all 4 zones. I could go as far as both leveling in legion and bfa are both equal in fun which is not fun lol.



1) essence are pretty much the same as your first golden trait ( should have been more lenient for alts ) and nobody i knew was happy with it realy.

2) class hall which nobody cares for, a bodyguard i personnaly never used cause why would i. The extra resources never mattered for me.

3) fucking true, dalaran is much better then this cluser fuck

4) invalid point. M+ could also provide legendaries.
Right now anything could give corrupted pieces making everything relevant. Raids are a fun social interactive activity for fun. I never pursued it for the gear ( always been tank ) never gotten gear


All im saying is legion isnt better then bfa. Their practicly the same. Bfa just fucked up with their ‘new’ addition to bfa

[Sondrelk]

I think they were planing Mechagon to be the diversion moment of the expansion. Like the troll raids in the middle of a burning legion expansion or the old god raid in the middle of an undead expansion and so on.

Which work great to combat "too many X" fatigue in a normal expansion, but fall apart when used in an expansion that is all over the place anyways. If we would have gone Uldir - Nazjatar - Nzoth, some whacky gnomes would have been fun. The same goes for an expansion which would have had 3 Siege of Dazaralor type raids fighting each other.

But since we were already starting out with more themes than the game could possibly handle, even with good storytelling, mechagon just felt like another distraction in a sea of distractions.

I think you are definitely on to something here. Even with Uldir as the first boss, if the final raid was Defence of Stormwind or something similar then mechagin could have been fitting, but seeing as both the faction war and old god story both felt like the subplot to the other story mechagin was drowned out in all the noise.

[keyboardshinobi]

Doubtful, none of the layoffs were from the Dev team, it was almost all just customer service and QA. No 8.3.5 is fine i just wish 8.3 would of ended better, so i hope there is an earlier prepatch.

They cancelled 8.3.5, Ian already said so, nothing till 9.0

[Pannonian]

someone had a link on a list to people that were fired and it was whole 11 people from wow QA from 337 people there... so yeah, must had a huge impact...

Did the performance improve? Do you really think the debacle of 8.3 and the slow down of Shadowland is cheaper than the salary of 11 people? Well, we both don't know what the impact is, but fact is the QA sucked for 8.3 and they fired QA staff. Make with that what you will, though my point wasn't really to pin the current problems on firing QA, but i wanted to counter the notion that QA is not part of dev.

[matrix123mko]

Yes, what would a gnome king wanting to undo the curse of flesh have anything to do with an Old God?

The thing is that a) he wanted that regardless of N'zoth b) as the rest said, we had too many story arcs already and they needed focus

- - - Updated - - -

Because someone on the dev team likes Gnomes way more than litearlly every person on the planet.

I guess it is an effect of people asking for spreading spotlight equally among races.

[Ragnarohk]

I'm glad they did on Mechagon. The whole old God thing is old and tired. Should've stopped at Yawn-Saron.

It's a much more interesting story arc than the horrible red vs blue fetish Blizz has... ugh..

[Kyphael]

Sadly, as detached and as irrelevant as Mechagon was to the overall story other than providing the Alliance an allied race the players didn't really want, it was more fun than the soul-sucking, joyless hole in the ocean floor Nazjatar was. It was like they sat down to brainstorm Nazjatar and went "all right, how do we make this the least fun, awfully dark and non-threatening, annoying zone possible? Make it like the worst part of Argus but fill it with Murlocs? Gotcha. It won't be underwater like Vash'jir, so they won't hate it!"

I'd take Vash'jir over Nazjatar any day, and Mechagon was a nice side escape from the awful unpleasantness of Nazjatar.

[unbound]

Seems like a waste to put so many resources on Mechagon with the big dungeon and world content when that could have been used for Nzoth stuff instead. Besides giving the alliance an allied race that barely anyone wants to play what was the point? Mechagon is so isolated from the rest of the story that BFA wouldn't have really been affected if it didn't exist. Why not just do Mechagon in another expansion?

Blizzard was already chewing on too many themes in BFA already. Sargeras sword stuck in azeroth, wrathion/dragons, Horde vs Horde&Alliance, the drust, Ghuun, Azshara, Nzoth, Voljin & Bob Salami, Azerite, Sylvanus plans, exploring Zandalaar & Kul'tiras and then amputee gnomes out of nowhere?? Blizzard lost focus with this expansion and just tried to throw everything in the can and shake it up and see what holds. This led to us feeling like there's little to no resolution on many of the core themes BFA tried to explore. Why does it feel like the thing they put they most effort into this expansion was the side story?

Fundamentally, panic.

It doesn't matter that some people think BfA is great. The reality is that the sub numbers are way, *way* down. They thought rushing to throw in a more sizeable chunk of half-baked content might help improve the numbers.

Since that didn't work, management has told them to finish up 8.3, forget about 8.3.5, and see if they can improve subs with the next expansion (but without spending much money on that expansion either). This is the old corporate BS mantra of "Work Smarter, Not Harder" that never works in the real world.

You are seeing the end-days of WoW Retail because of consistent decisions to cut costs (just more rapidly over the past few years). But don't worry, upper management got some great bonuses over many years for their cost-cutting measures.

[jstnw89]

They cut their losses and moved onto focusing on Shadowlands

[cparle87]

I assume it was supposed to be a comic reprieve from all the heavy/world ending stuff which would've been welcome if done right.


But Blizzard decided that it share the spotlight with Naz for some boneheaded reason and ended up diminishing the experience of both on top of wasting an Allied Race slot on it

Comic reprieve.

Omnicidal king who forcibly converts his own people, and anyone who crosses his path, into soulless emotionless robots. Complete with body horror. And a vision of a future where all living things literally had their flesh seared off their bones in an end of the world as we know it.

A comic reprieve?

Don't let Mechagon's shiny surface fool you. That was a dark, dark place.

[Sharby]

Comic reprieve.

Omnicidal king who forcibly converts his own people, and anyone who crosses his path, into soulless emotionless robots. Complete with body horror. And a vision of a future where all living things literally had their flesh seared off their bones in an end of the world as we know it.

A comic reprieve?

Don't let Mechagon's shiny surface fool you. That was a dark, dark place.

I am aware of the deeper themes, but its never presented as bleak or grimdark, nor are gnomes supposed to be taken very seriously, like Goblins, their stature and personalities lend to them being comedic in nature.

Playing through the Mechagon dungeon only solidifies this, I mean really 'Gnomercy4U' isn't something I'd ever take seriously even if it is trying to kill me.

[Imurbandaid]

Was just saying this to a buddy. The worst part of BfA for me has been the story. I fly around doing world quests and forget things even happened like the Bwansamdi pact with Talanji's bloodline even happened, etc. til a voiceline pops up with some flavor text. Too much went on in one expansion, if they needed to do a horde vs alliance expansion to introduce shadowlands it should have been done after a proper Azshara/Nzoth expansion. Everything was thrown into 1, nothing got a good ending. N'zoth ending is sad and sloppy, sylvanas just yeeted away with saurfang dead, nothing about Bwansamdi in forever, dragons out of no where, plan for the sword hasn't been mentioned in ages, its just been all over the place since day 1.