Retail wow suffering because of classic?

[GUZ]

First off I’m not a classic hater and I think its cool but I like retail and am paying for a subscription for it and the dlcs so my question is. Does anyone one else feel like because of all the classic hype we are losing content and a-lot of blizzards resources are going to classic projects?

[Soon-TM]

First off I’m not a classic hater and I think its cool but I like retail and am paying for a subscription for it and the dlcs so my question is. Does anyone one else feel like because of all the classic hype we are losing content and a-lot of blizzards resources are going to classic projects?

Blizzard supposedly has an entire separate team for handling Classic, so Retail shouldn't be "suffering" for it. If anything, my guess is that a good amount of WoW $$$ is financing stuff like D4 or those cheap ass mobile games.

[LordVargK]

Not really. Reimplementing classic is a completely different task than creating content for retail. For classic you mainly need technicians that can port the old data onto the new game structure. Retail needs content creators, designers and other devs.
I don't think classic is syphoning any ressources.

[thedingleberry]

First off I’m not a classic hater and I think its cool but I like retail and am paying for a subscription for it and the dlcs so my question is. Does anyone one else feel like because of all the classic hype we are losing content and a-lot of blizzards resources are going to classic projects?

Yes, an resources going to classic and other games takes away from resources going to retail WoW. There are only so many teams at a dev company. At least with other games, it's something different, but classic versions of wow are literally just rereleasing the same thing as before on new hardware. It also splits the playerbase. I lost some good guildies who quit retail only to play classic...

[Kokolums]

Blizzard was incredibly close to releasing a Starcraft MMO. Blizz divided the dev team into 3 groups, each of them worked on a new game concept. They were set to make 1 of the 3. I forget what dev team 1 proposed. Dev team 2 proposed a Starcraft MMO, and the entire team was massively hyped for it and were ready to go. But they stuck with the original plan and took at look at team 3s proposal and that was Overwatch. There was a lot of internal debate and at the last second they switched over to Overwatch.

The Starcraft MMO would have been announced in 2014 during WoD. It would have probably been released in 2016 the same time as Legion. We currently would likely be on the 2nd or 3rd SC MMO xpac by now.

If you think WoW is suffering because of classic, imagine retail competing with a Starcraft MMO.

They liked the concept of a Starcraft MMO so much that I wouldn't dismiss the idea of Blizzard going back and doing a Starcraft MMO at some point down the road. I mean, they *need* to update the graphics engine for their MMO offering pretty badly.

[McNeil]

Retail is suffering way more due to a very long content drought and the incompetence from the development team. Classic can basically work both ways: you have people from retail interested in trying out Classic, but you can also have people from Classic willing to try out retail.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

Blizzard was incredibly close to releasing a Starcraft MMO. Blizz divided the dev team into 3 groups, each of them worked on a new game concept. They were set to make 1 of the 3. I forget what dev team 1 proposed. Dev team 2 proposed a Starcraft MMO, and the entire team was massively hyped for it and were ready to go. But they stuck with the original plan and took at look at team 3s proposal and that was Overwatch. There was a lot of internal debate and at the last second they switched over to Overwatch.

The Starcraft MMO would have been announced in 2014 during WoD. It would have probably been released in 2016 the same time as Legion. We currently would likely be on the 2nd or 3rd SC MMO xpac by now.

If you think WoW is suffering because of classic, imagine retail competing with a Starcraft MMO.

They liked the concept of a Starcraft MMO so much that I wouldn't dismiss the idea of Blizzard going back and doing a Starcraft MMO at some point down the road. I mean, they *need* to update the graphics engine for their MMO offering pretty badly.

Where are you getting any of this from? they said rather publicly that they were working on an overwatch mmo (titan) but it fell apart and overwatch was the result.

[Tzunami]

Very little resources go into classic.

The content drought in retail is a direct result from covid and transitioning staff to working from home.

[Soon-TM]

Very little resources go into classic.

The content drought in retail is a direct result from covid and transitioning staff to working from home.

Covid is probably an important explanation for the drought, but not the only one. It is worth remembering that Blizzard was already behind schedule with SL even before the pandemic started.

[cparle87]

Covid is probably an important explanation for the drought, but not the only one. It is worth remembering that Blizzard was already behind schedule with SL even before the pandemic started.

6 months isn't even that long for a raid tier. We've had non-last tiers that long before. Then again, people on these forums were crying "content drought" as early as 6 weeks into the expansion.

[shoc]

We haven't had a real content drought since Siege of Orgrimmar.

[Soon-TM]

We haven't had a real content drought since Siege of Orgrimmar.

If you are only going to count those that last >12 months, yeah, we haven't had those anymore

[hayzlol]

Na. Classic has a separate team. They also have a small team for Classic too which makes sense as the content is already there. They're just there for some tuning, bug fixes and sorting out what is released when for the most part. They aren't making new content.

It's more to do with COVID.

[hulkgor]

had a big laugh at the "retail losing content and resources for classic".

Yea, the 2 developers making classic\tbc classic work really destroyed retail man. For sure.

[Kokolums]

Where are you getting any of this from? they said rather publicly that they were working on an overwatch mmo (titan) but it fell apart and overwatch was the result.

https://starcraft.fandom.com/wiki/StarCraft_MMO

Blizzard confirmed they were working on a new unnamed MMO, however[7] codenamed Titan,[8] as well as a fifth game, which used the World of Warcraft engine for testing purposes.[9] Titan ended development in the summer of 2013.[10] The cancellation of Titan eventually gave way to Overwatch, but in the intermediary period, three separate game ideas were conceived. One of them was an MMO set in a pre-established Blizzard IP. The other was an MMO set in the StarCraft universe, as the team wanted to be able to tell stories in the setting that one couldn't in an RTS format, such as what life was like for civilians on the various planets of the setting.[11] It is known that artwork of one of the characters (see above) was inspired by Prospector Logann (also note the hydralisk and dropships in the picture). Additionally, Team 4 was fond of the StarCraft universe, and was willing to do something similar in regards to how World of Warcraft related to the original Warcraft RTS games. However, neither the supposed StarCraft MMO nor Crossroads (another MMO idea) went through.[12]

McCree from Overwatch was originally going to be a central character in the Starcraft MMO, they even had artwork done with McCree standing over a dead Zerg with dropships overhead.

[froschhure]

i doubt it, but wow in general is suffering from diablo mmo

[Kokolums]

https://www.pcgamer.com/the-overwatc...-hero-shooter/

There were heaps of interesting insights to come out of the Overwatch Archive panel at Blizzcon 2017 (I'll post later today with another), but one revelation that sticks out is that before deciding to make a class-based shooter the Overwatch development team started working on a concept for an MMO called Crossworlds, which had up to 50 classes and was set "at the crossroads of the universe".

Kaplan and his team were given six weeks to come up with a game concept after the MMO Titan, which they were working on, was scrapped. They started exploring a new IP—an MMO that Kaplan referred to during the panel as Crossworlds. "Basically, the idea was that there was a remote outpost planet in the universe [that] was the crossroads of the universe and all different alien races would end up on the same planet.

"The game that we were talking about making was an MMO and it was going to be class-based. We were exploring between six and nine classes for the game," he said. The picture at the top of this article is some of the concept art. Pretty, right?

Blizzard class designer Geoff Goodman (who now designs Overwatch's heroes) encouraged the team to up the number of classes to 50, "each [of which] is very focused and has a certain set of abilities and they could all be wildly different from one another".

Kaplan thought that a 50-class MMO would be impossible, but the vision stuck with him, and he hastily stitched together a presentation that drew inspiration from some of the art for Titan. The image below is what he came up with, and the similarities between these characters and what would come to be the Overwatch lineup are striking. Reaper, a 'Guardian' and a 'Jumper' are all there—even some of the names of abilities that Kaplan envisaged are identical to what ended up in the shooter.

[Pebrocks The Warlock]

If they actually start developing content for Classic then I'd agree with you OP but they're not. I don't count the new mount as such because that already fits into Blizzard making store mounts which I'm simply against.

[dwarven]

Well butter my biscuit. The next StarCraft game could very well be an FPS MMO like Destiny. It would be different enough from WoW that it wouldn't compete directly with it.

[Kokolums]

Also it was Bobby Kotick that killed the Starcraft MMO in favor of Overwatch. Kotick took one look at the Overwatch lineup of heroes, pretty much saw a massive potential payday from marketing those heroes as action figures, and told them to scrap the SC MMO and make Overwatch instead.

Oops...

Kotick should NOT have been in charge of such decisions. That move alone may ultimately have doomed the entire company.