The far more interesting question here is "When will all the expert designers that play games instead of actually making them decide to make their own game and actually get it released?".
there was an interview with brian reynolds a few months back (the name to his credit I know best is civ2, but there is a long list). the impression I took away from it is that 1) MONEY (meaning that which buys top talent and names) is behind games for non-gamers now, e.g. games with no hard corners, etc. I guess either tablet or social media games (he had just left zenga). 2) he didn't say this at all but I am not sure what public co. is going to put money into a game targetted at such a small % of their potential market.
this translates into me saying I think the days top-line titles being geared towards GAMERS is long over. it is a paradigm shift IN DESIGN comparable to the coin-op days when we went from 'GAME OVER - INSERT COIN' to "INSERT COIN TO CONTINUE?", though the changes are in the opposite direction.
Last edited by Deficineiron; 2013-05-07 at 07:56 PM.
Authors I have enjoyed enough to mention here: JRR Tolkein, Poul Anderson,Jack Vance, Gene Wolfe, Glen Cook, Brian Stableford, MAR Barker, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, WM Hodgson, Fredrick Brown, Robert SheckleyJohn Steakley, Joe Abercrombie, Robert Silverberg, the norse sagas, CJ Cherryh, PG Wodehouse, Clark Ashton Smith, Alastair Reynolds, Cordwainer Smith, LE Modesitt, L. Sprague de Camp & Fletcher Pratt, Stephen R Donaldon, and Jack L Chalker.
While Cata is the weakest xpac blizz have released it still had some shining moments and amazing additions to the game. RealID and cross realm raiding has completely been a game changer.
Failure can be attributed squarely on the DS patch.
- Dumbed down the game even more the wotlk. While cata raiding started out nice and hard they freaked out and pulled a complete 180 mid expansion. DS was completely faceroll... even heroics :/
- Lengthy patch cycles and overall less content then any other expansion. DS dragged on for a ludicrous amount of time.
- Recycled content. DS was set in an old wotlk quest zone that was full of reused boss models.
"There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
"The bit about hardcore players not always caring about the long term interests of the game is spot on." -- Ghostcrawler
"Do you want a game with no casuals so about 500 players?"
it was certainly a conscious design/tuning choice made at that time, particularly compared to 2.4 content. not sure any of it matters now in that context, but the posters who talk like they were hard on wotlk release (they weren't, I don't think mob melee dmg increased at all from tbc to wotlk heroics. ), or that tbc heroics were easy, do sometimes get a rise out of me. there was one guy a while back who claimed to have cleared all 14/15 tbc heroics in like 6 hours. anyone who played the game would just laugh at such a claim.
Authors I have enjoyed enough to mention here: JRR Tolkein, Poul Anderson,Jack Vance, Gene Wolfe, Glen Cook, Brian Stableford, MAR Barker, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, WM Hodgson, Fredrick Brown, Robert SheckleyJohn Steakley, Joe Abercrombie, Robert Silverberg, the norse sagas, CJ Cherryh, PG Wodehouse, Clark Ashton Smith, Alastair Reynolds, Cordwainer Smith, LE Modesitt, L. Sprague de Camp & Fletcher Pratt, Stephen R Donaldon, and Jack L Chalker.
As others have said before, it's because Blizzard leaned towards the casual player in Wrath, only to make things hard again in Cata, and people didn't like it.
Had blizzard never implemented LFD, and would have kept forcing all players to do dungeons the old school way all along, they probably would have gotten away with the harder heroics in Cata. They learned the hard way that content can't be too difficult or full of a zillion mechanics in a game community where players no longer had to interact with eachother.
The shared raid lockout had something to do with it too, but to a lesser extent.
Had Blizzard not introduced LFD I think we would be talking massive losses in Wrath as well as Cata. Making dungeons hard was a massive mistake and I cannot figure out what they were thinking in doing so, it was clear in Wrath that people would drop the harder content. Halls of Reflection although not that difficult could be an absolute nightmare as you worked your way through a succession of players until you filled the group with players that were not only capable of but willing to complete the dungeon. They even had to introduce extra incentives for players running Oculus months after it had been nerfed to stop players dropping groups.
During TBC before WOTLK launch WOW reached over 10M subscribers, this were the people that were asking for harder 5man HC and normal Raids the guys that loved the "hard" stuff.
On Topic.
I see Cataclysm has a Failure when 4.1 hit, I quit till 4.2 because they nerffed everything and they ruin ZA.
Came back for Firelands witch was an awesome Raid only to get slaped in the face with more nerffs when my guild was 6/8 HC :X
5.3 was the last straw, LFR? Had to run it on main + 2 alts because the gear was better than HC Firelands :X did 3/8 HC the 2nd week of the patch and quit i still had to run LFR for upgrades for HC mode enrages I already see the last boss so many times and the boss machanics were boring :X only the ooze and shaman bosses were Ok i guess
Last edited by mmocce676f6b0f; 2013-05-07 at 09:10 PM.
i actually thought the expansion started alright. i was actually excited for the expansion personally. i thought the events and quests leading up to its release were well done and the first time i flew into mt hyjal i was pretty impressed. after hyjal though the story seemed to start going all over the place.
i think they did a good job with the 1-60 zone and its something they get a lot of flak over but it was something that i think was needed. it is awfully linear now but i think new gamers want more of that and less of the "find and go seek" zones that implemented back in vanilla.
i stopped playing just short of the firelands raid coming out. i realized that the game wasnt really giving me any more enjoyment anymore. i actually enjoyed the initial difficulty of the dungeons but a lot of people didnt. i theorize that it was just too big of a shock for people as they had been accustomed to basically pulling half of a dungeon and aoe'ing it down in wotlk.
Tons of specs were viable in season 11 and season 9. Both jahmilli and novoz got glad on elemental and enhancement. Abni got glad as arcane and even the worst spec resto druid was played to glad range. Yeah shamans dominate the top .5% percent but the other 20 glad spots were up for grabs.
You're right except for 2 things.
1. My name is spelt "God" not "Loucious-sama".
2. I'm not a man, because man is inherently flawed. I am in fact a being so far beyond your comprehension that archaic constraints like flesh, blood, time and consequently, gender, have no meaning to me.
LK was the beginning of the end for Wow. The superfast decline in sales can be directly attributed to Titan, and Team Deux coming in, half-way through and fubarrin' this game all to simithereens. Cata just made people realize there was no going back- Blizz was committed to under-funding Wow, living with the results, and generating new IPs/revenue steams. Mop and it's abysmal sales figures are directly attributable to LK, and how Cata was forced into a mould, and then all it's shortcomings.
Also another thing that ruined the overall the world in Cataclysm expansion is the amount of portals everywhere + mass summon give the players the feeling of the world is really small in the game overall.
You realise you just wasted several minutes of your life making a post that is almost complete nonsense?
Honestly. The ending was crap cos the content was the worst but the rest of what you said is just .... i mean seriously.... go back to your xbox
The mass summon feature is different than LFR mate...the difference is that specially at the first week of Cataclysm..it was possible to even mass summon your entire raid grp even if they are inside the raid instance to use it to skip some trash mobs in BWD and such thing is indeed ruining the game play experience. LFr doesn't ruin the game play experience it's just another diffeculty of raid which being easy mode diffculty of our raids.