Blizzard's core "done when it's done" philosophy under threat?

[Deleted]

I saw this and was quite surprised to be honest: https://twitter.com/Bashiok/status/490187297519042560

I dont know exactly what those faction outposts will look like (maybe theyll be better than how they sound?) but in every expansion Blizz have made time to create a decent faction hub. The fact that many people see WoD as having far fewer features than previous xpacs and that a lot of people will be spending much of their online time there doesnt sound too good....

If theyre diverting resources by creating lite versions of faction hubs, what are they spending their resources on? Do you think some other game's internal development is hogging those resources or maybe updating the character models is taking up all the art team's time?

Considering where the expansion is in development right now and after playing beta, this is the first time an xpac feels "rushed" to me :S

That philosophy went out the window over 5 years ago.....its not been true for a while.

"When its barely capable of release, ship it, and rely on rabid fanboys to defend it, the schmucks will pay for any crap we push out" has been the rule for a while now.

Bliz used to be a paragon of quality, but thats long gone, now they have a rep for late, rushed, buggy, poor quality products.

[Tech Priest Bojangles]

I have some tissues if you want them?

Did that post come off as crying?
Well maybe you actually do eat paste.

[Putin-Chan]

I dont know exactly what those faction outposts will look like (maybe theyll be better than how they sound?) but in every expansion Blizz have made time to create a decent faction hub.

the faction hubs are crap, they just copied and pasted some garrison buildings, you're just better off using the portal to sw/org in your garrison and going back

[clevin]

Honestly I wish people would stop pressuring them to release things fast. I'm quite happy to wait, if by some strange stroke of fate I run out of things to do in the game I have a huge pile of other games to play.

But it's not fast. It's 2 years. Again.

Blizzard needs to stop pretending that they're ever going to bring the expansions out much faster than 2 years and concentrate on how to not have the first year with regular patches and the second year one long nothing. If we had a 5.5 in March and maybe a small 5.6 in June most people would be just fine. It's the near year long droughts at the end of every expansion that annoys people.

[Tharkkun]

I don't think they are diverting resources at all. I think it's a matter of 'an expansion will bring in X amount of dollars, we need to release an expansion by Y date so that our numbers look good for Z quarterly report.' So looked at what it would take to release the expansion by the desired date, and decided to cut features, shift some things around, and as a result, made a lot of people question their motives.

I think they are dropping the ball.

When has Blizzard ever released an expansion/game to meet a quarterly deadline? This isn't EA. They want it out by the end of the year so customers don't have to deal with an even longer content drought.

[Tisane]

Like I've said in a previous thread:

''Look, we're trying to make an exceptional game that everyone will enjoy, and part of that is actually releasing something.''

sounds to me like

''Look, we're trying to make an exceptional game that everyone will enjoy, even though our new features will be of bad quality and possibly not so enjoyable. We're out of time and resources, deal with it.''

I don't think they're rushing through the development, I think they're making mistakes and errors.

[Osmeric]

I don't think they're rushing through the development, I think they're making mistakes and errors.

I've been told that the difference between a good businessman and a bad one is that a good businessman makes the right decision 60% of the time, while a bad one does so 40% of the time.

Of course they make errors. It's almost impossible not to in any activity of any complexity, and especially one so fraught with fuzziness and uncertainty as game design.

[Deleted]

If theyre diverting resources by creating lite versions of faction hubs, what are they spending their resources on? Do you think some other game's internal development is hogging those resources or maybe updating the character models is taking up all the art team's time?

The latter or possibly both. The character models take a lot of resources and at some point they wanted to release them slowly over time, always work on them when they have time for them but then they decided to make them a feature of the expansion, and I think that's because the expansion lacks something else on that scale, like new races or a new class.

People always said, maybe we won't get a new class or a new race, we don't need any more. And it's possible that Blizzard took that as a sign they could get away with an expansion that doesn't have either of those. Which never really sat well with me. One of the cool things about speculating about an expansion is what will we get? Will we get two new races? Which will they be? Or will it be a new class? What class could they add? Oh, we get neither?...great... I guess.

It's also possible they've pulled some WoW developers away from WoW and put them onto another game - Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm or Titan.

[Pony Soldier]

Personally, I think if they didn't revamp the classes/talents/stats every expansion, they'd have more time to focus on other stuff.

This especially. I'm so sick of them changing the way we play our classes. I can see changing something like the effects or the name of the spell but I hate when they change it up so much that you have to relearn your class, it's so damn annoying.

OT: Now that I think about it, yeah, it is pretty irritating how they are taking so long on this expansion and each new feature keeps being stripped down to a bare bone product. First it was the choice of where to build your garrison, then the stripping of the customization features of the garrisons, and now taking away those two main cities. More and more it's becoming an underwhelming expansion. There won't be much to look forward to if they keep taking away from the expansion.

[Eroginous]

When has Blizzard ever released an expansion/game to meet a quarterly deadline? This isn't EA. They want it out by the end of the year so customers don't have to deal with an even longer content drought.

To be honest, we don't know that information because Blizzard doesn't exactly come out and say 'hey, we released X game to make our quarterly numbers better.'

However, they are a cash business just like any other. Their shareholders like to see good numbers every quarter. Would I put it past them to release sooner rather than later just to boost those numbers? Nope.

Also: we're already in a longer-than-average content drought.

[nekobaka]

Blizzard has been releasing things incomplete for many years and even admitting to releasing things ahead of schedule without intended features like LFR being released with a place holder loot system. Never mind all the broken patches Blizzard has pushed out or intended zones created in Classic that was delayed and then shelved for good.

The done when it's done thing is really more of a mindset to release things when they the developers feel it is ready rather than push out based on a date regardless of it being "done" or not. A number of companies are known to push things out a month or so before they are ready due to sticking with launch dates. Like I have said though Blizzard has released broken shit that could have used another month. Every beta that I have read about for WoW has launched with known issues that dont get resolve until post launch. Something being done or ready doesnt mean it is perfect, just something the developers feel is acceptable to push out.

Bliz used to be a paragon of quality, but thats long gone, now they have a rep for late, rushed, buggy, poor quality products.

Thankfully for Blizzard they have EA and Activision to get all the attention, but many still dive right in regardless of how shitty a launch is for those two or their business practices. With big name AAA titles it doesnt really mater how shitty your product is as most consumers will still buy it.

[MoanaLisa]

I don't think they're rushing through the development, I think they're making mistakes and errors.

They are changing a lot with WoD; more than ever before really. I've been saying for a while that it's a complete restart of the game. Mistakes, errors, and unintended consequences--especially the latter--are bound to happen. Perhaps they've bit off a little more than they should have. The proof is in what gets released. And when. They've clearly given themselves another four or five months to pull things together.

There are a lot of things you can point to about their "When it's done" philosophy. The clearest was the D3 launch a couple of years ago which was very clearly not done (and I'm not talking about the login problems the first couple of days). I suppose they don't want to repeat that again.

And for those paying attention: Activision Blizzard over the last few years tend to have something really big in each quarter of the year. If it's not something from Blizzard it will be CoD or Waylander or something. I don't believe that the actual release date itself is of huge importance but they seem to like to get stuff out well before the end of the quarter when they can.

[Didacticus Syntacticus]

To some degree I share the sentiment...
The beta feels very incomplete to me. I can't help it, but I have the impression that the game development is behind schedule somehow.

Well with GC taking almost a dozen developers and PMs with him to Riot yeah the schedule could have suffered.

[Evilfish]

They are changing a lot with WoD; more than ever before really. I've been saying for a while that it's a complete restart of the game. Mistakes, errors, and unintended consequences--especially the latter--are bound to happen. Perhaps they've bit off a little more than they should have. The proof is in what gets released. And when. They've clearly given themselves another four or five months to pull things together.

There are a lot of things you can point to about their "When it's done" philosophy. The clearest was the D3 launch a couple of years ago which was very clearly not done (and I'm not talking about the login problems the first couple of days). I suppose they don't want to repeat that again.

And for those paying attention: Activision Blizzard over the last few years tend to have something really big in each quarter of the year. If it's not something from Blizzard it will be CoD or Waylander or something. I don't believe that the actual release date itself is of huge importance but they seem to like to get stuff out well before the end of the quarter when they can.

The "we really want it to be ready for you guys, that's why it takes longer" is really hard to swallow after 1 year of no content. And even if it's as ready as it can be, people are gonna bite into them like wild hounds, they've been doing that every expansion and just about every damn change.

People think the Draenor expansion is gonna be the redemption of WoW. Even Blizzard is trying to give off that idea, but I suspect expectations are too high.

In the end, they have a choice. Wait longer and get ripped on for not blowing minds and going 1 year with no content. Or the other version being the same just with bugs and errors involved.

But to be honest even after all this time they don't have any real competitor out there with Wildstar (which was meant to be WoW but better) looking like it failed to compete with WoW even before it launched it's good or bad expansion so, I guess they aren't that worried.

[MoanaLisa]

But to be honest even after all this time they don't have any real competitor out there with Wildstar (which was meant to be WoW but better) looking like it failed to compete with WoW even before it launched it's good or bad expansion so, I guess they aren't that worried.

I didn't say so in my post but implied that some of the delay is because they're changing too much. I'm sure that GC leaving threw a wrench into things. I have no 'for sure' knowledge about who, how many and how important they might be with regard to people going with him and don't really care to get into that. Greg Street leaving was enough by itself. They certainly struggled with communication in the weeks directly afterwards and it's reasonable to suppose that schedules and due dates for things were affected too. Art assets also appear to be an issue. They appear to be behind on that front as well.

All of that dire thinking aside, what I've seen on the beta looks pretty good and foundational stuff like the squish appears to be working well. We'll just have to see how it all comes out in the end.

[Evilfish]

I didn't say so in my post but implied that some of the delay is because they're changing too much. I'm sure that GC leaving threw a wrench into things. I have no 'for sure' knowledge about who, how many and how important they might be with regard to people going with him and don't really care to get into that. Greg Street leaving was enough by itself. They certainly struggled with communication in the weeks directly afterwards and it's reasonable to suppose that schedules and due dates for things were affected too. Art assets also appear to be an issue. They appear to be behind on that front as well.

All of that dire thinking aside, what I've seen on the beta looks pretty good and foundational stuff like the squish appears to be working well. We'll just have to see how it all comes out in the end.

I know you didn't. The point I was making is that even the game is as bad as the worse pessimists imagine, when the shit hits the fan, so to speak, Blizzard can simply say "Go play something else if you don't like WoD" and all things considered, there's nothing to rival Blizzards's game so far. They wouldn't say that directly cause that would be just Bad reputation but they are aware of that. Take EA for example, they have no shame when it comes to taking your money, but since they own most of the market, they get away with it.

In the end, it won't matter. The WoW's strongest feature is it's community. Immature and mature, annoying and pleasant, it attracts people and it calls those who left back. If they lose that then no matter how good or bad their content is, it won't save their game. The numbers might have dropped but the remaining number is still greater than many MMOs with the same or similar theme and system. And we are arguing and discussing WoW on a fan forum with 1000 page threads in it.

[anaxie]

I don't understand why they must spend tons of time each expansion to basically rewrite our classes...where is the value in having to "relearn" classes each and every bloody expansion?

Maybe they'd have loads more time on their hands if they didn't do this and simply allowed us to play the class we play the way that we have been for the past expansion.

How bout no

Infracted for minor spam

[Osmeric]

Well with GC taking almost a dozen developers and PMs with him to Riot yeah the schedule could have suffered.

GC denies that he "took" anyone. So, people may have gone to Riot, but he denies that he induced them to go.

- - - Updated - - -

I know you didn't. The point I was making is that even the game is as bad as the worse pessimists imagine, when the shit hits the fan, so to speak, Blizzard can simply say "Go play something else if you don't like WoD" and all things considered, there's nothing to rival Blizzards's game so far.

And it appears the stream of new MMOs is drying up. There was a lag there, but it's become clear that MMOs (P2P or F2P) are not a guaranteed gravy train to huge profits. So WoW is likely to face less competition from new MMOs in the future. The two biggest name MMOs that released this year appear to be at worst nuisances.

I wonder if this might have induced Blizzard to take their time with WoD.

[Kazlofski]

I still feel like something terrible went at development, like restarting everything or whatever causing this really big unusual delay and of course their policy of it's done when it's done had to change otherwise we would have SoO for 1 and a half-2 years and of course 1 year is too much, more than that is too extreme and dangerous so they are in sort of a rush now I suppose, scrapping stuff and delaying for later patches.
Sadly it will mean that patches will be what we were supposed to get at launch and won't get the cool stuff that we were supposed to normally... Perhaps easier for them then, need less ideas to think of for new patches. Gonna hope they pick up the pace when WoD is released and be quick with patches like they were with MoP until 5.4.

[Tharkkun]

To be honest, we don't know that information because Blizzard doesn't exactly come out and say 'hey, we released X game to make our quarterly numbers better.'

However, they are a cash business just like any other. Their shareholders like to see good numbers every quarter. Would I put it past them to release sooner rather than later just to boost those numbers? Nope.

Also: we're already in a longer-than-average content drought.

I definitely get the content drought. But in the past Blizzard delayed TBC until after the holidays and Diablo 3. They will make a killing as it stands and the Act-Blizz merger has other revenue streams to keep things going.