They should probably work longer for a GOOD expansion instead of rushing everything for money.
I'm guessing story, art and music are mostly done. While the bug, systems and balancing people are still at work on wod.
The real question is why should they release any faster? After all, a good many of you people give them your money every single month no matter what they do.
It's probably a simple math formula for them where they weigh potential additional revenue from new content vs additional costs from development.
Yeah, and they always say that. It's not stealing any work power from WoD development. They worked on WoD while MoP was in beta, and look how little they had done when it was announced.. "Working on" in this case is ideas and art at most, not actual content creation.
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Uhm, I think you're missing the part where the price of the expansion itself is equal to other brand new games, and more than pays for development.
I guess Activision has finally got WoW to where they want it, they'll churn out a new mediocre xpack annually I bet.
You can find interviews going back to Vanilla where they have talked about countless hypotheticals being juggled to one extent or another. On the WOTLK collector's edition making of featurette it was said they have around 30 Hero Classes in various conceptual stages, THIRTY. Some have interpreted that remark as a joke or snarky remark.
You really have no idea what was being worked on when, and what Chilton means now in terms of plans beyond vague ideas they want to tackle along with half explored experimental mechanics out the wazoo.
For instance, Chris Robinson has said they've messed with a depth of field effect it he engine more than one time and decided against having one. Who knows what crazy things are alive on a computer in Irvine somewhere?
If you like my draw-rings. http://yig.deviantart.com/
If you can't find them for some reason beyond that page. http://yig.deviantart.com/gallery/
WOW screenshot and concept art gallery http://smg.photobucket.com/user/evilknick/library/WoW
I'm curious about this too. If they really intend to have a 12-month expansion with Warlords they won't be announcing the next one at Blizzcon otherwise. It's this one or nothing.
A well-paced 18-month expansion would be better perhaps. Otherwise it's sort of mind-boggling to think we could be in beta for the one after Warlords in nine months. I suppose they could announce something and not give up a lot of details about it. Some sort of event like they had with the cinematic for Warlords might have been a dry run for non-Blizzcon major announcements. Other than tradition they don't really need to wait for Blizzcon to announce anything. And if they have events like the cinematic reveal they can cut down or avoid altogether annoying questions from subscribers.
Last edited by MoanaLisa; 2014-08-28 at 12:02 AM.
"...money's most powerful ability is to allow bad people to continue doing bad things at the expense of those who don't have it."
Oh, I'm sure they enjoy that 100+ million dollar infusion they get whenever they release an expansion. However, they probably pull that in per month easily between subscriptions and the market. Every month they push an expansion off is just another one where they get a chunk of change in their pocket. Sure, they might lose some people over those months, but they still are making a massive profit in the mean time.
People might get bored from no content, but they chew through it so fast that it's pretty much impossible to not have bored people around.
between bardarbunga, ebola, #IS and obama; i don't see how they can expect the Earth to still be around by then...