well, maybe if they work less they do less shit, who know
They create so much high-quality (no, you nor me not enjoying that content is not a deciding factor in quality) content, models, music, dungeons and everything, only to have it thrown away due to godawful, zero-patience reward structures and pacing that makes people become annoyed if they don't receive an incremental gear reward every 15 minutes of doing content they are literally designed into winning (Warfronts), or just rush through brainlessly (IEs). And getting to endgame, you just plow through all non-group content in a couple of afternoons.
I sure don't fault WoW devs, the one creating the art that is just going to be consumed by players within the first week of a new update to be overworked. I can only imagine how much time and work is put into creating a zone, or a new dungeon, only to see players consume that content within half an hour.
I hope Blizzard makes certain to make anyone with Diablo 3 influences to get the hell off the game design part of WoW, because they are fucking it up royally.
Last edited by MasterHamster; 2019-05-09 at 08:00 AM.
Active WoW player Jan 2006 - Aug 2020
Occasional WoW Classic Andy since.
Nothing lasts forever, as they say.
But at least I can casually play Classic and remember when MMORPGs were good.
Maybe they should work smarter and not harder. How many man-hours was spent coming up with that terrible BFA necklace and all the affixes? Or adjusting the abilities and rotations of every class to be boring this expansion? What a waste of time all of that was...
I didnt say no work was put in. Im just saying it's nowhere near the same amount of work or creativity as an entirely new game. Most of the base game mechanics are already in place. A great deal of their work is copy/pasting existing assets and applying slight modifications.
Both in terms of groundwork and design a LOT of their foundation is already done. The amount of work required for a new expansion is nowhere near that required for a new game, and the amount of content provided isn't anywhere near a new game worth the same amount of money($50 + 15sub) outside of the distorted scale of the MMO genre.
BFA is bad because their ideas and feature are bad. Not because game quality is bad.
If you release system that is bad like Azerite Armor, you can't expect anything good to come out of it.
Nintendo doesn't crunch, has an average daily work schedule of sub 8 hours and makes some of the most polished games in the industry.(source https://www.businessinsider.com/nint...ditions-2019-3 )
You don't need to crunch to make quality products, you just need to sit on them and polish them instead of trying to release them at the earliest possible time.
Nintendo doesn't even make pokemon so might want to google before you try more low quality bait replies like this. Please show me all the "art" they re-used between Super Mario 3D World(which came out in 2013) and Super Mario Odyssey(which came out in 2017). Literally nothing was re-used, nor is Mario even close to a yearly release.
Exactly.
They've sacrificed quality for quantity, taken core day 1 features and gated them to add "content" and the Azerite system is just a worse version of artifacts.
The core quality of WoW is mostly there. Just not in BFA.
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Won't happen while Activision are basically pulling their strings.
Again "record quarter" for the company and fires 800 employees across the board just so they can bring 20% more devs on to push the mobile garbage that Blizzard are working on because Activision told them to chase the dollar.
Whatever it is, I hope they do whatever it takes to appease the workers and improve the quality of the game.
BfA is utter trash in my opinion.
At least the article understands that most workers lose efficiency past 8 - 10 hours. I wish more companies did, because cycling individuals is MUCH more effective than having them work 12 - 16 hours instead. But regardless you sometimes can't have that and it's a bigger pain in the ass to do so, and many companies would rather have people work overtime it seems. Every worker should be allowed to leave after 8 hours at almost any job.
You can spend a thousand hours polishing a turd, in the end it's still a turd....
When they decide to work on content that is actually good instead of working thousands and thousands of hours on something that is pure crap, it's going to be different.