Which expansionns did Blizzard truly finish, and what could have been?

[ravenmoon]

Blizzard sseems to be cutting stuff more often than not.


TBC was probably the best finsihed expansion, with 4 patches, and big raid, SWP with huge story impact too at the end.

WotLK did finish, but it felt like the Ruby Sanctum was a bit short.

Cataclysm - they didn't really finish the revamp, it ended up only being partial

MoP - not sure

WoD - they cut Farahlon completely


Legion - they cut Thal'dranash (but spun it as replacing it with Argus, I think it was a cut)

BFA - HEavily reduced 8.3 content.


Do they need more time? or more staff? TBC ended surprisingly well, but if you normally play beta, you tend to find out a fraction of what gets cut.

[Enthusiastic Steward]

Legion - they cut Thal'dranash (but spun it as replacing it with Argus, I think it was a cut)

I disagree with this assessment. A cut would be if we got nothing. What we got was "We were going to do X zone but instead we're doing Y zone". A cut would be "We were going to X zone but now we're not doing a zone." or "We were going to do X and Y zones but now just Y."

[unbound]

Do they need more time? or more staff? TBC ended surprisingly well, but if you normally play beta, you tend to find out a fraction of what gets cut.

More staff is needed. BC was released a little over 2 years after Vanilla, so clearly ~2 years is sufficient.

Blizz has been cutting too many resources from WoW. You can look at the financial reports (https://investor.activision.com/annual-reports) and see that in about the middle of Wrath, they started cutting costs consistently until WoW costs got buried 5 years ago or so in all online properties.

WoW's drop in quality is something that was planned. Blizz management expects that they can provide the customer (you) with less and you'll keep paying them. Basically, they got greedy.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

They finished every expansion except WoD and BFA.

- - - Updated - - -

Wasn't Ruby Sanctum added because players were vocal about a content drought? I feel like Ruby Sanctum wasn't intended to be Wrath content in the first place.

Yes it was a filler raid meant to hold people over. In retrospect, the 3.3-4.0 drought should have been indicative of what was to come.

After 5.4's release, Blizzard stopped updating the game to work on the expansion, with no content update for 14 months, or 429 days after Siege of Orgrimmar was released in September 2013, to when WoD was released in November 2014. Worse, the expansion was rushed. Once players completed the initial leveling questlines, there was no content to do. No reputation questlines at all. Worse, Blizzard axed WoD's post launch support, with the game receiving no content update for 252 days, with June 2015's Hellfire Citadel being the one and only post launch content update for the expansion. Even WORSE, Blizzard AGAIN ceased updating the game to work on the expansion, with no content update for ANOTHER 14 months (434 days) between Hellfire Citadel and the release of Legion in August 2016. Oh, and you still had to pay $180 a year in subscription fees to play the game, despite no new content coming out for years. Fortunately, once Legion hit, we were back to regular patch content, with a new content update every 77 days.

Now it looks like we are going back to a very long content drought, with 8.3 being the last content for the foreseeable future.

- - - Updated - - -

Also, IIRC the Abyssal Maw was a planned raid for Cata that was cut.

When WoD was announced at Blizzcon 2013, Farahlon was advertised as a new zone. It was cut early during alpha.

WotLK's box art still advertises aerial combat.

[FelPlague]

Blizzard sseems to be cutting stuff more often than not.


TBC was probably the best finsihed expansion, with 4 patches, and big raid, SWP with huge story impact too at the end.

WotLK did finish, but it felt like the Ruby Sanctum was a bit short.

Cataclysm - they didn't really finish the revamp, it ended up only being partial

MoP - not sure

WoD - they cut Farahlon completely


Legion - they cut Thal'dranash (but spun it as replacing it with Argus, I think it was a cut)

BFA - HEavily reduced 8.3 content.


Do they need more time? or more staff? TBC ended surprisingly well, but if you normally play beta, you tend to find out a fraction of what gets cut.

TBC was not finished.
Wotlk was not finished.
no expansion has been finished.

you seem to have a "I deem this one finished, i deem this one not finished"
meanwhile in reality none of them finished.
TBC had an entire class and zone cut.
wotlk had an entire zone, multiple systems, and raids cut.


so no, they are not "cutting more then ever"
1. you just seem to be ignoring all the old content that was cut.
2. we have access to the files and such much easier then we used to, meaning we see alot more of the cut content, especially since a lot of the content they used to cut, never got to our ears.

[Kyphael]

To my knowledge, Abyssal Maw was cut and not replaced with anything. It was supposed to be released in the Firelands patch, but player complaint from Vashj'ir and the team thinking elements of fire and water didn't make sense thematically led to its cut. I've heard rumors of Spider Kingdom back in Wrath originally being a raid with Anub'arak as the final boss, but that was re-worked to him just being the final boss beneath Trial of the Crusader after we had already just killed him in a 5-man Heroic.

[FelPlague]

WotLK's box art still advertises aerial combat.

This too, plus many other videos on the entire cut zone.
also the dance studio that was advertised for the wotlk feature trailer.

every single expansion had massive amounts of cut content.

[Coldfrostzero]

Blizzard sseems to be cutting stuff more often than not.


TBC was probably the best finsihed expansion, with 4 patches, and big raid, SWP with huge story impact too at the end.

WotLK did finish, but it felt like the Ruby Sanctum was a bit short.

Cataclysm - they didn't really finish the revamp, it ended up only being partial

MoP - not sure

WoD - they cut Farahlon completely


Legion - they cut Thal'dranash (but spun it as replacing it with Argus, I think it was a cut)

BFA - HEavily reduced 8.3 content.


Do they need more time? or more staff? TBC ended surprisingly well, but if you normally play beta, you tend to find out a fraction of what gets cut.

Wasn't Ruby Sanctum added because players were vocal about a content drought? I feel like Ruby Sanctum wasn't intended to be Wrath content in the first place.

Ruby Sanctum, according to Blizzard at time, it is supposed to be the start of Cataclysm expansion.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

Legion is likely the only expan without cut content as they changed course instead of just dropping something.

Tbc might also count but I can’t say I know enough about it’s development.

[Beefhammer]

All expansion signs have had cut content. So none of them were ever finished.

- - - Updated - - -

Legion is likely the only expan without cut content as they changed course instead of just dropping something.

Tbc might also count but I can’t say I know enough about it’s development.

Except they cut that one island in favor of something else.

[Amaterasu65]

I thought Wrath Naxxramas was not in the plans initially.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

All expansion signs have had cut content. So none of them were ever finished.

- - - Updated - - -



Except they cut that one island in favor of something else.

I wouldn’t say it counts as cut content if they change that content into something else. It’s not like we were down a zone like in every other expan we still got one it just changed corse.

[Andonais]

Mid wrath was the start of massive changes to the game into a totally different game.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

Mid wrath was the start of massive changes to the game into a totally different game.

So how do you explain the absolutely massive cuts pre mid wrath?

[Briselody]

WoD - they cut Farahlon completely

That's putting it mildly. There was to be a Shattrath raid, a whole storyline focused on Yrel as this central new character for the Alliance, actual developed cities in Bladespire Hold and Karabor instead of Trashran. WoD is the king of lost potential.

[sam86]

every single exp has shitload of cut ideas, if anything, TBC has the most cut when they planned to introduce a 'hero' path for each class, i remember that priest discpline would get specialize in being demon hunter or something, a plan that got scrapped because how insane massive it was
wrath has entire massive underground zone cut, back when i used to dig wow data i could see a LOT of content, and the fallen kingdom 'dungeon' is around 4 time the size of what we got, with some unique zones even not available entire game

anyway to answer ur question only exp i know by heart what they wanted to do and scrapped is wrath, and what they wanted to do was AMAZING and i wish it was done, rest i can't judge since i don't know what they did want to do exactly
WoD has almost over 50% of content cut that they planned -.-

[Andonais]

So how do you explain the absolutely massive cuts pre mid wrath?

They cut in vanilla and bc too content I don't think is as important as the actual core game like community,realms and classes

[cparle87]

Blizzard sseems to be cutting stuff more often than not.


TBC was probably the best finsihed expansion, with 4 patches, and big raid, SWP with huge story impact too at the end.

WotLK did finish, but it felt like the Ruby Sanctum was a bit short.

Cataclysm - they didn't really finish the revamp, it ended up only being partial

MoP - not sure

WoD - they cut Farahlon completely


Legion - they cut Thal'dranash (but spun it as replacing it with Argus, I think it was a cut)

BFA - HEavily reduced 8.3 content.


Do they need more time? or more staff? TBC ended surprisingly well, but if you normally play beta, you tend to find out a fraction of what gets cut.

Answer: none. Vanilla was supposed to have HFC as a max level zone, and zones like Azshara, Silithus, and Blasted Lands were unfinished. BC would probably be the only one with nothing major cut, cause it was supposed to be part of classic. Wrath had flying combat cut, Azjol-Nerub was supposed to be an entire underground superzone under most of the continent, and as you said the sanctums.

Cata they cut off the Neptulon storyline and the underwater raid.

Thal'dranath was the original name of Broken Shore.

Do you have any evidence that anything was cut from 8.3?

[StillMcfuu]

Blizzard sseems to be cutting stuff more often than not.


TBC was probably the best finsihed expansion, with 4 patches, and big raid, SWP with huge story impact too at the end.

WotLK did finish, but it felt like the Ruby Sanctum was a bit short.

Cataclysm - they didn't really finish the revamp, it ended up only being partial

MoP - not sure

WoD - they cut Farahlon completely


Legion - they cut Thal'dranash (but spun it as replacing it with Argus, I think it was a cut)

BFA - HEavily reduced 8.3 content.


Do they need more time? or more staff? TBC ended surprisingly well, but if you normally play beta, you tend to find out a fraction of what gets cut.

Pretty sure most of TBC is just cut Vanilla content.

[GreenJesus]

Did Blizzard REALLY finish WotLK? The first raid tier was literally just a vanilla raid tuned to level 80. They also cut path of the titans and the dance studio. And the Crystalsong forest was supposed to be a questing zone but the content got cut because Dalaran caused too much lagg.