it was the dream expansion for people who just wanted to login and raid.
everyone else had nothing to do
it was the dream expansion for people who just wanted to login and raid.
everyone else had nothing to do
Because they gave up on the Expansion and started working on Legion? 6.1 was a joke patch giving us a camera, blood elf models,and twitter interrogation people hardly use and no one wanted. This was the nail in the coffin to the expansions terrible endgame systems and features..WoD was great up until endgame, WoD had the worst endgame to date
The launch of WoD other then various bugs and issues, was fantastic. WoD still has one of the best leveling experiences and questing experiences to date.
It's funny because WoD and Cataclysm are my two least favorite expansions and arguably among the worst, and I always wonder how different they'd have been if Blizzard didn't cut a tremendous amount of content from the both of them. Would they be middle of the pack or among the best?
It's interesting to think about.
(and no I'm not counting BFA among the worst yet because it still has life)
Would've rather had 2 more years of SoO than what we ended up getting with WoD.
That's how the game was since vanilla...
"Something to do" usually ends up being a boring grind like AP, leggos, herbs for pots, reps, so basically stuff most players what to get over with and actually play the end game which was raids or pvp. Now we have m+ as well.
Tell me when there was "something to do" that lasted months and it wasn't raids / dungeons / pvp / dailies / grinding gold?
What also needs to be taken into account, it's entirely possible that they fucked up the planning phase of WoD.
They realized a lot of the content in WoD would suffer from the "Orc fatigue" or is not exactly the best type of content.
Thing is, if that content is already in development and hundreds of hours went into it, there is no magical button that restores this dev time for other projects.
There are a handful of videos on WoD which show that there was quite a lot of content in WoD rather far in development but then got scrapped before the alpha.
The graveyard of scrapped systems / content in WoD is probably a lot bigger than for any other expansion.
let me first correct this for you:
WoD failed hard for YOU. or maybe us. or the consumers. WoD not failed THAT hard for blizz. they made an xpac with a great marketing and a „back to the roots“ setup in mind, which leaded to the most selling xpac in the first 2-3 months. they had over 12 million subs. but they did not any investments besides world and raid and garisson.
if you just assume they know they need that ppl for other games and they already did that system/setup with a concept like „lets make enough money with the outcome of the xpac and save all money while xpac is running“ in mind, they maybe get same or more amount of profit with it, than with more investment but for longer subs.
ofc, they can do that for a long time, bc loosing subs is long term problematic, so they ofc need a „bring back players all in“ thing like Legion after it. but for WoD itself, i think that worked very well for blizz. they know what they are doing. otherwise that xpac would not had that heavy marketing and not such a giant first 2-3 months peek. in the end they were even with their calculation and it was fine.
what i just wanna say is: YOU think WoD failed. THEY think WoD was financial wise ok. At least: Maybe.
and that means you ask your question (even with wrong given timeframe of 2 years, it wasnt 2 years) based on a false assumption. blizz was imo totally fine with SOO, because for the raiders it was good. and WoD was completely based on the old „raid or die“ concept.
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they fucked up nothing. as they said later in time, they shifted a lot of ppl to other projects and their focuses changed while already in development of WoD but a year or so before WoD even released. this wasnt an accident. this was planned and striped down. the complete mentailty of the whole marketing campaign was „back to the roots“ and „back to raid or die“ and brought A LOT old vanilla players back. thats the reason for the more than 12.2 million subs in the first 2-3 months and the most sold xpac.
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ppl have to differentiate that their point of view and mindset is not blizzards.
Last edited by Niwes; 2019-12-08 at 12:28 PM.
No new class/race.
Source on that.
That aside, your entire reasoning doesn't even explain the reason why they apparently shifted a lot of people to other projects.
Did they because they just felt like "Fuck WoW" or what?
Again, please provide me a source where Blizzard actually marketed this as pillar of WoD.
All i recall from WoD was a marketing campaign on "Savage orcs, orcs & orcs".
They could've released it. They didn't hesitate to release other pet projects like... islands in BFA for example. I'd swear half of Blizzcon where they announced BFA, was about the goddamned islands.
It's better to have some content than no content. It starts being bad when instead of leaving it optional they want to push the participation numbers up and force everyone to do that content whether they like it or not by tying the rest of the game to it, gate other stuff behind it, or add way too lucrative rewards for it.
Like for example in MOP they had to gate the valor point rewards behind dailies, or the legendary cloak behind 2 bg wins (yes we get it Blizz, you added 2 new bgs, we'd probably play them if only we liked to pvp).
Orc fatigue is a bit of a silly excuse, each expansion has a theme, did people complain about wotlk that there's too much snow and too much about scourge and undead?
And WOD could have some non-Orc themes as well, like Ogre, Arakkoa, Saberon, Gronn, Botani, etc. but main storyline was meant to be about Orc and Draenei. For example I'm a big Draenei fan and I feel that 2 places that were meant to be about them, WOD, and 7.3 Argus, were disappointing and story cut short. Tbh half of Mac'aree was about Alleria and the void...
Now for the Orc fans, I imagine Grom's story cut short and replaced with Gul'dan was probably disappointing as well.
I think WoD delivered on exactly what it was marketed for.
Because they didn't finish it.
Where's Farahlon?
Where's the Zangar Sea?
Why did garrisons feel like they weren't tested properly?
Why is the entire second raid tier missing?
The part that annoys me the most about the whole thing is that Alt-Draenor is quite possibly the most interesting, beautiful world Blizzard have ever made, and it was utterly wasted by the total lack of faith in their own product. When the going got tough, they just dumped WoD by the wayside, cracked open the emergency Illidan/Demon Hunter box, and forgot the whole thing ever happened.
Yeah, Blizzard seemingly went all in on garrisons -- and when they failed to deliver, there wasn't another major system to fall back on to pick up the slack. It worries me a little that when I look at Shadowlands, I see the same precarious scenario potentially playing out again with Torghast.
Last edited by EbonBehelit-; 2019-12-08 at 01:20 PM.
"Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice, without constraint." - Alexander Hamilton
Well yeah, i personally believe that BfA is basically the "complete" WoD if they had finished it rather than cutting it short.
They realized that WoD wasn't shaping up properly, so they cut their losses, in BfA, they also most likely realized that Island expeditions, Warfronts (that was the most overhyped feature of the expansion for me) or Azerite armor but kept on because they didn't want to repeat WoD.
It isn't.
After over a whole year of fighting Orcs in SoO, people got tired of Orcs, then a new expansion rolled around and was filled with Orcs.
As a matter of fact, they would have run into the same issue coming from WoD to Legion but avoided this in Legion by giving demons more of a side role initially.
Aszuna focuses on Undead elves and Naga.
Val'sharah on the Nightmare.
Highmountain on the Drogbar.
Stormheim on Vrykul.
The expansion later had strong demonic themes with ToS and Argus, but the Broken Isles itself were not as heavy on demons as Draenor was on Orcs.
"Could" is the key word.
They could have avoided this issue, but they didn't and realized this issue too late in development.
Gorgrond for example is a half finished mess on live because the original storyline was supposed to be about Orgrim and Durotan, the original layout of Gorgrond was also supposed to be different with the Grimrail track taking up a more prominent role.
They did tell us what happened. When Titan got cancelled, they moved most of the Titan devs back to WoW and the WoW teams were bogged down by bringing the Titan devs up to speed. Apparently there was also a culture clash between the two groups as to what direction to take WoD in; the buckets of wasted time and man hours resulted in a total development shitstorm and what we got was a half-baked wet shart of an expansion.
Be seeing you guys on Bloodsail Buccaneers NA!