World of Warcraft

hamlet.jpg
 
  • Islamic Content
  • Late
  • Lunacy
Reactions: Troonologist PhD, TVStactic, Bruh Really and 6 others
Übertroon said:
It's hilarious that I can already predict that the take away Blizzard is going to have from all the praise towards FF14 lately is that they will reason that they too need to pull a realm reborn and begin on a new WoW while burning the old.

Ignoring of course that FF14 was only a year old when they had their redo. Blizzard would meanwhile have to reset nearly two decades of progression.
FF14 didn't even fix all the issues with a realm reborn, and had to find their footing with a damned good expansion first.
And any reborn WoW you just know is going to be filled with current year bullahit. All the boring grinding will still be there, but now you get to enjoy half the npcs being black and the queen is a dude in a dress
Click to expand...
That's because WoW needs a FFXIV style reboot and badly. There's not really anything in the "core game" that you could point to as something that works really well and is worth saving. Most of things that people are notstalgic for (WOTLK and earlier game design) were in fact the "best ever made" but that's only the "best ever made until 2007 or so" and the bar for "best ever made" has been raised significantly since then.

Cataclysm wasn't anything approaching a reboot - all it really "rebooted" was questing in leveling zones and transportation in those same leveling zones.

They need a "Azeroth Reborn" for, if nothing else, a chance to throw all of their conflicting systems in the garbage and try and come up with more permanent solutions to gameplay problems they've had for 15 years in many cases.

Kane Lives said:
To put more context into FFXIV's reboot:
  • SEnix suspended the subscription system halfway through 1.0, due to the overwhelming negative reactions and feedback. Unknown if you still needed to buy the game then, but that was several months of negative income for the company.
  • They later gave everyone who continued to sub to the game throughout 1.0 a permanent 10% discount, even after ARR was released. That's right, you would have gotten a cheaper sub even today if you were around for the shitshow then. A nice gesture that they never revoked.
  • SEnix fired the two head honcho of the game, and brought in Yoshi-P. The team did not change substantially, I read, but they basically pulled overtime to redo the entire game from scratch, and even pulled resources from other departments to make it work.
I have immense trouble believing that Blizzard would accept even taking a temporary loss in their monetization just to fix the game, and actually putting effort in doing so. There's is NOTHING in their recent effort that even indicate they considered a change in their approach. It's all superficial shit.
Click to expand...
To put even more context to this, but if you wanted to play - you had to buy the game. This, however, was extremely difficult as Square actually had it pulled/recalled from store shelves.

Additionally, not only did they have a team working on the "new" game, they also had a team salvaging the "old" game as much as they could - via events, updates, patches, and so on.
 
  • Informative
  • Dumb
  • Agree
Reactions: AveraDiane, Stab You in the Back and Kane Lives
Tanner Glass said:
To put even more context to this, but if you wanted to play - you had to buy the game. This, however, was extremely difficult as Square actually had it pulled/recalled from store shelves.

Additionally, not only did they have a team working on the "new" game, they also had a team salvaging the "old" game as much as they could - via events, updates, patches, and so on.
Click to expand...
So if I've still my original copy I can still get the discount even if I haven't been subbed beyond the first few patched? I've still go the box, disc and activation codes, I might give it a god, I've been meaning to get into another MMO. I remember spending hours making different characters with the benchmark/character creator they released before the game launched.
 
Tanner Glass said:
They need a "Azeroth Reborn" for, if nothing else, a chance to throw all of their conflicting systems in the garbage and try and come up with more permanent solutions to gameplay problems they've had for 15 years in many cases.
Click to expand...
blizzard couldn't pull that off even when they had semi-competent people working for them. now it would end up worse than retail, if it ever comes out at all. activision might be a shit company, but even they're not dumb enough throwing money down that hole.
 
  • Like
Reactions: grimacefetishist
IneptRobot said:
So if I've still my original copy I can still get the discount even if I haven't been subbed beyond the first few patched? I've still go the box, disc and activation codes, I might give it a god, I've been meaning to get into another MMO. I remember spending hours making different characters with the benchmark/character creator they released before the game launched.
Click to expand...
Iirc there might be a minimum sub length too but there's no harm in trying. You'd also get a legacy tattoo and a few dialogue line changes in ARR.
 
  • Informative
Reactions: Pig Boss
ZMOT said:
blizzard couldn't pull that off even when they had semi-competent people working for them. now it would end up worse than retail, if it ever comes out at all. activision might be a shit company, but even they're not dumb enough throwing money down that hole.
Click to expand...
I'm not saying that modern Blizzard could do it - simply that World of Warcraft needs it done if they ever realistically want to be the "best MMO" ever again. The game has so many problems that go all the way down to the "core design" that it's completely understandable why some WoW players would want a "realm reborn" treatement.
 
  • Like
  • Dumb
Reactions: Agarathium1066, Stab You in the Back and grimacefetishist
Based off what they dev team is doing with WoW, I have three predictions for WoW:

1. Maintenance mode after next expansion. Bug fixes will be even more infrequent in favor of getting rid of problematic humor. Cash shop will continue to receive new stuff (transmog / new races / mounts). Game continues it's downward spiral as 50% of the playerbase is composed of bots. Economy continues to collapse due to hyper inflation. Game lasts maybe 5 to 10 years more before Acti-Blizz decides it isn't worth having around.

2. Major overhaul of the game takes place that is the opposite of FFXIV's "A realm reborn". The game will worsen as blizzard decides it wants WoW to run on cellphones now. Game is free to play and pay to win. Classes homogenize and become super simplistic to the point where most fights can be won by auto attacking. Bosses are made super easy. Standing in the fire only results in a small amount of damage and your character is stunned for a few seconds. Chat system is heavily restricted to basic per-determined phrases like in Hearthstone in order to battle toxicity. Yearly expansions come out with maybe two to four dungeons and one or two raids. Great focus on the cash shop for cosmetics (transmog/new races/mounts/hair styles) as well as Leveling potions. Items sets found in dungeons can be bought only a month or two after the dungeon is released for around $20 USD. Game may last around 10 to 20 more years before Acti-Blizz pulls the plug.
 
  • Horrifying
  • Like
  • Optimistic
Reactions: Nien Nunb, Dante Alighieri, Kane Lives and 3 others
Smug Chuckler said:
Like Everquest they will keep pumping out expansions with declining quality until it's no longer profitable or at least until Bobby has enough of the bullshit and decides to sell the IP.
Click to expand...
Bobby may be looking to revive Spyro and Crash and rent them out to a large company who will foot the bill to make more games. Influencers are getting crash and spyro shit out of the blue from Activision itself, but the fate of Toys for Bob and Vicarious Visions has already been sealed months ago where they will be assigned non-crash or spyro projects.

Blizzard looks like it's getting the axe and server responsibilities may be transferred over to another activision owned entity. He wants everyone who can to be making COD installments. This is the will of Bobby.
 
Tanner Glass said:
I'm not saying that modern Blizzard could do it - simply that World of Warcraft needs it done if they ever realistically want to be the "best MMO" ever again. The game has so many problems that go all the way down to the "core design" that it's completely understandable why some WoW players would want a "realm reborn" treatement.
Click to expand...
You already mentioned that Blizzard realistically can't do this, but I felt like elaborating on exactly why they can't do it.

First off, consider the difference between FF14 when they announced their 2.0 project and the modern state of WoW. FF14 flopped on release bigtime, with a very negative critical and player reaction, so much so that it only took Square Enix seven months to announce that they were fully remaking the game, going so far as to prevent new subscriptions for a time and offering discounts to those who decided to tough it out. Nobody really minded the idea of their progress being wiped due to the state of the game at the time and the sparse amount of time that they'd invested in it already. Three years after the game's release, they finally put out A Realm Reborn, and it was considerably more successful.

In contrast, WoW is almost 17 years old now, and while I'm sure there aren't many, there are probably still some people that have been subscribed since day 1. Many players have years of time sunk into the game, with a vast assortment of items, mounts, pets, and achievements to their name. If WoW were to get the 2.0 treatment and players were told they'd be forced to give up everything they had for the new game, there'd be massive revolts no matter how good 2.0 looked. And if Blizzard instead decided to port everything from 1.0 to 2.0, that would be considerably more development time spent on bringing thousands more assets to the new game and updating them to modern standards. I mean, they could go the lazy route and just do a straight 1:1 port, but if the idea is to create an improved game, that probably wouldn't be wise.

Next, consider the story. Again, FF14 had barely any story to its name when ARR came out, so it was easy enough to wipe it clean and start anew. What would you do with WoW's behemoth of a story? Do you retcon everything and go back to the Classic days, starting off just a few years after WC3? Do you keep the expansions people generally thought were alright and axe the less popular ones? Or do you keep the whole kit and kaboodle and keep moving the story forward from where 1.0 left off? I certainly wouldn't expect them to do a decent job with any retconned version what with the current state of the story department, but remember, the more you keep, the more you have to port.

On top of that, consider the developers themselves. Blizzard has a lot of devs, but a project as massive in scope as a complete rework of WoW would require pretty much all hands on deck, and probably more besides. Bobby Kotick probably wouldn't be all that thrilled if Blizzard went to him and asked for permission to hire a couple hundred more devs for 2.0 so they could still make updates to 1.0 in the meantime; they're on thin ice as it is, and more devs cut into his bonuses for himself. That means that 1.0 would basically go on life support for however many years it would take for 2.0 to come out, and how many players would be willing to stick around in the meantime? I doubt that Bobby would let them remove or discount subs in the meantime (again, cuts into his bonuses), so imagine asking their playerbase to continue to subscribe to a game that's getting zero updates for years. We saw the reactions to the devs taking time off from work to "reflect on our workplace culture" or whatever bullshit, and that was just a couple weeks. Expand that to years, and it'd be nuclear.

Remember also that WoW is still pretty much Blizzard's cash cow. Three of their main IPs have been on life support for years, and the other two aren't as popular as they used to be (though Hearthstone is basically pure profit beyond paying artists for new card art). Diablo 4 and Overwatch 2 have been delayed substantially, so there's not much on the horizon for a while. If Blizzard cut off subs for WoW, or even announced that the game wouldn't be updated until WoW 2.0 was done, they'd be kneecapping themselves hard. And I don't think Bobby would be all that happy about Blizzard draining Activision's finances further.

So to summarize, it's a much bigger game with a much bigger story that can't realistically be cut down without alienating people who have invested years of their lives and hundreds or thousands of dollars into the game, which would be worked on by devs that have proven to be incompetent and can't hire additional help to turn things around, all for a goal that might never be reached and might never recoup the investment put into it. I think for these reasons, it's safe to say WoW 2.0 will never happen, or at least not while 1.0 still has development going on. On that note, I expect maybe one more major expansion and patch cycle before the game officially goes on life support; when that happens, maybe a 2.0 or a brand-new MMO could be started. But that's years away, so it's impossible to really speculate.
 
  • Like
  • Winner
Reactions: Hoplixe, Kane Lives, KEKMUHLORD and 3 others
Stab You in the Back said:
FFXIV 1.0 was fundamentally a bad game.
WoW is fundamentally a good game.

Remaking WoW because of the design decisions implemented in 7.0 and beyond is the height of retardation.
Click to expand...
WoW is not fundamentally a good game - it was a mediocre game that for the time, was the best that ever had existed. It blew away it's competition, but it's competition was Everquest, Star Wars Galaxies (lol), Ragnarok Online (lol) and Anarchy Online (triple lol). For all of WoW's grindy bullshit, it was far and away the least grindy and most accessible game that had ever hit the market at that point.

There are huge, gigantic, and glaring issues that the game never addressed from it's inception that still exist to this day. Class specs are frequently dogshit, class balance is frequently dogshit, Alliance/Horde balance is frequently dogshit, The "remake wow" idea isn't because of 7.0 design decisions - it's because bad 1.0 decisions are still in the game that were never addressed in later patches or frequently made worse (via putting "gameplay systems" on top of bad designs).
 
  • Autistic
  • Disagree
  • Like
Reactions: name68126988, Lowlife Adventures, Nien Nunb and 1 other person
Tanner Glass said:
WoW is not fundamentally a good game - it was a mediocre game that for the time, was the best that ever had existed. It blew away it's competition, but it's competition was Everquest, Star Wars Galaxies (lol), Ragnarok Online (lol) and Anarchy Online (triple lol). For all of WoW's grindy bullshit, it was far and away the least grindy and most accessible game that had ever hit the market at that point.
Click to expand...
Everyone forgets Asheron's Call.
 
  • Agree
  • Feels
Reactions: Niggermancer and White Devil
There's no hope for a WoW: An Azeroth Reborn that doesn't feature firing or at least putting the fear of firing into 3/4s of the non-technical and non-artistic staff. Blizzard has been suffering from hiring and promoting mediocre talent in the gameplay facing departments for so long that their only hope is realizing that's what they have done and purging their staff.

Even if they do realize the problem there's no way to put it into practice given all the legal challenges right now, and given the recent communication on trying to hire more females regardless of qualification they don't realize it's a problem. Only an idiot wouldn't ignore their claim of "ha ha we won't hire literally anyone," it's impossible to hire enough talented woman (cis or otherwise) because there's a low number of them and they probably don't want to work at Blizzard for peanuts. They just will redefine talented into having a pulse.

The current crew helming WoW doesn't have a clue; they don't understand what makes a good game and they won't listen to any feedback that comes from the community that isn't just agreeing with them mindlessly.

I unironically think the least terrible support for a Blizzard game right now is D3, because at least they make well intentioned changes and have a solid grasp on how their game is fun even though they are like a fraction of a skeleton crew working in a trailer behind the chemical sheds at Blizzard HQ.
 
  • Agree
Reactions: eternal dog mongler, Dante Alighieri and Smug Chuckler
Oddjob OTP said:
Blizzard has been suffering from hiring and promoting mediocre talent in the gameplay facing departments for so long that their only hope is realizing that's what they have done and purging their staff.
Click to expand...
It's going to happen but it won't be Blizzard who does the purging.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back