I don’t mean this as a troll post, but the past few years, what had blizzard innovated with wow? Classic was something absolute special, but these days it feels more like maintaining the status quo more than anything else. I could be wrong and would like to hear peoples thoughts.
EDIT: I hope everyone knows the difference between innovate and just adding new time played metrics.
“Innovation” has never really been Blizzard’s MO. In the 90’s and 00’s they excelled at taking what other game companies had done and distilling it into a more palatable and marketable form. Honestly these days they’re trying too hard to “innovate” and come up with new ideas when they should be doing what they do best and stealing what works for other games while perfecting what they already have.
What you mean they don’t innovate? The renown system isn’t innovative enough for you?
Innovation costs money.
Thats why we have been on barrowed power for 6 years.
Activsioned.
This is something most people don’t realize… but Blizzard was never the innovator. Blizzard’s specialty was perfecting good ideas that had been imperfectly implemented in other forms.
Prettymuch every one of Blizzard’s big successes were ideas that were already out there in other games, taken by Blizzard and applied to one of their franchises, then polished until it shined. THAT was their great success. Their strength was implementation and refinement, not innovation.
I hate to spoil the thread, but Blizzard never innovated much. The secret of their sauce during their prime time was to take existing ideas and then giving them the polish they needed.
Blizzard wasn’t someone who reinvented the MMORPG wheel.
They took Brad McQuaid and John Smedley’s work on EQ, then took their massively popular Warcraft property, designed the MMORPG on the same system EQ used. Added more action buttons, made the graphics so simple a potato could run WoW, and then made the game far more casual friendly than any game on the market. Took their famous CGI mini-movies and marketing and BLAM WoW.
Accessibility was the mantra when WoW first bust onto the scene. Then they took off like wildfire and since WoD (where they really were trying to be innovative) they basically retreated back and now just operate on maintenance mode because they’ve never been able to get to the numbers they were at with WoTLK
So are there a lack of good ideas these days to draw from?
And they won’t so soon. They continue releasing a expansion every 2 years to get the money from 3/4 millions players.
Oh, there’s plenty, but modern WoW developers seem to have some serious ego problems. They’re convinced that their game design is as high quality as what it’s built on, and have insulated themselves from hearing anything to the contrary.
Maybe they’ll try something new after lk classic, when there will be no new classic game to get more people into the game.
I think one of the key problems was that once Blizzard crushed all the competition, the number of ideas for MMOs specifically went downhill… and then Blizzard got stuck in their own heads a bit and stopped looking at their competition for ideas to perfect…
But it’s impossible to know for sure.
This.
Also this.
I just wish Blizzard had taken the time to implement player housing back when they were still in the game of taking ideas and making them better.
I still want player housing but I don’t trust the current dev team enough to think they could pull it off without making garrison 2.0.
This is a good question, Avati. I would need to ask a follow-up, clarifying question: What would constitute innovation? Moving away from the trinity role concept? The issue with a game like WoW - a persistent massively multiplayer RPG - is that there probably needs to be a good sense of permanence to promote the basic game design: RPG.
If WoW innovated away from how those roles were defined, it might alienate folks from the main core of the game.
That stated, I feel there is change, change like Torghast, Warfronts, Covenants that all expand on what was possible in the early years of wow: limited single-player instance content and limited single-player progression. We didn’t have the ability to get legendaries or end-game gear via single-player content (minus some overworld rare drops purchased on AH), nor did we have a way to procure new abilities or skills outside our initial class pick that occurred during character creation.
I would also argue Class Order Halls were innovative in that they expanded some of the typical limitations of inter-factional support that hadn’t really existed before that point, which was an incredibly defining concept in wow: choose your faction, choose your fate.
(Whether these are good innovations are definitely debatable!)
However, I do think some things would be amazing to incorporate: dynamic, random occurring events in the overworld - a la Rift’s planar invasions. (Although, I guess that wouldn’t be innovative but rather incorporative)
What would player housing add that would be worth the dev time? Like garrisons? Because I never went there.
MAU’s and money, things they obviously aren’t interested in nowadays.
Does TC care to point out at what point in time Blizzard ever did innovate and not just take something popular and make it better?
Probably gotta go back to 3 Vikings for that.
WoW, and truthfully Blizzard, have never been particularly innovative.
A lot of people aren’t going to like to hear this, but Blizzard traditionally has been something of an “Apple” in the gaming world. Not much of what they do is truly new — instead, they take existing (often trending) ideas and polish them and make them palatable to a much larger audience. That’s exactly what WoW did: it took MMOs from the super niche nerd thing and made it something that a huge range of people wanted to play. At its peak it had everybody from high school kids to late 20s-and-30s parents to middle-aged truck drivers to grandmas played it, and that was a far, FAR greater reach than say EQ ever had.
Innovation station
I feel like they try to innovate, but they just miss the mark up front (mostly because they ignore feedback from beta testers).
We got Torghast this expansion and a twist of fates leveling system, on top of chromie time. They attempted to be more story-driven with the leveling experience and with the casual content. They obviously put the effort into innovation. Last expansion they tried azerite gear, they tried corruption, etc…
What really bugs me is that they will launch a broken system and then fix it over the course of the expansion to the point where it’s actually pretty okay, (Looking at you island expeditions, azerite gear with residuum, wakening essences and legendaries, etc… ) and then they’ll completely discard it and start over with an entirely different system.
If anything they innovate too much. I’d love to see them just refine and polish the stuff we have into good systems themselves.