This game company has tried it, too! And it’s worked pretty terribly.
They introduced “smaller, faster” back in Cataclysm and it kicked off WoW’s death spiral. Players already chew through content in a day. Making things shorter meant that the content, already lacking in structure, ideas and quality, would be finished even quicker and so the next piece of content had to be even shorter.
This is how you end up with years-long endgames for unpopular expansions like Warlords of Draenor.
Then, eventually, they decide to take longer and the stuff gets more quality. Then that’s not making money fast enough, so back we go to shorter and faster.
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Was Cata really smaller than wotlk? They’ve almost always produced ~2 year long expansions with ~3 “raid tier” content patches. Sometimes those patches were particularly poorly paced (like MoP I guess, which seemed rushed at the beginning and the lingered on its final patch for a long time).
WoD, SL and DF will all be 2 “tier” expansions though. With Wod and shadowlands I wonder if it was just the devs losing faith in the ideas partway through and deciding to move on rather than doubling down on bad concepts, and for DF I wonder if this will just be the standard going forward
I don’t have a warm, fuzzy feeling about it. But, maybe by having some “evergreen” content it means that they can be a little faster since they don’t have to reinvent the wheel with every expansion and brand new features. I dunno though.
Blizzcon was even for them to get my interest back. However it was not enough for them to get any trust back.
Cataclysm is the closest I came to leaving this game entirely.
I was subbed the whole time, but other than logging in once in awhile to stare at the screen and quickly log out, I went over 6 months without really playing.
I’d imagine the new model is an xpac is “launch + 2 raid tiers”.
It will be easier for them now with a large team, at least for this “block” of expansions. They’re being designed and built in parallel this time. All this should mean is a reduction of the “Fated” season’s length for each expac, which will be much better at 8 weeks than 6+ months.
Cata is when I started taking breaks. Before that, you couldn’t have pried me out of Vanilla, BC or LK.
And Shadowlands is the longest break I’ve had. I didn’t play for about a year.
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Credit where it’s due–they have definitely smoothed out their production to where the updates are quite reliable and quality.
Another interesting thing is how for the past few years the line between “expansion features” and “patch features” has blurred–we’ve seen stuff like new races and specs launch as patch features, rather than stuff you’d only see at an expansion’s launch in the past.
That could fit pretty well with a more fast-paced release schedule, where maybe the patches and expansions all sort of blur together and you don’t get dramatic system shifts from one expansion to the other.
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