BfA’s major strike against it was the faction war. Yes, it’s the focus of the expansion but they didn’t do anything with it and a repeat of MoP. They rehashed the Horde as the aggressors, a suspicious and corrupt warchief, a rebellion against said Warchief, return of Thrall and Saurfang combo, and a major Horde city getting sacked.
At this point Blizz has got to make a home run. If they don’t then it may really kill WoW or gut it to the point that it’s not worth sustaining. They’ve got to pour their hearts into the next expansion.
Legion doubled down on the prune that I was already very against.
It also further gutted professions and introduced the titanforging system. Legion had good content and I liked some of the classes despite the changes, but still, it effectively destroyed a lot of the game’s foundational aspects.
BfA has been pretty weird in terms of progression, too. Right out of the gates two difficulties of dungeon and all crafted items were rendered irrelevant, which was super strange… usually that doesn’t happen until at least the xpac’s x.1 patch. As a result people were twiddling their thumbs waiting for the next thing to drop way earlier than they normally would have been.
The ONLY thing that made WOD bad was the LACK of content that was released for WOD. Its not that the content itself was bad just that there was a lack of it. Not to mention theres also all the content from Previous expansions people can do when such a big lack of content is happening. For Example people can work on the LoreMaster Meta Achievement, Farm out all the past LVL reps, farm all the past Dungeons and raids for gold and/or transmog, Collect all the Profession patterns for the profession there toon has assuming they arent deul gathering on the toon.
I was STILL raising some dangling reps from MoP, during content break/time gating walls in Legion (which I already had all reps to exalted, getting umpteen paragon caches from each.)
Legion had a billion cool, fun things to do. It only had a few reps, all of which were very easy to raise with World Quests.
MoP was such a mess. The only thing I really liked in it was the Timeless Isle.
Having stuff to do when classes are broken/feel like ish doesn’t make for a great experience. You can have all of the content imaginable but if the vehicle in which you experience it is broken, you aren’t going to enjoy it.
Not really if they keep the same formula the same. They have to do a lot to bring many players back or else players will stick with ESO, FFXIV, GW2 and any other game that’s not overly outdated.
blizz has this every other good / bad x-pac thing going, and the next one should be good, but i have my doubts. the last three expansions have been basically the same fundamentally speaking. i don’t see the current leadership staying from this.
The pattern existted under the Old blizzard. This is the new Actiblizzard and activision is more in control now. I doubt 9.0 will be any better quality then BFA . The cost cutting, poor moral and teh fact that activision told Blizzard to Focus on making brand new games to to release to boost stock prices means that quality will be out the window.
Remember Blizzard is no longer Games designed by gamers for gamers . They design games for the shareholders
Most likely it will have trash finder so that is already strike one and being a small indie company Blizzard will somehow screw it up but I have hopes it is better then this trashcan fire.
Whether or not that famous pattern is true (although thinking about it, it worked for the original Star Trek movies…) its obvious the storyline has been in progress for at least 2 expansions so I’m hoping that means they have a lot of things worked out for the next one, and perhaps even taken into account the sorts of things we’ve been tearing our hair out over in this one…
If N’zoth truly is the final boss of BfA, I would love for us to actually lose. Get bent, fail everyone, be cast aside and watch the world transform to updated 2019/2020 graphics with some old-god polluted areas and restore areas like Gilneas & Ashenvale.
Of course, this is just a pipe dream, but I’d love for the ultra bad guys to win.
Not sure to be honest. I still feel the WoW devs have gone down a road here and still do not understand what the core issues are.
For me, it really started in WoD. I was personally fine with WoD, but many players complained up and down about lack of content. This resulted in Blizzard going overboard in Legion and BFA with endless world quests and factioning. It also started to become very apparent that the content was being made to intentionally slow you down. While WoW has always been a time sink, the sheer volume of it now is staggering.
I still laugh at people who say that Vanilla was a crazy timesink compared to today. They are very wrong. I was fine as a filthy casual in Vanilla. I camped Wildheart gear on my druid and I could partake in any raid with it. Now? There are so many layers of difficulties, randomness in drops and factioning to hell and back just for the ability to fly.
People keep saying how easy the game is now. That is true to an extent, but in the place of difficulty Blizzard has added a million chores to do now. Its endless. It does not work because the more I stay logged off, the less I want to log in and even begin my itinerary of 7000 unfun things to do.
I also feel that the current WoW gameplay model has become very stale. Bound to happen after 15 years I guess. But if Blizzard think they are just going to keep releasing rep grinds and world quests and that is going to do in 2019, they are in for a rude awakening.
![:upside_down_face:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/upside_down_face.png?v=6" ":upside_down_face:")