I can understand and respect that. That’s part of why there is a clear delineation between Classic and Classic+/WoW2 as it were. Many of the changes are a fine line to walk. i think many of them could be done, and done well, without negative impact to the kind of game play found in Classic. People have honestly and likely attributed cause and effect to some of the wrong things.
Battle pets didn’t take away anything from the game, or do more than add a new mini-game to the game. Pet/Mount collections by themselves weren’t the problem, account wide linkages, and the in-game store are the real problem to be found there. Although the addition of the Mount collection did open a “cheap way out” for developers for “new rewards” to become increasingly common, so there are perils to be watched out for.
It isn’t the system that necessarily is the problem, but the implementation which requires refinement. This is something Blizzard historically has been good at making improvements to(although retail rightfully calls some of that into question). Taking game systems somebody else created, looking at them, identifying their strengths and weaknesses, and them pushing out an implementation with all the strengths, and few to none of the weaknesses.
The problem Retail has, which Classic+/WoW2 wouldn’t have, is they’re not contending with “Legacy issues” from the V1 implementation needing to be supported. Instead, they get to deal with the reflexive response from players like yourself who recoil in horror because you’ve had bad experiences with V1, and are not willing to contemplate a good implementation as even being possible.
And you’re probably right, Ion probably isn’t going to be up to that task, 90+% of the people on the current & former WoW Development team are probably not up to that task. They likely need someone from “outside that bubble” to come in and handle such re-implementations. Just hope like nobody’s business that the person they get to do it is a fan of Classic’s game systems rather than the later iterations.
I could take it a step further. Mounts as initially implemented were actually somewhat harmful to the community. Very good odds that a lot of the “drive by buffing” that a lot of players have been commenting on in the Beta drops off by a considerable amount as soon as players start moving around on mounts… Because they’ll have to dismount to buff, as such, that is not happening. (And didn’t happen in retail, unless you were near the bank, AH, or some other structure where players were already dismounted for other reasons)
Flying mounts just took it to another different level, by allowing bypassing of content(flying way over it). They were also bypassing fellow members of the community and forgoing opportunities to interact with other players.
That player who just got swarmed by a patrol they failed to notice and is about to die? Sorry, no help is coming. The player that might have saved them just flew over the top of the event at 10,000 feet and didn’t even know it was happening.
This terrifies in a wide number of ways. Least of which being this is essentially how WoW found itself in the situation it is in today.
Players kept asking for things, Blizzard said no.
Players kept asking for that thing, Blizzard caves and gives it to them.
Players then turn around and complain about how the thing they asked for ruined the game.
Define “the feel of Classic” please? And good luck at doing so.
It meant different things to different people. It’s a moving and very malleable target. Even the 1.12 reference client cannot deliver your vaunted “100% recreation of the feel of Classic” for you, or most other players.
The goal is to do things “in the spirit of Classic” with mechanics that obviously belonged in Classic. Mechanics that only get lip service in the game that is current Retail. I believe there are some people working at Blizzard who could pull it off, but I also suspect those people either aren’t currently working on WoW, or have little to no say in what goes on (design wise) in WoW currently if they do work on it.
It’s definitely not 100% impossible, it is certainly possible. That doesn’t mean it would be easy though.
I think they do have a skeleton of a plan for further Classic releases at present. (TBC, Wrath, etc) but they haven’t committed to them yet.
I think Classic+(or variants thereof) is something that may be getting discussed, but no decisions have been made, and those discussions have likely “punted” the time for making such a decision to some point further down the road. Such as after they establish whether or not “Classic has legs” to stand upon.
Throw in the whole legal angle involving abandon ware on top of it, and somebody Specifically asking about plans for “Adding new content to Classic” and you just the door wide open for Ion to reply “Absolutely not.”
Because Classic is intended to be a museum piece. That isn’t to say they can’t create a fork that branches away from it. It just won’t be under the Classic Label. Ion gets to be 100% truthful multiple ways. Classic isn’t getting new content. So “Absolutely not” is correct.
Also, they haven’t made a decision as to whether or not it is “worth their time” to create such a “fork in the road” for that kind of content, so no plans exist at present except for the intention to evaluate things later. So once again “Absolutely not” is a demonstrably valid response for him to give at the time the interview was given.
It doesn’t mean he ruled out the possibility of such a thing happening in the future. He was simply making clear such a thing was not happening right now.
Classic isn’t out yet and already the requests for content beyond classic start. No, there should NOT be any because then they’d be running two full games side by side. If they’re going to do anything they should totally revamp the current retail and return it to a more classic state. That would make sense, trying to run two versions of the game does not.
I would actually like to see them take wow classic and now take it into another direction with future addons. Make it essentially wow alternate timeline, basically wow 2.0. Use the art and assets from expansions but keep them to strict vanilla design guidelines.
I don’t recall them ever saying that. There was never a definitive ‘no chance.’ It was always ‘no current plans’ or something like that.
But to change Classic and abandon their promise of delivering an authentic Vanilla recreation would mean they lied to us about their intentions. Look, I understand the desire. Honestly I’ve thought about the possibilities of adding new content (dungeons, raids) and how that might be interesting. But then I read long posts by players about adding this feature, that feature, balance changes, homogenization, convenience elements, etc, etc. And you see how it can (and will) go horribly, horribly wrong. Much safer to just release TBC and perhaps Wrath servers. Capture those pieces if history as well.
And then perhaps work on another new mmorpg. I never thought Blizz would do that again…and still don’t. But perhaps if Classic is a huge success it’ll show them that the genre can still be very profitable and worth the investment.
It’s really not. For example, my latest suggestion, the Hunter Pet Un-Homogenization Idea, captures the design aesthethic and feel of classic WoW perfectly.
This proves my point. This is precisely why it’s not possible.
You’re talking about mechanics and spirit like they’re just plug-and-play formulas they have kicking around. They’re not. There’s an attitude…an ethos…a mindset…a particular time and place. There are thousands of thoughts and feelings that fed into the decision-making process that ended up creating Vanilla WoW that are simply not things that can be felt or thought again, even if you took the same exact people who made Vanilla WoW and had them do it all again. Those people think and feel things differently now than they did 15-18 years ago. Whatever they produced could be amazing to engage with but any feeling like “Oh this captures the spirit of the old days” would be purely anecdotal and a whole host of people might just disagree with you.