A streamer made a comment this week that “Since WoD, WoW has had expansion defining features, and they’re responsible for development problems. I’m glad they got rid of them for DF.”
I had always thought the issue was some behind the scenes thing like downsizing or quarterly profit earnings. But as I thought about it, from Garrisons to Covenants, they do seem to be responsible. I tried thinking back to what we used to get hyped for before expansion features and I guess it was just the game.
I still think the removal of brand new complex systems is good, but that leads me to ask, most expansion features were really cool in concept, and if they were developed well they’d have been great. I loved Torghast, Garrisons seem cool, Island Expeditions and Warfronts are fun…
Question: How should WoW get expansion features into the game if they’re not going to be tied to expansions so strongly. Would you accept an expansion feature to start small and to grow over 3-4 expansions? Is there an example of pre-WoD features you think should be the model?
The philosophy Blizzard have leaned heavily on since Legion is that many systems are expansion specific, which means Blizzard can go hog-wild on them.
Artifacts are a good example, that level of progression is not practical to keep within expansions (especially if Blizzard decides to change how ANY spec works at a significant level). The design is to be so far over the top that simply their removal is a significant change to how you play in future expansions, even if the specs core remains the same. In a sense, they’re like more convoluted tier-sets.
But none of those things you mentioned were really problematic. That’s stuff like Heart of Azeroth (and associated systems), Artifacts and Covenants.
Garrisons were just straight up feature creep that ate too many man-hours of WoD. Torghast, Expeditions and Warfronts could have been built on, but they don’t really make much sense in the context of future expansions.
If you want to point to an expansion feature that has sustained itself, I’d point to Mythic+. It’s easily adaptable and has a broad appeal.
Brawler’s Guild was awesome. It was an expansion feature but it also kind of wasn’t. There were Panda-themed bosses in the first season and then it became more expansion-agnostic.
Anyways, as far as expansion features, Blizzard should focus more on making features fun than mandatory. You can say, okay, well people did way more Torghast than Covenant Sanctum features, but Covenant Sanctum features were gated by Anima and had no reward and people had tons of chores already that people were not going to go out of their way to grind Anima on top of everything else. And by the time the drought was over, that content was “old” and only dedicated mog farmers pursue them.
Just let people have fun from the get-go and people will have fun.
They just make them not heavily tied into borrowed power or a place you do everything in like we did with garrisons. Just make it a ‘feature’ of that expansion to continue trying new ideas, which I’m sure they are going to continue doing.
Consider that people are intelligent enough to figure out if they want to do a particular piece of content for whatever reason they chose rather than making it required. If it sticks and the community likes it just listen to the feedback and continue iterating on it.
Something like the Darkmoon Faire. Something that is an activity you can do for fun and enjoyment that isn’t tied to your character power. Torghast could have been an option had they not tied it to getting legendaries. They could just add cosmetic, titles, pets etc. Imo they tied it to getting your legendary so they could artificially inflate their numbers about how many people were actually participating.
Not saying the Darkmoon Faire is “awesome”, just saying it’s an example. It’s not tied to character power. It’s an activity outside of just killing things. And you can do it regardless of what expansion you’re in for fun if you enjoy it.
I don’t mind them expanding torghast as long as it’s not tied to legendaries and character power. It wasn’t really my cup of tea , but I’m sure many others enjoy it.
Because they became a mandatory feature as blizz was afraid nobody would do them otherwise. If islands, wf, torghast, ap ect had no player power gains from them they wouldn’t be so bad cause if you didn’t like them then you wouldn’t do them but being made to do them weekly for the power gains was horrible.
Torghast is tainted. I tried to do Torghast in S3 and I just got flashbacks to the mandatory grind elements during S2 and hated it.
S2 really put a dark shadow over the whole expansion. From the terrible lore, terrible open-world zone, boring affix, lack of new M+ content, bad raid, boring aesthetics, just a terrible patch, one of the worst we’ve ever seen I think. Not the worst, but one of the worst.
If it were just a new feature each expansion it wouldn’t be so bad. One of my biggest beefs with the game is the need to rewrite the whole game every expansion. It puts too much emphasis on systems and gimmicks, while not enough is invested in creating actual content.
That’s why you make the stories great, and write more content. Nobody’s saying don’t make changes, but wholesale rewriting of mechanics to force people to relearn their characters all the time is more of a frustration than a fun challenge.