The level of acceptance on all of the announcements is something Blizzard really needs to learn from.
Account-bound everything, evergreen systems, dynamic flight / regular flight everything and everywhere, warbands, delves and all the stuff that says “be who you are and play this game to your own style. everyone is welcome” is really what the majority of the community has been asking for.
Call me an optimist, but this new “let’s break and rebuild the foundations of something that was made 20 years ago” might very well be what the game needs to get back on track.
Hopefully they will see this Blizzcon as a success and learn from it.
I like your optimism pal but this is a company that made legion, and then went on to make bfa and shadowlands LOL
I do think the game is catching up to the rest of the market however. Wow is fun until you play other games and can’t wrap your head around how smaller dev studios can put out such higher quality work.
If the game is going to survive as long as they apparently want it to, it’s going to need to evolve in all sorts of ways. This could be the start of that, but time will tell.
A tricky situation for them is the the type of person who would attend Blizzcon is far from the average player.
Pretty much all of their mobile announcements have gone over like a lead balloon at Blizzcon because the audience there isn’t going to be interested in that mode of play, while Diablo Immortal made a butt load of money and arclite rumble probably will as well.
Show the metrics where all WoW players voted on what they liked and did not like. I will wait.
In the mean time I will sit here with a smirk on my face and the lack of audience enthusiasm through the entire thing broken occasionally by some very awkward forced cheers and a few real ones. I thought I was watching Real Time with Bill Maher at times with the way the crowd was sounding.
I mean, sure Shadowlands was a stinker but Legion is my single most-played expansion since probably WotLK or Cata, and while BfA clearly wasn’t as good as Legion it had bright spots that I found enjoyable.
While I agree with you here, I want to highlight some text from Ghostcrawler’s new MMO project.
“…we also feel that the genre (MMORPGs) has lately struggled to provide a community that you care about while still making your character feel heroic or special. We believe MMOs have moved too far toward solo adventuring, where other players often just slow you down. We want to bring back as central pillars of the MMO experience both playing with friends and building a community.”
So while I do see the advantages that Blizzard is moving forward with to make things more solo friendly (like delves), there are others in the market who definitely view solo content differently.
It’s tricky because some of the game’s most fervent players want ever more challenging content, but the more challenging and complicated content is the more you cut down on the number of players who are capable and willing to participate. That can partially be addressed with content tiering, but then you have a problem with players seeing each other as stepping stones and a means to an end rather than people, which leads some percentage to opt out of group content entirely which then increases demand for solo-able content.
Personally as time goes on I become more skeptical that challenging MMO group content can scale well or have mass appeal and think that the genre is better suited to content that’s less competitive and more like a tabletop gaming session (D&D, etc).
But it was a big old awkward yikes when it came to everything else.
Let’s be honest, Starcraft getting zero love, besides a shoutout from Phil Spencer, was just a big oof to me. Since that game was one of the major titles to get Blizzard where it is now.
Not without it’s problems, but most of those problems are forgotten because Blizzard essentially patched stuff like the AP grind and Legendary RNG out of existence in the second half of the expac and people tend to forget the first half of an expac pretty easy.
The problem was that SL and BFA were just low effort Legion. Like they fixed many of the problems Legion had (while introducing some new ones of their own, just to keep it fresh). But it’s like telling the same joke over and over, you get less laughs each time.
SL and BfA also axed two of the most loved aspects of Legion (class halls and artifacts) in favor of worse versions of both which certainly didn’t help matters. Both xpacs probably would’ve been received better had they built upon those features or even let them stand as they were.
I can say with 100% certainty, i played every other expansion FAR more than i have played DF. They keep adding things, just to let them die off within 2 weeks, or they intentionally make a stupid decision,(see ZC rares) that kill their own released work.
This expansion has been a sad commentary of the current team tbh.
Like on a technical level I would think there’s a fair argument that SL and BFA are better than Legion. They really got in their stride of designing dungeons for M+ in BFA and quite frankly on the raiding front, BFA was probably one of the best expansions with every raid being a banger except crucible.
On a technical level, Legion was a bit of a mess to put it bluntly. But it did so many unique things that even as I remain critical of the expansion, it’s hard NOT to be impressed by it’s ambition.
As for building on the features, that was never the point. The entire selling point of Borrowed Power was “we can do REALLY cool stuff because we don’t expect to sustain it, we can just replace it with equally cool (but different) stuff”.
And then I guess halfway through BFA development that they realized it was really hard to make stuff as cool as what Legion did with Artifacts and Legiondaries and they just said screw it and gave us Azerite instead.
This is why people like me exist. To counter-balance the people who will live their 80 or so years in life never happy with anything at all!
I myself am a group-oriented player. I can’t raid anymore due to the fact that I live in Europe and Blizzard won’t let me transfer my account to Europe, so gaming hours are cr&pped for me, but I do M+ content all the time. I play Classic HC in a group, and try to get everyone online to play Retail. I am on board with the necessity of guilds and groups, and I surely wish they’d make it more appeasing to players.
I can’t ignore, though, that videogames should be for everyone, and if you want to experience World of Warcraft in a “single player” style of gaming, then you should be able to.
Thank you for your input.
Because Daarrk decides what wow is.
I cannot disagree with you there.
I’m in love with how brutally honest you are about the whole thing. Thanks for this!