Here’s what I think about why BFA and WOD were both considered bad expansions. I think that Blizzard plans MAJOR great expansions (Legion, next xpac) and pours all of their efforts into making it amazing, and can’t handle an xpac of this level back-to-back, so they “fill in” with expansions that will give them more time.
Here’s a layout:
LK (Amazing)
Cata (Considered bad)
MOP (Pretty Good)
WOD (Terrible)
Legion (Amazing)
BFA (Bad)
Next Xpac - Old Gods
Maybe BFA was bad because Blizz is gearing up for a massive old gods expansion? Does anyone else ever feel this way?
Yes they really should, I’m just observing that there seems to be an on-and-off pattern for how expansions turn out, and the good ones tend to have tons of work put in and content … But yes, they should know how to handle turning around amazing content every release.
This is pretty accurate. From a personal opinion standpoint it doesn’t matter what you think. It only matters when your personal opinion is shared with others. So basically the collective opinion is more important.
Wrath was the most populated time in WoW’s history. It’s the most popular expansion for that reason.
Cata saw a significant sub loss but it wasn’t that bad. Then Mop lost more but again, most didn’t think it was that bad.
WoD was just enough… Blizzards lowest point in it’s entire expansion history still to date.
Legion saw a rise in Subs majorly.
BFA did worse than Legion in sub count. During BFA we see that Classic has dramatically increased the population of WoW. A HUGE amount. Many Millions are now playing again.
Popular opinion is acknowledging that the Beatles are one of the best musicians there has ever been. Personal opinion is saying your grandma’s cookies are the best in the entire world. Both matter but only one matters to Blizzard and that’s the popular opinion. I mean they’re a business. They don’t care if 1 person wants Blizzard to make a My Little Pony game. They might care if literally 100 million people blow up Reddit requesting them to make it.
If you didn’t play at launch and see someone quit the game because their first legendary was sephuz or prydaz, you aren’t qualified to give an opinion on Legion.
Eh, I’ve had a great time with it. I accept I’m basically an outlier though, so whatever. But really you can’t compare WoD and BfA. Even if I concede that BfA objectively sucks, it sucks in a completely different way to WoD.
BfA has a myriad of changes and mechanics that people don’t like. Azerite, GCD, class pruning and design that people largely seem to hate. And of course plenty of people don’t like the story (I love it though and will fight you!). Despite it all coming together so badly though, the effort is there. They have tried. The patches have been chock full of content, and they’ve tried their damnedest to make azerite a fun system.
WoD though, was simply abandoned. Sure it still had its fair share of bad class design (cough, arms warrior, unconvincing cough), but a lot of what was in the game was great. The leveling was an amazing time the first one or two times. I remember the positivity on the forums in those first few weeks. I’m not a raider, but I remember plenty of people who know their stuff speaking very well of the raids. There was just a massive lack of meaningful stuff to do otherwise. And so much content that was dropped, like proper capital cities, like two other island zones, the gorgrond storyline. They had clearly decided shortly before release that they wanted to rush through it to get onto the next expansion.
yes but the general structure, lore, game design, music, world, questing in legion had that “wow factor” that gets us hooked. it replayed elements from classic and the classic world and i think that’s what made it more popular.
First, Blizzard designed BfA without most of the improvements they made to their systems over the course of Legion. Seems like they incorporated a handful but either couldn’t or wouldn’t include things that people liked from the very end of the expac that made it much friendlier for multiple characters or catching up. Those should have been in place from the beginning of BfA. People just aren’t interested in the “sucks then fun then sucks again but maybe fun in the future” Grand Scheme model. We’ll just wait until it’s fun to play again, if ever.
Maybe that had something to do with the aggressive launch timeline of BfA, in which case that’s a failure of management in determining those timelines.
Second, Blizzard missed the mark completely with people’s interest in what were supposed to be major selling points of the expansion. Faction conflict? Huge MEH after we fought as part of faction-neutral orders throughout Legion. Would have been a daunting task for the best of writing teams. Azerite? Well, someone had to be absolutely bonkers to think we would actually enjoy re-grinding the same traits over and over all expansion but apparently they did think that.
So the foundation was rotten from the start, then the expansion was rushed out the door without time to fix classes after hacking away Artifacts, class sets, legendaries. Then it was shamefully packed full of bugs due to inadequate time for QA.
Bad systems, bad start, and that was the death blow for the xpac before it even began.
I dont think BFA is bad or sucks. It was the fastest selling xpac ever and tbh no one has raw data on how well its gone besides blizz. Is it the best and funnest xpac for me? No. That wuld be legion and wotlk, bfa is kinda 3rdish. But its a fun game still for me and many others.
The reason why in its current state WoW sucked for some people is the same reason Legion felt very anti-climactic.
The design of the assaults is to make the war feel ongoing, I get it, but it doesn’t work.
I would rather that it have been developed to kind of sway the way GW2 does it, so that the world feels more alive as a result. I have a hard time believing Azeroth and the Legion assaulting us that we were in some high stakes war, I never felt the pressure.
I would have loved if the Legion was actually attackign Azeroth, not just the Broken Isles…I would have loved if it was the same way for BfA with assaults, have opposing faction mobs that are threatening and even unkillable just to add to the intensity, but we had none of that.
So for a war that was depleting our resources, I never once felt like it was. It didn’t play out well in an MMO because we had lulls between patches and as a result that’s how the game felt, like a slow burn and not something you would have received out of a single player experience.
Blizzard needs to really move away from these big moments story telling, it’s so corny, contrived and vague at times.
People praise FFXIV main story, well gues what, they get the story in the game…not through 3 different mediums. We need that. Stop forcing people who are interested in the story to have to consume other forms that they might not care about to absorb it.
You want to tell an MMO story, keep it in the MMO. I don’t read novels, I could care less about having to also spend time reading a comic, but I play WoW. put the entire story in WoW.