They planned on starting 1 year expansion cycles. They planned on having enough time to do this. They didn’t plan for a summer release of the Warcraft movie with an unfinished game. Their lack of communication between teams lead them into all orc and nothing but orc to the point that they had to rework an entire zone+ during the Beta. And they Hyped the crap out of content that got cut to meet deadlines.
When 4.6M players came back and saw that the hype was all hot air and left just as fast, Blizzard gave up on fixing WoD and just let it coast while they focused on Legion.
WoW Development is like the Exxon Valdez. You’ve got an incompetent (drunk) at the helm steering the ship, nobody on the ship knows what the other guy is doing, and nobody is making sure the ship stays on course.
Not just that, they flat out admitted that the garrison development took far more time than anticipated (literally it took apparently 2/3rds of available dev time)
It’s impossible for an expansion to be worse than WoD, but on top of that I’ve really enjoyed BfA so far and I’d rate it as fourth overall behind Wrath, Legion, and Cataclysm.
Pretty close race. I enjoyed leveling in WoD though, and not so much in BfA save a couple zones that I mostly like because of the music and the view, but not necessarily the questing itself. (Stormsong and TS I like a lot)
I also liked Ashran once premades became a thing. On the other hand most of everything else was either not interesting to me or just… green. So green… in WoD.
I might have to give them a tie at this point, and BfA could pull ahead if they add some things that make the second half fun.
WOD suffered from a severe lack of content but what was implemented was near top notch. If you weren’t in a raiding guild, then it was severely lacking in open world content. This all ended in a massive content drought as the expansion was cut short and Legion took forever to release.
BFA has a lot of content but there is nothing in the system to help your character permanently progress. Even WOD had perks and legion had the Artifact Weapons. Azerite Armor isn’t really character progression. The instanced content in BFA seems to be hit and miss. The overarching story is hastily put together and full of holes, like a Christie Golden novel.
Which is better really depends on your play style.
With people that don’t play the game, yet come to the forums daily to talk smack about it? Talk about not being able to cope. lol
All you do in your comments is criticize every expansion and aspect of the game. If the disdain is so much, why keep playing? If all is so boring and mindless and you are
“logging off forever and leaving this xpack behind until they get it right”
then do so. I always support people making their opinions be herd with their wallets. I don’t respect trolls that like to stir the pot for argument sake with no proof at all.
Blizzard could have worked towards adding some of the content to improve WoD, but WoD was never planned to run 2 years.
8.2 isn’t salvaging the story of BFA, it’s not salvaging the classes which the Devs have already said won’t get any more work, it’s not even salvaging the Artifact just shifting the grind from gear to essences and from gear unlocks to essence unlocks.
But it’s okay because you might get to play a gnome torso in 8.3!
They didn’t abandon it, except for Grom being the end boss because it was basically finished already and Legion development had been well underway when WoD launched.
Players didn’t like the total failure to deliver the hype: no Karabor or Bladespire capital cities, no Farahlon, no expansion of Ogre lore or seeing the Ogre civilization, nothing on the Botani outside of Gorgrond, no real call back to the old Horde with the AU versions of Warchiefs playing the villian role and getting roflstomped immediately.
Every expansion has an end of expansion lull and WoD was no different and BFA probably won’t be any different either.
Wod was the original butchery of classes. THe original (blatant) prune. (I specify blatant, because depending on who you ask, as far back as WOTLK or Cata, blizzard was homogenizing and pruning.) Looking back, it was much more fun. but only because nobody dreamed things could get even worse. (A lot of us said. “It will only get worse.” but yeah. anyway.)
Sadly, yeah I agree. Classes were more interesting in WoD, despite the prune and how they became worse from MoP.
I disagree that leveling was better in WoD though. When my new toons hit Frostfire it takes all the steam right out of me. I never want to WoD level ever again.
What’s similar to wod leveling though is that I’m so effing bored with the game I"m leveling more alts than I usually do.
But despite that, so much is so similar to Legion that I think people are giving it more hate than it deserves because they’re tired of it. BfA is worse than Legion, but it isn’t THAT much worse.
Is BfA worse than WoD? Absolutely not. Not even freaking close.
But you’re going to have people claiming otherwise, because despite what the title says, the dust has not “settled”. This is the current expansion, so people are going to be vocal about what’s wrong with it and have more raw feelings about it while forgetting some details about what came before.
3 weeks into WoD and the -only- thing to do was raid. Nothing else. Literally even the “rep grind” was a literal grind, no quests, no nothing, just farm mobs for rep for no meaningful reward. Sorry, but you can’t beat that in terms of “bad expansion”.
If you prefer quantity you prefer BFA, that’s really easy this is gonna be a full expansion vs WoD. And you get tons of repeatable things to do with wqs, islands, M+.
If you prefer quality you prefer WoD, everything in wod was better(classes, raids, base dungeons, story, garrisons way better than war campain, no sharding etc.), only m+ is better in BFA. You just rapidly didn’t have much content to do except login in to make gold if you weren’t trying to raid or pvp.