Yes yes, I have heard Tom Chilton reflect back on the “Orc fatigue” issue. But I SWEAR that I don’t remember seeing this complaint from any actual players, or even games journalists (joke that they are).
Was there really a sentiment of “orc fatigue”?
Doing TW WoD last week just made me realized how much cool stuff there was like the Botani, Shattrath (RIP), the arrakkoa (that Spires of Arakk dungeon is SO COOL), Auchindoun, saberon etc. Definitely not the total “orc orc orc” Tom Chilton mentioned.
And my understanding is that Farahlon wouldn’t have orcs either. So what really happened?
Was this just some Blizzard DEVS getting tired of the theme? (To reiterate, this doesn’t make sense because as I outlined, WoD had a fair bit of variation and they could always add more but they chose to stop adding)
It sucked, no content, so we were forced to hunker down in our Garrisons and make a huge piles of gold that would pay for the game into the distant future.
I feel like they didn’t even give it a fair chance to incubate though. especially when you consider that Tanaan was supposed to be a launch zone. All that variation would have mostly been there from the start.
Ultimately we don’t know. Blizz has never given any official story on why they abandoned their original plan. All we know is during beta there was a radical design shift that cut and changed everything and the fallout afterwards to what we got.
So likely it was some change of heart or story arcs that happened in development. Then later during they decided to just prioritize Legion instead and call it a day.
It certainly had some cool things going on, but even on release there were a lot of things that were expected that were cut out. Weren’t Garrisons supposed to be so much more? There was supposed to be a railroad or something, two cities. I think they scrapped a whole zone. Story was condensed. I don’t really know what happened, but the thing was kinda messed up from release day.
The plug was pulled on WoD due to massive sub loss.
Flying debacle (Blizzard’s first attempt at removing flying was in WoD.)
Raid or die (The implementation of the solo play Garrision playstyle.)
Questing was great, but about 3 to 6 months in there was a massive drop off of subs as people discovered that unless you were going to go on into Raiding there wasn’t much group content for the casual crowd.
The six month mark was when the casual/social guilds I was in really started to nose dive.
WoD really was the social/casual guild killer expansion.
I believe a bunch of reasons were cited. WoD attempted an experimental 1 year expansion cycle but failed. I believe they also said they moved people around to Overwatch and new people they hired couldn’t keep up. Additionally they said like Cataclysm that development time was mismanaged with a lot of time going towards updating the old models and garrisons.
So likely a combination of those factors and others as well. I am sure the lackluster response to the overall theme of the expansion and lack of hype for the WarCraft movie didn’t help either.
Yep, midway through development they tossed everything they had done at that point. This was partially due to a major narrative change but there were a few other reasons.
Also it was never confirmed but I think they might’ve been gunning to line up the release of WoD alongside the debut of Warcraft given the bits the two shared, but Legendary Pictures had their own crapshow going on which led to that getting delayed repeatedly.