We already do actually, its the old model though.
Orc fatigue is real and was a thing for a lot of people back then.
Going from SoO into an entire expansion of orcs, with the only non orc raid cancelled, was a migraine and a half for a person like me who can’t stand the race in general.
I actually stopped playing Horde because of it. I can’t stand zug zug blood and thunder me no bad guy victory or death.
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Yeah but this one was cut from WoD apparently.
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They were trying to push out an expansion every year.
Needless to say, WoD was a failure of such cataclysmic proportions that this endeavor died very, very, very quickly.
Worst of all was that a huge amount of content was cut. Like, more cut content than Wrath and Cataclysm combined levels of huge. The amazing capital cities we saw in the announcement trailer were dead questing zones that never amounted to anything more than an end-of-zone scenario and thus went completely to waste.
Ashran was an experiment that flopped miserably to the point where the entire PvP community was calling for Brian Holinka, the lead PvP dev, to be fired. The community hated him so much that the downvote button got removed from the game because anyone who wished him well when he got moved to a different game was downvoted into oblivion.
The Zangar Sea and Farahlon were anticipated additions to the game. One became a zone that serves literally no purpose; the other just got yeeted from the development cycle completely and got passed off as something else.
The narrative shift was completely out of the blue as well because of just how much crap was left over after everything that got axed got axed.
It was doomed to fail from the word go because Blizzard just couldn’t deliver upon what it hyped up with this expansion. And WoD was the most hyped expansion since the original trilogy.
Patch 6.1 was considered one of WoD’s “major content patches.”
Wanna know what it added? The SELFIE Camera. The toy that let you take selfies. And it added like two QoL fixes.
Patch 9.0.5 unironically added more content to the game than WoD’s first “major content patch” did.
WoD’s content patches were absolutely not okay whatsoever considering Patch 6.1 was one of its literal two content patches. There is a reason why it is hailed as the worst major content patch in WoW’s history by a colossal margin. Absolutely nothing comes even remotely close to how bad 6.1 failed as a major content patch.
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Wasn’t it like 8 months and nothing?
Trying to remember because I wasn’t active at the time.
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WOD was dead on arrival.
somehow with 16 months of siege of orgrimmar all that was at launch with WOD was what we got. thats hilariously, terribly, heinously laughable. and 5.3 barely had any content in it either, so strictly speaking, blizz had a solid 2+ years to work on WOD and we got some apexis and the garrisons. oh and trashcan. its easy to forget trashcan.
something massive must of been happening internally at blizz to cause that literal catastrophe to limp out of the gate.
the entire premise of WOD was resolved within the first 15 mins of the xpack going live. the iron horde which were united by garrosh invaded azeroth and within the first 15 mins of the xpack, we blew up the dark portal on there side and cut them off from azeroth. instead of dadgar porting in troops to build our garrisons, we could of ported home and left a mana bomb to nuke the planet. roll credits.
the writing has been disastrous for a while from blizz. with many many plot holes coming up. garrisons were a literal joke, with 2+ years of development and most of the plots were copy pastes of previous buildings. i makes literally 0 sense for how little content there was just surrounding garrisons, let alone the rest of the xpack. this is like anthem or no mans sky level mishandling of a product.
dont get me wrong, WOD had some good things going for it. the leveling was great. BRF is in the top 3 raids ever created for the game, and BRF also introduced mythic only level transmogs which was a brilliant idea. but WOD was so dead on arrival and blizz couldnt turn the ship around. the shipyard just doubled down on the WORST parts of the garrison. apexis was a 100% useless currency on arrival. by the time you could even buy one piece of gear from the vendor you already outgeared the gear you could buy with it. blizz has had that problem since cata that they refuse to address ( even though the easy fix is to make the rep quartermaster gear BOA ).
and this isnt even going into the launch of the xpack, where players couldnt even play the game for the first 2 months because the servers were literally melting out of there racks.
its kinda lucky that they abandoned WOD, because it was followed up by Legion which was probably the second or third best xpack they have made.
shadowlands… theres a lot wrong with it. and theres massive potential for it to be amazing. but its kinda limped out of the gate at this stage and kinda just trudging along. nothing is really standing out, and even only a couple months in, the content is already pretty dead. they have made a lot of really bone headed design decisions which is just hemorrhaging players. and even the up coming patch looks like more bone headed decisions. they arnt even making another set for the next raid tier, they are just rehashing the current legendary set as the raid set. so they arnt even putting in art effort for a new tier set. thats… pretty damn lazy. content wise, theres just more maw crap nobody wants to do. and thats all we have heard so far. blizz need to turn this ship around, but if WOD and BFA are anything to go by, we might be in trouble here of back to back terrible xpacks.
blizz need to start knocking it out of the park again. because this is looking and feeling really bleak at this stage.
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For unknown reasons they fired a lot of the staff that made MoP
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Actually you do have a good point.
Patch 6.1 had virtually no content in it. Lots of balance changes, but no new zone, raid or dungeon.
This left 6.2 as WoD’s only patch that felt like a major content patch.
Bottom line: WoD sucked. Absolute worst expansion in WoW’s history by far.
That said, the pre first-major content patch version of WoD was still much better than the pre first-major content patch version of BFA.
For the early expansion cycle, BFA had so many broken systems and failed new features I think it was the worst expansion for that point in the cycle. The only thing that saved BFA from being the worst expansion ever is that it actually did have a lot more content than WoD, and by the end of the expansion it was a considerably better expansion than WoD.
Personally, I’d rate WoD the worst expansion ever, and BFA the second worst.
^ Prophetic words. Is this the future for Shadowlands?
WoD was bad because the time and resources spent to develop the game was were cut and cancelled.
BfA was bad because the time and resources spent to develop the game actually translated into a truly blah gaming experience.
So ask yourself which was the bigger disaster?
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Don’t forget the launch issues either.
Anybody else remember the “official” Reddit getting set to private because the head mod wasn’t able to log in?
I think Legion was really sort of the last hurrah for what WoW once was. It was basically the last story they had left to tell that fans were interested in, and they went all out.
Blizzard has never said. But my theory has always been that they diverted a large part of their development resources elsewhere. To things like Overwatch and Heroes of the Storm. Then WoD dragged along and putting more money into finishing wouldn’t help the bottom line. But a new expansion always makes them big money.
I’m confused and had to edit this post 3 times.
Don’t mind me nothing to see here.
Not quite accurate.
WoD’s resources were never “cut and canceled”. Instead, Blizzard tried to do half an expansion in half the time. They failed. We ended up with half an expansion for the same amount of time as all the other expansions.
BFA was a full expansion in the full amount of time. It probably had twice as much content in it as WoD.
BFA was bad because it was a dumpster fire at launch. It felt like Blizzard had forgotten all the lessons of prior game development about what made for a fun gaming experience.
Gradually, Blizzard fixed most of these problems, but the game really didn’t become decent to play until around the 3rd major content patch. Too much of the expansion had passed in too poor a state for BFA to be considered a good or even average expansion.
In my comments for reasons why I was cancelling my subscription at the time I said “WoD is an expansion written by Orcs for Orcs about Orcs.”
I hate to say it but it is about time for Blizzard to move on with something new in my opinion.
I will probably play wow in some way until the switch o nthe servers gets flipped but some of the story is getting old and stale.
I will say that I am having a lot of fun playing through SL.
I was hoping for a World of Starcraft.
But it will never happen. It would just suck players from WoW and wouldn’t end up making any money for Blizzard.
The heyday for MMOs passed years ago. WoW is one of the few holdouts.
I agree.
Nothing is forever.
I could cite many articles and Youtube videos on content that were cut from WoD but people who are interested can do that on their own.
Given the state of Shadowlands, should Blizzard be thinking about doing the same in 2021-2022?