As much as we like to pretend otherwise, Blizzard lives in the real world, and they’ve had to deal with real world issues in the past year, like trying to maintain two separate MMO’s with most of their staff working from home. They’ve already ran into launch delays (not seen since TBC, really), and it sounds like 9.1 is going to be awhile as well. Trying to say “to hell with it” and doing a new expansion from scratch is just going to lead them back to the same place with the same problems.
I can’t speak for the community, I don’t have the data. But anecdotally several people in my guild decided to skip WoD or bailed on it early because it was “too many orcs”. I wasn’t one of them, but I remember it happening.
The development cycle for WoW expansions spans multiple years long before they are actually announced. Blizzard is already hard at work on the next expansion and possibly even the one after that.
Basically, cutting out further efforts on Shadowlands would in no way speed up the release of the follow-on expansion. Instead we would just have an absolutely enormous wait with no new content.
I always thought maybe the next one is already planned and skeletoned out while the writers start work on the one after that before the current one is even released.
If Blizzard is on their usual cycle, they’ve had a team working on 10.x for a while already. Has anyone asked whether WFH has had any impact on 10.x development?
There was an entire island removed from the map lol NE of Gorgorond, if I recall. An entire patch was removed. Garrisons were supposed to have multiple places you could place them, just SO much missed opportunity.
I don’t think it was “removed” as much as “abandoned in the early planning stages.”
Given the time constraints and personnel transitions (they’ve stated one of their biggest problems during that time was losing so many people during MoP and expecting their replacements to jump right in), even if we’d gotten the content, we probably would have been disappointed in it all the same.
I get the feeling that the devs could go into hamburger helper mode, stretching out the content in the patch cycle for Shadowlands. When have Blizzard released the first major patch in the past? Shadowlands is 4 months into a (roughly) two year cycle and the 9.1.0 ptr isn’t out yet.
Not saying we need new content asap. Just comparing this cycle to prior xpac cycles. Remember, everything is relative.
It’s a shame, too, since it had magnificent raiding, and pretty solid PvP and dungeon frameworks for Legion. The story could’ve been better, but I was a Mythic raider with some PvP on the side, and I had a ton of fun.
Here is a vid of the WoD panel at the 2013 Blizzcon.
Interesting points:
At around 10:14 you can see the original map of Draenor. Notice the two sizeable extra areas in the north east and south west of the map. These were intended to be extra zones, I imagine similar to what was done with MoP when game areas were added during later patches. They were removed from the map later.
At 26:17 you will see a descriptive panel which lists “Bladespire Fortress…Horde city”. That idea was scrapped and Bladespire Fortress was simply a Horde questing area.
At around 30:27 another panel images shows “Save Karabor, the Draenei holy temple…Alliance city”. That idea also scrapped and made a questing area that was barely used.
At 43:35 Tom Chilton says “A lot of the zones support the ability to build the garrisons, so if you decide you want your garrison to be in the hard zone of Gorgrond etc” So the plan was that you could choose to position your garrison in one of a number of locations. Obviously that didn’t happen.
At 1:18:00 they discussed Trial of the Gladiator. It was a PVP competition which removed gear advantage to put all players on an equal footing. Due to the potential issues from only being available at certain times, development was ultimately canceled during the expansion’s alpha. And yet now we have Brawls which come out only at certain times, and that seems to be acceptable.
I’m sure I probably missed more - but the issue was that all of these things were shown, not as items being considered, but as things that WOULD be in the expansion. Presumably to tempt people to purchase the expansion. And which never happened.
Those things alone are what caused so much dissatisfaction.
Lowkey seeing deja vu with SL, I wonder if they gonna abandon it after 9.1. Delay 9.1 further then gives 9.1 for 6-8 months then whine COVID made it impossible to create content or balance/fix the game then move on to next expansion.
Well, only if they refund the majority of what I paid for the expansion. And if they didn’t I’d be talking to our Consumer Affairs department because, despite what might happen in the rest of the world, here in Oz we are entitled to get what we paid for and to demand recompense if we don’t.
And thank goodness for that, because Bladespire would have been atrocious as a faction hub.
I remember in WoD alpha posting very detailed time logs of exactly how long it would take to run from point A to point B in Bladespire in order to get things done. It was absolutely horrible. A triumph of concept over functionality. Was super happy to see it get scrapped as a base.
