Yeah that is part of it, so they are going to be taking the money the are saving by cutting off un-needed employees and focus on developing games. What is so hard to understand from this?
I don’t understand what Kool-Aid I am drinking I just comprehend and understand what they announced and I understand their business plan. Do you not? If you don’t I honestly wouldn’t be surprised.
I don’t know…most of these mobile MMO games (see Lineage 2 ports) are more streamlined and automated than what we are getting out of even the most casual PC based MMOs.
The intent of going back to Classic WOW is to remove a lot of the automation that’s come with later expansions. Playing Classic on a mobile would be a nightmare, and would probably drive away the VAST majority of the player base that is supporting the project.
More likely, I could see them extending store offerings to cosmetic items, buffs, etc.
Hey, Ythisens. Do me a favor. Tell your bosses and corporate overlords that even if this completely bombs financially, it wasn’t a waste of time or money.
I don’t really plan on playing Classic. I played Classic when Classic was retail, and I don’t plan on playing the same content again. (Related: I hate timewalking.) But that said, I can appreciate the fact that I can go and see how the world looked at that point. Original Thousand Needles was a beautiful place in its barrenness. Ashenvale was amazing with hundreds of nooks and crannies. It was absolutely a beautiful world, and it’s the reason Classic had something like 8 million subscribers when the developers thought 500k would be a runaway success.
If nothing else, Classic is important to showcase the original work. The love and care that Blizzard, 15 years ago, put into creating a world with magical, beautiful places, back when the world had secrets - not the kind that are meant to be solved, but the kind that left you wondering.
I fondly remember Classic, and I enjoy flying through old zones now and then, because flying pulls back the curtain a little on the tricks the original developers pulled to make the world look amazing on the technology of the time. Trees in Felwood, for instance, look laughably bad from the top down, but they were (and are) amazing and enveloping (as they should be) when viewed from the ground.
I’m curious what the reaction will be to old mechanics that maybe people who never played Classic will experience for the first time. I always enjoyed crafting poisons, though I don’t wish for them to have charges again, nor would I want to have to reapply them when zoning into an instance.
In the words of Queen…
I want it alll and I want it NOW!!!
Curious if classic wow is a one sided discussion or if it will be a collaborative endeavour as originally hyped (e.g UBRS 10 or 15)?
Some of the fine points hanging people up could be a matter of presentation.
(It’s not an XP penalty. It’s a rested bonus! #classicexperience)
I really appreciate, and I’m sure others do too, posts like this. Even if they don’t reveal anything specific. It’s a nice gesture.
Love how it’s become a running gag amongst the blues.
On one hand, check out the secrets discord. Lucid nightmare was hard with a walkthrough.
On the other, I have heard there was one quest (at least?) that no one ever found in classic.
Looking forward to that discovery.
One blue post out of all these threads. As time goes on I am noticing the Classic forum seems to be dying down. I am guessing people are losing hype about the game. We need some sort of news, the questions being asked are not difficult questions. Tell us what you are working on, what are your expectations, dates, anything! We are desperate!
You do realize that WoW itself started development in 1998 and didn’t release until 2004? You do realize that Overwatch started out as Titan, which started about 2005/2006-ish IIRC, was canceled, then ressurected and repurposed into Overwatch which wasn’t released until 2016? That was a nearly 10-year long development pipeline.
You have no idea what exists in their unannounced development pipeline, or how long it has been there. Just because you don’t know about possible other titles they’re working on doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
Although I am inclined to suspect a lot of the bloodletting at Blizzard right now is their slimming down support staff in response to BfA under-performing by a wide margin, causing the Cash Cow that was WoW Retail to be insufficient for maintaining the overhead they were carrying. As such cuts are being made in order to better support the core business(game development) while they work through the long-lead times many of these projects often have. Its a combination of being pro-active and reactive at the same time, their income is dropping a lot, and the know what their development costs are likely to be for what they’re working on. So they’re trying to strike a balance in managing current/future budgetary constraints against projected future costs.
Hopefully WoW can add a million or so players(if not much more than that) back into their subscriber base so things can stabilize for them. But until/unless that happens, they have to deal with financial reality as it is, not what it might become.
soon™ has been a byline for them since before at LEAST the original StarCraft Beta Test.
Ythisens, I’m really sorry to see you go. You were one of the CMs I really liked. ![:cry:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/cry.png?v=6" ":cry:")
Shame the only CM likely to reply is now gone, But honestly these “geeky” conversations as much as possible of them need to start happening, on twitch on a youtube video, doesn’t matter if the appeal is to 10% of the wow population just working you guys work and just like world of warships blur out material you don’t want to release…
But these kinds of things really need to happen it creates so much good pr for no work but every-time its suggested somebody seems scared of saying something “wrong” and they don’t go ahead.
Ion is good at side stepping questions and saying a lot to end up with not a lot said in the end and its his job and he’s great at it, but sometimes you need the really excited dev who is really happy he got trees to act the same as in classic, that kind of “mood” being seen would really be a great boon… Think Ben Brode.(sp)
If that guy said azerite sucked and they weren’t going to fix them but told us how excited he was at seeing the new traits we’d follow him into lava and all die happily skipping along after him.
Wow, the beancounters win another one, and cost the company in the process. Always makes for interesting outcomes. Sadly for us, it means it’ll be that much longer before we get any meaningful information out of Blizzard about Classic.
But in the context of “they’re cutting people who aren’t involved in making games” the CM’s getting axed isn’t entirely shocking. Just sucks to see the good ones get let go like that.
This is such a sad thread now. We all finally had something to look forward to. Instead we got some really bad news. I feel terrible for all of the people who lost their jobs.
This is pretty messed up. I don’t expect this company to even do any kind of damage control at this point. They are killing their reputation quick and don’t even realize it.
In some respects, it’s OLD SCHOOL Blizzard after a fashion. Way back in the day, they let the games speak for themselves. After all is said and done, it isn’t going to be what a CM tells you about an upcoming release that matters. It will be the gameplay itself, and the player response that will matter.
But yeah, bad Public Relations all the same.
The SouthPark episode
My heart…
Seriously…
I really fear for classic now.