The same ol “Four Zones/8 Dungeon” formula is predictable and boring. It doesn’t really feel good to say “Oh the next expansion we get four more zones and eight dungeons…again.”
Patch content is pretty predictable too. “We’ll get a small zone and maybe a megadungeon somewhere in there too.”
Not to mention that it doesn’t really seem like we got more content in DF than SL. Did it come out faster? I guess if you look at it based on the release schedule. Not sure I consider faster-but-smaller releases to be a win…
Anyways, I’m running old Karazhan right now and the magic I feel in this (and many other old raids) just hasn’t been around in the newer stuff lately.
A live service subscription-based game needs to be predictable to maintain players. Most people won’t just subscribe forever and hope for more content. Having a baseline expectation that buying an expansion comes with at least 4 zones, 8 dungeons, a raid, and a story campaign makes it clear what you are paying for.
There’s still plenty of other additions, new systems, experimentation, and so on. Remember Zskera Vaults? That’s not a baseline expectation, it’s a one-off expansion feature. We also got Evokers this time; we don’t always get a class. The list goes on.
They could reverse engineer it so that to get access to open world content, you must first clear the hardest mythic raid. No new gear except whatever the RNG gives you once a week. That’d be exciting.
If you asked some people…even the more content of the old days was not really wanted.
Occulus added + 1 dungeon content to wrath. the +1 many people would shed no tears if not there. that be OG wrath and redo.
Cata redo…we have heroic deadmines as top deserter rate. I am told in theory the rdf deserter can be shorter than the actual run. Or at least is less painful.
As recently as BFA, we had more than 4 zones/8 dungeons for an expansion (BFA started with 6/10). We didn’t have this predictable 4/8 thing until SL, and god was that a bad expansion.
SL was 4 zones/8 dungeons. DF was 4 zones/8 dungeons. Now TWW is the same. It’s predictable and boring. It’s not hype.
I’d like to see Blizzard take more risks with their expansion packs, but I don’t think that’s the kind of corporate culture Blizzard has these days. Basically nothing Blizzard makes takes any risks.
I generally like the game the way it is right now, although I do take lots of breaks and don’t play as heavily as I once did.
It isn’t a great system and makes for a lot of wasted content, but we have too many competing methods of progression.
Blizzard should have split them out into other franchises years ago rather than trying to balance them into 1 game. Just make a Blizzard battle pass or whatever so you can play a MMO that focuses on M+ type content, or another that focuses on raids, maybe even one that focuses on pvp progression. Then Blizzard could focus on giving those particular players exactly what they like, rather than having to balance the wants and needs of the different groups.
