This. There’s a fairly low limit on the number of tiers that can be relevant at the same time. Making new content stay at L60 or go to a new level cap doesn’t change this, except in the context of catchup mechanics.
On that subject, as much as some people hate them, catch up mechanics have to exist. If they don’t, people below the relevance threshold aren’t going to “progress naturally” through the old (now irrelevant) content. They will simply be gated out of new content entirely.
I don’t think you understand how game development works.
Things get cut and release unfinished all the time. The developers didn’t actually want to release the game when they did but were forced to push it out by activision. During vanilla WoW they were still working on patch content that had yet to be released.
The idea that this content wasnt at some point planned for release is simply ridiculous.
Could be something in Classic plus.
Blizzard wasn’t part of Activision back then…
Okay fair enough. Vivendi. Whoever spoke for the stockholders.
Ohhhhh. Thanks. I’m sure your countless years of experience in the industry backs up your opinion.
The argument is that it was intended for Vanilla. Not TBC, nor Wrath…Vanilla. Nothing points to that as a known quantity.
Lol buddy blizzard has outright stated that they planned the emerald nightmare for Vanilla and couldn’t finish it in time. Why on earth wouldn’t that apply to other unfinished content?
i think the lore was it was hidden from view due to some machine the titans made, but deathwing broke it when he went to the surface
That’s about where the story took a 180 for me.
Why’s that? I stopped playing WoW right before TBC and only casually watched cinematics after that.
This may have been the point that retail jumped the proverbial shark for me. Uldum was one of those things that was shrouded in mystery. Guarded by golems behind that big ol gate all those years… and then when it finally opens it’s ancient Egypt and memes.
I don’t think you need years of experience as a game developer to have an understanding of how the industry works. All you really need to do is read interviews with developers, articles written by them and so on. There was a lot of content planned for WoW that just didn’t make it for the original release. That stuff then got put on the back burner and picked up later on if it made sense, or forgotten entirely. I don’t doubt that there were plans for Uldum originally, but the one thing you never have enough of in game dev is time.
There was also stuff that they stopped working on because they realized they had enough content.
Oh I wasn’t clear, old content will become invalid for veteran guilds, but new guilds will still need to progress through it to get to other tiers, and so on. Even if each new tier of gear is 25% stronger, it’d take a lot of expansions before the power gap would be equivalent to even 60-70, let alone 60-120 like we have now in retail.
Was the start of having to grow strong like a god to defeat a god. And by then the expansions had to come out so fast due to players demand that the slow build up to the story was lost. Where Uldaman was a mystery and a curiousity for only the Lorey-est of Loreseekers, Wraths titan mythos was cranked up to 10 and never stopped trying to outdo itself from that point on.
I just want to fight dragons, and slay the undead, instead, I’m helping a dwarf restart his ancestors computer and flying around on Mimiron’s Head.
I would love to learn more about the creators of Azeroth’s great diversity. As well as the rest of the stuff. I was so into the quest dialogue I had never done Uldaman in my vanilla experience and I was surprised by how fascinating it was for a midlevel dungeon. Would also love to see more High elf story expanded on. What’s going on in Hyjal? Unreleased content is exactly what Classic needs for longevity.
All this means is that no new guilds ever exist and the game eventually dies by player attrition. There is a reason catchup mechanics exist and that’s why they’ve been in the game literally since Launch.
I’m glad Uldum turned out the way it did, for one. The more Warcraft differs from being standard, boring, medieval European fantasy, the better.
That was yet another Cataclysm letdown for me.
In case it’s not obvious, I was not a fan of Cataclysm. The dungeons were OK, but IMO the story and questing really sucked.
I dont think you understand the criticism. Uldum being boring medieval european fantasy was never in the cards from the beginning.