The proposed profession revamp is a big deal too. I’m kind of excited about work orders to be honest.
The old dungeon content upfits to m+ is the only thing I’m skeptical of right now. I can easily see a season or more where tanks and heals become incredibly hard to find because route study becomes too demanding. I don’t mind some third party stuff to min/max my character. I don’t like spending a couple hours a season learning new routes, dungeons, etc. I want to jump in and play or have in game mechanics that help direct me a little bit more.
No. Only a small number of people were fired. A large number of people left on their own when they saw that management was going to remain in the hands of the people who dreamed up Shadowlands and are still blaming the players for its failure, rather than accepting responsibility and honestly asking themselves why it was rejected. Instead they are still flying on the idea that players are always wrong, and it would be a mistake to do actual research to find out what they are willing to pay for and what will make them quit.
When a company is in turmoil, the best people quit. Having “Blizzard” on your resume is no longer going to impress future employers. They’re going to have to pay more to get people who are the most skilled, and likely they still haven’t filled all those positions. Even when or if they do, it takes many months to bring workers up to full productivity.
I think they’ve hit on some trivial things that are irrelevant to gameplay that they can hype now. “Dragons!” “A sort of dragon race!” But gameplay is what will make or break the expansion.
I don’t disagree with what you’re saying but he also said that ZM is a good zone and people liked it.
That fills me with concern. I don’t hate ZM but neither do I find it interesting. The lack of real story, the lack of engagement, the same small circle of quests…
He also thinks people love creating the mounts and pets. I again, don’t hate it, but I do dislike, greatly, the super-duper rare drops, the additional junk in my bank and the gazillion things I will have to kill to make those.
That turns a system of oh, I collect as I go and eventually I’ll build X to: There’s nothing else to do in this zone but grind to make X. And much as I like collecting pets and mounts, with nothing much else to do there it gets old fast.
My biggest worry is he thinks the above is all ‘casual content’ and nothing else is and we’ll end up with this big zone of – lackluster random bits we’ll care very little about after the first encounter.
Oh YOU! I remember you from an Epic Battlegrounds PvP match your Arcane Blast was killing me and my friends in one shot!
Never forget this name! You have the name of one of my Nightmare science projects I had to do in collage! I will NEVER FORGET! Warrr! (Joking)
Sorry could not resist what ever you were doing in PvP that was awesome, it was like a Super Hadouken or DBZ Death Ball players were dropping like flies awesome game!
Er, sorry sorry carry on… nothing to see here I just had to say hi for the person who made my friends rage so much I could not play because how much I was laughing! Made my night…
I can see it now, a bunch of random side content to collect cosmetics for your dragon… and that’s it. The entire open world being just rares, mobs you can grind for currency, little treasure boxes you can loot once a day, a few very basic “Kill This Guy” world quests for cosmetic currency, Emissaries… and that’s it. No other types of fun activities, just grinding and collecting stuff and that’s it.
Oh, thrown in like, one elite area like Perdition Hold or Endless Sands and claim that is a “group activity” and act like that’s good enough.
Dragon riding, talent and profession revamps aren’t systems? At the same time, we’ve been begging them to not add anymore borrowed power.
I’m not sure how you can say no class lore or flavor when we have evokers, new talent trees (again), and they haven’t released any details about class design yet.
They have talked about multiple events to do in the world like races and climbing. Rares are going to be better designed. They talked about adventures in that bronze tower. But they never fleshed out what a lot of this was, there is still a lot in the air.
Dragon riding is a system the way Pathfinder is a system.
Profession “revamp” looks more like profession tuning.
The only new system is the return of an old system. And Blizzard themselves have admitted in interviews it is hard to get hyped until they put something in front of us to actually digest in regards to talent trees.
My hope is most of the effort is going into working on the Classes/Specs which we’ve been asking about for years.
Instead of just Borrowed Power band aids to shore up poorly designed Talents and Skills maybe we’ll see fully formed Classes for once. Specs like Mistweaver have been directionless since MoP ended and every Class has dead talents since the Talent Tree revamp.
Hopefully not just a dungeon, but then again, if it wasn’t, we would imagine Blizzard would have said at least something about it. Not just implying that “people liked Zereth Mortis”.
I just want WoD style of pvp gearing and scaling along with no more systems that are external to your class that are required to be optimal. No more artifacts, azerite, or soulbind/conduit systems.
New talent system… new crafting system… new zones… new dungeons… new raids… new gliding/flying system… loot reworks… new class/race combos… tier gear that looks like someone spent more than 14 seconds designing it…
They’re doing a ton… I feel the opposite that you do. Sounds to me like they’re making good choices
He is looking at engagement metrics, which during Legion he explained to us is a 43 minute play session.
You thought it was about fun. Fun is not a consideration in game design, because it is difficult to quantify. They would have to do actual research to find out what players think and feel. They go on engagement instead.
