I look at the adventure guide and see “Burning Crusade” and “Wrath of the Lich King” and they have so many dungeons and raids while the “final chapter of a story that supposed to had started since Warcraft 3 or in other words, Shadowlands” have the same amount of raids as “Warlords of Draenor” which was a expansion that was supposed to fill in subscription time until “Legion” which was a massive expansion, an expansion that we should expect to get all the time from a company as big as Activision Blizzard.
You would think since we have better technology, more people working on the game compared to when the game was first created, more money, more talent, more support from corporate, more prestige since the game is a established success, we would get more content and not less right?
Something isn’t adding up, how are we getting more resources to make the game better and somehow we get less content… I think Activision Blizzard needs to start a internal investigation to see if some one is “helping” themselves to your money that should had went into game development.
because wow is in maintenance mode they release the same amount of dungeons every 2 years and just turn up the ilvl knob each patch ez maintenance mode.
True there were more people but there were also less items in the cash shop. I think having the token, boost, and more mounts/pets/transmog/toys in the shop balance that out. Blizzard is making more more now than it did then. Money is not the issue, they are just giving us less because it saves them more money.
Because Blizz wastes time making soulbinds, conduits, covenants, Timeless Isle wannabe zones, fiddy five currencies and other such things and less time making dungeons and raids.
For Burning Crusade, as it’s an easier example let’s take some stuff into account.
Two difficulties - Normal and Heroic which only had a few more things added but hit like 300%harder and needed CC or trash packs would wipe the floor with you, they didn’t have to build it up for increasingly complex mechanics and affixes.
Many dungeons outside of a few outliers were bundles together in the same area and shared many environmental assets that existed in their sister dungeons or the zone they were located in, so it was a fairly straightforward process of banging out a bunch in development.
They also probably realized that because dungeons were the only real method of getting most reputations to exalted, they needed multiple to slow burnout as people grinded and didn’t get bored of doing the same thing over n over as fast if there were fewer dungeons.
They realized in MoP, perhaps even towards the end of Cata that implementing new dungeons was not economical. The time spent didn’t equate to the two weeks or less that the player base took to outgeared them. There have been multiple iterations, e.g. WoD just didn’t make any new ones. Legion introduced M+, but also affixes which is a substitute for variety/number of dungeons.
MMOs are very expensive to make and constitute a very small piece of the overall gaming pie. Just economics.
They weren’t completely subservient to corporate overlords back then. There was at least a hint of care about the product. They didn’t release something until it was absolutely ready - no rushing to get something out by a release date & settling for band-aid fixes when the content goes live.
Every previous expansion - and more importantly the behavior of the players during them - has led us to where we are today. We, the playerbase, have demonstrated over & over that they can do less & less, give less & less - we are willing to keep paying. We may vent on the forums but that’s meaningless.
Internally, developers have to look at how much time to invest into creating content that has replay-ability and content that scales. This was NOT something that was really looked at as far back as TBC or Wrath.
Dungeons were more like stepping stones into raid.
I don’t disagree that having a wide variety of dungeons to choose from is beneficial to the player. However, if I had to choose between what we have now versus what they did in TBC, I’d choose the current style 10 times out of 10. M+ has honestly breathed new life into the game by offering a 3rd separate progression path for players.
I think it was an interesting idea that the Key quest to Shattered Halls dropped off of a Fel Orc Blacksmith outside the Black Temple as it encouraged world exploration, even though it probably took a good while before anyone figured it out the first time through.
Attunement to Karazhan encouraged more groups to form for dungeons which of course helped with rep grinding and gearing.
But the biggest loss may be the key ring, I don’t know why they got rid of the key ring and now make me hold keys and key fragments in my bags.
Please someone try to convince me that attunement or a barrier of ANY type just to set foot in a dungeon or raid would be popular with today’s playerbase.
Time gating, played time metrics, none of that would come up at all. The only adjective would be epic, right?