I’m just saying, I don’t think anyone would be upset if you had waited until the end of December to ensure polish.
We have WotLK Classic to play with until then.
From my (very limited) time in beta, I don’t get the impression the game is going to be 100% come November.
Maybe I’ll be wrong.
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It is coming out in November
In terms of the beta though, they have already said that they are done “designing” the game - now its just about getting numbers in the right place and get things functioning properly and … its going to be like it always is for every single game development company in that it’ll be a crunch, some things will be overlooked, and it’ll release in the best possible form it can
Games can’t be delayed anymore without costing millions of millions of dollars to the game, company, and players
At the end of the day, the game has a release date and it has to be shipped at some point - polish or not
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No, I KNOW it’s coming out then. As like you say, that is the release date.
My question, and maybe not worded very well, is WHY was that the decision?
Initially promo said by December. Why didn’t they just go with December? That’s a whole extra month of polishing.
But what is 1 month sooner of playing in the grand scheme of the life span of the expansion.
My point is, I don’t get the reasoning and was hoping some posters my have some speculation that I would find interesting.
Yeah, i have the same feeling.
- There’s a lot of bugs, specially with UI, Click casting, and mouseover macros.
- I really feel that a lot of specs still not refined, and there’s a lot to do.
- Other than raids, we had too little if none test in other endgames activities (M+/Arenas)
- We had no feedback on reward from those activities, neither a good balance so far.
- The game is sluggish and not optimized, even a 3070Ti is having small freezes
So tbh, i think the comunity values more transparency and the efford to make the game better, than a pontual release. It won’t be the first game delayed, neither will be the last.
It’s better fix the bleeding playerbase for once, than deliver a crap first season.
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- One should NEVER EVER release a game during December, too much competition - and the competition, due to Christmas
- Release sales are different in December than Novemember, patch dates are different, returned products are different in Novemember versus December, and a whole lot more
- The game suffers from a ‘bad release’, the company’s assets take a nosedive and thus’ the stockholders will push on the company to deliver more money (WoD’s development cycle was in part caused by this), and players now’a’days have to often take out vacation days to play during a release week which would become wasted and many would stop playing the game completely
And … you aren’t arguing for “One month sooner”, you are arguing for “A month later”; the release date was set for November, the initial announcement said “Before the end of the year”, not explicitly December
Sorry but there’s nothing to really debate here and most of the responses if it got attraction would be akin to:
Without realizing that the first and second part of what they said is the same … and delaying it would cause a SERIOUS hemorrhage of players
If we want to understand this the absolute best … I’m pretty sure everyone has heard of Skyrim, the game that soon will be released onto Smart-fridges for the 11:th time … and how the game is unbelievably buggy to this day
Well… it was even buggier at release, and folks still played it, folks still play it
Bugs and “unbalanced/ruined/non-OP-my-favourite-class” has never been a player determent unless its been serious enough to impact the actual gameplay (see Cyberpunk for an example)
This is, (kind-of) sadly, just how the state of how we consume things as consumers (because yes, this is like 90-95% purely a consumer issue, and not one that you or I or even a thousand people could fix but something deeply rooted in how human psyche overall function)
And even on the beta … nothing is making me worried about it yet, and honestly … most likely it won’t even be able to make me feel worried about it, due to the fact that Blizzard has openly stated that they are keeping things under the hood in terms of a lot of DF which means internal builds
Folks are testing bugs that are “easy to miss”, not actually “this is how we are going to build DF” - that was settled before the game went into beta, and the game is for all intent and purposes finished right now, but we won’t see what the “finished” product is until two points:
The release of DF, and the end of DF - where we can figure out what things got cut and what things, if any, were fully realized
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I really don’t agree. World of Warcraft isn’t a new game, like Skyrim was.
If we’re talking about examples and models, we can use Final Fantasy XIV, that had to literaly shutdown it’s first version to save the game in the long run.
What I meant as fix the bleeding playerbase, wasn’t the seasonal aspect of it, was indeed fixing the root-cause.
One small thing, just for the sake of clarity.
Them releasing in November is “One month sooner” compared to the original promo saying by end of December.
Thus they are releasing ‘one month sooner’, and that is why I asked how is that beneficial in the grand scheme of the life of the expansion.
You did go on to provide some reasoning as to why they might have made that decision, so thanks.
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If we are talking about games that have done this successfully, congratulations
You found one exception
FF14 is unique in this case, and a lot of it can alone be attributed by just how strong the name recognition of “Final Fantasy” is
No other game in the last 40+ years have ever successfully conducted a restart like that
You can’t “fix” WoW’s “bleeding playerbase” because for that you’d know what the loss comes from and here’s the simple answer: age, WoW is old - everything that folks play WoW for is because of its age and how it makes it unique
You can’t re-create that, all you can do is attempt a reboot of the franchise and crash and burn much like how Everquest Next did; regardless of however awesome that looked and played like
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You’re probably not wrong…
Blizzard hasn’t shipped any expansion 100%. They don’t care about it being perfect for customers on release day because it can be patched and hot fixed later. It just has to be close enough. Release dates are chosen for the best impact on SEC filings and shareholder value.
In December? Sure, why don’t we release on a Friday while we’re at it?
Never release in December, it’s a miserable time to have to call people in to do emergency fixes when something goes wrong. And if you push your luck like that, things will go wrong.
I’d be upset.
Lemme out of Shadowlands.
Polish in a .5 patch.
LEMME OUT OF THE SHADOWLANDS
LEMME - NO ONE ESCAPES THE MAW
An extra month wouldn’t make much difference.
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That not everyone plays. I don’t. I haven’t done much in game for almost 2 months. Got my Jelly Cat, Heroic Raid Mount, KSM Mount. Ain’t been doing much of anything since.
That said, I would be fine if they delayed it, then had raids open in January. I been enjoying my break from having to login.
Everyone should preorder some extra popcorn in preparation for all the forum posts during launch week about this and that being screwed up.
A clause added for legal reasons, not because they intended to release it at that time.
Honestly, I’d rather they go back to August(ish) release dates.
Why do it in December when we can wait till June and have it even more polished with even more content!
Because you can’t wait forever, the longer they wait the more people quit the game, the worse it is on finances and cuts into profit. As long as the bugs are fixed and they continue with balance changes DF seems fine to me from my testing on the beta.
my guess is for sales during Christmas.
They want a good 4th quarter report.
So, November it is.
Market forces.
1st thing is that they stated ON OR BEFORE DEC 31st, well guess what its before.
2nd thing is that most WoW players that enjoy retail don’t play Classic. Wrath Classic is not that huge of a draw for the core players of retail WoW.
3rd The xpac is far enough along at this point to be ready for release come the end of Nov, another 31 days wouldn’t make a difference at that point in the product.
4th Everyone is tired of Shadowlands and is ready to move on.