Not this coming expansion, but maybe the following one.
And it won’t be a huge rollback. Instead, they’ll tweak existing systems to mitigate the damage done to the game.
I think some features like LFR really should be rolled back, but I just don’t see it happening.
From this interview, it sounds like Blizzard would make two or more different games and maintain both if Classic was successful.
ttps://www.forbes.com/sites/hnewman/2019/05/14/blizzard-entertainment-ceo-interview-on-priorities-wow-classic-and-diablo/#4e98c1005bf3
Which at least in my mind sounds great. If each fan base can enjoy something, then we have things the way they like it, it’s the best of both worlds.
Would be weird for Retail to go in Classic’s direction.
Modern WoW is essentially THE MMO Diablo-like.
Though it has gone way too far in removing its social elements and in making loot not matter (among a host of other things), it is an interesting experiment.
I say keep going down that route, add some side progression and very rare loot drops that matter, and it is on its way to becoming a quality game of its own.
Expansions are worked on long in advance of even being announced. At this point, I doubt anything involving Classic’s success or failure would have any influence on the very next retail expansion. If anything, it would be the expansion after that where you’d begin to see the influence.
That’s what I think, too. 9.0 is simply too far along at this point for major changes to be made, but we could see if their design philosophy has changed any, and what way the wind is blowing. 10.0 is the earliest we could have a real ‘back to basics’ expansion.
And, if 9.0 is a big Old Gods expansion where we venture into the Shadowlands and have fun, or something similar, then we could have things set up for a 10.0 where the entire world has been revamped, and they use that revamp to change a lot of their systems as well. There’s a reason the world has suddenly ramped up in difficulty, and why all the classes have changed, and maybe some classes have new abilities (like talent trees) and glyphs become a thing again, and so on.
Now that Shadowlands has been leaked, which was probably no mistake and most likely intentional, (kind of like the Avenger movie leaks to create more hype and get feedback.) The idea of trying to see what people think of the next expansion is probably the effort to comfort what people actually want, without coming out and asking players, “Hey, what do you want,” especially if after the release of classic is out and people play classic far more than current content. The next expansion can go into a few different directions… it could keep doing what it’s doing, it could go back to its roots and back to a more familiar Vanilla play style, it could be the opening of a 3rd faction… the Scourge. I mean if Bolvar is showing up, and everyone is in the Shadowlands, with the dead spirits or whatever, couldn’t Bolvar be the new Boss/King of the Scourge?..(Side note, won’t dead Arthus be there too?) I dunno, just seems very Scourgey. I think that this leak was intended to be seen right before Blizzcon, and I also think the Classic will 100% influence the next expansion, and pretty sure the leak was on purpose, for that exact reason… feedback.
I am not saying that it would or wouldn’t happen as I have no numbers at all, and don’t think I could even make a guess, but that would never happen unless Blizz is confident that a change back towards classic would gain more players than it would upset.
You have to remember that Blizz has spent the last 10 years moving away from vanilla, and has a playerbase to match. That being said, I hope so.
The “leaks” have never been right.
Level scaling is literally one of the best things blizzard has ever done. Allowing me to go quest in my favourite zones and skipping those that I can’t stand is fantastic.
Allowing me to skip bc (I hate leveling in bc) and go straight to wrath is the greatest thing they did.
Pssst, no it isn’t. 9.0 is expansion 8. 10.0 is expansion 9.
I can understand this sentiment. Although if I didn’t want want to level in a particular zone, there were usually 2 others to choose from. I generally waited for TW dungeons to bypass expansions that I didn’t like(MoP). Different folks, defferent strokes.
Leveling barrens @ 50, while convenient IMO just feels wrong. Leveling only places that you know you like kinda takes the discovery away from the game as well.
TW wouldn’t work for you if you don’t like TBC dungeons though.
i’ve played the game since beta.
there is no discovering while leveling.
Are you sure you’re talking about WoW? I’m sorry that you’ve not discovered anything in 16 years if so.
No I mean i’ve been playing since beta. I have already discovered and did every quest/secret in every zone in the game. Years before zone scaling.
So when it came it allowed me to skip those zones I find uninteresting and the quests in them boring.
Except the subs are shared, so it’s pointless to say that…
Blizzard’s main goal is sub retention/monthly user stats. I think it would be a fair assumption, based on the hundreds of players that I regularly play with, that roughly 1/4 of players stay subbed for a whole expansion. The other 3/4 usually only play a month or so here and there when new content comes out. Even I’m lumped into the crowd that comes and goes throughout an expansion… Sure, that might not sound like it’s that statistically significant, but it shows an overall trend that likely scales outward to the rest of the playerbase.
The problem is that the playerbase has shifted in needs and desires. 15 years ago, I had no problem no-lifing WoW playing 8-12 hours a day. Today, I’m lucky to drop 4 hours, in a day, when I’m playing. Most of us have grown up, have jobs, have families and our risk of burning out on the game has increased. Also, the gaming community, as a whole, has gotten more ADHD, as time has gone on, and they are the majority of gamers now days.
Then along comes time gating (though there’s always been methods of gating though like attunements and such). As annoying as it can be at times, this was a necessary demon to help ensure that Blizzard got enough months worth of subscription out of a player. If left unregulated, a lot of the gogogogogo ADHD crowd of players will chew through content in weeks and then quit because they have nothing to do now. To help regulate that, they started time gating things heavily.
In terms of ability pruning, yeah, they need to strike a happy balance between too few and too many abilities. It’s hard to say exactly where the medium lies though. As bad as the vocally loud minority paints it out to be, I think WoW is in an alright balance of ability numbers per spec. Sure, some specs could use a couple more buttons and some, a couple less, but overall, it’s in an alright spot. If you have too many abilities, then it unnecessarily complicates the gameplay. Convolution =/= interesting gameplay. I remember having all six bars filled on my screen when I played my hunter back in vanilla, the good majority of which were used on a very frequent basis, and that’s waaaaaay overkill. However, with too few abilities, then the gameplay becomes too simplistic and repetitive.
WoW is likely never going to peak again. MMOs are a dying breed compared to what they were in their prime. All games follow a natural bell curve of people playing them. Most go through that cycle within a few months to a year, WoW just happens to have dragged it out over 15… All Blizzard can do is try to slow the rate of loss.
No. The next expansion has been in the works for a long time already. 10.0 is a possibility though.
I love Blizzard, or did, but I have to agree with you. I don’t trust them anymore to make great games. It’s almost as if, during Wrath, they became embarrassed of their massive success with World of Warcraft and decided to tank their own game.
Except that isn’t how it happened, Bone. It was a hundred tiny decisions, decisions people thought were a good idea at the time, which slowly shifted course and changed the way the game was played.
People had trouble finding groups for dungeons, meaning a lot of people may have gotten to max level and only done one or two dungeons the whole time unless they were in a guild that did guild runs. So they introduced LFD, and people were like, “Awesome, now I can experience this content without as much of the hassle!”
In Cataclysm, they did the same for raids, because more people getting to see the content is good, right? It was only later that we saw how that led to the breakdown in the communities.
10 and 25 man raids were put in because it was damn hard to find a group of 40 who could all do a raid. Because they wanted to get more people into the content. Because people had been complaining that they never got to see the content. And for most of the players, this was good. They weren’t hardcore raiders, after all, so they didn’t see how this affected people on the bleeding edge. They didn’t realize until later how it trickled down and harmed the experience.
There are many more examples. They weren’t conscious decisions to destroy the game, they were decisions made at the height of the game’s popularity, with the idea of making things more open. And the game remained popular for years because, hey, people like experiencing content.
And then, suddenly, an expansion came where the cut was just a little too deep, and a feature that people had come to expect and rely on was taken away, before being added back in only after you did a two-part achievement that included some of the most odious rep grinds and fetch achievements in the game. And the classes had been ‘streamlined’ to such a degree that things were practically the same. And suddenly, people realized how far things had come.
And yet, Legion proved that Blizzard could make good content. The artifact weapons and the mage towers were grindy, sure, but they were fun. People were legitimately hopeful when BFA started, despite the fact that our artifacts were getting taken away. But Blizzard tried to double down on systems that were in place, rather than either doing something new or returning to the way things were. They tried to play it safe. And that is how we got to where we are now.
They went too far with about 90% of the game.
I’d hope not. They are two separate games and it’s ok if they play differently. I doubt the retail fans would appreciate those sort of changes.
I’d prefer if Classic is successful then possibly expand on that.