World of Warcraft Archives - Page 54 of 109

A Mixed Bag

August 8, 2015 by Belghast

Now it is time for me to finally sit down and write the post I have largely been avoiding writing since Thursday. For those that have been living under a rock this week, or otherwise disconnected from the internet… Thursday was the time at which Blizzard broke with tradition and announced a new World of Warcraft expansion at a convention other than Blizzcon. For awhile now I had made the comment that if they had a shot in hell at keeping players interested… they could not afford to wait until November to announce what was coming down the pipe. Looking at the convention calendar the only slot that really made sense was either GamesCom or Pax Prime… and since they were planning a significant presence at GamesCom that was my theoretical choice. The truth is while I said this… I never actually expected it to happy until last week when they actually verified that was the case by posting the moment the announcement would happen. Thankfully for me it happened over my lunch hour and I freely admit I went into this announcement with a bunch of emotional hype. Deep down inside of me there is still a player that hopes someday for World of Warcraft to turn into the game I really want to play. You can’t be engaged in a decade long relationship with a game without having some glimmer of hope.

A few days ahead of the announcement I posted my list of “serious” predictions… that in truth only had one valid prediction. After watching the final cinematic for Warlords of Draenor, there was literally only one place this expansion could go. We were going to be taking on the Burning Legion in a new invasion of Azeroth, and sure enough as the teaser rolled and showed our old buddy Gul’dan pulling another of our old friend Illidan out of some kind of green crystal prison… it pretty much set the tone of the show for me. At face value the idea of a Burning Legion expansion is pretty cool, but it also has a very “repeating history” feel to it. In truth this entire expansion is a tapestry of cobbled together ideas left on the cutting room floor from previous games that lore fanatics have been begging for. We are going to get to see the remainder of the Broken Isles and the Tomb of Sageras as well as finally finding out what is going on in the Emerald Dream. These are all awesome components on their own… but just because I love Peanut Butter and I also love Alfredo Sauce… doesn’t necessarily mean that putting the two together is going to be even more awesome. I am in this strange place because as much as I did not want to play a “Dances with Orcs” expansion… the Warlords reveal gave me all manner of warm fuzzies up and down my spine in spite of not really wanting them. This reveal on the other hand, had all of these elements that I should love… but left me not really feeling anything but skepticism.

Demon Hunters

The biggest feature of the expansion is that we are adding another Hero Class to the game, meaning that they will start somewhere between 95 and 100 according to further elaboration in a similar manner to how Deathknights did in Wrath of the Lich King. This is a class that I have wanted so badly since I first knew there was going to be a World of Warcraft. Illidan Stormrage is quite literally the only Elf in the Warcraft universe that I like, in part because he looks badass and runs around with the Twinblades of Azzinoth. It seems that there is going to be a tank option as well for the class… which should make me even more excited to play them. I admit the whole angry half demonic tattoo’d elf thing largely works for me, and I’ve always thought the blind fold thing looked badass. I just feel like I should be more excited than I am about it.

Melee Hunters

I have images of me that I have posted her tanking Scarlet Monastery on my Hunter back in Vanilla. For better or worse I spent a significant amount of my time meleeing as Hunter, in part because I was frankly too cheap to restock bullets constantly. When I ground out the faction with the Firbolgs… I did pretty much all of it with a two-handed weapon and my pet. Is it wrong that the announcement that Hunters are actually getting a melee spec was the point at which I have gotten the most excited for this expansion? It seems that Beastmastery is going to work pretty much how it works today, and that Marksmanship is going to be losing the pet but essentially getting Lone Wolf like buffs. The problem has always been that survival did not feel sufficiently different from the other trees other than the reliance on traps. Now apparently Survival will be up close and personal in melee range while still keeping the pet, which makes it sound a lot like the Beastmaster soul in Rift. For a long while that was my dps soul of choice, because it let me run around beating on things… while having a really cool cat pet at my side. This might seriously be the best news for me personally in the expansion, because I love the idea of a hunter… I just never really enjoyed being ranged dps.

Class Order Halls

This is another really cool idea, but one that I am deeply skeptical. Essentially the plan is to create special areas that only members of a specific class can go to. Inside of it will be the givers of specific class based quests, and a whole new follower system that allows you to go out on adventures with fledgeling members of your class order. All of this sounds pretty kick ass because I loved Archerus as a Deathknight, and having a specific area I could go to just for my class. The problem there is that it never really became a “hub” for players, and as Blizzard has moved on past Wrath it progressively became a bigger and bigger pain in the ass to have to keep going back there to Runeforge new weapons. My biggest fear however is that in WoW 8.0 this will become yet another awesome idea that has been relegated to the dustbin just like the Halfhill Farm, and soon to be Garrison and Shipyard. The WoW team is exceptionally bad at creating constructs that will leave on with the game past a single expansion. One of my key frustrations with the game is that it is a series of loosely connected disposable content packs rather than one seamless living and breathing world. While Class Order Halls might be fun for an expansion, I full expect they are already planning on the next new thing to replace them.

Artifact Weapons

Apparently the Relic Weapon quest from Final Fantasy XIV is coming to World of Warcraft, but they are taking it further. If I am reading an interview correctly it sounds like there simply won’t be weapon drops in the Legion expansion at all. This is honestly not a horrible idea at least from a game design perspective because it means that content becomes so much easier to balance. Upgrading your weapon in any game tends to be the single biggest power boost a player can get, since it has a function… increasing your damage/healing/survival rather than simply being a random collection of stat boosts. By assuring that players evolve this power over time through the completion of content, this gives you a measured gauge to scale against rather than somehow trying to make things doable with crappy white quality weapons… but at the same time not an absolute train wreck when done by anyone with epic quality anything. Again they are making a stab straight at our nostalgia by having us reforge classic weapons from lore. The example they give is that we will be quite literally collecting the fragments of Frostmourne and reforging them into a new weapon. I have to admit this sounds badass… but the problem once again is… this sounds like a system that they will be all too happy to abandon come 8.0. If they promised that from this point out, we will be able to keep upgrading our weapons with ever more intricate designs and quests backing them up… then I would probably be extremely amped. I just lack the faith that this is going to be something that will be around for awhile.

It Could be Awesome

I freely admit that the raw material of this expansion that was announced on Thursday could end up making an extremely awesome expansion. The problem being that I just do not have faith any longer that Blizzard will create a game that I want to play for the long term. I absolutely enjoy playing each expansion and leveling through the content. I fully expect that I will purchase Legion when it launches and enjoy myself while leveling a few characters. The problem is that the game doesn’t have enough that I want to do once I have gotten three characters to the new level cap. Three seems to always be the number, it was the case in all of the recent WoW expansions, and was the case in Rift and SWTOR. Once I have seen the content that third time… I am just done with it for the time being and ready to move on and do something else. The systems that are there just are not sticky enough to keep me logging in on a daily basis, and the majority of my time in Warlords was spent logging in for ten minutes to fiddle with my Garrison and then logging right back out. Now they hinted that they are trying to come up with reasons for us to run dungeons even after we have hit the level cap… and I look forward to seeing more detail on this one. That was ultimately the thing that kept me going in Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King and the thing that ultimately felt pointless in most of the expansions since. It honestly feels like they are trying to borrow some ideas from Final Fantasy XIV… which is absolutely a good thing… pending they actually took the time to understand why those ideas work in that game. Right now I have zero faith… but there is a tiny fire in side of me that wants to be in love with Azeroth again. So here is hoping as we move closer to the likely Q2 2016 launch window that something will rekindle that fire.

WoW 7.0 Predictions

August 5, 2015 by Belghast

I didn’t want to do this as an “official” post, so instead I am making a bonus post today which is a truly rare occasion. With tomorrow being the day we find out what the new World of Warcraft expansion is, I thought I would jot down some ideas. Some of these are in fact serious ideas… others are absolutely not, and I can’t be bothered to differentiate between the two at this point.

During this expansion Thrall will have to stay home with the kid, which leaves Aggra to go out on adventures and be the “big damned hero” for a change.
Yrel comes to Azeroth from Draenor and deposes Varian Wrynn as the leader of the Alliance.
With a strong woman at the helm of both the Alliance and the Horde they realize how childish and futile it is to continue making up wars over essentially nothing… and instead decide to join forces and usher in a new era of peace allowing people to do whatever the hell they want with whoever the hell they want to.
Unfortunately our time bending shenanigans have punched a hole in the fabric of space and time, and we have ended up in the world of The Nexus.
All of the zones in this expansion as a result will be vaguely square in shape and consist largely of three large fields of play where all the quests will be located. The dungeon for each map will be conveniently located at the far end of the map.
Because we broke time we can now have a raid tier consisting of Arthas, Illidan, Diablo, Tassadar, and Sgt. Hammer.
Bolivar Fordragon has decided that his butt is cold, and has finally climbed off the Frozen Throne and now begins rampaging across Azeroth with his army of Scourge. The game will become a gritty survival game about fighting for resources in a world plagued by the Zombie Apocalypse.
We figured out yet another way to bring Onyxia and Nefarian back… and they are doing something in a dark dungeon with lots of lava and orcs or something… we will figure it out as we go with this one.
We are absolutely going to have an Old God in this expansion, because everyone loves crawling through Titan Dungeons right? We’ve had Norse and Egyptian mythology based Titans… now we are just going to remove all of the illusions here and make a H.P. Lovecraft themed mythology… every world needs for nameless tentacled things right?
Mentoring will be introduced but you can only do it on patch day while the servers are down.
We will have roughly half of our abilities removed so that it can fit on an Xbox controller… which will lead the way to World of Warcraft breaking onto consoles for instant improved relevance.
Gnome Druids… kitten form, bear cub form, baby seal form…. and Parrot form. We will make it work lore wise… something about digging too deep and hitting the Emerald Dream or something. Hippie Gnomes.
Bards… will not be in the expansion because while it would be awesome… we really don’t want to have to add a fourth role to the holy trinity.
World of Warcraft will no longer be a game, but a carefully curated selection of designer snacks… delivered monthly to subscribers.
We voyage to the South Seas and discover a kingdom of Murlocs… player character Murlocs! Except they can’t use text chat other than Murloc noises.
The Burning Legion… seriously it is probably going to be about The Burning Legion.

Blizzard Does Not Need WoW

August 5, 2015 by Belghast

The Elephant in the Room

I figure this morning I would cut with any sidebar discussions and get straight into the topic that was on everyones lips yesterday… the Blizzard Q2 Earnings call. If you remember during the Q1 2015 earnings call they announced a drop to 7.1 million subscribers after a peak of 10 million during the Warlords of Draenor launch bump. I think we all knew that the numbers would be down, at least incidentally based on our own experiences from the game. I have to say that I thought WoW token would be more of a game changer, and when they announced that World of Warcraft was down to 5.6 million subscribers I figured that the Token numbers would bolster this amount. However based on further information it appears that this number does include token subscribers as well. In truth this number likely does not fully account for the actual loss. Personally I would consider myself no longer playing World of Warcraft, but my account does not actually die until mid September. There are several folks in similar holding patterns in our guild waiting on their time to tick down as well.

As always MMO Champion has a spiffy graph charting the subscription numbers since the release of the game. To put things into proper perspective, the subscription numbers are exactly what the subscription numbers were in December of 2005 roughly a year after the initial launch of the game. This has lead some folks to point out that when you iron out the outliers like the Warlords of Draenor bump you end up with a standard curve that you might expect for a game of this longevity. There was a lot to be gleaned from the earnings call, but one of the major points I got out of it.. is that while they have already announced that the World of Warcraft expansion would be revealed Thursday at Gamescom, they left it off of the list of products planned for the rest of the year. That tells me that at the very best the expansion will be a Q1 2016 release. That means that there will be at a minimum of a six month lag between content patches, and at worst… honestly who knows what the worse case scenario could be. Hopefully this will not be anywhere near as long as the content drought after 5.4, but I am seriously hoping that they reconsider Hellfire being the final patch of the expansion.

Blizzard Does Not Need WoW

I feel like the takeaway from the earnings call is not that World of Warcraft has fallen by 1.5 million subscribers in a quarter. Anyone who was not expecting this was living in a rose colored world. Quite honestly I half expected it to be a bigger drop just based on my own experiences. The real take away for me however is that in spite of losing this many players Activision Blizzard had one of its strongest quarters yet. During the earnings call there were repeated mentions of “diversification of product offerings”, which tells me that Blizzard no longer considers themselves the “World of Warcraft” company. They see the writing on the way, that their juggernaut is winding down, and they have replaced its revenue by more agile games that are significantly easier to support. The hard truth is that Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm are making them lots and lots of money. When Overwatch launches you can damn well bet that it is also going to make them equally large piles of money, further diluting the need for World of Warcraft.

There was a time when Warcraft was the prize bull, but that is simply no longer the case. If you think of it from a pure numbers perspective it makes sense. Hearthstone for example is a digital card game, and the bulk of the assets that are created for it are two dimensional images. Granted they are awesome looking but they do not require the amount of time it takes to create three dimensional textured models and even more so huge three dimensional worlds for players to explore. The type of content that goes into games like Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm is just simply cheaper to produce than the amount of time that goes into building an entire world filled with hundreds of quest givers that have to be debugged and cross checked to make sure they are not breaking something else. To make matters worse… this expensive content is something we are extremely good at either avoiding or burning through as quickly as possible. The hunger for new content is never changing, there is never a point where we the players will ever be satiated. Adding a new playfield to Heroes of the Storm changes that game and its meta for months, and requires only a faction of the work that a single zone would take in a traditional MMO.

The Movie Tie In

The timing of all of this seems to coincide with the release of the Warcraft movie, but I question what exactly that means for the franchise. All of the details behind the movie so far seem to point at this being a “Warcraft” movie and not necessarily a “World of Warcraft” movie, meaning that it takes place in a time before the MMO is set. So does this mean that we will be doing more “timey wimey” stuff with the expansion, and we are somehow trapped in the timeline that we created by following Garrosh to Draenor? Are we going to play a role in trying to stop a new invasion of Azeroth by Guldan and the Burning Legion? The bigger question is… if all of this is going to happen are players going to stomach yet another storyline retcon? These are all questions that I really don’t have an answer for. I feel like if Blizzard has a shot in hell at rekindling the love of this game, they have to take us someplace new and unexplored, but do it in a way that feels epic like never before. I still mark Wrath of the Lich King as the best expansion to date, and it built upon the success of Vanilla and the Burning Crusade polishing both to a mirror sheen.

This is simply something that going back in time cannot provide for me. We’ve done the reboot of the world thing before with Cataclysm, and I found the whole process frustrating and annoying that places I once loved… simply no longer existed. I feel the only real option is for us to take the fight to the Legion, and have an expansion where we are the ones laying siege for once. What I want to see is an expansion where the Alliance and Horde finally put aside their difference, and with it the artificial barriers between players fall down. I want to see an expansion that places us squarely in the path of epic battles as we lay siege to the worlds that the Legion has conquered before, slowly working our way back to their base of operation and banishing their evil from the universe. That is the adventure that will bring players back, and anything less than that I think will ultimately feel hollow. We have run out of villains that we care about… and the whole “Dances with Orcs” feel of both Pandaria and Warlords of Draenor has been infuriating for anyone who really doesn’t care a damn about Orcs. Blizzard needs to prove to us that it can still create an opposition that is worth of the lineage of Arthas and Illidan, and I feel the only way they can do that is by having us take on the Burning Legion on their own territory.

Blame Acti-Blizz

June 30, 2015 by Belghast

Closing in on Turn Nine

Monday night is traditionally the raid night of our static group in the Greysky Armada Free Company. I had been wondering if we would actually raid since… well the expansion was released and we are all busy leveling. We were wondering just how a lot of things would work out, how our gear levels would scale appropriately and how effective we would be down leveled back to 50. It turns out I was pleasantly surprised on almost all counts and we stepped foot into turn nine once more making some of the most progress we have ever made. We actually managed to make it through a dive bomb phase unscathed, so at least now we know what that feels and looks like. The problem is shortly after doing so… we started our normal “death by simple mistakes” meaning we were all getting too tired to continue on.

I have hope however that maybe this weekend or next week we can step back in there and finally get a damned victory. Right now turn nine is our white whale… which is ironic in a game that literally has a giant flying white whale for a boss. This is one of those things that I just want deep down in my bones now, to move past this barrier and be able to say we have beaten it. I realize at this point it is outdated content… but that doesn’t matter to me. What matters to me is taking down Nael and being able to move into the Final Coil of Bahamut. I am hoping that we will continue plugging forward and taking down this stuff even when it is no longer relevant. It makes me happy that the game continues to be challenging even though some of our members have long since reached the new level cap of 60. I however was on my dragoon last night which is still only level 51.

Blame Acti-Blizz

I was having a conversation yesterday with a good friend of mine, about the 6.2 patch and what has worked and what has not worked. During the course of this chat, he threw something out there as though it were just fact… that surprised me a little bit. This friend of mine is as diehard a World of Warcraft fan as they come, and both he and his son play on a daily basis. So to hear it from him really took me back to an earlier conversation he and I had back in 2008, to the announced merger of Activision and Blizzard. His comment was, that the current state of the game and the seeming lack of forward momentum… is entirely to blame on the merger with Activision. Back when this happened he said that his greatest fear was that it would change the way Blizzard interacts with its games and with its players. Last night he said that essentially all of his worst fears have been realized, and that the game we today is a direct result of this merger.

While we cannot say this with any certainty for me at least Blizzard has been on a downhill slide since the release of Wrath of the Lich King. That was the last “great” expansion for me personally, and represented the closing of an era when I was completely enraptured by the game. Granted lots of things have changed, and so many other games have hit the market… but it feels like Blizzard stopped being the revolutionary market leader… and started trailing behind in the days post Activision merger. My question is more did they simply shift focus… did they no longer care as much about the World of Warcraft community as they did their other product offerings? It feels like WoW is a game that has been left to largely fend for itself. There is a large amount of hype drummed up each time a new expansion releases, but then that quickly dies down and we are thrown right back into the cycle of doing just enough to keep hope alive in their player base that things will eventually get better. The problem is… this sense of hope is fading as players are staring down the barrel of potentially another Siege of Orgrimmar like lapse in content.

Following the Money

I think the problem is that quite literally World of Warcraft is no longer Blizzards most important asset. You can see that pretty clearly as you look at the attention paid to each of their product offerings. The favored children of Blizzard right now are Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm, and this is evident by how much attention they seem to be getting by the company. You have to think about the simple economics behind that decision. If you can create a game where people will gladly plunk down $4 for five virtual cards, and potentially do so multiple times a month… what is the pure money benefit of spending much effort on a game where the players are ONLY paying you $15 a month. Similarly with Heroes of the Storm you have a game where you can churn out multiple new heroes a month and sell them for the priced to own rate of $10 a piece roughly, not including the skins which are also often around the $10 price point. I saw a recent article stating that it would cost around $1000 to purchase everything that is currently available in the in game Heroes of the Storm store.

Don’t get me wrong… I don’t begrudge them either of these games because I play both of them. The problem is… if you can churn out a few champions a month, or a new hearthstone expansion… the potential investment of time to the money it makes the company is far greater than spending the year it takes to make a brand new World of Warcraft expansion. Even factoring in the box sales it is no wonder that the Warcraft team seems to be starved for resources when the rest of this company is thriving. So I guess I get back to my friends point… that the Activision merger shifted the focus of this company from making great games “whenever they were ready” to making games to maximize investor profits. I cannot be so naive as to believe that the Blizzard of old didn’t care about profits, but I think for a long period of time they were simply shocked and baffled by their own success. I’ve said for awhile that when you start to believe your own hype… you are setting yourself up for the fall. I think with the Activision merger… Blizzard saw their valuation and consumed their own hype completely. Ultimately as I watch the company change, I fear for the state of World of Warcraft, this game that in spite of all of my better sense… that I still care about.