World of Warcraft Archives - Page 54 of 108

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.

Shoddy Shipyards

June 29, 2015 by Belghast

Struggling to Blog

This morning I am struggling a bit to find purpose as I sit down at the keyboard. As of last night I reached level 58 in Final Fantasy XIV on my Warrior and am not quite to the next level wall. Things are happening that are enriching the experience, but those same things are massive revelations and spoilers and I am concerned about giving too much away. As a result I am just not sure what to talk about. I could break out some more of my existential angst that I can presently only be a tank when someone in guild asks for groups. I could comment vaguely about how much I am enjoying the story, and how awesome it is going so far. Neither of which seem all that fulfilling however and as I sit here tickety tacking my keys my mind is a blank page when it comes to other things that I might talk about.

I had these grand ideas that I would stream some more this weekend, but since my wife spent most of her time downstairs… I was inclined to do the same. I don’t like streaming when I could be disturbing her, so instead I just kept playing. I really wish Forge did what I wanted it to do… namely that it would take real screenshots to a directory, instead of getting uploaded to the Forge website. The problem I have run into in the past is that I cannot run Fraps at the same time as Forge, and without Fraps I don’t have my stable source of screenshotting anything that crosses my screen. I tend to disable the in game screenshot keys and use fraps to dump all of my game screenshots into one standard directory to make pulling from it for blogging purposes easier. The other problem with forge is that the clip size was too limited to snapshot an entire boss fight. I also wish there was a way to back up my stream to youtube the same way I can with twitch. Nonetheless I might give it another shot soon.

Shoddy Shipyards

Yesterday I spent some time in World of Warcraft, for all the wrong reasons. The night before I had left my phone upstairs on the charger, and by the time I got situated on the sofa and realized that I didn’t have my phone… and as a result did not have access to my FFXIV authenticator I could not be bothered to get up. The Blizzard client on the other hand authenticates far less often, when connecting from the same machine over and over… and I was able to get in with just my account information. As a result I played for a bit, long enough to unlock Shipyards and the first and I think second camps in Tanaan Jungle. The renovations to my garrison however that resulted in the building of my shipyard however were not quite so successful as I noticed I now apparently have a break in my wall. It was one of those things that I caught out of the corner of my eye as I rode past, and now I cannot keep myself from seeing it every time I ride to the shipyards to check on progress.

The journey into the jungle is pretty much the same as the journey out of it. You complete objectives which moves the storyline further, and unlocks an additional base camp. I am not terribly far into it at this point so I am not sure how long this mission goes. It was around the time I got to the second camp that I needed to stretch my legs… and while I was up I grabbed my phone so I could play other things. I have to give Blizzard credit because they do this moving target as you go through a zone thing really well. There were several moments like this during the leveling process, where you help this or that base to progress the storyline, and those tended to be the best part of this expansion. If they had somehow managed to create an entire expansion around moving the ball forward and delivered new content on a monthly basis I think I would be significantly happier than I am currently. As it is right now patch 6.2 just feels like too little too late for me. Other than the break in my outer defenses, the craftsmanship of this patch seems to be on par with the rest of the content they have released, so at some point I want to finish to see how things progress.

More Mobile Gaming

One of my biggest complaints this expansion has been that Garrisons turned out the way they did. I was hoping for player housing, and what I got instead was a mobile game… that was not mobile at all. All of the mechanics that go into the garrison and the shipyard as well are the same sort of ploys that go into getting people to keep playing a mobile app. I have been playing the hell out of Fallout Shelter for example, and it is the exact same sort of gameplay as you find in the Garrison. You have abilities that you use and then timers that you are waiting out… so you can do additional things… all the while juggling limited resources and trying to find ways to replenish them. There is nothing really “wrong” with this sort of cooldown based gameplay, because it seems to work phenomenally well in getting us to keep pushing buttons on our phones. The problem here however is… we are not on our phones. In fact we are having to do this sort of upkeep based gameplay on a client that requires a PC to log in and check. The end result has been me logging into my characters in the morning and in the evening for most of this expansion to do nothing but swap missions.

I think more than anything… this has been what has grated on my nerves this expansion. These mechanics place me into the game on a regular interval… but I am not actually “playing” the game when I am in it. Instead I am juggling the upkeep of a mobile game, without an easy to use mobile interface. As I have moved forward into the Shipyards it feels like they are taking the whole follower mechanic to the next level with allowing players to customize the ships… which means you need to go locate the blueprints to make various upgrades, while also locating blueprints for various ships. It just feels like this would be a really enjoyable experience had they added it to the WoW Armory app as a mini-game that you could either interface with in game… or through an easy to navigate menu on your phone. Instead the result is giving us something that feels more cumbersome than daily quests ever did, and at the same time extracting us from the game world… and keeping us holed up in our garrison scheduling this next batch of missions for our dozen alts. This experience makes me question even further if Blizzard actually understands its player base at all… and what made their game great for all those years.