World of Warcraft: Dragon Desperation

[Ravielsk]

You can have no such ending or redefining moments for factions or player characters in an MMO. You could theoretically have a playable faction in WoW get defeated (ie, the Alliance wipes out or cures the Forsaken and reclaims Lordaeron), but then that raises the question of how you're going to continue satisfying players/customers who bought into a particular fantasy (ie, being Forsaken) and have built up an emotional investment in that over the years. Do the surviving Forsaken players get absorbed into a non-Forsaken faction that they may not like? Or are all Forsaken hunted down and the player is forced to create a new character as a part of an existing faction? Etc.

Its entirely possible to do all that but you have to be prepared that the first time you do such a thing there will be push back that will evaporate on second or third time as the player base realizes that giving the world a bit of dynamic nature is mainly a benefit for them. Problem is Blizzard was always kind of a pansy and basically despite all their posturing almost always buckled under player pressure which is why every single expansion has its own quirk that is never re-used or re-purposed for anything because its first implementation did not sit well with players.

A simple example would be the resistance system from Vanilla that was a good idea on its own but was terribly implemented on random drop items. If it were bound to classes or buffs it could have easily deepened the game by potentially turning every class into a tank for some bosses. Same with lockpicking which was just a minor benefit for rogues and blacksmiths that could have easily been used to put traps and hidden shortcuts into dungeons or randomly generated world chests(that were not pure vendot trash) and so on. The reputation system could have been easily utilized as means of giving the players story choices and so on and so on.
But every time Blizzard backed off these interesting ideas because their very first implementation was not immediately a hit. And the ones that were well received, such as artifacts from Legion, they just keep recycling without really getting why the first version of them was so popular in the first place. So if as a company if they cannot even properly stick with their own ideas nor recycle the few popular ones there is 0 chance they would have ever successfully pulled off a faction shake up of any kind.

Its entirely possible but not for Blizzard.

 

[Absinthe]

Fixed it. WoW's core it’s just outdated, and I honestly think that no amount of new classes/races, system revamps, make up and botox will fix it. Blizzard needs to stop being a bunch of cunts and go back at making decent new games instead of squeezing as many penny’s as they can from dumb fucking shit.

They can't do that, because all the people who actually made Blizzard's games are long gone. Activision took over in all but name, eroding the Blizzard contingent right out of it, and the recent clique wave of SJWs and their office politics has been driving out the rest of the old guard. The Blizzard of today is just a shitty brand, with none of the talent. There might be 1 or 2 people left from the old days but no one there is delusional enough to believe they are still the Blizzard of yesteryear when you could trust that the games they made would be worth playing. All that's left is marketers and a bunch of idiots with their heads up their asses who couldn't make a decent game if their lives depended on it.

If you want Blizzard games like before, you have to look where the Blizzard devs went.

 

[Sykar]

Or play old classics. Like Warcraft 3 Reforged.

 

[Ravielsk]

Fixed it. WoW's core it’s just outdated, and I honestly think that no amount of new classes/races, system revamps, make up and botox will fix it. Blizzard needs to stop being a bunch of cunts and go back at making decent new games instead of squeezing as many penny’s as they can from dumb fucking shit.

They can't do that, because all the people who actually made Blizzard's games are long gone. Activision took over in all but name, eroding the Blizzard contingent right out of it, and the recent clique wave of SJWs and their office politics has been driving out the rest of the old guard. The Blizzard of today is just a shitty brand, with none of the talent. There might be 1 or 2 people left from the old days but no one there is delusional enough to believe they are still the Blizzard of yesteryear when you could trust that the games they made would be worth playing. All that's left is marketers and a bunch of idiots with their heads up their asses who couldn't make a decent game if their lives depended on it.

If you want Blizzard games like before, you have to look where the Blizzard devs went.

Which highlights how insanely outdated the laws surrounding the IP are when it comes to video games and software in general. Because if I wrote Harry Potter 9 under J.K Rowlings name or tried to make another Star Wars and then credited myself as George Lucas I would be rightfully charged with fraud even if I had the permission from both authors to produce said work because I am simply not J.K Rowling nor am I George Lucas. I can credit them but I am not allowed to pretend I am them.
Yet Blizzard and pretty much any software studios are allowed to gaslight the customers with names referring to teams that have been disbanded years ago or of whom only the janitor remains. Realistically if the laws were applied in any consistent manner they should have been forced to rebrand several times already.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

Nah, the orcs were more like "might makes right". They were a warrior culture with none of the "frills"(and benefits) of the European colonialism. Hence why they accepted the initial offer from the demons as they have both proven stronger than them and ultimately seemed to have wanted the same thing.

What they definitely were not is some sort of a noble savage that just got tricked into drinking green roids like WoW and the Warcraft movie retconned them to be.

The demon offer and noble savage stuff was retconned in during WC3. In WC2, the orcs were not patsies for demons at all. They made all their choices without any outside influence.

 

[J1M]

Fixed it. WoW's core it’s just outdated, and I honestly think that no amount of new classes/races, system revamps, make up and botox will fix it. Blizzard needs to stop being a bunch of cunts and go back at making decent new games instead of squeezing as many penny’s as they can from dumb fucking shit.

They can't do that, because all the people who actually made Blizzard's games are long gone. Activision took over in all but name, eroding the Blizzard contingent right out of it, and the recent clique wave of SJWs and their office politics has been driving out the rest of the old guard. The Blizzard of today is just a shitty brand, with none of the talent. There might be 1 or 2 people left from the old days but no one there is delusional enough to believe they are still the Blizzard of yesteryear when you could trust that the games they made would be worth playing. All that's left is marketers and a bunch of idiots with their heads up their asses who couldn't make a decent game if their lives depended on it.

If you want Blizzard games like before, you have to look where the Blizzard devs went.

Activision isn't to blame. The success of WoW caused them to grow too quickly, which killed the company culture.

Also, the generational replacement employees were simply less capable and driven than the people they were intended to replace. Probably caused by continuing to pay substandard wages, but without the profit sharing potential the earliest employees had.

 

[Ravielsk]

Activision isn't to blame. The success of WoW caused them to grow too quickly, which killed the company culture.

Also, the generational replacement employees were simply less capable and driven than the people they were intended to replace. Probably caused by continuing to pay substandard wages, but without the profit sharing potential the earliest employees had.

If I remember correctly then the wages were always low but back in the WC 1-3 days they would split the profit among the team members. So they would be paid peanuts but after the game launched and succeed they got their own plantation. Problem was that such a thing is not maintainable with a publicly traded company and when you go from 20-50 guys to 200-500 it also gets messy.

I also think a huge chunk of the problem is that the new blood was not trained to make games but just to maintain them. Because ultimately WoW was in a semi-maintenance mode as early as the launch of TBC. After Vanilla Blizzard basically just stopped developing the "World" in the World of Warcraft and just started to go down the checklist of potential end game bosses they had setup previously with little to no fresh ideas. This is why Illidan is suddenly a straight up villain in TBC and why after Pandaria they had to simply recycle old ideas into new expansions because they no longer material from WC3 to carry them.
Compare that to Vanilla where outside of a couple of end-game bosses everything was a fresh new idea. Then after TBC and onward its just old faces, old places with a new coat of paint. Worse yet the game got stuck on the Diablo formula of "get more loot the get morer loot" which on its own was never designed nor capable of carrying a game for over a decade(soon over two decades). So even the newcomers that received some training did not receive any relevant one and mixed with modern lefty brain virus they straight up had no chance to ever become competent.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

after WoW's success people joined blizzard to say they worked at blizzard, not because they wanted to make games.
hope that clears things up

it's also why having blizzard on your resume is worthless now unless it's from prior to ~2007

 

[J1M]

Yes, and the rock stars of the company hid themselves away working on Titan, but the magic never materialized on that project.

 

[Dwemer Puzzle Box]

https://www.wowhead.com/news/mages-priests-and-rogues-available-to-all-races-in-dragonflight-326890

So they're so creatively bankrupt they have to resort to an almost two decades old meme?

 

[Hobknobling]

https://www.wowhead.com/news/mages-priests-and-rogues-available-to-all-races-in-dragonflight-326890

So they're so creatively bankrupt they have to resort to an almost two decades old meme?

It is interesting to read the transcript of this old Rob Pardo talk from 2006 and see how many original design decisions they have overruled at this point:

https://www.raphkoster.com/2006/09/06/agc-rob-pardos-keynote/

Once you get enough different units or classes, players can only handle so much. When you see someone, you might not know what they can do, and this matters because when you want to form a group, you lose track of the strengths and weaknesses. In battlegrounds, you need to know instantly what the opponent can do to you.

 

[Myobi]

Might as well just remove all class restrictions n factions already, if you are going to fuck it, fuck it brutally, not this inch by inch soft porn bullshit.

 

[Dwemer Puzzle Box]

Might as well just remove all class restrictions n factions already

It's easy to imagine them going for "pick your faction" approach. I mean, at this point, this whole Alliance/Horde dichotomy is just window dressing. Blood elves shamans when?

 

[Reever]

Might as well just remove all class restrictions n factions already, if you are going to fuck it, fuck it brutally, not this inch by inch soft porn bullshit.

They'd have to make custom forms for druids and custom totems for Shamans. And that'd require effort. Much easier for classes where they pretty much just have to flip a switch.

 

[1451]

The class fantasy of a sneaky Tauren, I love it!

 

[Dwemer Puzzle Box]

They'd have to make custom forms for druids and custom totems for Shamans.

What for? Totems and druid forms are already tied to your race, let's keep 'em that way or just throw in some recolor - blue totems for Alliance goblins, red totems for Horde goblins etc.

Come on, blizz, I know you're hiring (it's not like you suffer from overabundance of creative people ), look me up on linkedin.

 

[Myobi]

Might as well just remove all class restrictions n factions already, if you are going to fuck it, fuck it brutally, not this inch by inch soft porn bullshit.

They'd have to make custom forms for druids and custom totems for Shamans. And that'd require effort. Much easier for classes where they pretty much just have to flip a switch.

Copy paste some random ass mob, throw on a recolor, and voilá! A master pisso.

 

[J1M]

They've already stated this is their intention now.

But they will release slowly because they want to casuals to resub to level each new combo. They could allow it no-effort style by just giving everyone orc totems until the art interns get around to it.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

Might as well just remove all class restrictions n factions already

It's easy to imagine them going for "pick your faction" approach. I mean, at this point, this whole Alliance/Horde dichotomy is just window dressing. Blood elves shamans when?

The dichotomy made sense in WC2 because the Horde was a bloc formed by the orcs with the express purpose of conquering Azeroth, while the Alliance was formed to stop them. After the war ended, it made little sense for them to continue existing as political entities. Much less for every major race encountered thereafter to join one or the other. They don’t even have coherent ideologies. In WC3 the Alliance falls apart and the Horde isn’t even the same political entity. They only persist into WoW because the design team didn’t want to change it to account for the developments in WC3, as it was originally developed concurrently and intended to occur a century after WC3.

 

[Sykar]

The class fantasy of a sneaky Tauren, I love it!

There you go!

 

[Sarathiour]

Oh, yeah I remember that. It was a pretty good gag the first time but by the end of the game it was just tedious and I believe in the end even you the OVERLORD turned out to be a virtuous hero.

I finished it this year, so I might as well barge in. The reveal is that the overlord was actually one of the seven heroes, who had been betrayed by the other one and manipulated by the wizard. You actually got two ending depending on your degree of corruption, though they are technically not cannon because he end up stuck in hell at the end of the DLC.

 

[Late Bloomer]

These will be introduced in 10.0, with general intentions for us to look at more options down the line, but immediately in 10.0, you'll be able to change your Rogue, Mage and Priest to any race combinations

change says Holinka

 

[Artyoan]

I haven't played since Legion but I imagine WoW could still be tolerable if I were to line up a series of podcasts and coast to coast AM episodes and just level slowly and without regard for efficiency. Its like Monster Hunter World or Conan Exiles, the audio feedback is low, the game play is the whole pie, and its just a slow grind with half the mind necessary.

I'm not sure if I'd call it 'role playing' or not but in its classic form the game did a monumental job at getting the player to feel a sense of presence with their character. Classes had more stark strengths/weaknesses, adds could be deadly so watching area respawns was a weirdly dynamic form of danger ever present, you needed to eat/drink, learn to pull, ask for help sometimes, and the devs had something special on their hands with how chaotic and asymmetric the whole thing was. Over the years some questionable QoL changes and efficiency oriented gameplay eroded that away and its basically like playing Hay Day in mmo form. Spin the plates, do what the game incentivizes, do your chores, and slowly but surely begin to wonder why you're doing it. The potential and promise of MMO's felt somewhat realized for a moment and is lost. It would take a real formula breaker to get me to even try one at this point.

 

[TedNugent]

I'm just going to say, one of the most incredible feelings for me on WoW (and one of the few things I liked about vanilla) was starting a Forsaken character and starting in Silver pine and going into the Undercity for the first time.

Holy shit, they nailed the atmosphere. The Burtonesque characters, the color palate, the sense of dark and dreary with the oppressive atmosphere that something was wrong, a tangible emotional feeling of longing.

Then I walked into the city, that magnificent entrance into the throne room modeled precisely off the War3 cinematic where Arthas made the fateful move to kill his father.

Then the bizarre, playful, Nightmare Before Christmas humor in the Undercity itself.

I wish I had seen that level of genius anywhere else in the game.

They had such pathos and energy and character there. I had no desire to main a Forsaken just because all that energy left once you left their starting zone.

Seeing the direction they ultimately steered them in fucking hurt, man.

 

[Dr1f7]

they should give the cover art girl a massive cock and have her flying around fucking the hole world pussy and the 40 man raid is u cum on her face