World of Warcraft Classic Relase
worldofwarcraft.com
worldofwarcraft.com
Recently they are only remaking old games StarCraft, WarCraft, World of Warcraft. Basically, the remake doesn't touch the functionality. They seem only want to juice money from their current market.
For more 'real' new games from Blizzard like Overwatch is Okayish, and Heroes of Storms (I can't even be sure about the name) are bad.
Anyway, I think I would play Classic for a while, but I guess it wouldn't be long. Although It was and still is the best game I ever played, without constant releases, it just won't persist - World of Warcraft doesn't mean to be modeled as a game with infinite replay value without new releases. And there won't be new releases because would be branching the game.
I am sure they won't do full blown expansion for Classic, but new content within lvl 60 cap does actually make sense. It's also possible, that at some point, when people get bored with this content they can bump the tier to TBC (1st expansion). They could probably also keep all of those running at the same time, and people could choose which tier they wan't to stop them. It all comes down to people voting with their wallets I guess.
Like who you replied to, i sort if blame activision for the death of blizzard, but that timeline doesnt really line up. I wonder whats going on? Changing demogrpahics, I suppose.
Similarly, Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King are pure Blizzard. Cataclysm (2010) was controversial. On the other hand Mists of Pandaria (2012) was generally disliked, Warlords of Draenor (2014) was an inane mess.
[0] https://wowwiki.fandom.com/wiki/Character_Transfer
[1] https://wowwiki.fandom.com/wiki/Faction_Change_service
[4] “The precursors to modern-day heirlooms were introduced in Vanilla/Classic World of Warcraft. Heirlooms up to the Wrath of the Lich King expansion were items that were sold by a specific battleground vendor. There were Warsong Gulch, Arathi Basin and Alterac Valley heirlooms.”
[2] This depends on how you mark an expansion. IMO, after the initial bug fixes are put that’s the expansion. Everything after that like 3.3.0 is it’s own separate patch.
Regarding heirlooms, they were introduced in WotLK:
"Heirlooms that increase experience and scale based on character level were introduced in the Wrath of the Lich King expansion."
The line is blurry, but I believe that a trend was definitely noticeable even in late Burning Crusade. In particular, efforts to attract a broader player base. It is unfortunately surprisingly hard to track and timestamp all the controversial changes introduced to the game.
Legion went through the same thing where at the start it was considered even worse than Warlords, but is now considered a high water mark.
I assume people that remain generally liked the changes, but from what I can tell the player base tanked.
For some people, there hasn't been a great traditional Blizzard game in many years.
Also possible Blizzard asks their more senior people to do these AMA's I guess...
Yes there are still people working for Blizzard that have been there for 15 years or longer. (Is that a good thing? yes and no. The motivation declines the longer you are at a specific job, not that it applies to everyone but I consider that to be a a big factor)
The issue here though isn't about how long someone has been working on a project like WoW or for the company itself. The main issue is that like any other company out there that became successful it went in full corporate mode.
That dev that has been working in wow since 2002 and before the game was even out, has probably very little say of what happens to the game. The game as any other game that is coming out from blizzard right now feels like its build by pure stats. It feels like a marketing specialist, sat down with a stats guru and they decided on what people like based on trends and what people are doing. That combined with the business people demanding more money, more game currency transactions, more gambling involved into the game and RNG being the top, have made games like WoW being awful to enjoy.
The difference between Blizzard back then and Activision-Blizzard now is that Blizzard a small/medium game studio was building games that the team would love to play. WoW was a pure unexplored world ready to accommodate any kind of player - it was an adventure. Nowadays the WoW of today is like a themepark where every ride is very specific.
Again personally I spent so much time in WoW during the first 2-3 expansions, and nowadays I want to play but the game is just not good enough.
So as a player yes I'd say you are right to say there are people still working for Blizzard that were working back then but the small/medium studio that would put passion behind their games, turned into a corporation trying to build games based on stats.
And I hope that there will be another indie company that will eventually become like valve, blizzard or ea. Us gamers need that, we need a company that will produce amazing games with loads of passion and not just for the moneygrab.
The other argument is that Blizzard tends to do remastered releases of games ~15 years after their original release, and guess what, it's been 15 years. So it fits into that bucket as well.
While it's definitely a grab at more players, people are also asking for it. Go poking around to see how much people are excited about this thing (there are various podcasts, https://countdowntoclassic.com/ being one I've listened to).
This sounds like a matter of opinion. Overwatch is a relatively new game and Blizzard is continuing to release expansions for WoW. They have also long been rumored to be working on various new IPs (both in-universe and entirely original) for a few years now.
They are expected to present some new games in the next year (probably they'll announce it at Blizzcon).
As far as I know Starcraft is mostly dead. They did the remastered version of the first game but I don't think there are any new projects on the horizon.
> Although It was and still is the best game I ever played, without constant releases, it just won't persist - World of Warcraft doesn't mean to be modeled as a game with infinite replay value without new releases. And there won't be new releases because would be branching the game.
We'll see. As evidenced by a thriving private server community built on reverse engineered servers, a lot of people simply disagree. They want to play the old game and have no interest in seeing it updated.
I always felt a bit sad that parts of my childhood are simply gone (i.e. patched out of existence). So I see this development as positive. It makes me happy. I think I feel like my dad felt when he bought The Prisoner (60s TV show that he watched as a kid) on VHS and we watched it together.
This is subtly different from what I have heard. They'd love to have more features in Classic WoW, but present-day Activison Blizzard doesn't employ any of the original game designers, so more Classic isn't possible - only a leakage of present-day ideas into Classic (which they don't want).
It's unclear what happens when that reaches its natural conclusion, however. Best guess is that it's going to depend on the userbase - which I suspect will see high attrition rate as the reality takes over the rose-tinted specs.
Not affiliated by the way. Just a fan. Regardless:
https://old.reddit.com/r/classicwow/comments/ct08c7/welcome_...
I checked out let's plays for Nier Automata, Zelda BotW and had my expectation blown out of the water. While on the other side of the spectrum I see big name franchises packed with microtransaction ideas yet no substances to back it up.
https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/news/22646759/restoring-hi...
Here is a live blog of the Blizzcon talk: https://www.wowhead.com/news=288407/blizzcon-2018-restoring-...
My take is one of the original programmers for WoW still at work's at Blizzard and helped great deal with this effort. They were also able to go back in their source Control and pull the code from back then and they've been different current code to previous code in various places to see how behaviour has changed. And then Ford porting old behavior onto a existing client.
It might not work that way with new players coming in to classic, but making it trivially easy to group and port to an instance has its own problems.
https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/news/21881587/dev-watercoo...
Many suggest games like Diablo but it tends to play more as a scaled single player game than a genuine balanced composition group game (i.e. if you're not hearing/feeling "Need healer/dps/tank"! it's not what I mean). MOBAs brought this for PvP but there are many out there that simply like good ol' PvE co-op with character and strategy.
The game's fans have been playing competitively on private servers that preserved/recreated the pre-expansion releases all this time. Stepping into 5-person PvE in this Classic release might be a very different from how it was 15 years ago, even though the game mechanics itself were meticulously designed to be just like the original.
But like I said, I'm worried about that. So I'm trying to avoid as much info about Classic as I can. I pre-registered my character based off of my first main character in WoW, rather than what's raid-viable. I aim to avoid guides and stay the hell away from easy-mode addons (Quest Helper, DBM, etc.). I want to recapture as much of my original experience as I can.
(Yes, it has a bad launch due to balance and content issues. The past year or so has been great.)
WoW is a landmark in the gaming world and we now have the chance to replay it. Maybe try a RP server. I for one am excited to play it, even though I don't have that much time to dedicate to this.
For the horde!
I'm really curious to learn about the sustained user count of those who never played classic.
a.) Schedule your time better (timebox, baby)
b.) Or get the kids and wife involved
c.) Or stop whining about it.
a) "Scheduling a baby" or children in general isn't a thing. They are full time commitments. Which is the entire point of the original comment. To say nothing of the fact that MMOs like WoW are extremely time demanding games. Its pretty hard to play WoW casually, for small amounts of time, and actually get enjoyment out of it. Which again, is the point of the original comment.
b) Possible, but unlikely. MMOs are pretty niche, and again, giant time commitments. Its unlikely his entire family will be into the idea of all grinding away together online. But sure, its a possibility.
c) At no point was the comment doing anything resembling whining. It was simply pointing out that much of the fanbase that would potentially be enticed to come back to the game by WoW Classic has aged into a stage of life where it will be hard if not impossible to enjoy it the same way they did previously. Its simply an observation, and a good one at that.
I think you misunderstood the 'timebox baby' comment. I was simply suggesting timeboxing the gaming time. And clearly communicating that with the wife (at the very least). I wasn't suggesting timeboxing baby / children / family time.
To my ear, the statement 'Everything I absolutely loved about WoW is inaccessible to me 15 years later now that I have kids and a job.' sounds like whining: No indication of any failed effort -- just lamenting.
Like buying your first car, again, 20 years later. Exactly the same car, but it won't be .. exactly the same. It won't be the same breakthrough freedom it was in your teens - just the empty husk of it.
The benefit of a clan/guild/free company can’t be understated. They will provide entertainment, support, and access to a set of content that’s otherwise very hard to do.
I like trusts, but they’re definitely a band-aid for a very specific issue (DPS queue lengths).
1. time investment
2. social interactions with others
3. repetitive gameplay loops
Interestingly, the games I do sink hundreds of hours into all have the same sort of principles, but in different forms:
1. I don't mind sinking hundreds of hours into something like Rocket League or a fighting game or a multiplayer shooter, but I also don't feel like I need to in order to get the most out of the game. I can go weeks or months without playing Rocket League and pick up right where I left off. If I stop playing something with a "progression" component, then when I come back, all my buddies are now leveled beyond me, or a new expansion is out, or I somehow feel like I've missed out on a bunch of content. MMOs start to feel like another job almost.
2. I mostly play games to play with my friends online. But I'm not necessarily interested in making new friends I don't know in real life online. So while I love multiplayer games that I can play with my friends, or with/against randoms I don't need to maintain a relationship with, the kind of social interaction in MMOs doesn't really appeal to me.
3. Again, a game of Rocket League or SSB is going to be essentially the same as every other, so they are highly repetitive too. But at the same time, the fun in a game of Rocket League is in the thing you are doing over and over again. In an MMO, the repetition of killing the same monster 100 times to level up isn't generally that fun. Rather the reward is the actually leveling up and the loot, (or the social aspects). And even the social aspects take a lot of work for the payoff (I'm thinking about the amazing narratives that come out of EVE, or tightly knit clans in WoW). But that means I'm essentially spending a ton of time doing something I don't find that fun just for the reward at the end. If I'm going to be doing that I figure I might as well be working, or working out at the gym, or something like that.
You may be similar to me in finding the games appealing on the surface, but the fundamental aspects of the genre unappealing in reality.
The game is, for the serious raiders, too simple. For the casual crowd, it’s going to be slow and comparatively unrewarding. The nostalgia hit for people who have played it before will wear off fairly quickly, leaving only those for whom classic WoW hits their sweet spot. At least for a year or two. What will happen once those niche players hit max level and run out of content to do?
So, do they just re-release the same content again (and where do they stop)? Any attempt to release new “old school” content would be immediately compared to the original expansions (considered some of the best expansions of the game), and most likely not welcomed by the community.
Runescape 3 has been on its own development path since 2007. In 2013 they released OSRS, which has its own development path that sticks to the old design philosophy rather than the one that they took in Runescape 3 following the evolution of combat update.
Content in Modern WoW has an entirely different design philosophy than Vanilla. If they added to Classic, say 6 months to a year after Phase 6/Naxxramas has been released, that new content could stick to the Vanilla design philosophy and be totally warranted. They could even implement horizontal progression paths that don't invalidate Naxxramas as a source of powerful gear.
If necessary, they could also leave up a museum server up for certain players who just want to relive 1.13 over and over again.
There’s nobody to really lead the charge to create “old school” content for WoW.
For example, no LFG, keep the level cap, no transmog, no multi-server sharding, no removing RPG elements like hunter ammo, things of that sort.
Also not every evolution means going down the paths previously taken. Old School Runescape has been developing continuously without turning into modern Runescape.
AFAIK Blizzard has stated that if successfull (udefined criteria) they want to expand on the Classic release, but they have not decided wether they want that to be releasing ports of the next exansions (The Burning Crusade etc., 'vertical expansion'), or more content but still in the Classic game ('horizonal expansion'), or both etc.
In short, a small niche set of gamers is split in three on where they want Class WoW to go, promising no real value to Blizzard (especially since they are not being independently monetized).
Whether the customer-base for such a remake game series is primarily predatory on the current 'modern' game remains to be seen. Some retakes have been far more successful than their original bloodlines. Everyone always references OSRS, as that is also an MMO and therefore the most comparable, but think about the successes of the 'Age of Empires II' series still going strong where AoE3 was not longlived.
I think a lot of people have rose tinted glasses on and simply don't remember how simple the game used to be and how far it's evolved since.
I am curious what they've done with the mechanics though. Some were broken by expacs, some were fixed, wonder what they rolled back and what they left.
Were there any wall jumps that were actually exploitable (i.e. let you do bad things)? Most of the ones I remember just let you get to weird spots in the environment.
Check out Project 1999 [0] for an example of what happens. It's a classic Everquest server that only plans to ever release the first 3 expansions and has been running for almost decade now.
Seems to me like Classic is aimed at players who aren't currently subscribed, who aren't served by the current modern WoW. You know, different demographics and stuff. I know I'm not subscribed, but I'm considering resubbing just for Classic, and I've seen plenty of people in the same position.
The other part of it is a genuine desire for a more difficult, time-consuming, socially-driven game.
I was a pretty dedicated player, off and on, from open beta in late-summer 2004 through the Cataclysm expansion in 2012, with a little dabbling later for Mists of Pandaria in 2014.
The game changed a LOT. I was never much of an endgame raid player; I really, really enjoyed the progression through the world with friends, so I did that several times.
As WOW shifted to be more endgame raid focused, world progression got a lot faster, a lot lonelier, and a lot less interesting. OTOH, those first years of playing WoW remain, to me, probably the best video gaming experiences I've ever had (and I'm pushing 50, so I've seen the whole ride).
I'll probably re-up to play some Classic. I doubt I'll stick with it -- I have other things I enjoy doing now that would preclude me from playing more than an hour or two a week -- but it'll be fun to visit that world again.
(Oh, and I should note for non-WoW people that the actual in-game world literally changed -- geography shifted, towns were destroyed, etc -- with the release of Cataclysm in 2010. Among the shattered places left behind were the early-level zones for my first characters. I'd love to see those as they were again.)
Yes, pretty much. The reason it has been getting so much fanfare is that people have been trying to play vanilla WoW for over a decade on private servers, but kept getting shut down by Blizzard's legal department. Blizzard refused to host a classic server for the longest time leading to the infamous condescending quote "You don't want that ... You think you do, but you don't"
I never played original WoW, I joined in TBC but I really want to try Classic and I expect that I will love it. Nostalgia has nothing to do with that, obviously. Also, if we're talking about nostalgia, it's WotLK for me. And I'm not going to play it again :) Been there, done that. And a lot of players tried to remake classic WoW on pirate servers and they did amazing job, actually. Hundreds of thousands of players played on private servers for years. So demand is there.
I wonder if adding a diablo like ladder type system where everyone starts fresh periodically (see Path of Exile leagues) make game a lot more addictive.
Why would I go back to that mess? What's the appeal of 5+ hour raids every night in 2019? For content thoroughly covered 15 years ago. "Nostalgia" is no where near enough for me and I would expect that I am the primary demo for this product. Maybe if they gave me my hammer back..
then again, we must be gluttons for punishment, because we played on nostalrius for a while, too.