World of Warcraft: Current Year

Wombat said:

Yeah, this just strikes me as the current X.Y.5s will be the new point releases, and the current point releases will just be slightly inflated into new 'expansions'.

Even worse, the quick blurb has them reusing Quel'Thalas for 'expansion' 2 and Northrend for 'expansion' 3, so who knows how much actual new geography we are dealing with.

All of this is frankly fine in a free to play game where you can pick and choose expansions as you wish (e.g. Destiny 2), but I haven't heard anything about them dropping the sub fee here.

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Should be noted that you can get at least 40 hours of gameplay out of each one of these expansions.

Maybe you hadn't considered that?

Koushirou said:

Pretty much everything in the deep dive was good. Just for me personally, they can fix the gameplay and systems, but they really needed something amazing for me to look past all the woke culture shit that's still behind the scenes. I know caring about story is gay, but I still want my setting and lore and characters to not be completely retarded, otherwise it does tend to ruin some games for me.

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Well you'll be happy to know they plan on making all characters gay moving forward. Nothing says diversity like uniformity! That's why all the races are now democracies that love freedom!

TJT said:

If you read the WoW Developer Diary the understanding by the entire team was that story does not matter. Make interns write it. The majority of quest lines, even the excellent ones, were first draft final draft. Because its a MMORPG. YOU ARE THE FUCKING STORY. YOUR EXPERIENCE IS THE STORY. Like any game, gameplay is King.

There's some Black Dragons living over in this badass Volcano. I'm sure they're up to no good. Go fuck their shit up for loots. Boom MMORPG story.

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Gameplay is king, but you need hooks besides gameplay. Like some people are content to play dust2 in Counter Strike exclusively for 20 fucking years, but that doesn't mean everyone likes doing that shit forever.

Gameplay keeps you engaged, but a good story keeps many coming back. This again comes back to preference, but if you exclude an entire potential audience with the only hook being gameplay and some raids and shit, and have zero hooks beyond that, you're going to get lots of bored people where that stuff gets stale for them. They'll get bored when the story "ends" for the time being, but they're more likely to come back when the story picks up again.

FF14 is a good example of this - you get a lot of "story only" people who basically do the story then vanish for a few months. Then you get lots of people who do other shit like raiding, pvp, etc.

WoW's problem was that it was sort of failing in both categories - they tried to elevate the story aspect, but they kept falling into the same tropes (like the infamous "you have defeated me, but I was the only thing holding back even eviler thingy!!!) and also had to contend with a 20 year old game engine already stretched to almost maximum. And gameplay wise they kept falling into the "borrowed power" trap and making every xpac feel like a season vs. a actual step in your progression.

The deep dive with Ion was actually pretty encouraging. "Hero Classes" finally getting some semblance of existence (that was shit being asked for even in closed WoW beta lol), shared progression between characters so you dont feel like you have to grind the same stuff over and over. The only other thing I would have loved them announcing is dumping the "2 trade/gather skills only" and just let people become omnicrafters. I fucking hate how you can't have fun stuff like engineering without sacrificing one of your gather/crafting options.

Apparently they're implementing something called warbands which will allow you to share rep and xmog across chars? If it works nice will be one of the best QoL improvements since xmog itself for people that play multiple characters.

TJT said:

Hero Classes do seem really cool if they can pull them off well. I'll continue reading up on those.

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I like the concept, especially if it allows them to do horizontal additions later by adding new ones instead of just redoing every character constantly or only vertical progression.

However, while I'm personally more than happy for them to be fun and interesting over "balanced", Blizz are always chasing esports and we haven't had any evidence they've bitch slapped Ion and stopped focusing 90% of dev time to the ultra .05%, so we'll have to see.

Right now some specs have a lot of interesting choices, while others don't really have any. Overall the new talents are way way better but it seems like the ones redone since 10.1 are much better at offering coherent play style options.

Penance said:

Apparently they're implementing something called warbands which will allow you to share rep and xmog across chars? If it works nice will be one of the best QoL improvements since xmog itself for people that play multiple characters.

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Well it's a lost ark loading screen and some back end technical debt getting resolved. It's good they're finally fixing this but ehhhh this is kinda mid as a headline feature since there's basically nothing new with it? DF is relatively low friction already.

Penance said:

Apparently they're implementing something called warbands which will allow you to share rep and xmog across chars? If it works nice will be one of the best QoL improvements since xmog itself for people that play multiple characters.

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I wonder if Warbands might eventually allow characters to bypass the current tradeskill/gathering limits as well. Like if you have it leveled on one of your characters, you can use it on all your characters.

I want to be able to use alts as NPC companions like EQ mercenaries or FF14 has something like that for dungeons.

No wonder they brought Metzen back.

Big Phoenix said:

So they invalidate the ending of cataclysm and also continue to demonstrate they know nothing about the fundamentals of their lore.

Bruh its much worse. They went and made a cringe copy of endgame's final battle scene;



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Then theres a equally cringe girlboss deals with the evil old whyte man moment as well which also demonstrates a lack of knowledge about the lore of their ip;



Its just so fucking retarded and horrible. How pathetic is Metzen to come back to this franchise after the retarded SJWs that control it have so thoroughly raped and shit on it while laughing?

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Seeing all the clips come out from that (former?) employee that streams now, talking about the diversity training and shit...


I mean, Im not even sure why they brought Metzen back to begin with now. What exactly could he change that would make fuck all of a difference? Diversity training is required there. Then some shit about active training in harassment situations? Like whoa whoa whoa bro - I signed up to make fucking video games, not figure out why Jews, Blacks and Faggots have been ostracized for the last 3000 years+.

That DF storyline is basically some dragons get their children titan transed without their consent so they go to war and eventually go to jail for 50-life, but then get out and Vyranoth is hey I'm gonna violate some parole but eventually decides to become an informant and work for the Titan FBI.

Also the undead who genocided the noble savage elves get forgiven.

Because friendship.

So this is legit worse than a child writing fanfic.