It also feels like Blizzard thinks players need increasingly powerful entities to fight to feel powerful themselves, leading to a strange Dragon Ball-like power creep. But, it has become more apparent than ever that there's a lack of conviction or forethought about some aspects of the story design. Given the constraints Blizzard has had to work with in recent years, it's a wonder that they've achieved as much as they have. I feel like World of Warcraft should have pulled back a bit from the cosmic-level threats.īalancing big story ambitions with game development pipelines is by no means a simple feat, and I don't mean to suggest it is. It strangely rushed through its story too quickly, though, placing two major characters in N'Zoth and Azshara in subsequent raid tiers, both of whom had enough character build-up to arguably warrant their own expansions, as opposed to a single raid tier each. Battle for Azeroth started off relatively well in this regard, in my view, having us explore new lands, dealing with more local threats. Source: Blizzard After committing genocide, for some reason, Sylvanas has a change of heart? (Image credit: Source: Blizzard)Īfter Legion, which dealt with literal space travel and planet-sized enemies, I feel like World of Warcraft should have pulled back a bit from the cosmic-level threats. The Jailer was Blizzard's attempt to create a fresh antagonist from its gallery of villains, but he was ultimately a near-direct copy of Sargeras, albeit using undead spirits as an army instead of demons, with a contradictory "killing us to save us" motivation. Shadowlands' big central antagonist, The Jailer, also has vague motivations, which end on a similarly vague, "There's an even scarier threat!" cliffhanger at the end of his story, with a banal soap-opera twang. This is just one example of many potential ones that lead to disengagement with the story at large, and disinterest in the wider lore. Much of the confusion about the current story stems from the lack of context, and putting lore in external sources compounds the issue in my view. Some important context may appear in an upcoming book about Sylvanas, but. The consequences of those actions haven't really manifested in any meaningful way, nor have her exact motivations. Sylvanas had the Horde commit genocide of the elves, burning down their ancestral home of Teldrassil. Her character arc has been strange, to say the least, potentially made worse by comments Blizzard made in interviews that inflated expectations. A lot of the criticism has revolved around Sylvanas Windrunner, one of Warcraft's most iconic characters. The plan was sound, but the execution hasn't been particularly great. How might World of Warcraft benefit from this potential renewed focus?īlizzard had a fairly ambitious plan in place, which started out in Legion, or in some ways even earlier, where plot threads from multiple expansions would bleed into one another and overlap in a saga-like fashion. I feel like that wouldn't have happened if they weren't being acquired, freeing them up from the profit pressure cooker that leads to low investment, poor innovation, and player-hostile mechanics. Call of Duty 2023 is reportedly straight up not happening, which would be only the second time in the annualized franchise's history that CoD skipped a year. The plan might have worked at first, but a range of issues have led to an exodus of subscribing players over time, bleeding MMO fans to games like Lost Ark and FFXIV.Īctivision seems to be changing tac already, though. World of Warcraft has arguably run afoul of this mentality in recent years, with mechanics that heavily favor time-gating, arbitrarily, to try to pad out the amount of time players need to spend in the game, giving Activision favorable stats to report back to shareholders. We're seeing them do the same to Blizzard franchises and even Call of Duty, which cut back on innovation in favor of seeing how far it can punish players with aggressive monetization before people get tired. We've seen Activision bleed franchises like Skylanders and Guitar Hero dry without thinking about the long game. Activision's shareholder culture demands perpetual profits while perpetually cutting costs.
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