Well hopefully with the restructuring we can see more actual work and development in the game.
Happy and safe workers are productive. Good management will listen to their workers and consumers and make some changes based on what’s said.
But… but this does not spell “Maximise Profit”! Impossible!!
/s. But also apparently true.
Considering we barely saw any work or development in the game beforehand I suppose the only way is up.
Unless…
Don’t. Don’t look back to the darkness.
tHe DaRkNeSs cOnSuMeS aLl…
jOiN uS…
“Hello darkness my old friend. I’ve come to talk with you again…”
Anything other than the bare necessity of the patch cycle (new areas, new quests, cinematics, etc) seems to be relegated to ‘passion projects’ which may or may not get involved.
Glasses, one of the most requested transmog items probably since the advent of transmog, only got in because of someone doing it themselves on unpaid time. The Garrosh cinematic (and probably all the flappy mouth cinematics) were one person. I honestly suspect half the ‘good’ things of Shadowlands have been swimming uphill against a management that wants to do as little as possible and only includes things beyond a spartan, necessary update cycle, on the basis of people not being paid for it.
12 Likes
So you’re telling me that if I put in the effort, in my own time, to remove the fire and blight from Tirisfal Glades, Blizzard will give us a ruined Lordaeron that we can actually enter?
4 Likes
i will happily redesign nordrassil if it means we can stop being in tents in stormwind
it’s not like people haven’t designed pretty stuff already somehow in their free time . . .
6 Likes
Even that isn’t stellar in quality lately. 8.2’s Mechagon was the only patch I’d say they tried to something relatively successful but even then it relied heavily on rare drops to keep you sitting there. Nazjatar was lame so I don’t talk about it.
Quality is degrading and innovative things aren’t attempted anymore. This is why most patch zones are pure time gated grind, it stinks of a lack of confidence, players aren’t allowed to feel that “They’re done.” Problem is they swung so far out in that way that essentially everyone ended up not caring.
Something something passion something something steve jobbs something something laziness.
There are many stories of things people did work on just being scrapped for no reason by this management. The one I remember in particular was a woman who during early Shadowlands almost singlehandledly worked on the design for Bastion for some time. Only to come back to the office to find that her entire worked had been scrapped without notice, and the Bastion we got today was then patched together in a couple of days instead.
And litterally the day before it and prior, she was told several times that she did a good job/always asked for pointers. But it was allegedly scrapped because one of the cubic dudes just said something else later.
2 Likes
I remember the original pitch for Nazjatar and I weep.
2 Likes
I don’t.
What was it?
It was going to have multiple regions rather than just being a really cramped oval zone.
It rivalled WoD for gutted content. Can’t remember if it was Gamescom or whatever but when they announced the patch they had a PowerPoint showing what they had in store and we got a sliver of it.
I wonder what the ratio of content getting cut due to management, Activision interference (hi wc3:r) and employees just getting hammered.
5 Likes
Zin-Azshari, the great underwater empire, the seat of the queen herself. Teased since the days of warcraft being an RTS and referenced through nearly all of WoW’s history.
Better make it 4 copypasted buildings with Legion assets in the corner of one of the smallest zone maps to date.
9 Likes
Whole bunch’a content cut out for sure including that huge creature in the north of it, now masked by the water wall.
1 Like
I weep, in ten characters…
I’m giddy for a total gutting of this wretched company if all the necessary purging and restaffing gives us these famously lost passion projects and things that’d otherwise be cut to make big line go up.
First things first; get rid of abusers, reform the corporate culture, get lazy sods to do their darn jobs and let workers unionize. Empowered workers are happy workers, motivated and driven by things other than fear of starvation.
2 Likes
All of the people who have been abusing their co-workers(and those who enabled it) should honestly be blacklisted from the entire industry and not be allowed to work with game development again.
1 Like