As far as I’m concerned, nothing would make me happier than having gameplay similar to some hybrid TBC / WotLK style. But I simply don’t see it happening, it think they consider that style is too old now.
I don’t need to watch youtube, I played the game from the start, I remember cataclysm. Obviously, there will be opinions and opinions, but at least in my experience, yours isn’t one that is shared by many people. To each their own I suppose, but as far as I’m concerned, another Cataclysm or another Legion would only mean a 2 years break from WoW for me. Never again do I want to play anything like either of those two expansions.
Can you imagine if Football clubs thought like this?
“Yeah I mean it’s a game people ahve played for a hundred years in this form and billions of people love it. But it’s a bit old-fashioned. Let’s change it!”
I know, but computer games have different dynamics. In fact, even sports have different dynamics, some sports being changed over time almost as a matter of course. F1 for example. Do you think League of Legends would have enjoyed great success if it was launched in 1993? Because I don’t think so.
Besides, even football rules changed over time. At first, they didn’t have different coloured equipment, there was no crossbar, the size of the field changed multiple times, there were no refrees, the offside rule changed several times… and that’s just the rules, the team tactics changed massively over time.
I haven’t followed all classes, but for mages, apart from Alter Time - a situational ability which they are NOT giving back in its original form - they are just restoring one basic attack spell from each school. That’s MEANINGLESS. How often am I going to find a use for Fire Blast as Frost? How much will I use Frostbolt as Fire?
Yes, it’s something, I suppose, but it is literally the least they could do. It will have almost no effect on gameplay. They’re just putting up a fake PR front. They’re still stubbornly doubling down on their bad ideas.
Hey, wouldn’t bother me at all. But raiding isn’t really my cup of tea, I only do it when I feel like it when I play. Though last time when I can say raiding wasn’t frustrating but rather it was fun for me was MoP. Before that, Wrath, so should they return to that, I’m totally good with it!
I am pretty happy about the unpruning for mages so far, I can’t think of a spell I don’t find any use for and even if, you don’t have to use them if you don’t find yourself in any scenario that would support the use.
why complain about spells you don’t use while others do ?
pretty ignorant if you ask me
well then you should communicate that better since Blizzard might interpret your statement as “anti un-pruning” support and I want to go away from the pruning mindset as far as possible.
If I was you I wouldn’t complain about spells that came back you don’t find a use for but instead complain about spells you want to have back in addition to the ones we are getting back.
Well, it has to be technologically feasible. LoL is all about that online matchmaking and 5v5 network gameplay. Without that, LoL really doesn’t work.
But it was already in 2000 with Aeon of Strife, and then again in 2002 with Defense of the Ancients, that the MOBA became feasible. It was immediately popular then, and it still is.
But that genre has actually changed because well… it started out being a map. Blizzard tried to overhaul and deviate from it with Heroes of the Storm. They failed. Although the game tolerates new heroes and other meta changes, MOBA’s are MOBA’s because nobody dares to mess with the formula, and they are stupidly popular.
It’s still 5v5.
It’s still 30-60 minutes.
It’s still got a bunch of heroes that level up to 25.
It’s still the same map every single time.
It’s still 3 lanes.
It’s still got the same kinds of towers.
It’s still got things like last-hitting for XP and gold.
It’s still got the same shops in the same places.
It’s still got 2 extra hard mobs.
You mess with any of this stuff and you fail. Blizzard learned the hard way.
Do you know what was utterly awesome in 1993, though? DOOM. Do you know what’s still utterly awesome in 2020? DOOM. Literally never gets old.
Yeah, it did change, but the goals, pun intended, remained roughly the same.
It’s still about two teams kicking a ball to the other side of map. The map is still built the same way, the goals are still placed the same place, and the roles are still roughly the same, even if the meta shifted.
The problem that I think WoW has is that it just stopped being WoW. Entirely. It had these 3 important pillars: Fun gameplay, social interaction, and sense of world.
We basically maintained the first one and sacrificed everything in its service. We just did so much convenience and fast paced action and messing about with the game world in order to always try to make engaging gameplay.
On the flipside of this we made it nearly impossible to actually believe in Azeroth as a place, and we made it very difficult to meet people compared to what it was before, and you certainly don’t meet them in the world!
And for someone to come and tell me that the WoW design pillars are outdated, and then classic comes out and attracts millions of players instantly and keeps a vast majority of them… I mean, something around here smells.
Arguably, so did WoW though. This isn’t exactly an honest argument, there are more points of comparison you can think of where WoW 2020 is essentially the same game as WoW 2005 than those where it is different. You still have classes, abilities, raids, talents, a huge world with many players in it, battlegrounds, dungeons, two factions, and so on. What we are all arguing about is in the fine details of that, and same as football or other sports and esports and activities, there are changes, some of which you can tell if they are for the greater good or not when you are deeply in that activity.
I don’t disagree with you actually Ish, you know I don’t, I think the original trilogy actually had some things that were lost along the way. But I don’t believe that, realistically speaking, they will return the gameplay to TBC/WotLK style. I think that if there is a chance for them to do something at all, that chance is to take inspiration from something post-Cata, and of all the post-Cata expansions, in my mind MoP had the best gameplay. Doesn’t literally mean they should copy/paste it, but there were things that provided more fun then than there are now, and I think it would still be great if they did look for those things.
The thing about MOBA’s is that the core design pillars are extremely strict, whereas WoW’s are more abstract.
But design pillars are still about “What do we want to acheive?” not “How do we achieve it?”
None of WoW’s design pillars have anything to do with dungeons, raids, or battlegrounds.
Of the things that do remain, there’s been quite a significant corruption of them to where they really aren’t even trying to achieve the same thing any more.
For example, classes and abilities. Originally they were just a large amalgamation of spells inspired by Warcraft 3. The classes and abilities were there in the service of making us feel like Warcraft 3 units. Their function was to provide gameplay, yes, but also to enhance the sense of world. Many spells had entirely social purposes, like a Paladin walking close to you with his Aura to make you feel protected, or a mage summoning food for his party. Those things weren’t for convenience (goodness knows, if you’ve ever been doing MC on a mage back in vanilla you should know lmao), they were for roleplaying.
Today the classes are streamlined for gameplay and balance. The roleplay elements are there to serve as variety in gameplay. Nobody thinks of themselves as a distinctive recognisable character in a wide world because of their spec and class and race and face.
So while it’s still got classes and abilities, it’s not really about what it used to be. The goals are different.
The same applies to the open world itself. Originally the open world was the centerpiece of the experience. Internal design meetings suggested that they didn’t actually want big servers. They wanted a server of 5-15k people - the idea being that the community was so large that you couldn’t get to know everyone and could therefore be overwhelmed by the scale of it, yet so small that you would meet friends all the time. Like a small town. A game with that design pillar would never even have considered growing the world so large that it would empty out in the way that it has, and certainly they would not have added CRZ or the inability to invite people you meet into guilds. Not a chance.
Blizzard could add group finders and a huge mega-server. These guys had just made Warcraft 3, which had all those things! Of course they could do that. It was a choice. They wanted the sense of world and the community to be above the convenience of going into a dungeon quickly. A dungeon finger is a terrible idea in Classic because it’s a completely different game from the ground up.
In fact the dungeon was a band-aid over a problem in Everquest where you would clear a dungeon but another team was ahead of you and mobs were spawning in on top of you and bosses being dead already and other such nastiness. If you’ve been in a smaller cave in Classic you know exactly what I’m talking about.
Dungeons were never meant to be the center-piece of the game. It was this far-away end-game thing that you got to once you had played many many hours and made dozens of friends and probably formed a guild.
It’s like two people walking down a street. Their objective is to get to the end, both of them, but the purpose of their walk might be for one to get to the grocery store and for the other to go for a dinner with his girlfriend.
Their interests are different, the reasons and the design in their mind for why they’re going is different, but their surface-level action is exactly the same. And that’s really what you have to reach for to understand how it went so wrong.
And then Classic comes out and the new design team just looks at that and goes: Hold on. This isn’t even the same game any more? How do we get this back?
It was very, very telling when the interview with Sloot came out. He didn’t ask a single social question, and the minute Ion got even the slightest hint of a chance to talk about it at the end of the interview, he grabbed it. What happened with Classic was everything I hoped for.
I know, I know. You might be right. I just really, really hope you’re wrong.
But going back to the original topic: I still think the core gameplay was better before MoP. I just do. And I’ve explained that in previous posts. I would prefer the class design of WotLK or Cata over that of MoP
those who wants it back is …