Dunno, could be something to do with…he used to be raid designer before he got “thrown” into his current postion. We’ve whitnessed several times he’s not the BEST person for that role. And as he loved, and still loves, his raid designs many of us would appreciate he’d go/would be allowed to go back to his former position as lead dungeon/raid designer.
Show me an MMO where questing is not mainly running chores. You can’t fill an MMO with main story only quests, that does not work.
But where are the devs walking on eggshells though?
Corporate gaming, sure, yes. Every gaming company has this issue since the focus moved way too far to the “maximize income” segment.
But…Blizzard is really toned down in that regard compared to other companies. Well, with WoW at least.
The cash shop of WoW is really…nothing…and the sub price is still stuck in 2004 with being even less worth for Blizzard than it was 2004.
i’d just like to see more radical changes, rather than tweaks here and there, though i admit, now i think about it, this expansion has certainly mad some big changes so maybe i’m not being fair. it always seemed that in recent years they didn’t want to change the status quo. n/m, i’ve been here too long
No worries, I’m on this boat since EU launch 2004 xD
But…everytime I hear people ask for “radical changes”, “innovations”, etc., I fail to comprehend what they have in their heads.
Most of the time I get the feeling people just grew out of WoW and refuse to accept this.
Don’t limit it to MMOs. Questing is stellar in most of CD Project Red’s games. You can’t seriously tell me you can’t make questlines that actually make you do something different than ‘click this 10 times’ or ‘gather 10 of these’ or ‘kill 10 of those’.
For instance, Legion had a cool feature where you didn’t need to run back to the questgiver for follow ups. They just spoke to you when you completed a part and immidiately gave you the follow up. I loved that, because it kept you in the action.
Why not even devise a design without quests, except for the main storyline. You could give the players a book with things to accomplish, with rewards at the end of those, and players can choose whatever they feel like doing. It would contain things like, kill 10000 gnolls, 10000 skeletons, etc., provision any encampment in the world with 100 pieces of crafted food/leather/ore (with specific rewards tuned to that encampment), have a wildlife faction that has you tagging all the wildlife in the world. There’s literally no end to what you can come up with in such a huge world with all the stuff they’ve already created.
The main reason they don’t, however, is because it’s all tied in to this reward structure they’ve committed to, like this edition’s valorstones and crest, so they can minmax what you as a player can achieve per week. It’s not only condescending to players, imo, only exists to support their management metrics, but it’s antithetical to good game design.
Do you think Blizzard is working on something other than WoW? With the new Riot MMO eventually making an appearance albeit in many many many years will Blizzard want something to compete or will they just continue with the same old WOW expac after expac until only the MVP’s remain lol.
