f13.net

Sources are saying it looks legit, of note is Titan, slated to be an MMOFPS

(http://i53.tinypic.com/34t7l6s.jpg)

SC2 Zerg Campaign release in tandem with D3? Seems fishy.

Where's WoW mobile at now?

Could be the mobile armory and auction thing, which has been out for a bit.

Oh yeah that's probly it. For some reason I was thinking a playable mobile WoW or something.

So the followup mmo that they announced several years ago isn't slated for release until q4 '13, which means it'll probably come out q2 '15? :crying_panda:

It makes sense overall.  Blizzard stated that they wanted WoW xpacs on 18 month intervals before, and looking at how content was launched in both BC/Wrath in six month spurts with the last six months being dead, 18 months is about perfect. 

I think the D3 schedule explains why development is taking so long... they're likely building all the xpacs right along with the base game. 

Cool find. 

So what's the difference between SC2 Phoenix and SC2 X1?

Am I wrong in thinking that all this says is that they are releasing regular expansion packs for each of their 3 franchises?

This is like seeing a release schedule for Call of Duty or Madden.

I don't think that comes as any surprise.

I do like the idea of Blizzard doing a MMOFPS though. If anything is going to test whether the concept has legs this will probably be it.

StarCraft 2 eXpansion 1

Pheonix is probably a stand alone version or not an RTS

Phoenix must be an unannounced project. X1 has to be heart of the swarm, and x2 is likely Legacy of the Void

Would not surprise me if SC2 Pheonix is a Facebook game.

Protoss-themed Starfox-esque console game perhaps?

The sequel to Lost Vikings.

Phoenix is the code name for Starcraft: Ghost!  :grin:

I strongly suspect there's no point releasing the followup MMO. At the moment 90% of NA/EU MMOers play WoW. What would be the point of releasing something that would compete with WoW?

They'll probably sit on it until WoW's numbers significantly drop. Not just mid-expansion doldrums but people actually being so bored they don't bother buying the expansions.

If the rumors about it being a FPS MMO rather than an RPG are true, that's a different market really.

Heh, well so far FPS MMOs haven't had many customers (APB, Planetside).

The point is it's a Blizzard MMO. A lot of people might buy it because it's a Blizzard MMO and they trust Blizzard to keep them entertained.

In terms of Venn diagrams there's a tiny circle containing FPS MMO fans who play every FPS MMO and a very large circle of Blizzard fans who try every Blizzard game. The FPS MMO fans are statistically insignificant next to the Blizzard fans.

You're thinking about it the wrong way. The draw of the FPS MMO for developers is not to try to tap the little FPS MMO fan circle, but to try to suck in the much, much larger circle that is FPS fans in general.

Well, it does make a degree of sense...

Let me guess, you're one of those people who thought, before WoW, that the potential MMO userbase consisted of around a million people, right?

The popularity of awards/ranks/grind shit in contemporary FPS's shows that there are millions of players out there who would jump on an actual quality mmofps.

D3 at the end of NEXT year.

Fuck that  :heartbreak:

I bet you called "11 million subs in 2010" first.

Battle.net pass. Plus, the genre and fell will be a big enough change as not to compete with WoW.

After 10 years your game starts to look dated. 

Anyone want to start a betting pool on D3 not being out until at least 2013?

I remembered a blizzard whiteboard leaked way back at the start suggested two more expansions after the current. Kill Death-wing in this one, Free Ysera in the emerald dream expansion and then we're about ready to take on the legion for the finale. I could almost imagine blizzard (over the screams of Vivendi) declaring the game as complete, in maintenance mode and maybe even f2p. Especially if their next MMO launches at the same time and proves popular and drains players from WoW.

I heard Blizzard was pissed about this leak ...

no way to confirm that tho.

Given how good blizzards information control normally is, and how sensitive to competition this information is (if it were true), I'd not be in the least surprised.

On the keeping of secrets (http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/5/23/).

WoW looked dated on release.

I don't really get why people say that.  I thought WoW looked better at release, and for a long time after, than any MMO at the time.  I know a bit later some games had higher polygon counts and other stats, but they still looked like shit compared to WoW.  Good artwork goes a long way.

If the artwork isn't so advanced that it has to be reused endlessly to keep your computer from melting then it's just not good enough.

The base models need some more poly's badly... but even so I still prefer it, especially in motion, to the plastic doll with attachments look of EQ2, CO and SWTOR. In the case of EQ2 the dolly having a replaceable head.

And has significantly improved every year since. Thing is they mostly save the really good artwork and design for the endgame raids. Have you seen inside Ulduar and ICC? Amazing stuff for such an old engine.

What does this have to do with kanye west?  :oh_i_see:

Good is not what I would call WoW's art.  Consistent and extremely well animated, both of which are very important.

Good is Guild Wars, which does more with a texture or piece of landscape than WoW artists could ever dream of.

Yeah, but GW doesn't have the same amount of MM in their MMO.  They can get away with having better graphics due to the heavy use of instances.  I much prefer the "cartoony" style of WoW over the "hyper realistic" style that many MMOs tried, and failed, to do (I'm looking at you in particular EQ2).

I love how people call stylized art direction "dated". They didn't make their game photo-realistic, big fucking deal, games that tried to look photo realistic all looked like or ran like shit. It was cartoony, but for the most part ALL Blizzard games look cartoony. It is the type of art direction they use.

photorealistic minecraft would suck.

Yes it would.

There is a mod for it, and charm is lost.


Photorealistic images or art has a shorter lifespan than stylized in just about all cases. In regards to "dated".

GW's looks amazing, but it also "cheats" a whole shit load. When was the last time you went inside a house in guildwars? What's that? Never?  :why_so_serious: There are just so many restrictions on movement and interaction in guildwars, that your often looking at actual portraits, not game worlds.

The other thing about GuildWars, is it isn't photo-realistic either. It's stylizing is more subtle then WoW, but it still isn't trying to be 'real life' or whatever. It's using a real ENOUGH style.




Most games that really do go for the photo realism look, run at 5 FPS on anything but the most bleeding edge system and/or look like a 1990's cgi art project.

I never said GW was realistic.  More realistic certainly, but it is stylized.  It's still what I would call Good when I would not with WoW.

Speaking of WoW graphics: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L10g6JQLJFg
(Was anyone else expecting Metzenthrall to follow up "Behold" with "Corn!"?)

The only photo realistic mmo that looks good is Age of Conan.  It has a great looking environment and good character models.  The rest look even more dated than WoW ever will.

I like the look of Champions Online a lot actually, for what its worth, though I know there are a lot of people who didn't like it.  Stylized graphics can look good AND dated, I think by the way.  Watching that video a couple posts up, that looked very dated to me, but it also had a nice charm and consistency to it that made it perfectly fine anyway.

Picasso, Degas and Van Gogh were all shitty artists for not painting like Bernardi (http://www.robertobernardi.com/) or the realists that preceded them.  :awesome_for_real:

I don't like their works at all, so I'd agree with what you meant to say sarcastically. ;D

Wake me up when the SC2 battlechest comes out.

Ah, so if you don't subjectively like something it's objectively bad?

More to the point; art is subjective, not objective, and just because you dislike it doesn't mean it's bad.  It only means that it doesn't suit your particular aesthetic tastes.

Yes.

Since we're fully derailed now, I just have to say that although I like some of picasso's trippy surrealist stuff, I agree. And Van Gogh is one of the most overrated artists of all time.

I'm honestly surprised so few MMOs have gone for cartoon asthetics, especially after Blizzard left that particular door open. They make for lousy screenshots, but the gameplay and cinematic experiences survive largely unscathed. In the longer term it isn't important how realistic art appears, but how consistent it is. How well everything fits together, not how perfect any individual part appears. Where most of the more photorealistic MMOs have failed is in their inability to maintain that photorealism. One bad terrain texture in the background, one poorly modeled tree, whatever... it breaks the immersion.

"Bad" art like WoW's may turn some people off on first impressions. There are a small minority of people who won't play it because it looks "like crap". Those are the only people Blizzard loses for all they gain with their low-poly design, and they're only lost until their friends convince them to give the game a try. At that point the crappy art blends together into the not-so-crappy whole.

It's interesting how true this is.  Often over the past few years I've seen a screenshot of WoW while not actively playing and thought, "Man, that looks old."  But pretty much consistently while I'm playing (some older character models aside), I'm generally thinking, "Good lord, this looks awesome."

As I said above, consistency and animations do make a huge difference.  Despite considering most of WoW's art bad, I managed around two and a half years of playing in total.  I also wouldn't call Free Realm's (or Clone War's) art all that great, but it's consistent and the animations are good.  Both make it very easy to look past the art and enjoy playing the game.

That's why I like it, it's about as "real" as I find acceptable. It's also about as "real" as you can get without it looking like ass five years later.

That describes me pretty well. Back when they were both launching, I chose EQ2 over WoW primarily because of graphics, and even when I was done with EQ2 (because it was a pile of ass at launch), it took some convincing to get me to give WoW a shot. Once I actually played it and got over the cartoony style, the graphics stopped bothering me and haven't since.

I seriously don't understand you guys who thought EQ2 ever looked 'good'. We are from different planets or something.

Free Realms and There were the other cartoonish games I was thinking of when I write that post, and yes animations are absolutely as important to the illusion as number of polygons, if not more so. Many of the "more realistic" AAA titles have distressingly poor animation quality.

It's the inverse of WoW.  EQ2's Screenshots look a lot better than the game looked while playing it.  I recall some pretty stunning EQ2 shots (so long as you never were zoomed in on the models and their plastic skin and crappy armor.)

...or had to watch them hobble and ski around.

It's the same thing as the models, really. Realistic animations are more difficult to make look good than exaggerated, cartoony WoW style animation. WoW's animations are pretty much a textbook case of Disney's 12 principles of animation.

That has nothing to do with it. Compare WoW to Wind Waker, which is more stylized and came out earlier. WW looks far less dated.

If anything stylized art direction should make something look less dated. But in the case of WoW they were aiming for very low specs and it was pretty apparent judging against the state of PC games at the time.

Making a game to run on 95% of PCs at the time of release, rather than 20% seems like a pretty smart move

And it was, and still is, the right decision. Also: WoW's models still have more character than, say, EQ2. Or Vanguard. Or whatever.

I don't disagree. But a game that runs on 95% of PCs is probably going to look dated to gaming enthusiasts.

I can't agree with this, simply because of the resolution you're stuck with with WW. It looks like hell on any modern tv.

Look up pictures of WW running under emulation at higher resolutions. The art and assets stand up very well.

Modern tvs are crap because the majority have poor or nonexistent upscaling. Even the expensive ones for the filthy rich have this issue because the priorities on feature sets are catering to HD content (that doesn't exist in the volume it should at this point) instead of ensuring SD content doesn't look like ass while we wait for HD content that is still being slowly delivered. Seriously LCD manufacturers are pants on head silly by chasing after the HD shiny and now going after the 3D shiny.

It's amusing to note that the end of 2012 coincides with the release of the WoW movie.   :why_so_serious:

A key factor is that WoW lasted longer than a lot of people's first impressions.

For a lot of games, graphics are a big thing they have to hook in players who might just be looking at screenshots, online videos or on the back of the box. It's a short step from "it looks good" to "it must play well". Obviously that isn't true, but WoW had the advantage of having a rapidly (rabidly?) growing group of people clamouring about how fun it was.

Completely agree with the system specs though - the lower devs can set the specs, the greater number of potential players they have.

My favorite games of all time had nothing to do with the graphics. I don't get that mentality.

Graphics are your interface with the world as well as representing the world itself. Some people can get over lower levels and enjoy titles that don't have fancy graphics (e.g. Dwarf Fortress) but graphics matter for attracting a player before they even start the game. Word of mouth that it is fun also helps, but not everyone reads game reviews and I'm sure there is a lot of impulse buying of video games (which can be aided by screenshots / videos).

It's retroactive as well - I mean, I played games that had stunning graphics (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbGVZqht2C4) for the time, but going back they look so basic.

Graphics matter to me but my idea of good graphics is a mix of charm, art direction, etc, not raw tech stuff. For example I think many SNES games have great graphics. Not "great for their time" but plain great.

So explain why that doesn't apply to WoW.

Because he categorically hates WoW, nothing good can ever be said about it.

He categorically hates pretty much everything. Nothing new there.

WoW doesn't look very good.

In what way? Be precise. Give examples.

I didn't intend to pick on the graphics of WoW, in the end for an MMO I don't think graphics really matter, if you're going to play a game for hundreds of hours the gameplay dwarfs graphic quality. I was just objecting to the idea that people call WoW dated looking because it's stylized. Generally stylized games are considered to age better. Yoshi's Island aged better than Donkey Kong Country. Wind Waker has aged great. Nobody called Prince of Persia 2008 dated, or Limbo, or Shank. Mad World was black and white but I never heard anyone call that dated. I don't think being stylized has anything to do with that, if anything it's an immunization against aging.

If anything WoW could be more stylized. In particular the shading model is still pretty standard phong / blinn / approximate BRDF whatever. The proportions on the characters and colors and such may be stylized but the engine and the way the graphics are presented is pretty standard. So you tend to notice things like general lack of polygons. People say it looks like a cartoon but the shading / lighting model is nothing like a cartoon. Wind Waker looks like a cartoon - WoW has cartoony proportions.

My original "it was dated on release" comment meant that producing a new MMO to replace or run concurrent with WoW probably won't be motivated by graphics because graphics have never been a selling point of WOW. At some point the game might look so dated that people stop playing but I don't think that's going to happen for a long time.

My point was that as long as you are in the ballpark with graphics, I don't see the appeal of "This game simply LOOKS awesome." I don't really give a fuck. Tell me how it plays, because I ignore the graphics after 10 hours into gameplay. Minecraft, WoW, Total War games, Pirates!, Civ games, etc. These have little to do with graphics but they were some of the most fun to me.

Yes, in the ballpark is all that matters, I agree with that. 

The few people turned off by WoWs graphics are more than made up by the millions playing it on computers that have no chance in hell of running a prettier game.  All cutting edge graphics do is remove 90% of the computer base as possible customers.

Pretty much that. Also, for every guy not playing the game because the graphics aren't good enough for him a poopsocker in the basement will be running five+ copies thanks to the low hardware requirements...

I just saw a question on WoW Ladies on LJ from someone who plays WoW on a MacBook. Not a MacBook Pro. A MacBook with the integrated intel graphics. And not a new one either.

I think people here would be shocked at how many of those casual players who never did an MMO before WoW started playing on or are still playing on an integrated chipset or $20 video card. I'm constantly answering hardware questions by looking up whether or not a PC has a PCIe or AGP slot and recommending a sub $50 card.

But those people aren't real gamers. We can safely ignore them.  :grin:

I didn't start playing or stop playing UO for the graphics.

Deep, I know.

B.net third parties?

Turning B.net into a steam competitor w/ Activision games included?

Why does every Blizzard thread turn into a discussion about WoW?

It's a little difficult to ignore the 800lb gorilla in the room, especially when it's wearing a double breasted money jacket and bathing in the blood its failed challengers.

Damn near sig-worthy.

except the imagine is of a cultured, uptown simian, who for some reason is wearing his best double breasted jacket while sitting in a bath tub of blood.

I like, "It's a little difficult to ignore the 800lb gorilla in the room, especially when it's wearing a double breasted money jacket and sipping on the blood its failed challengers", better. 

Now I see him with a bloody mary glass in his hand, celery stick poking out.  He's wearing a monocle and (double breasted) money suit.  He's elegant. He's proud.  He crushes competitors and drains their blood to make bloody mary's.   Are there hooker gorillas in the background?  Is that blow on the table?  Could be, hard to tell from here.

I dunno, I kind of like the vision of the gorilla sitting back in a steamy competitor-blood-filled jacuzzi, maybe a couple lady gorillas in there with him, not having bothered to take off his double breasted money jacket because who cares if it stains, it's not like he doesn't have more.

Dang it! I was going to say that.

Seriously though, WoW is the beast that it is because it has broken through, if you know what I mean.

WoW has the same casual acceptance as a normal old console game. At a party recently; my (nerdy) friends were asking what we all were playing these days. There was some Assasin's Creed 2's, quite a few CoD Black Ops; a dude who was playing Fallout 3 New Vegas, and like 3 WoWs (likely do to Cataclysm.....I was the only dedicated WoW player there [and my friends all know WoW is one of the only games I play anyways]). Then there was one dude who mentioned he was playing FFIV. He was looked at like he had a third head. I mentioned that I had taken a brief gander at that game, but I was waiting for RiFT, and GW2.....and GW2; and suddenly I was in the Three Head category. All of a sudden I wished I had stuck to my last statement of 'Yeah, Paladins are cool: but no amount of gear can make up for my druid's instant flight form!' so I didn't look like such a nerd  :ye_gods:

TLDR: WoW being mainstream is not just a perk, is exponentially responsible for it's success.

Now we just need someone to make a game that we can tell people 'It is like WoW- but good!'.

I wish I had your sense of optimism. I'd settle for someone releasing an MMO that wasn't a half-baked mess.

Having played some cataclysm it's definitely absorbing influences from console games and modern gamers with short attention spans. Everything seems noisy and exaggerated even compared to WoW on release. And having quick time events was a bit  :sad:

Just wanted to chime in that I think WoW's art design and direction is near the best in the business. Most big-budget HD games have incredibly bland art design coupled with great technical effects.

I rather like GW's art direction too. But I despise the generic art design that infests way too many games, the "Two Worlds" category. Recently Final Fantasy XIV has really great art design for the characters, the outfits and some specific locales, but everything is hideously bland.

I generally like stylized art direction because it avoids the uncanny valley blandness that still plagues current generation videogame technology. I would still rather look at Baldur's Gate 2 than Dragon Age.

For maximum revenue, a WoW movie release should coincide with a WoW expansion pack release. Perhaps "WoW movie" actually means both.

No, cause then the fans won't know what to do - stand in line at midnight to buy the expansion or stand in line at midnight for the movie.  For maximum revenue they release the movie and at the same time several pets (from the movie) for sale, and the expansion three weeks later.

Add a vanity pet code to every box of popcorn. :grin:

The film won't be made for WoW fans - there aren't enough in NA/Europe to ensure that the film is going to get its money back.  It'll need to appeal to the movie going public and will probably piss off the fans entirely because it'll be nothing like the game.

A Warcraft movie will be just like a comic book movie. It may very well piss off the rabid fanbase of the IP for not being "true" to the "original" but when it comes down to dollars, making a movie that poops on the head of someone's precious story but sells 500 million in tickets is always going to be the way of things.

Most of the rabid fans don't even know what the true or original lore is.  Or if they do, they know it's never consistant.

Except for the red shirt guy.

There is no original lore. Nothing original at all. Anywhere in any of Blizzard's IPs.

That's a terribly old and boring joke.

Most warhammer fans are terribly old and boring.

 Well, I guess it's real. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jos4UWnDM88&feature=player_embedded)  Titan confirmed.

As if there was any real doubt *fake smugness*

I haven't seen someone that uncomfortable to be interviewed in a long, long time.

He was worried about the cranial bomb.

(http://i.imgur.com/98aDm.jpg)

http://kotaku.com/5816849/blizzards-secret-titan-project-labeled-a-new-casual-mmo
Yeah, Kotaku, I know. Still, we have an 'official' timeline now - "12 to 24 months" so therefore it's three years off due to Blizzard-time.

I'll expound a little on my thought process for Titan because I think Blizzard's business strategy (while annoying to some like myself in the short term) is probably not as crazy as it looks to the WoW player looking at their game in comparison to their past efforts.

Blizzard is obviously moving assets away from WoW to Titan because they believe it will be their next big 10 year cash cow. WoW simply can't live up to that kind of status after 2014, it's 10 year mark. The shift, ideologically, should be for Blizzard to continue to make WoW more and more hardcore over the next 3 years while Titan is in development. They should strive to make a game that caters to the niche players they want to keep in that market so that when they do release Titan, they can brand it as the casual game for everyone. In a sense, they can capitalize on the success that WoW had by being more casual friendly when it was released. The ironic thing is that the only competitor in the foreseeable market that could legitimately compete with Blizzard is Blizzard itself.

As it stands, they can afford to cannibalize their own content and split off their 10M+ subscriber base into two groups. WoW could continue to cater to the hardcore contingent, while Titan goes after the low-hanging LCD fruit. If they do it in a relatively smooth fashion, they could see minimal loss of their subscribers due to mistrust over the WoW changes, and perhaps even pick up new players in the next cycle. In the meantime, they can build up goodwill with the release of Diablo III and the Starcraft games to prove the company still "gets it" even though their previous cash cow has been painted with new spots.

The timing is interesting.   It's not hard to believe that a new Xbox will have been out for a year by the time Titan is complete.   Maybe they've been holding off all this time because the current hardware is basically shit for an MMO.

While there will certainly be people who play a game just because it's Blizzard, I think WoW has gone well beyond that.  I'm not sure their own game is capable of cannibalizing a sizable chunk of the player base.  If they quit WoW, they just quit.

They'd be better served actually putting the resources into making WoW better and more expansive.  As long as its numbers are high, any development costs are a drop in the bucket.  Once they're gone, it'll be a lot harder to get them back.

I suspect that the holy grail is making an paid, online, open-world, single player RPG where players can periodically interact with other humans. Pretty much taking the MMO and working from the bottom up from the player point-of-view, rather than top-down from the 'massively' point of view. Frankly, it seems to be what a vast chunk of the WoW populace would like. A world to play in by themselves, with arenas where there are other people that they can dip their toes into as they please.

And shit-tons of vanity pets. Vanity pets are to Blizzard as hats are to Valve.

That's pretty much GW1 you just described.

I can easily see a large segment of the population playing both.

Isn't that TOR in a nutshell?

Yep. If I'm given the choice of putting my resources into a new project that has the potential to be fantastic, or put the resources into improving the aging product that's on it's 3rd facelift, I'm going to choose the new project.

You can't rest on your laurels at this point. Blizzard has to make a play for the next thing within the next 3 years, or risk slowly smothering while the market stagnates. That doesn't mean that WoW can't continue to be popular, but for a different reason than the new game.

The issue I have with this is that I'm not sure it's possible for WoW to rebrand itself this radically at this point.  Boot up any other MMO, and when people talk about WoW, they talk about how casual it is.  That's how it's seen.  Nobody cares that the Cataclysm raid bosses were slightly overtuned or that only 5% (or whatever) of the top end guilds have beaten Cho'Gall.  It just doesn't factor for them.  Even for people who are playing WoW already, it's generally less "yay, more hardcore content" and more "boo, this is a pain, my friends are leaving because the content is too hard etc. etc.".

To be honest, I'm kind of curious just how Blizzard intends to make Titan more casual friendly than WoW.  A lot of the stickiness of MMOs depends on character advancement, while a lot of the appeal of "casual" games works against that, in that you don't need to devote X hours to do Y.  And at this point, it's not like WoW has a lot of arbitrary gating mechanisms to frustrate casuals.  How are they going to change it, I wonder?  Remove levelling?  Remove rep grinding?  Remove gear progression?  Make raids/dungeons super short and easy?  I'm not sure how you'd remove a lot of that without hurting your stickiness.  I kind of suspect it'll be an F2P cash shop game, but beyond that, I really don't know where they plan to take this.

Valve has shown them the way.  Sell hats and they will come.

Remove raiding or even grouping as a requirement to the highest level of gear. If even a single piece of gear is available via a raid that isn't available at the same rate to people wandereing around solo the game fails to be casual and starts the shitty forced grouping thing and stratification of players. But I'm not talking about a Diablo style loot system of randomly generated gear. Make gear buyable with experience points.

THe genre as a whole needs to abandon the concept of raids.

Save yourself a lot of money and make it single player and offline.

It's funny how many times I've said this, and people just keep looking at me like I'm a leper or something. vOv

The thing is, it turns out people want games which are *social* but not games in which they actually have to rely on other people.

You pointed this out in the wow subforum and I'd been thinking on it but Kail beat me to the punch on the problems.  Yeah, it'd make a lot of sense if they wanted to rebrand WoW and make it harder (or is WoW the new level of "hardcore" and we ignore the catasses in the genre?)  Except they're pissing customers off RIGHT NOW.  Sure, they'll still have that core of Blizzard fans but I don't think they'll be able to recapture the lightning that gave them 12mil. 

There's till people who won't touch anything with SOE on it based just off of experiences in EQ1. How many of the disgruntled Cata Casuals will avoid the next Blizzard game, no matter how casual they declare it to be?

It makes sense from a business plan standpoint, but as things are going 'on the ground' they're fucking it all up.

I'll use myself as an example.

I'm furious about the way WoW has gone, and I spend day after day cherry-picking quotes of people quitting for posts, in addition to going back and forth with Rokal for months over how stupid they were to let the game get to this point. They drove a dagger into my social circle and ruined the entire thing for me.

Yet, I still acknowledge that Blizzard can and will put out a superior product when they put the right resources behind it. I will buy Diablo III. I will buy Titan. What they've done (when the dust settles) will be seen as them moving to "C Team" on WoW while this next project will be branded as the "A Team" best in show.

As will I. However, you and I know about the background and ongoings of the company and the industry more than your average user.  It's those people I'm wondering about.  The ones who never visit a message board, only know that the game they enjoyed turned into one they didn't and so slinked off in silence.

Which is why having serious business esports as an end game is so shitty.

Who is this analyst and why should we believe them?

Don't get me wrong - Blizzard will be releasing a mass market title designed with as wide appeal as possible - but I've been amazed how much attention this comment has received in MMO circles.

I think people are inherently simple in their tastes and boycotts are inherently hard. If a company releases a good product with a good team and good buzz, it becomes very hard for the majority of regular people to boycott the product over a perceived injustice in the past.

Look at college football. How many people dislike the bowl system and want a playoff? Yet, because of the product, they are unwilling to stop watching and do the only thing that would force a change even with a perceived injustice. It's a different form of entertainment, but I don't believe that Blizzard has shattered so much of it's goodwill simply by shifting their game.

WoW doesn't have serious business esports as an endgame.  I guess you could be talking about Starcraft.  I may just have a different definition of serious business esports than you though.

I came in here looking for a Release date, found the same conversation thats going on in 5 other threads!

 :oh_i_see:

Maybe we differ on what the endgame of WoW is?   I'm talking about hard mode raids.   You can't do them as they release without an extremely serious group of talented players.   They have ladders and sponsors and shit.    Seems serious enough to me.   Raiding at the start of wrath was ezmode but once they got the hard mode stuff worked out it became extremely difficult.    Going to 10 man has increased the difficulty further as well according to all the raider types.

Yea, raiding isn't eSports to me.  Whatever though, your point that its too difficult stands and I don't care enough to argue semantics.

Yea I'm not really big on calling it esports that's just the justification Blizzard always pulls out for why they are fucking over normal players.

casual = shooter?

login and pew pew competitively without having to catass

Well, CoD does make about a billion dollars a year.

Appearance Tab, several cosmetic outfit slots, sell cosmetic gear. Seems to be doing ok for Turbine...

Exactly

Blizzard does CoD with Planetside style persistance to justify the recurring subscription = $$$$$

I'd play it.  Hell, doing away with leveling/progression and still having world persistence is practically my biggest hope for the genre.

One way or another, there's really no excuse for WoW to be as content-starved as it seems to be anymore. Even if we're talking about shitty c-team content, there's no reason for there to be so little of it. It's not like WoW doesn't make the money, aging game or not.

WoW's barely above maintenance mode.  Do you really want your c-team to add content to your cash cow?

At this point, I fully expect them to rehash AQ raids since the expansion seems to only be about reskinning old content.

Considering that there are strong indications that the next big raid will be the original battle with C'thulu in the Caverns of Time, yeah, AQ20/40 being the new 5-mans wouldn't stun me.

If you don't say it, maybe it won't happen   :sad:

Some of us want it to happen though.   WoW sucking and everyone fleeing it is about the best possible thing that could happen.

Every other game isn't going to magically get better just because Blizzard are being goddamn stupid.

Is that seat next to yours taken?  I offer  :popcorn: in exchange for it if it not.   :grin:

The tears are so delicious though.

Schadenfreude is a comfortable feeling for people following MMO development.

Maybe, TOR is going to be carrying around the huge shoulder growth that is the Starwars license in a massive multiplayer setting.

Frankly turning the AQs into 5 mans wouldn't really be a terrible choice, there's a lot of content there that wasn't seen by a huge number of people. Even lots of people who have been playing since release never saw that stuff when it was relevant.

2015: StarCraftVille, Mafia Warscraft, and Diablejeweled Blitz

Rachel's new StarCraftVille zergling is hungry.
Rachel just adopted a scaly friend to help around the hive.
Bonnie is hungry and Rachel wants their friends to send their zergling some minerals!

People fleeing the game will cause Blizzard to react in a better manner than they have been, though. If they lose 20% of their base over a year due to choices made in an expansion, that's a true "Cataclysm" that will cause heads to roll.

I'll say it again. I want a formal apology. I want them to publically admit that this was a horrible decision and reverse their course. The day they publically and directly do that, I will sign up for a full 6 months of sub. I don't even care if I play much anymore, I just want to support that decision with my money.

You realize just how far down the road this is into 'get over yourself' territory, right?

I want to see Ghostcrawler eat a plate of shit on national television.

I'm well aware how crazy it is. Still, I've gotten to a point now where I want what I want, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

Can they do it through a press release, or does it need to be nationally televised?

I like WUA's answer to that question.  Mainly because it'd be funny.  I don't actually care.

A press release followed by a development schedule on how they plan to fix things would be fine by me. I'm not picky.

Whoa hold up.  They need to fuck up the game more so everyone quits.   Ghostcrawler eating a plate of shit sounds good though.

Only if Tseric can sit in the background looking all smug.

I want him eating a heaping plate of shit halftime at the Superbowl while Paelos whips and curses him. Then I want him to bring back WOTLK ret pallies before comitting seppuku.

I just want no cooldown WoG and HP on misses strikes back :(

I don't want everyone to quit. I want them to unfuck the game, publicly admit their complete and utter ignorance of their playerbase, and do the biggest 180 on their design in 4.3 they have ever done.

That being said I think 4.2 was their chance, and they blew it. They are locked in for the rest of this horrible expansion. By the time they pull their heads out of their asses, it'll be November, the Q3 numbers will be a complete mess, and they will be faced with the fact that for the first year ever the game was worse off because they released an expansion.

I'd come back for a bit only for this.

BTW, I can't imagine anything worse than them making AQ20/40 the new heroics. I mean how much more blatantly can one scream "Yeah this game ended when the Lich King died, we're just fucking around and milking it now."

4.3 - RISE OF THE SWARM! - Journey to An'Quiraj to take part in an epic outdoor raid against the Old God Bigba'Daz
4.4 - UNCLOG THE SUNWELL - Journey to the Sunwell where you'll find a NEWER daily quest hub without the random gating! Battle Blizblaz, Corruptor of Doom!
4.5 - OUTLANDS GONE WILD! - Journey back in time a little further before a blind elf took over a temple!

5.0 - It Burns When I Pee - Bolvar's had enough of the lot of you.

Besides, Ahn'Qiraj were fucking terrible instances even by that day's standards. Ugly (brown, purple-brown and green-brown manga porn,) empty and with cheap, annoying bosses. Updating Zul'Gurub I can get, it was a popular instance with great visuals, some iconic encounters (the big fish, Hakkar) and had tie-ins with Sunken Temple.

Ahn'Qiraj on the other hand was the refuse of got shit out at the end of vanilla (Naxxramas took to long to design, or something) to keep catasses (such as yours truly) happy. The only remotely fun encounter in either of the instances was C'thun himself and that mainly because of the sense of accomplishment you felt after beating such a ball-bustingly unforgiving encounter.

I would however unironically be tempted by a Karazhan re-release but they have a long list of shitty raids they'll redo before Kara.

AQ20 and 40 were both pretty fun. I'll agree that AQ40's art style got old after a while, but AQ20 felt pretty varied, mostly thanks to how small & fast it was. Both had bosses that would be worth revisiting.

That said, the nostalgia-fest is somewhat less appealing when you're asking people to pay $180 a year to play your game, and you're providing 'new' content that people already played through years ago. New content is needed.


It won't really cause them to react at a pace people want. Most MMO companies have live patches planned out and partially worked on a year or more before the content is due to go live. I expect that most of the patch content got pushed to the side for Cataclysm, because remaking the old world turned out to be such a massive undertaking. I'm sure they planned for 4.1 and 4.2 to be out sooner (Blizzcon suggests this is the case), and with more content, but those plans were probably scrapped or delayed as 1-60 took up more and more resources. They can't pull new content out of their ass that fast, even if people are leaving the game because they have nothing to do.


This is still a completely retarded thing to ask for, and you'd have a hard time getting players to agree on what went wrong with this expansion that they should be apologizing for  :oh_i_see:

Re: Titan. I always figured it would be some sort of shooter. Borderlands was proof-of-concept that an MMO FPS could work well and actually be pretty fun. I imagine something like Borderlands combined with DDO-style instanced quests that are scalable to your group size and have adjustable difficulties would be pretty awesome, and have wide-appeal.

 

I'm pretty sure people left because they tuned up shit so their friends couldn't do it. Almost every problem stemmed from that.

Actually if there's anything your silly "I Quit" posts have shown, it's that people have a variety of reasons for quitting the game. One man's "this is too hard for my dumb friends" is another man's "RP isn't encouraged enough in Cata and the world feels small", etc.

I have my Horde characters on Moon Guard, an RP server, the big whine there lately is how some Ask the Devs column made all the pen and paper RPG books NON-CANON and it RUINED their backgrounds etc.

Oh, wow, the guys over at Wowpedia must be having a goddamn seisure.  Half their content was pulled from the P&P RPG.

Pretty much, yes.


The entire lolore/RP community went  :uhrr: :ye_gods: :uhrr: :oh_i_see: :uhrr: :ye_gods:  :why_so_serious:

Need link.   Loretard tears are among the most delicious in existence.

Edit:  Nm I found it.

http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2283549208


:awesome_for_real:

Blizzard is just being greedy as fuck and doesn't really give a shit about WoW anymore. Even if Cataclysm chased off 50% of their subscribers they would still be the biggest thing in the world with more than enough resources to give us an appearance tab, instanced houses, and all the fucking content we could shake a poopsock at. Instead they're just milking the bitch dry for a minimal expenditure.

All that's a way of avoiding the bitching that would happen if they did something counter to what some RPG book writer made-up on the fly to fill some space.   Metzen's ego couldn't handle having to fit "his world" around someone else's idea.

Stop loretards from bitching about things they don't like is a futile effort.   This answer was just the equivalent of them kicking an ant hill.

Get ready for more silly I quit posts, then. I haven't even posted the MY SERVER IS DEAD PLEASE HELP! posts.

I'm not even sure what it means to be canon in the WoW universe, since they've shown willingness to retcon away things they didn't like from the Warcraft games.

(http://files.sharenator.com/South_Park_Zone_Free_Hat_Press_Button_for_free_hat-s200x150-122584-535.gif)

I think one a day is (more than) enough, but your point is already dis-proven. You won't get the WoW community to agree on what is 'wrong' with the game, there are simply too many different players out there with different reasons to play or not to play the game.


I wouldn't say either of those features are missing from the game because of greed. Ego maybe, but not greed. Player housing is a mixed blessing in MMOs, and it's clear they decided against it instead of implementing housing that was either fluff that was never used (no AH/bank), or replaced cities (AH/bank). The appearance tab thing is totally "we want you to wear the new armor art we're making even if you don't like it".

I don't think Blizzard has plans on ever winding down WoW. In fact, if Titan is some sort of shooter, the games won't even really be competing with each other. People claiming they are intentionally trying to scare off players in preparation to shift them to Titan are crazy.

Considering every million WoW customers represents 5% of of ATVI's annual revenue, they will definitely hear about it very loudly from their shareholders/board if there is a significant subscriber decline.

They're not trying to chase people off, they're trying to milk their cash cow while expending the minimal amount of resources required to do so. Long-term UO veteran here, I know what this looks like.

"We know we promised two raids, but then we decided that this one was so awesome that we totally didn't need another. Really. Enjoy your 7 bosses and please buy another sparklepony lion thingy from our cash shop."

Sure.  :oh_i_see:

Exactly. 

It's clear that the company milking WoW (and killing WoW) is not the company that poured its heart and soul into making WoW.  The attitude shift has been very clear to anyone playing the game for more than a couple of years.

Are we allowed to blame it on Actvision, I'd really like to blame it on Activision.

So you're saying it's unfixable, then? Or is this another one of your attempts to point at burnout. I always get confused on which party line you're pushing.

I'm not stupid enough to believe 10M people will agree on anything. What the quitters can agree on is this expansion fucked everything up. That and WUA's right. They are miliking the shit out of this thing for the lowest possible inputs.

Some people were claiming it earlier in the thread.


It's unfixable within this expansion I'm pretty sure. Next expansion needs to focus on end-game, have more stuff to do at the level cap, and have a better variety of content for all playstyles.

Compare what Blizzard's philosophy has become to this, from an interview in 2004 (http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/world-of-warcraft/493681p1.html): 


Blizzard lost its way.  Is it just a coincidence that it occurred after being acquired by Activision, whose CEO has a much different philosophy (http://www.h3xed.com/post.php?id=23)? 

At this point they may well look at these as key features which can set their new, casual MMO apart from the established juggernaut.

ATVI stock is almost up to $12 a share, so it's not falling yet due to the moves made by the company. Since I watch the markets closely I think this is anticipation of future development rather than any Q2 numbers release. The Motley Fool, which is a pretty good Wall Street information source, rated the recent move by Blizzard as one of the dumbest this week:

This isn't the behavior reflected by most F2P games where you eventually hit a paywall. I'd assume Activisions stock price is mostly tied to the performance of CoD at this point.

I'd say that's true, but there are many people in the market out there who warn investors that the company is sacrificing quality across all fronts to achieve these goals. The target price right now its $13 for the second half of 2011, and I'm pretty sure they will reach that mark. However, I think they are due for a downturn in 2012 when the WoW numbers show the company has been shooting itself in the foot.

I get the impression this guy doesn't know much about MMOs. Existing players won't and don't give two craps about people floating around for free at level 20.

50% of Activision's revenue is WoW, any subscription dropoff is a very big deal.

That was broken as fuck and you could see the holy power on misses nerf coming from a gazillion miles away, dearheart.

The WOG cooldown is annoying as shit, though at this point I'm used to it.

He doesn't. He's giving you the impression of the market when it looks at WoW, which I think is a valuable counterpoint to our more insider view. It might be wrong, but the money sees it that way and questions the game for differing reasons.

http://www.mmowned.com/forums/content/370-new-world-of-warcraft-expansion-memo-leak.html
http://www.mmowned.com/forums/content/373-vengeance-of-void-pages-2-15-leaked-image-heavy.html


It's a FAAAAAAAAAAKKE!

Why would you even link that?

Vivendi (owners of Blizzard) bought Activision, not the other way around. Vivendi has been very careful since it's owned Blizzard not to kill the goose that's laying their golden eggs. That's one of the reasons why the combined gaming companies is called "Activision Blizzard" -- Blizzard Entertainment is a separate entity from Activision. That's not to say that Kotick's hasn't had a negative influence on Blizzard but his influence is limited.

Bullshit.

More specifically, the two companies were approximately the same size when they merged (Vivendi a little larger).  However, Activision is now the parent company of Vivendi games former division.  Kotick, who was the president of Activision, is the president and CEO of Activision Blizzard.  The old chairman of Vivendi became chairman of Activision Blizzard (and has since been replaced by another board member of Vivendi).

It still looks to me as though Kotick is the big cheese in charge.

Sure, it could be complete coincidence that Blizzard is now acting like greedy fuckers trying to squeeze every last nickle out of the business without putting much fun in, but I don't think so.

Activision is the parent of the former Vivendi game divisions *except* for Blizzard. Read the Wiki page again.

Vivendi owns a majority share in the combined companies. Kotick answers to Vivendi and as I said Vivendi has been very careful to protect Blizzard.

What in my post is bullshit? Kotick may be a dickwad but saying he is responsible for the issues with WoW is a stretch. The far more likely scenario is that Blizzard is focused on things other than WoW right now.

Morhaime has a boss and has for over 15 months at least.  That is Thomas Tipil,  the Acti-Blizzard COO. That boss reports to Kotick.

http://www.1up.com/news/corporate-shuffling-activision-results-coo

Vivendi placed their trust in Kotick, not Morhaime. This isn't the old days when Vivendi was directly working with Morhaime and crew, they have to go through layers now to even talk.  So long as the numbers stay up they won't care what happens to the games.  Those numbers - which we're only seeing on quarterlies -  haven't dipped enough for the Vivendi board to do anymore than grouse at Kotick at this point.

Like I said, wait until Q3 numbers release.

Kotick has little or nothing to do with the actual development of WoW. All he's doing is putting the assets in different places. The actual decisions of the assets still on WoW are their own brand of dumb (aside from the cash shop stuff).

The only people I know who play WoW still say Cata was really well done...

This thread cracks me up.

Well, yeah. If they're still playing WoW, they like Cata.  :awesome_for_real:

100% of people who eat shit think shit is delicious!

Transformers 3!

http://blogs.forbes.com/davidewalt/2011/07/20/activision-blizzard-bobby-kotick-innovation/ (http://blogs.forbes.com/davidewalt/2011/07/20/activision-blizzard-bobby-kotick-innovation/)

Here's a current interview that praises Bobby Kotick on how he engenders innovation in his company. Grab your vomit bag!

The best part is how he explains how making DJ Hero drove Guitar Hero into the ground, and that they tried to cram it down the customer's throats. He learned a lot from that experience. He learned a lot by releasing a sequel after it "flopped" in 2010. He's certainly learned a lot about cramming with WoW as well.

 :uhrr:

Don't worry if somethings fun, just worry about whether it looks good in an ad - brought to you by, Activision.

*shrug* It sounds like they develop the marketing along with the game. 

This should be surprising to nobody who has read Stormwaltz's comments in the ME2 thread about that game's dev process.

I'm just surprised that of all the things I could give Kotick credit for, innovative ideas wasn't one of them. Buying up successful franchises in takeovers? Yeah he's the go-to guy.

I mean this shit was in Forbes attached to investor news.

Having the marketing be part of the greenlight isn't a terrible idea. It means marketing and development have to work together and it prevents situations where you spend a lot of money on a game that marketing has no interest in or ability to sell.

But no, that doesn't encourage innovation.

Yeah, the guy ends it by asking about innovation strategies for other CEO's and Kotick goes into a bleargh about copying Grand Theft Auto without the violence.

That sounds like the most boring game ever.

I'm not big on "new games must be unique and innovative blah blah" but what he said is just patently retarded.   Sure if they were just bringing in marketing to say "clown shooter with rpg elements won't sell" that'd be fine.   I'm sure it's more along the lines of them bringing in the marketing to dictate to the designers what type of game to make though.   That works fine for Modern Warfare 7 or whatever but not for anything else.

This is what happens everywhere else in software/hardware - for the most part product marketing determines what goes into the products, not engineers.

Umm, he actually says exactly what they bring in marketing for: peer review.  Specifically so that marketing can have their shit reviewed.