Blizzard AMA on Reddit

[Amaron]

Not all of those things are thing that should go in every game, though. Investigation missions would just be weird and out of place in WoW as one example, you need a game that's built to accomodate them, which is necessarily going to be different from WoW in terms of its rewards structure etc.

Certainly you wouldn't have the out of game aspect.  Having puzzle quests with vague hints in WoW is perfectly feasible though.  I think that's actually a great way to add lore detail without it just being a wall of text.

WoW is successful enough to not need to reinvent itself. It's got a long way to go before it becomes #2 to anything.

What matters is the shareholder perception due to lost subs.  They've been doing heavy changes since the game came out anyways.  The new talent system is far more controversial than something like dynamic events.

[Merusk]

In WoW it was kill Arthas.

Funny how a character created for the final game in a trilogy became the be-all and end-all in so many players' eyes.

Yeah but it was a more compelling and better-told story than the Orc vs. Human stuff of the first two games.  I didn't even know a ton of the lore from WC1 (despite owning the game) until I found the game manual again years later and read through it.   I still can't tell you the plot for WC2 despite playing through twice in 1996/7-ish.   WC3 did the storytelling well enough and was big enough that it really caught everyone's imagination, it would seem.

[Kageru]

Arthas was a dramatic character in need of a beat down. It was motivating. The villain in cataclysm was "meh". Same for their armies.

WoW is successful enough to not need to reinvent itself. It's got a long way to go before it becomes #2 to anything. And that really only happens if the genre sheds millions of players. Unless we think GW2 is hitting 8mm units sold...

And I'll say again, I'll believe Titan is coming when they saying something official.

Titan will come when WoW stops being dominant. Will make a nice foil to the competition... if they had any.

GW2 isn't competing with WoW, if you want to get the leet purples in PvE or PvP WoW is still the game to be playing. Though it might punch some holes in it and cause some of the more casual players to leak away.

[Simond]

OTOH, I bet that we see a bunch of stuff from GW2 added to WoW either in 5.2 onwards or in 6.0. Jumping puzzles and exploration points could be crowbarred into the achievement system pretty quickly and vistas are just "use object" triggered cutscenes. I mean, there's already 'Explorer" achievements based on map blocks so adding 'Traveller' ones based on points of interest isn't that much of a stretch. And, mechanically, I would not be at all surprised if Blizzard is working on a global AH already.

Heart system/public quests? Not so much.

(Deathwing was 'meh' because some people bitched about Arthas being a saturday morning cartoon villain who kept showing up throughout Northrend before running off with a "I'll get you next time, Gadget. NEXT TIME!", so they kept the big guy in the background and focused on his subordinates. So now people are complaining about DW not being visible enough. MMO playerbase doesn't know what the fuck it wants, example #23544525)

[Tannhauser]

I prefer the way they did Arthas.  We went up to Northrend to defeat him, it was cool he appeared from time to time.  Whereas Deathwing, he deigned to incinerate me once when he passed overhead.  *casual player shakes tiny fist*

Oh and the new talent system sucks balls.  Of all the classes, only the Hunter, Pally and maybe Mage are still fun to play for me.  What they did to the Balance Druid...

I do like all the new dungeon notes, bosses and loot.  That's very nice.

[Ratman_tf]

OTOH, I bet that we see a bunch of stuff from GW2 added to WoW either in 5.2 onwards or in 6.0. Jumping puzzles and exploration points could be crowbarred into the achievement system pretty quickly and vistas are just "use object" triggered cutscenes. I mean, there's already 'Explorer" achievements based on map blocks so adding 'Traveller' ones based on points of interest isn't that much of a stretch. And, mechanically, I would not be at all surprised if Blizzard is working on a global AH already.

Heart system/public quests? Not so much.

If WoW was EQ without the suck, then GW2 is WoW without the suck.
While I don't think GW2 will dethrone WoW, I do think it's the only MMOG that has a chance of even getting in the ballpark.

[Hutch]

If Blizzard adds jumping puzzles to WoW, I'll have the same stabby reaction as some folks have had to the notion of Pandas.

In MMOs, there are jumping puzzles, and there are jumping puzzles. GW2 has both kinds.
1) You are figuring out how to get to the objective. There's some easy jumping on the way.
2) You have to be good at jumping in an MMO.

1 is fun. 1 is most of the vista's I've found in GW2. 1 is Rift's cache's.

2 SUCKS and I have hated them since Asheron's Call. In fact, up until GW2, I hadn't seen a 2-style jumping puzzle since AC.
MMO devs have, for the most part, been smart enough not to put them in.
Even in GW2 they're optional content, so I can skip them.

[ajax34i]

If WoW was EQ without the suck, then GW2 is WoW without the suck.

There's a lot of "suck" being described and complained about in the GW2 forum...

[Merusk]

If WoW was EQ without the suck, then GW2 is WoW without the suck.

There's a lot of "suck" being described and complained about in the GW2 forum...

Meh, just leave off.  They're all still in the honeymoon period. Give it another two weeks.

[Kageru]

The f13 version of a honeymoon is a short and bitter event ahead of the break-up.

Also surprised I'd totally forgotten cataclysm was about death-wing. Guess it's a good indication of how much I cared about puff the emo dragon.

[SurfD]

If Blizzard adds jumping puzzles to WoW, I'll have the same stabby reaction as some folks have had to the notion of Pandas.

In MMOs, there are jumping puzzles, and there are jumping puzzles. GW2 has both kinds.
1) You are figuring out how to get to the objective. There's some easy jumping on the way.
2) You have to be good at jumping in an MMO.

1 is fun. 1 is most of the vista's I've found in GW2. 1 is Rift's cache's.

2 SUCKS and I have hated them since Asheron's Call. In fact, up until GW2, I hadn't seen a 2-style jumping puzzle since AC.
MMO devs have, for the most part, been smart enough not to put them in.
Even in GW2 they're optional content, so I can skip them.

I think I can recall exactly one "jumping puzzle" in WoW.  Which would have been the jump in wailing caverns required to get to the one boss area.  And that was eventually "fixed" so that you could basicly auto run off the ledge and still make the "jump".  Which goes a long way to show exactly what the WoW devs think of jumping puzzles.

[Merusk]

I'm reminded of the group of F13ers trying to get an Omnicron in TOR one evening.  We spent about 45 minutes waiting for poor Slack, who eventually just had to give up because 1) his rig was giving him fits and 2) he couldn't time right to compensate for #1.

It all sounds like a good idea until you run into latency, spec and performance problems. These aren't console games and some people try to run them on toasters (slack was more of a microwave).

[Paelos]

I think I can recall exactly one "jumping puzzle" in WoW.  Which would have been the jump in wailing caverns required to get to the one boss area.  And that was eventually "fixed" so that you could basicly auto run off the ledge and still make the "jump".  Which goes a long way to show exactly what the WoW devs think of jumping puzzles.

There was a jumping thing in Naxx when you ran off the platforms to get to the boss. Several people in my raid would screw it up weekly. Mostly people with shitty old computers.

[Malakili]

I think I can recall exactly one "jumping puzzle" in WoW.  Which would have been the jump in wailing caverns required to get to the one boss area.  And that was eventually "fixed" so that you could basicly auto run off the ledge and still make the "jump".  Which goes a long way to show exactly what the WoW devs think of jumping puzzles.

There was a jumping thing in Naxx when you ran off the platforms to get to the boss. Several people in my raid would screw it up weekly. Mostly people with shitty old computers.

Yeah, that was quite bad I think it was after Grobbulus and before Gluth, but I haven't raided Naxx since original Naxx, so my memory might be off.

[Merusk]

Yes, that's where it was and I'd forgotten about that one.  We had a few regularly fall as well.  Eventually we resigned ourselves to knowing they were going to die, so we'd just plan to rez them on the pipe for the run down to Gluth.

[Amaron]

Even the hardest jumps in GW2 are far easier than that Naxx jump on Thaddius amusingly.  It's probably a good idea for Blizzard to not do them in that respect.  They'd make them stupid hard.  The only reason I like them in GW2 is because they are easy.

[Ingmar]

If WoW was EQ without the suck, then GW2 is WoW without the suck.

I guess they both have classes, levels, and a fantasy theme. Beyond that? They're extremely dissimilar games. To the point where your statement strikes me as nonsense. It's WoW without raiding, without max level character progression, without questing - in other words all the things that make WoW WoW? All that tells us is you don't like WoW, it doesn't say anything meaningful about the difference or similarity between the games.

[Ratman_tf]

If WoW was EQ without the suck, then GW2 is WoW without the suck.

There's a lot of "suck" being described and complained about in the GW2 forum...

If game's didn't suck somehow, this subforum would be pretty dull.  

GW2 has a core concept of player cooperation, and WoW is pretty slow and clumsy to get on that bandwagon. (LFR)

[Nevermore]

I'm reminded of the group of F13ers trying to get an Omnicron in TOR one evening.  We spent about 45 minutes waiting for poor Slack, who eventually just had to give up because 1) his rig was giving him fits and 2) he couldn't time right to compensate for #1.

It all sounds like a good idea until you run into latency, spec and performance problems. These aren't console games and some people try to run them on toasters (slack was more of a microwave).

If one of you was a 50 Sage/Sorcerer you could have pulled him past whatever he was having trouble with.  So at least TOR has that.

[Merusk]

We were leveling and about L10 at the time.

[Nevermore]

Ah.  I never bothered with the crons until I hit 50.

[Kageru]

GW2 has a core concept of player cooperation, and WoW is pretty slow and clumsy to get on that bandwagon. (LFR)

WoW has a core concept of superiority through itemscore so they're pretty much incompatible. Co-operation might let people who don't deserve it get the rewards.

[Ingmar]

Eh, there are a spectrum of approaches to player interaction, from the purely cooperative (I guess GW2 probably falls in here, or close to it) to the purely competitive (Eve, at least on a macro level) and WoW falls in between. I think it is pretty hard to argue that any one of the places you can place your game on the spectrum is the "wrong" place, because different players want different things. WoW seems to have pretty well staked out their part of the spectrum, and it is hard to argue that they don't capture the way the majority want to play.

In other words player cooperation is not a goal that every game should seek to accommodate in every way possible.

[Zetor]

Back to jump puzzles - while GW2/Rift have them, the 'mandatory' ones are a lot easier than in arcade games (though I'd disagree about the Thaddius jump; I never had any problem making that, while I DID have a problem with The Cost of Magic in TSW and at least one of the triciker vistas in GW2 like the one in the southwestern keep of the Eternal Battlegrounds). The optional ones with wind and shit are well... optional.

I disliked SWTOR's jump puzzles (again, the one with the insect people? eff that noise) -- and I imagine if I was on a pvp server with griefers whose only purpose was to stealth by critical points with a finger on the knockback or pull button, I'd dislike them more... I believe I'll have the same reaction to the optional GW2 jump puzzles once I get there. However, I can't imagine doing any of GW2's or TSW's jump puzzles with player interference; they're hard enough as they are.

(Actually I lied, GW2 does have a jumping puzzle in WVW, and I decided to avoid that like a plague - I prefer the veins in my temple to remain UNpopped, thankyouverymuch.)

[Amaron]

Back to jump puzzles - while GW2/Rift have them, the 'mandatory' ones are a lot easier than in arcade games (though I'd disagree about the Thaddius jump; I never had any problem making that, while I DID have a problem with The Cost of Magic in TSW and at least one of the triciker vistas in GW2 like the one in the southwestern keep of the Eternal Battlegrounds).

The actual puzzles in GW2 are "harder" but the literal jumps themselves are all definitely easier than the Thaddius jump.  The timing on them is much much looser.  Mostly because the GW2 engine will count it as "close enough" if you get anywhere near the edge.

[Sjofn]

GW2 has a core concept of player cooperation, and WoW is pretty slow and clumsy to get on that bandwagon. (LFR)

And yet, GW2 has no goddamn dungeon finder, why do you have no dungeon finder, GW2.

[Simond]

No roles to select! 

[Phred]

OTOH, I bet that we see a bunch of stuff from GW2 added to WoW either in 5.2 onwards or in 6.0. Jumping puzzles and exploration points could be crowbarred into the achievement system pretty quickly and vistas are just "use object" triggered cutscenes.

How are you going to implement vistas or jumping puzzles when everyone can just fly to the end?

[Fordel]

They can limit flying in certain zones/areas easily enough.


They've already done it for Wintergrasp.

[cmlancas]

They can limit flying in certain zones/areas easily enough.

They've already done it for Wintergrasp.

Lol blood elves.

[Simond]

OTOH, I bet that we see a bunch of stuff from GW2 added to WoW either in 5.2 onwards or in 6.0. Jumping puzzles and exploration points could be crowbarred into the achievement system pretty quickly and vistas are just "use object" triggered cutscenes.

How are you going to implement vistas or jumping puzzles when everyone can just fly to the end?

Something like have them start with a area-triggered quest popup that gives you a "No cheating!" debuff that prevents mounting, or similar.

[Venkman]

Or maybe make them interesting to find via flying. Seemed like one of the more underutilized features in terms of game play. Did they ever add anything more than just having your own way to fly around? There was that one BC quest where you could dive-bomb things, but that was about it from what I recall.