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Frankly they really need to put a lore compendium in game. I’ve been playing for two years, paying attention to story and lore the whole time, and I still regularly find myself having no clue what’s going on a lot of the time
I was so happy when Chronicle came out, thinking that it was exactly this. When they said it was written by an 'unreliable narrator,' I gave up on the WoW lore completely.
They update the story with like 1-2 minutes of cutscene every3 months or so. If that's too much to ask of you, but a 17 minute youtube video on the same game is fair game, you might want to reconsider if you're trying to stay caught up at all.
The warband system addresses the fundamental gameplay aspect that kept me away from most of Dragonflight. But I have serious concerns about Blizzard's ability to tell a coherent story, and about WoW content creators/dataminers not spoiling every plot point for short term engagement.
@@erichall090909 are we witnessing the same story? it's horribly paced, half the lore is told retroactively, frost dragon lady literally turned on a dime, this expansion has lost any sort of focus, first we're told about these scuffed evil dragon aspects, then we're adventuring through deathwing lair to learn about dracthyr, then we're befriending infinite dragons for....reasons? now we're in the emerald dream...like wtf what is the through line? what is connecting any of this?
@@DaWoWzerall of the reasons are clearly laid out in game and everything is tied together... I can't for the life of me understand how you came to the conclusions you did...
If they want to help the long term absent players to get back into the story they really need to give some massive lore catch-up for anyone. More than just a few texts and Lorewalker Cho. Nobbel talked about it on his stream, looking forward to his resumee on that idea. During the last Q&A they also talked about something called *Azerothian Archives* . I hope it is what I think it is.
This, literally. I'm a TA at a fairly respectable uni in a European capital. From time to time I have to face the generation gap bw. myself and ppl born in the early 2000s. In the elevator I just overheard two students nerding about the sword, and one guy was trying to briefly explain why it is important. Blizz needs to give that elevator guy the catch up, bcs he will happily jump into that timesink, while a guy freshly married, new job, and a thesis defense on the horizont is less likely to resub.😅
last time they tried to consolidate lore and sell it to use as definitive, they pulled the rug from under us and slapped us with "tiatn's point of view, eat poop losers"
One of the most mature things a person can do is admit when they’re wrong. Ion (and the WoW team as a whole) have had a lot of issues in the past with this but they seem to have finally started to do so. War Within is going pretty well so far and folks still seem quite happy with things minus some scaling issues.
WoW is a comfort game to me. I started playing when I was 9 years old. I had to beg my parents to buy it for me, and pay my sub. I’m now 26 and still find myself returning to it every few months. The music, the world, the characters. It’s so nostalgia ridden for me. I just want to see them take this game in a fresh, exciting direction. This game was so many people’s introduction to online gaming and it’s been long overdue for some of these changes. Here’s hoping that they can deliver us an experience that brings back awe and excitement, and not just an experience catered to getting our wallets out.
How can I trust the crew will turn the ship around, when it's the exact crew that got us here in the first place? Will the writers suddenly become good? Beyond that, as a Night Elf main, no writing possibly could undo the years of shitting on this race and their lore.
Yeah i find it hilarious how people kepe buying into the hype that the game will be good again when the same people that made it awful are still in charge
I'm very much like the crowd was at the very beginning. Very hesitant to cheer.. I want things to get better but it's on them to show us that things are changing for the better. I'm not about to throw my money at them to preorder this new expansion just because they got Chris Metzen on the stage to try to get everyone hyped.
To be fair Dragonflight has been pretty good. Its certainly better than BFA and SL. I’d say its as good as Legion. Trying my best not to get too excited though.
How can you say that things are "changing for the better" when these announcements were then followed by the extremely predatory monetization of the launch event - the biggest celebration of Warcraft and its community - by excluding anyone unwilling to pay up from it? Things aren't getting better. They're continuing to get worse. As someone who has returning for ever launch, even if just to participate in it as a cultural event, I have never felt more alienated. They're telling me that I'm too poor for them to care. It's disgraceful.
@@henrikhumle7255 While it's not good, I think you're overblowing it with this "extremely predatory" claim - these 3 days won't matter to 99.9% of the player base after the first two weeks to a month when everybody would have their main and maybe an alt or two to max level. It won't matter than much for professions either because it's always extremely few no-lifers that get the lion's share of gold-making in early expansions anyway. If anyone thinks EA is why they won't make millions of gold, get real
As someone who has played since vanilla almost exclusively for lore, they have a long way to go to get my trust back. Having metzen back i think will help, hes a long term thinker. Itll be hard to reconcile the lore of both WOD and shadowlands going forward but i hope they can.
Metzen is a brilliant creative but I don't think we can ignore some of the worst pieces of WoW lore also happened on his watch. His departure from Blizzard was recent so he contributed as much bad as anybody...
I think people forget how badly tbc was received lorewise retconning the legion, demons and draenei, kaelthas etc. Or the fact metzen started cross media narrative. Or how badly mop was received. Or cata. All under metzen.
Vanilla WoW was this cool interesting world-building spin off to the RTS lore. Major lore characters were treated as cameos, the bosses you killed were all WoW originals save Kel'Thuzad, who was the boss of the game and didn't actually die. It's first expansion, TBC, was when there was a dip in quality and we started killing off lore characters because loot, though there were other more drastic ones (Cata with forgettable Deathwing and replacing the world buildign with meme quests, WoD with... well, WoD, etc.). Ironically MoP, if you can get by the "hur dur silly kung-fu pandas" atmosphere, was probably the best expansion lore-wise. It introduced a bunch of new stuff that didn't really screw up and retcon stuff, Pandaland was actually a pretty good continent, and I don't remember it butchering any characters. Some claim it butchered Garrosh, however I don't think so, I think Garrosh was always going to end up there, it's just in Pandaland his fall happened way too quickly, it went from A to B to C to Z, but I don't think it was out of character for him to become a violent warmonger who thinks he could take on the world, I would make the argument that was _in_ character, but again, the change happened too fast. I stopped caring a ton about the lore after WoD though, so eh. I would often just read summaries about it since following it in-game was just disappointing.
@@DrewPicklesTheDark Speaking of the Lore dipping in Burning Crusade a friend of mine pointed out to me in Warcraft 2 we destroy the dark portal. I think there may have been plans (i.e. had classic continued) to have a quest sort of explaining why the dark portal is back.. but we never got it.
I love the Preach-Ion Character arc throughout the expansions, its been a wild ride seeing you two discuss events over the years and how thats evolved.
Especially if you watch interviews with Ion i always get the feeling that he is super relaxed when talking to Mike. He certainly acts more reserved with most other interviewers.
Yeah, jumping on this comment I as I was going to comment this myself. Talking about real stuff - great questions followed by, in my opinion, honest answers. I love the relationship Preach and Ion have now it's it brings out the best of them both.
I agree with what you said regarding early access for people buying the epic edition. I feel compelled to spend more now because I don’t wanna miss out or be delayed. It doesn’t feel like early access for others, just delayed for those who can’t afford it or don’t want to pay that amount. Such a shame, it does kinda put a stain on it all and them trying to justify it is just insulting our intelligence if I’m honest. Either way excited to see what the worldsoul saga holds!
They answered this in their QA video check it out and give me ur opiniom regarding it, given it's only words there and no details so we can't say for sure.
@@gunshin8244 I saw that, it’s still a greedy move and not fair on those who can’t afford the epic edition or simply don’t want to spend that much. Just cos they added the 70 boost to the base edition doesn’t make it okay, like.. I for one couldn’t care less about the boost I don’t even want it. The levelling experience is the best part of the game imo.
Ye i completely understand, i never rly cared for the early access in any games, this 1 as well, they mentioned it become the norm which is true, but it's bad norm for the industry imo - as for the boost i quite like it, unlike u i hate lvling ( i did it too much ) so i like having it back for sure at the very least tho early avcess is not nice
@@gunshin8244 levelling can become repetitive tbh idk sometimes I like replaying the old zones and stuff. But yeah it rly takes away from the excitement of everyone waiting on launch night for the new expansion to drop live at the same time for everyone. Really a shame cos obviously most of the streamers etc will be playing the 3 day early access
@@OhaiItsLucinda ye launch is always big, ig the biggest drawback in game aside from hype is finding ummm farming spots ig, i hope it's just that not advantage and shit that'd make a lot of stuff feel iffy for a week or 2 at least
I just feel like this 3 days early access kills most of that big launch day hype. where you are all there, be it your friends or wow streamers you happen to watch , everyone is there together waiting for the clock to hit launch time
Tbh i rather have a smooth launch with early acces instead of being a Lagfest like it was in DF and even worse WOD. and since you dont gain any power and dont have any ingame advantage and i was gonna preoder anyway for the beta acces its fine in my book. i get the problems if you get a advantage but the only advantage is you can level a few days earlier.
@@BPStyle89It's really not about that at all, it's all about having to pay double to hang out with your friends, under the guise of "giving value." If Ion wanted to give value, they could add more cosmetics easily - they churn shit out for trading post every month. I would have not minded it so much if the early access was a pre-order bonus for buying the game like at least a month before launch, but this is just telling a large group of the player base that they must buy the 90 dollar pack, or lose out on a great deal of the fun of launch.
@@audiolols So dont buy the preorder and level with your friends whats the big deal? nobody forcing you to play early. and like just farm some mats in game and make some gold and you dont even have to pay with money for that. you can buy the whole thing for GOLD like i did. not 1 $ spent and im still enjoy the prooder bonus.. its not like they force you to pay
It's not about money either lol, it's about the principle of the thing. Some of my friends are going to want the epic edition stuff, some won't. But we're all gonna have to buy it or miss out on day 1 expansion time. You're thinking too much of gameplay and not enough about social dynamics.
Paid early access. In an mmo.. Where the launch of a new expansion is supposed to be the exciting part where everyone goes on an adventure. This should tell you all you need to know about in what kind of hands the game is in.
Why did that last line of the video have to hit me so hard? I stopped playing retail the day classic came out, but I wasn’t invested in the game anymore way before that. Wanting to come home really resonated with me because I think I feel the same way.
If you want to be smart with your money there's literally no reason to buy it. Just look at the DF launch, everyone was farming those rares and there was drama about blizz nerfing it and literally none of it mattered. You could join the last week of mythic dungeons being available before the raid and your character would be just as geared as someone playing from day 1 launch.
I'm glad to see Metzen back, but over the years too many bridges were burnt for me with Activision-Blizzard as a larger entity. I hope this isn't just all hype and bluster. I won't return, but I've got my fingers crossed for those who want to see a return to the quality they hope for and expect, even better.
@@CrzBonKerz21Oh 1000% agreed on that. My apprehension years back was SOLELY because of Activision. I've had a grudge with them longer than I care to admit lol.
@@rowdyretromoose I think the idea of them delivering at outlandish monetization is the idea. They're trying the WOW player's limits, and finding they're willing to accept almost anything.
"Come back home!" "Did you fix the gas leak that made me sick six years ago?" "I promise we will a year from now." "You keep saying that!" "But it's true this time I swear!"
If they can prove that they can write a satisfying story (inside of the game), with authentic characters, i will consider coming back. Even now WoW is not a bad game. But I don't JUST want to have fun, I want to fall in love with the world as well
nope. Since thy want to release expansion per year, charging you 70-90€ per year + monthly fee + HAVING THAT MTX SHOP and WOW TOKEN, It wont make game better... Its incredible hard to find guild, since many, many troubles and problems the game devs created. (on release 8 dungeons and 1 raid, but doubt there will be 4-5 raids per expansion, i would guess 2 to three instead, maybe more if they do one boss raids like in WOTLK)
@@GhostAeonWolf no way you just watched a video in which Ion said that there's a 7 year plan for the next 3 expansions and went "they want to release an expansion every year", FUCKING LMAO
What's shocking to me is hearing Blizzard say they didn't really have a long term plan or goal for their Warcraft franchise before NOW, when the game has been out for 19 years already. This new approach should already have been a part since Cata at the latest.
It's hardly surprising given how chaotic wow development has been historically - even Vanilla had its ambitions massively cut short because most of Vanillas life time was spent just keeping the game up and running.
Shadowlands was supposed to be like this too. Then right before launch they absolutely screwed everything up (and didn't fix most of it til the last season). Dragonflight, as you said, has been better in a lot of ways, but it really has exposed some of the weaknesses of the core game. I'm hopeful that DF showed them some things about the playerbase, and that the next few expansions truly do feel like a return home.
because in Dragonflight they listened to twitter about a more grounded story and then found out that its BOOORING AND NOT WHAT THE ACTUAL AUDIENCE WANTS
@@Freestyle80people didn’t dislike the dragon flight story bc it’s grounded. They disliked it bc there wasn’t stakes and build up the way there were for previous expansions.
For me, the question if they can make the story feel like it matters is still the biggest questionmark, like Preach alluded to in the video. I would describe most of WoW Story-telling as "Storytelling on debt". All those amazing moments we really love and think about worked out so great not because those stories were told and developed in WoW, but because they already had their roots established through WC3 etc, which was a much more story-focused game and took it's time to establish a meaningful story. That's why people went into WoW (vanilla). They loved the Warcraft universe, and then got amazing events unfolding in BC and WotLK that gave us conclusions to previous events. But all those things were based on what was established before. WoW, at least for me, has failed in establishing new lore and I can't say I felt good about anything "new" simply because they don't give it the time it needs. I personally don't see this chaning drastically in the future. They will try but I would be surprised if they can deliver more than those weird moments of enemies turning into besties within 3 minutes of gameplay, which just feels so out of place. If all it took was a 3 minute conversation for the world to be fine it's just not something I can take seriously with how grand they make it out to be in the first place. I knew Illidan and the Lich King were things that mattered because I played through a game for HOURS and HOURS that established why they're important. I just don't think they think WoW is the kind of game that can deliver a similarly in depth, meaningful backstory and thus leaving us play out only the "highlights" of a story they invision which is a shame.
Leaving retail was the best decision I ever made. It'll take an hell of a miracle in changes to bring me back. My time is precious and is better spent in fulfilling things.
WoW did not invent quest-based leveling. There were many, many popular MUDs with huge quest systems. XP from quests, even mainly from quests, predates WoW by decades. Everquest took certain things from certain MUDs. WoW just took different things from different MUDs. They just have slightly different lineages (though a lot of shared lineage too). I think if you are really interested in the history of MMOs, you need to look at the history of MUDs, maybe talk to some people about them, even play a few of the surviving ones (though most have died and a lot of the remaining ones are hard to get into), etc.
Great video as always. I can say, though, that WoW will never be my home again. It was my home for a long, long time, but the game just doesn't have that appeal to me anymore. I still like to check things out and and play from time and time with a month subbed here and there, but I've simply moved on from the WoW being my main game. I have fantastic memories of all the years I've spent in Azeroth, admittedly soured by some pretty bad memories toward the end. I hope the game gets into a much better place and that people can think of it as their home again - but I'll be watching from the sidelines.
players were madge about those incredibly shitty systems since the fucking alpha. They hated endless AP grinding, they hated random drop legendaries, they voiced their contempt with varying degree of NSFW in their vocabulary. And what happened? A big fat nothingburger. The game shipped with all the crap that was criticized since it was first shown.
Promises, promises. Show something first, then i'll consider coming back. Blizzard has just pulled too many dickmoves in the past, promising overwatch pve as a popular example. Now they promise us an epic storyline and a conclusion to so many story paths....and yet, all we got on our hands is a preorder pack for 90 dollars with a predatory buisiness model.
So dont buy the 90$ pack then.. like you dont get any advantage in game you can just LEVEL earlier. and tbh alot of people prolly bought the 90$ pack for the beta acces to test things.
@@BPStyle89 You've clearly not played a whole lot if you believe that. The first 24-48 hours of an expansion is when supply of the new items is low and demand is high, which has a tremendous impact on their prices. You play it right and you can get hundreds of thousands of gold - gold which you can use to buy high end BOEs, gold for GDKPs, gold to make your professions better faster - which solidifies your advantage. Then you have the issue of gearing. By the time m+ is released you are competing with everyone else to see who can get the highest gear score the quickest so that you actually get invited. If you miss out on that then you will be forever behind and forever unable to get into groups. Same goes for PVP. The "there is no advantage" is a lie.
@BPStyle89 This philosophy only works if you are a dedicated solo player. If you are in a guild, you'll see friends, you guild, start early while you still sit there waiting. You'll fear of missing something. Once you start, you cant share your experiences with them anymore because for them stuff is already three days old. This is a disgusting trend which shouldnt exist, period. But yeah, you are right i am not going to buy the $90 pack. I am not even preordering the normal pack. As i said in my original comment, i want to see them deliver something worthwhile first. Chris metzen really knows how to rally a crowd, hes incredibly charismatic. And yeah, the plans they showcased look good. Nevertheless, up until this point all we got is promises. I hope they get it right, but i am not trusting them enough to give them my money yet. Until they have built up trust again, they should deliver first.
@@Happydrumstick93 apperently you have no clue what you are talking about then mate. Gold in this game hasent been an issue for over 10 years. if you think leveling 3 day earlier without m+ unlocked and all the weekly quest and mythic 0 Ids only starting when the early acces is over you dont have any advantage. then gearing that you think will be an issue make your own group then problem solved. Mythic 0 wont be open untill early acces is over you dont get any more loot than the rest. and M+ wont be release for another 3 weeks when raids are released. just like it was in BFA shadowlands and Dragonflight. and if you are buying preraid BOEs then you are trolling anyway. since you will be replacing then in a matter of hours to a week when M+ is released. I get having FOMO but in reality you dont have any advantage for leveing a few days early and spending 100k gold for proffessions when a few days later the prices allready drop is trolling aswell. And if you think i dont play the game cause i dont see leveling early is any advantage then you are straight up trolling.
@@termagant425 Actually im a CA raider that has to have a few chars ready for m0 Weeks so no the philosophy still works. cause when you are in a semi competend guild you will run the m0 anyway with them since they arent open before anyway. the only thing that i agree with you is the fear of missing something or missing out on something. but thats not a game problem, thats a you problem. had many people preoder and still not level on launch night and guild groups waiting for a day later since you cant do anything at maxlevel anyway till your groups are ready. like i said i understand if you straightup get any advantage in Game then its an issue that should be solved. but since the only thing is getting to level a bit later thats fine IMO
Nothing I've heard of Blizzcon or the current state of WoW seems like anything other than typical Blizzard hype that is likely to fall flat on its face. They know the game is going downhill, and are trying to do everything possible to generate interest in it. The devs seem to barely know their own lore, which really doesn't bode well for making a compelling story. Having so much lore in out-of-game sources is another major issue the whole IP has, and severely hampers what they have done and can do in game. The dev team expanding could be good, but could also produce no real changes or even be worse. The saying of "too many cooks in the kitchen" often applies to game development as well. Dragonflight was a step forward for the game, but a relatively small one. Lots of hype at the launch, and everyone was giving it good reviews. Since then, the only things I've really heard about it is that it's an "okay" expansion. Not "great," often not even "good," simply "okay." And that really doesn't mean all that much when it's coming off the backs of BFA and Shadowlands, both of which were massive letdowns. Taking a step forward is good, sure... but is vastly diminished when that single step is coming after numerous giant leaps backwards. Unfortunately, like just about anything Blizzard releases, the upcoming expansions will likely see a massive positive reception on launch, regardless of how good or bad they are. This will, in turn, continue to fuel Blizzard doing whatever Blizzard wants to do to milk money from players, because they know that millions of people will slurp down even the worst crap they have to offer, and beg for more.
first of all. look at you and your glow up. i mean everybody noticed that by now.bnut you look great preach. seeing old vids of you and the shape u r now in. huge respect. im happy for you. second of all. i really feel like wow is becoming the great game again it used to be under new conditions. im so happy to invest time again now in my character because it feels imr really getting rewarded. and hearing about all the new fetures and quality of life makes me thinka bout this game long term again. im gonna play this a lot over the next years.
My issue is that it feels to me that everything good they do is reactionary. No change feels honest and feels like it's not made because they think it'll be better. Feels like they're forcing themselves to do this because everyone left, and, as soon as they get their numbers back to what they want, they'll restart the cycle of bullshit again
By definition change is reactionary tho. If everything was perfect , they wouldnt have to change. Give credit where credit is due cause in DF , they've had constant Ws. As for the "everyone left" argument, dunno if you logged in lately but game is pretty alive tbh ^^
@georgeadam6744 if it was so good why they have never shown sub numbers again? or why do they keep milking the playerbase with more and more in game store bs, WoW has worse in game store than many f2p MMOs now. People need to stop being fanboy
@@PedroIgori Who even gives a flying fuck about WoW's ingame store? Its cosmetics. buy em or dont, they offer nothing. Dont play the game if you dont want to , just stop being crybabies with a superiority complex. Also regarding player numbers you can easily google that and find out! ^^
@@valvol1ne if its was CONSTANT Ws there wouldn;'t be mixed reactions about DF and complaints about lacking stuff to do. While DF is a step up from Shadowlands, to make something worse would be impressive at this point. If everyone left the servers would be shut down but to deny a massive and i mean MASSIVE amount of the player base has left retail for classic, hardcore or another game is straight up denial. Baiscally blizzard has ruined their reputation with MMO gamers and will have to slowly earn it back...can they do it sure, but i am skeptical of their ability to succeed.
"Will these expansions be smaller? No, War Within will have 4 zones, 8 dungeons, and a raid! Midnight will have 4 zones, 8 dungeons, and a raid!" Okay, so they'll continue to be the smallest expansions in terms of number of zones and dungeons on release? That didn't make me less worried at all. The quality is much higher these days and the zones are bigger, but imagine if Northrend only had 4 zones but the same size. Imagine if Outland was 4 zones. Or Pandaria. I don't think him saying "They won't be smaller, we'll continue with the same formula - the smallest one yet" was a good move. Patch content is great, and with how much they've focused on seasons, I bet there's some dope stuff coming. But how many people are doing Forbidden Reach these days? Or even Zaralek Cavern?
Can you imagine people getting this hyped if Metzen didn’t deliver that keynote? He hasn’t been back long enough to change much of anything yet, so that exact speech was going to be delivered by someone else before they drove that dump truck full of money to his front porch. It worked, so money well spent.
you realise a lot of people still play and dont spend their free time complaining about Blizzard on TH-cam right? What is this loser mindset that because you dont play the game anymore it sucks and no one can play it
Metzen will just pull the same shit he did in Cata. He literally gets a boner at the mention of the word "Thrall". He'll just pull some Thrall/horde centric shit again. It is beyond my understanding how anyone still gives Blizzard another chance. They've fucked us over so many times and for so damn long.
Blizzard said all the right things I wanted to hear. The Warbands system alone might be enough to draw me back. However, they really set the expectations high imo. Let's see if they can deliver.
Blizzard needs to address the bot problem that they have ignored for years, they need improve their customer service experience and just because something is "industry standard" doesnt mean that it should be and that everyone should be doing it.
As long as they basically wipe the game with every patch im done with this treadmill. It needs a change of fundamentals to get me back. They always try to sell us respecting our time, but at the end its all about online time and monetization. And "Early access has no longterm effect" - Bullshit!
The point about storyline being behind renown is a good one. I had no interest in grinding out renown throughout the expansion, so I missed a bunch of the story. Once I realised I was missing some of the story, I just stopped caring about anything after that point. The main story should really be self-contained and not require people to go do a bunch of unrelated filler to unlock.
Is it time to come home? I'm grateful for the memories from wow over the years, grateful to have found PG because of wow. Nothing from blizz in the last 4 years indicates a change of behavior or desire to respect player time. Dragonflight is a far cry from good, it beat shadowlands and BFA but still fell well behind MoP. So is it time to come home? No.
I feel sad for all the hype train passengers. But at the same time, you deserve to be disappointed in the end. If you fell for their "We're sorry, we will do better next time" BS after WoD and BFA and Shadowlands and you're now falling for it after Dragonflight, you're a fool. Enjoy huffing on the copium bag and forking out $100+ for 3 days early access. It's time to come home? No thanks. Wow is like a prostitute. The older it gets the more makeup it cakes on to cover the scars.
The 3 expansion plan had me excited, but that momentum was quashed by drop in quality of story telling for the Guardians of the Dream. Fryakk was disposed of with little fanfare. A villain that has been one of the best parts of DF, and he doesn't even get cutscene death? Yet the Dragon Aspect getting their powers back went on way too long. Quote from another player, "I killed Fryrak and the to stand around serving tea while the Aspects are empowered. Doesn't seem fair, given the Champion has been doing all the work again.
That is some impressive hubris to blame the old guard for the shortcomings of modern expansions, while at the same time cranking out Classic derivatives, never change Ian, you absolute lemon.
We all want to go home, Mike. Warcraft to me, will always be the greatest and most impactful game ever made but damn do they have a long ways to go improving the story and how it's paced and delivered
I feel as though people are getting caught up in the blizzcon hype. Let's not forget this is the same company that's thumbled every new system release in modern history. Let's just wait and see before coming back.
Vanilla gave 2 continents,60 levels Burning crusade added an area only 10 levels obsoleted all previous work rinse and repeat all the way to current release
I'm inspired by how long you've carried this ancient silly torch. Almost 2 decades later and this is your hot topic. Of the many many criticisms I've seen, I never expected to be surprised again. Kudos to you dude!
I was burned with Shadowlands and quit WoW halfway through the expansion. With Metzen back, Account Wide focus, & Hero Talents has me thinking about coming back. WoW Classic+ is also interesting~
Isn't Hero Talents literally regular talent tree but just a more powerful version ? And it's just 10 points. So far I haven't see anything in this new expansion that made me say "Wow they must have spent a lot of time developping this new system/mechanic".
its 1 point per level when you level up during TWW. so 10 points. the tree also has 10 nodes. some of which are choice nodes, allowing for differentiated builds where wanted. The DF talent trees (spec and class talent tree with 30+ points each) are of course staying. Essentially the hero talents are artifact weapons meet talent trees minus artifact power@@TsukadaHina
its not groundbreaking, but I think its a pretty elegant solution to the talent tree bloat problem that wow ran into in cata/MoP and thus lead them to abandon talent trees. By putting the 10 points into designated spots in their own little pocket dimension, tuning doesnt get exponentially more difficult. And it gives the opportunity to give us some class fantasies that many always wanted to be in the game, but never made it in. tbh, Im most exited about the visual changes that the hero talents will do to some specs/classes. a zoo of pets as BM, thunder and lightning as mountain thane, and whatever "Bringer of the apocalypse" will look like, but it sound pretty dope lol @@TsukadaHina
It's weird that it's now somehow normal that expansions have 4 new zones to begin with when in the past they'd all launch with 7+. Outland had 7 + 4 for the new races, WOTLK had 8-10 depending on how you count Wintergrasp/Crystalsong/Dalaran, Cata had the entire world revamp + 7 + 3 starting zones, MoP had 7, WoD had 6+ Ashran, etc. And it's not like the new zones are particularly denser in detail either, WoD and MoP zones had way more treasures and secret stuff than newer ones.
well the difference is not that large. you have to consider that it is 4 zones on release. SL and DF got 2 zones added in the .1 and .2 patches. SL had 5 zones to start with so with the 2 additions (do we count 2nd half of maw?) it is also 7 in total. DF currently has 7 as well (4 standard, caverns, dream and Forbidden reach)
@@yasminmeier8437 ??? Yeah, no shit, if you add all the zones that weren't on release then it'll be more than what it was on release..? I didn't count any of the zones that got added to any of the expansions I mentioned post-release. (And WOTLK still had more on release than the last 2 expacs at their final stage lmao, and twice as many as at their release) And older expansions also utilised existing leveling zones by adding massive new content hubs to them later on which also doesn't really happen anymore, like Krasarang or Icecrown etc.
@@invictus7736 you're also forgetting that the Dragon Isles are bigger than Northrend, so while the number is smaller, you actually got more content in DF than Northrend, just from a zone perspective
I think they settled on that number due to changes in how the team operated and how easy or difficult it was to manage the content quality and pacing. Remember that the old expansions did not have Mythic + for example, that was added in Legion which was also when the zone formula changed. Team members had to be diverted from some areas to others so we essentially exchanged zones for other types of content
@@tobiasb1632 Having a larger, less dense landmass doesn't equal more content. Like a third of the Dragon Isles' size is made up of the empty mass of water west of the ohn'ahran plains and the forbidden reach neither of which served any gameplay purpose on release. I mean sure, if they were making just as much content then the quantity of zones wouldn't matter, but none of the DF zones have significantly more than old zones, whether we're talking about quests or treasures or whatnot. In fact, looking at the loremaster chievs and storylines even the smaller Northrend zones like Storm Peaks had more quests than the DF zones which have bigger landmasses.. and there were 8 of the Northrend ones. Icecrown had like double the quests of the Waking Shore. And this comparison shouldn't even matter because WOTLK was 15 years ago... (DF should blow it out of the park, but evidently it doesn't.) Pandaria had similar amounts of quests to Northrend zones but it also had a ton of cool treasures, rares, secrets etc. to find. NOT TO MENTION this was when they made separate questlines for the factions, whereas DF had the exact same for both, so DF was miles behind old expansions in terms of zones' content, and let's not even mention Shadowlands..
The biggest question is are they going to take another important page from ffxiv, and make each expansion payable like it's current content? For someone like me, who will probably wait until the second expansion, maybe 3rd, to come back and play the story, will we be able to like someone starting ffxiv fresh today can play all of the 3 expansions worth of content as close to if it was current as possible?
End of the video reaction: Same. I would LOVE to come home. I left in the first tier of WoD, I've been gone a long time. But I started at the very end of OG/start of BC. I have fond memories of the game and a whole host of characters I'd like to play again. But they have to show me there's something worth coming back for.
This is all copium. Hype train that will fade 1 month after the release of the new expansion. I wish streamers/content creators valued themselves instead of being sheep. Some people on youtube/twitch actually influence people to play. People will buy and pay and the corporates at blizzard will again think "hey we don't need an actual MMO we can do this hype thing over and over and people will blindly do it again". They haver clearly no clue of what the players want. SOD is not what the community asked. We asked for balance. Not shortcuts and OP new abilities and specs. They are already ruining what made classic fun. Class identity. So much for classic +. I rather stick to my turtle =)
Tbh honest mate , your whole comment sounds like a big baby tantrum "WAAAH I DIDNT GET WHAT I WANTED WAAAH". You need to grow up and realize that you dont always get what you asked for and majority of people are actually excited for SOD. So, play it or dont play it , just dont be a big baby publicly ,its embarrassing.@@DaniDaDevil
Give me a chance to rephrase my answer then. "Blizzard" didn't show anything in that presentation. All we got was promises.Its always the same "we are going to do better" "get ready to be mind blown" "we copied features from other games(even pirated versions of our game)" "we listen to the community". Everybody gets on the hype train and it crashes and burns after 1 month when people realise that they were mislead by the 20x time. It is deserverd when the wow community is more gullible than a 3yo kid and have the memory of a 80 year old person. I am just suprised how dumb this community is. It will be fun to watch everybody cry and the best part is that I won't have to pay a cent.@@valvol1ne
Love your content. I for one and cautiously optimistic on a bunch of things. There certain things that get me excited and not necessarily the upcoming three expansions. Allowing us to dragon ride in the old zones and Dracthyr getting Dragon Riding system into their Soar kit gets me pretty excited.
A black stain on the industry. What a great way to convey the early access issue. Well done Mike! Sincerely hope that you and other influential persons in this space can pressure Blizzard into reversing that terrible decision
Are they really charging extra for the early access? I'm sure people will point out that FFXIV also does 3 days early access to content if you pre order. But as far as I am aware, it is just part of the regular preorder perks. It's what you would pay for the regular expansion anyways but you get a bonus for giving them that amount early.
@@cynicalmanatee They are not charging more for it per se but only including it in the most expensive package. The package is the same price it was last expansion, but with it only being in the most expensive one, people are arguing that it is trying to drive people to buy that one. Honestly, I want the company to make money so they can stay open and make more content.
It's crazy how happy and stress-free Ion looks since his appearance on the retail deep dive panel, I guess we'll never know how much was just beign stubborn and ''knowing better'' and how much was keeping his overlords happy but what I know is that his panel was a HUGE win for WoW's future and that's not even taking Metzen into account...
Saying "come home" and slapping a $90 price tag on an """early access"" edition...man can this company just put aside it's boundless greed for a SECOND? Even if they pull out Metzen, the biggest hype guy they can get, they just don't realize that WoW is no longer "home" for a lot of people PRECISELY because of shit like this. Also I have absolutely 0 faith in the story until they can actually put out something. The same writers who disenchanted Arthas and created the Jailer are still working there, why would things suddenly completely change?
Yeah, it's like coming home to the area you once lived only to find out it's been completely gentrified, fenced in and with bodyguards in shades standing at the toll booth. And then inside it's actually the same neighbourhood it always was, they just wanted to feel fancy and get some cash flow going.
Ffxiv not only has early access, but you have to pay for many good emotes (and bank space) in their store. I'm not even defending WoW here, but the hypocrisy of some people who get mad at Blizzard about doing what everyone in the industry does (or who doesn't do nearly as bad as others), yet let's everyone else slide is pretty strange. It's all or nothing. You either are against all AAA studios doing this stuff or not, it can't be one rule for Blizzard and one rule for Square.
@@andrewshandle FFXIV early access is for every single person that preorders the game for no additional cost, and the purchase counts as a preorder up until the official release. Literally everyone gets it for free, it's not even in the same universe as what Blizzard are pulling. There is no hypocrisy here. You can do an ethical cash shop that is non-intrusive to the actual game experience and fully optional and in no way present in the game (you really don't need more than two retainers for normal play, and if you do, just make a bank FC like you'd do in any other MMO) - or you can do a subscription, in-game cash shop that is permanent in the UI at all times and moving to the top in the new Warbands UI, selling gold directly to your players along with battlepass cosmetics points... These aren't different rules. These companies do things entirely differently. And I want to be clear - this isn't about Square. Square as a company is fully okay with nickel and diming. This is about CBU3 who make a stand on how hard the game is monetized, what gets put in and what isn't. Blizzard used to have that too, but over the years it turned into an overmonetized hell of a game.
@@thesunthrone "You can do an ethical cash shop that is non-intrusive to the actual game experience and fully optional and in no way present in the game " FFXIV sells bank slots and emotes. You are tying yourself in a lot of knots to justify it because we all knew if Blizzard did the same you'd be losing your mind. Like I said, it's all or nothing. You don't get to pick and choose your outrage and maintain credibility.
The shortsighted nature of Mike's comment about "salty players who think they deserve" is honestly staggering. Look, I understand that Mike personally doesn't care about gear, but surely he must be able to understand that most people do, and in fact, the very reason the raiding scene used to be as popular as it was back in the day and the reason why so many people engaged in it was because of gear. If you wanted the best gear in the game, you had to be a raider. Mike has long been a champion of getting people into raiding, convincing them to try the content out, teaching them how to play, making them understand that they can overcome these challenges. That's all fine, but it comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of what people's reluctance is. It's not because people think they can't deal with these challenges (I mean, some can't, granted). I'm sure most people are aware that, if push came to shove, they would be able to put the work in and get on the level of a Mythic raider, even if not Cutting Edge. That's not the problem. The problem is that the effort required to do that isn't worth it. If you want to get people into raiding, then you need to examine why people raid in the first place, and people's reasons for raiding can largely be divided into 3 pillars: 1.) The challenge. People enjoy the challenge and the exhilaration of overcoming it. 2.) The gear. People like the idea of wearing the shiniest and coolest gear in the game and AFKing in front of their capital's auction house to be envied and admired by passing casuals. Whether you think this motivation is vain or not is immaterial. The point is that it is a significant motivator that cannot be dismissed out of hand. 3.) The prestige. People enjoy the prestige of being a raider, of being part of an elite class of players who are saving the world. Let's face it, the main demographic of MMORPGs are not the Chads who are popular in school. Ain't many prom kings and queens farming Azerite Power. As such, the people who play MMORPGs are generally individuals who have trouble adjusting to their real-life social environment, and want to escape that status quo in a fantasy world. In this fantasy world, they want what they can't get in real life - status, fame, prestige. That's literally the central underpinning of any RPG, fulfilling one's fantasy of being the Hero of the story. Sure, there are many pieces of content that people can enjoy in World of Warcraft, and someone can have fun all day pet battling, but the guy who spends all live long day pet battling, transmogging, or playing the auction house did not save the world. You did. You saved Outland from Illidan, or Azeroth from the Lich King, Deathwing, the Thunder King, and any number of other threats. These are the 3 pillars that motivate people to raid. Not all people will relate to these to the same degree, some will relate only to one, Mike for instance, who only cares about the challenge, but the fact of the matter is that these 3 reasons, in various combinations and to various degrees, cover the 99.99% of raiders. And the unfortunate reality is that at this point in time, the challenge remains the only element that is still unique to raiding. Gear? You want the best gear in the game? Cool, you have 2 options. You either commit to a guild and a raid schedule, put in a tremendous amount of work to fit into a social group, to learn your class, optimize your character, optimize your rotation, invest time in becoming the best player you can be and then continually invest time and effort into maintaining that level of skill so as to raid Mythic and get your gear from Mythic bosses... OR... you can just clear a dungeon each week (doesn't even have to be in time, just get to the end somehow) and get a Mythic iLvL piece of loot every single week. There is NO comparison between a M+ 15 and a Mythic raid boss in terms of difficulty and the extracurricular effort that goes into organizing a Mythic raid run versus a M+ run. My main in Legion ended up at 976 iLvL. Antorus Mythic dropped 960 gear. I never stepped foot in Antorus Mythic. That should simply not be possible. Prestige? The same thing goes for that. In his podcast with Zepla, Mike said to raiders who complain about LFR that "That content is just not for you". Yes, but it drives away engagement from our content. Prestige is a 0 sum game. If everyone has prestige, no one does. An Aston Martin is a prestigious car not because it's a good car. It's a prestigious car because not everyone has one. Scarcity gives value. Think about the prestige someone had back in the day when they said they had killed Illidan, or the Lich King, or Yogg-Saron, or Ragnaros, or Kel'Thuzad, or C'Thun, or Kael'thas. Think about the prestige someone has right right now when they say they've killed the Jailer, or Deathwing, or Jaina, or G'huun, or Denathrius, or Sylvanas, or N'Zoth, or Azshara. Literally anyone can do it by just pressing a button and entering a queue. Mike himself did an experiment in Mists where he took a fresh rogue (if memory serves) character and managed to kill Lei Shen on LFR without ever typing in chat or pressing a single ability. That's possible in the game right now, in an MMORPG, it is completely possible to kill the final supervillain of the story without ever talking to any of your fellow MMO players and without using any of your RPG abilities. You cannot possibly make the case that that is an acceptable state of affairs. So, is it any wonder that people stop raiding? I mean, why would they bother with it? If they can get easily get to see all the content and experience defeating the ultimate supervillain in tourist mode and they can easily get the best gear in the game by just running some dungeons, why ever bother with something as challenging as Mythic raiding? Like I said, the challenge is the only thing that raiding has got going for itself anymore, and yes, I understand that that's enough for a lot of people, but you must also understand that for the overwhelming majority of players, that's not enough. It's like saying that you only work out for the health benefits. You don't care about aesthetics. You don't care if working out makes you look better or not. Ok, sure, good for you, gold star, but surely you must understand that the overwhelming majority of gym goers work out for appearance-based reasons. If it were the case that starting tomorrow, working out no longer made you look better, or if you could easily achieve an aesthetic physique some other way with no side-effects (even without the health benefits), literally 90% of gyms worldwide would go out of business overnight and it would come as no surprise whatsoever.
I really hope they stick the story also. They really need some kind of in game story catch up mechanic like a scenario you can pick a certain expansion and play thru that gives you a condensed version of the story beats from it. A lore compendium in game would be nice as well for those that want to skip a readable version. I've had friends start playing that hadn't before or took a long break and were lost at points in the story.
I really enjoyed how this video turned out. It felt particularly well organized and edited, which is funny given the turnaround time on it 😅. Well done! I played WoW from release to the first patch of Shadowlands, off and on. I have to say, I have no idea what would make me want to play WoW again. And it has nothing to do with whether or not I trust Blizzard to deliver on their "promises". As a fan of the lore, I was really bothered by how much of the story turned out. The Jailer and the idea of the unreliable narrator really bothers me. And when I think about playing again, I think about having to deal with addons and toxic groups and ptr testing/not playing blind (the expectation is there in normal content, I'm sorry, it is), and I really just don't want to bother. So I don't think WoW is home for me anymore, and that's totally fine. I hope you and my friends who still play enjoy the changes and have fun. All that said, really looking forward to the RWF!
I've been on and off with WoW since Cataclysm. I really stopped playing after base BfA, and still to this day haven't completed the Shadowlands storyline. I moved to FFXIV and found a home. It is where my guild is. It is where my friends are. It is where my community is. The announcements and forthcoming changes make me happy, but not enough to make WoW my main game again. That foothold isn't there, even if I will be buying and playing the new expansion. (I have played Dragonflight a bit, but nothing too deep.) WoW will be a nostalgia trip that I will be happy to go on. But that is honestly it. FFXIV is my base, and I am not really sure Ion, Chris and the gang at Blizzard can pull me back in like I was so long ago.
I've had the reverse. I played FFXI for many years before coming to WoW, but WoW always felt more like home to me. Inevitably every time I go to a different game - be it FFXIV or Guild Wars 2, where I've had tons of fun and made lasting memories - a part of me always longs to go back to Azeroth. But after a few months, I just get disappointed in the same old grinding systems and find myself just farming for transmog. Now that they're actually acknowledging open world players and making sure we have something to do at endgame, I am really excited. Wish I didn't have to wait a year!
I'm somewhat the opposite. I played wow and FFXIV both in parallel for a long time. Then during BFA and shadowlands I focused more on FFXIV but always wished I could just go back to wow. And now with wow doing so much good in dragonflight and it looks like they're doing so much more good with the war within onwards, and then FFXIV just being the same stuff except even less content than previous expansions, worse stories, worse class gameplay etc.. I'm probably leaving eorzea for a long time in favour of azeroth once more
Legion was the last expansion since WOTLK that genuinely hooked me. I do not foresee them topping that - unless they’re ready to commit to a true finale.
I do not see it working. Players have been taught for almost twenty years not to care about the story. The few who read quest text are seen as nerds in a mmorpg... And entire addon was created to voice quests because no one reads.
I think one really important thing they need to look into is get new players into the story that is no longer current or accessible in-game. About 3-4 years ago in BFA my girlfriend at the time wanted to try WoW. I had played since launch so I was ready to offer any help or advice that I could. She enjoyed the game but the major issue she had was that there was so much lore referencing to the time before the Cataclysm but she had no way to access this content. For a new player leveling up it's just so wierd when you level through Northrend and everyone is talking about the Lich King being the big bad that we need to worry about. But once you go and level somewhere else then the Lich King is completely forgotten and not mentioned again. "Who was Onyxia? What was the significant story behind her?", "Why is Illidan a boss in Black Temple? I thought he was a good guy?", "In this cinematic Garrosh is leader of the horde, but when I go to orgrimmar he is not there? Why is that?" One interesting thing I heard from a new player was "I thought the Lich King was blue? But when he appears in Shadowlands he is glowing red?". This player had leveled in Northrend. Hit high enough level to leave the zone before even fighting Arthas and just never having that story done because the game told him to go somewhere else. New players are not interested in going on TH-cam and watching a video to understand what is happening in this game they just bought. The lore from a new players eyes will just be a mess because it jumps around all the time. Some type of lore recap would be great for new players. Having the Bronze Dragonflight tell you the story of what has happened since Vanilla and have you transported back to experience short versions of the fights and moments that were significant maybe? And besides this I just want more solo things to do in the game. Grinding M+ is fun for a week and then it just gets old when you have done the same dungeons over and over again. Raiding is fun but too much of a time commitment and the fights have too many mechanics. I think one of the biggest appeals of Classic is that it's not about the difficulty of the raid but rather the experience and the enjoyment of doing it. I enjoyed Dragonflight but it was a short enjoyment as I had nothing to do except grinding M+ and bashing my head against mythic raids 3 days a week. The future looks bright for WoW and I am ready to come home if Blizzard is actually going to come through and make the game into the home we all want and not a crack shack.
WoW stopped being my home long ago. The house has been torn down. Nostalgia has no place in my life (for anything) anymore. Hopefully the game will be good for the people who still care though.
I got Dragonflight when it came out, played it for 2 days and just forgot about it entirely. I didn't even have a big "fuck this game" moment, I just lost interest. I used to at least be able to get a month or two out of a WoW expansion, which was fine for me, but I can't even get that anymore. I had my fun with the game but at this point, there's just so many other things I'd rather play. Maybe they'll surprise me with the new expansion, but I doubt it.
For the first time what they're saying is genuinely in line with what I want. Everything will come down to execution. If they deliver, I'll be there, if not, business as usual (in other games).
@@McLean757 the Questline: Garden of Secrets requires Renown 19 with Valdrraken. It's the stuff that takes place _before_ Fire Season. It's quite an extensive quest line that about 90% of the player base never saw. It also contains a crap ton of important lore, like where certain incredibly important characters are and why.
@@mynameiscal3478 that's not how people play the game though, they play seasonally, then leave the game for a few months, so most players didn't even know the quests were there. More importantly, if 10.2 is all about the Dream, WTF are they hiding all the quests behind a rep grind? You _want_ people to be interested in it. I had to explain the entire story to a few guild mates this week because they had no clue the new tree was in the Dream. It's just bad business to hide story behind rep. The idea that the players should have just grinded out all the rep to see it is so backwards. Those quests are the Trailer for the entire patch, you want players to see it.
I tried to come home. But after ffxiv and classic wow, retail is just too fast paced, both in its combat, and in its GOGOGO approach to content. I cant do it, i cant play when it feels like an esport i cant keep up with.
@@kye4216 I know I dont have to be at the cutting edge. But even in normal dungeons, in classic its slow and methodical, in FFXIV it's medium-paced, your rotation is predictable and stable, gcd is managable, and when things are fast its clearly telegraphed. But even just in leveling dungeons in retail, everyones running at 3 times the pace im used to in the others, blasting into packs, before I even know what's happening things are dead and im running again, no one talks, i have no idea whats going on, half my action bar is flashing and the addon to help in dungeons is yelling several things at me, it's too much. And if im struggling now, in leveling dungeons, theres no way i'll manage at actual endgame. to clarify, I almost never die. I just dont have a clue what the heck is going on.
@@atinygoose6199 Well yes in low level dungeons people will just melt every pack and speed run the dungeon because its so easy. But once you get to the harder stuff the enemies have a lot of health and it actually takes a while to kill them. If you dont like all the noise just dont use those add-ons. All i play with are weakauras for my abilities and Plater.
Mike, you talked about the frustration of locking quests behind renown. I agree not fun! But Wow has always locked the huge climatic ending of an expansion behind a raid wall. Even if I do get involved in the over arching story of any expansion, I have to watch the end of the story on TH-cam. I don't raid (though years ago I did and loved it), Im just not sure why I have to do that again just to get to the end of my story. Other games have handled it much better in my opinion. Raids are still an important part of any expansion but shouldn't hold the key to the ending of the main story line. I don't want to get my cinamatic endings from TH-cam anymore nor should I be forced into raiding just to reach a satisfactory conclusion of the expansion. I haven't found anything that talks about a remedy for this, though I admit that info overload (so many great things) may have casued me to miss it. I AM going home with fingers crossed that I can finally be a **hero** all the way to the end of the story :)
Watching everyone instantly forget and get hyped about shit they are going to hate when it comes out is amusing. "OMG METZEN IS BACK!" from people who didn't even like him when he was current lol. People constantly whined about the stories he wrote and the direction he was going. Cata was crap, mop was hated until it wasn't, and WOD was a big ol fail. All were under Metzen.
Is that so? Or perhaps many people liked what Metzen brought to WoW storywise and you are just not one of them. Just because people have a different opinion or preference doesn't make them hypocrites.
@@melissakampers Metzen has genuine passion and loves fiction, it's clear in his work. But he cannot write the game alone. Just read through Chronicle 2 and all the INCREDIBLE lore about Draenor... and notice how barely any of it was in the game, because they pulled the crank mid-development and cut budget to make Legion instead. Chris couldn't do anything about it then, how can he do anything about it now?
I distinctly remembering people trashing Cata, MoP, and WoD stories. Forums were nothing but rage posting about green jesus, Cata story reclining, WoD orc fatigue and time-wimey nostalgia exploitation, etc. They said MOP was boring kung fu panda world of dailycraft mists of grinderia. People consistently hate stuff and then say it was great later after they forget what it was like. People also hated that PVP lead too. Then he left. Then he came back and people were like "finally, someone good!"@@melissakampers
Like you I hate the 3 day early access and will be buying just the base version of the expansion. Another thing that needs addressing is the fixation on pets and transmogs. They’ve gone completely ridiculous with it and as someone who doesn’t give a shit about this stuff I’m not very motivated to climb the renown tree among other things.
Good luck to anyone still playing or going back, I hope you all have a good time. I don't think I can bother again myself, after returning to Dragonflight solely for the sake of friends only to quit in under a week. The game just makes me feel bitter and irritable now. Improvements I notice just make me upset that Blizzard ignored the community for so many years before finally acting on sensible feedback. My deep love of the world and lore is poisoned by the dive in quality and character assassination of the past decade of expansions. My love of chasing upgrades from around the world, shattered by mandatory weekly chores for power and Vault RNG drip feeding me my best pieces, once every week or two. The community is filled with poisonous behavior that is accepted or celebrated, and I have no desire to tank dungeons only to be raged at on day two of a season by the bottom DPS in a +2 group for not knowing about some MDM skip strat he saw on a stream, or having someone quit the group three pulls in for not using this week's third-party optimized route in a low-mid key. I'm also damn tired of Blizzard offloading readability and usability onto addon developers. I felt the old excitement watching this BlizzCon, but I know where it takes me. I feel like it is just healthier for me to get my competitive drive met in games that are purely designed for competition, and do my lore-hunting/gear chasing in an MMO with less baggage.
not interested to come "home" as long m+ and itemisation works like it does it wont feel like a game to play with friends wit hall those crossrealms and anonym shitstuff
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my man stop cutting ion during his talk with every question lol
Frankly they really need to put a lore compendium in game. I’ve been playing for two years, paying attention to story and lore the whole time, and I still regularly find myself having no clue what’s going on a lot of the time
I was so happy when Chronicle came out, thinking that it was exactly this.
When they said it was written by an 'unreliable narrator,' I gave up on the WoW lore completely.
Your not the only one, they are really bad at crafting stories. They can’t write a good villain to save there life.
This!! I’m a new player and I’m sooooo damn lost all the time haha
They update the story with like 1-2 minutes of cutscene every3 months or so. If that's too much to ask of you, but a 17 minute youtube video on the same game is fair game, you might want to reconsider if you're trying to stay caught up at all.
preferably there is being an optional 20 minute ish cutscene you can watch guiding you through the lore of each storyline.
The warband system addresses the fundamental gameplay aspect that kept me away from most of Dragonflight. But I have serious concerns about Blizzard's ability to tell a coherent story, and about WoW content creators/dataminers not spoiling every plot point for short term engagement.
The story this xpac has been pretty good. It’s not super edgy or anything but it’s a good one
You don't have to read data miner websites or social media posts. Spoilers in WoW don't matter as much as in FF14 anyway.
@@erichall090909 are we witnessing the same story? it's horribly paced, half the lore is told retroactively, frost dragon lady literally turned on a dime, this expansion has lost any sort of focus, first we're told about these scuffed evil dragon aspects, then we're adventuring through deathwing lair to learn about dracthyr, then we're befriending infinite dragons for....reasons? now we're in the emerald dream...like wtf what is the through line? what is connecting any of this?
WoW story will always be datamined, just don't visit the datamining websites.
@@DaWoWzerall of the reasons are clearly laid out in game and everything is tied together... I can't for the life of me understand how you came to the conclusions you did...
I`m gonna trust blizzard not in their words but what they actually deliver
You said it, we can't let sentimentality get the better of us. I loved blizz and wow, but they burned all my bridges
Amen. This goes for any company though in all fairness.
If they want to help the long term absent players to get back into the story they really need to give some massive lore catch-up for anyone. More than just a few texts and Lorewalker Cho.
Nobbel talked about it on his stream, looking forward to his resumee on that idea.
During the last Q&A they also talked about something called *Azerothian Archives* . I hope it is what I think it is.
I can only hope for a 10.2.5, where the focus is some fun, interactive, timewalking function, so we’re all caught up on the story.
This, literally. I'm a TA at a fairly respectable uni in a European capital. From time to time I have to face the generation gap bw. myself and ppl born in the early 2000s. In the elevator I just overheard two students nerding about the sword, and one guy was trying to briefly explain why it is important. Blizz needs to give that elevator guy the catch up, bcs he will happily jump into that timesink, while a guy freshly married, new job, and a thesis defense on the horizont is less likely to resub.😅
last time they tried to consolidate lore and sell it to use as definitive, they pulled the rug from under us and slapped us with "tiatn's point of view, eat poop losers"
This would defiantly help sure but the majority of wow players are not lore buffs, dont even read the quests and just play for gameplay.
they said there's still three more patches for DF after 10.2@@ToreOnTH-cam
Props to Ion for not taking anything you've told him personally over the years and actually moving forward with the game by making these improvements
One of the most mature things a person can do is admit when they’re wrong. Ion (and the WoW team as a whole) have had a lot of issues in the past with this but they seem to have finally started to do so. War Within is going pretty well so far and folks still seem quite happy with things minus some scaling issues.
WoW is a comfort game to me. I started playing when I was 9 years old. I had to beg my parents to buy it for me, and pay my sub. I’m now 26 and still find myself returning to it every few months. The music, the world, the characters. It’s so nostalgia ridden for me. I just want to see them take this game in a fresh, exciting direction. This game was so many people’s introduction to online gaming and it’s been long overdue for some of these changes. Here’s hoping that they can deliver us an experience that brings back awe and excitement, and not just an experience catered to getting our wallets out.
How can I trust the crew will turn the ship around, when it's the exact crew that got us here in the first place?
Will the writers suddenly become good?
Beyond that, as a Night Elf main, no writing possibly could undo the years of shitting on this race and their lore.
Yeah i find it hilarious how people kepe buying into the hype that the game will be good again when the same people that made it awful are still in charge
They think Metzen coming back will change the game entirely when they forget he was responsible for a lot of the mess we're in today.@@PedroIgori
Game is pretty good right now
Curious to hear what these years of shitting is
because people change and the game seems to be going in the right direction.
I don't know why but seeing Ion and Preach in the same room is so funny to me, would love to see Preach doing regular interviews with the wow devs
I'm very much like the crowd was at the very beginning. Very hesitant to cheer.. I want things to get better but it's on them to show us that things are changing for the better. I'm not about to throw my money at them to preorder this new expansion just because they got Chris Metzen on the stage to try to get everyone hyped.
To be fair Dragonflight has been pretty good. Its certainly better than BFA and SL. I’d say its as good as Legion. Trying my best not to get too excited though.
How can you say that things are "changing for the better" when these announcements were then followed by the extremely predatory monetization of the launch event - the biggest celebration of Warcraft and its community - by excluding anyone unwilling to pay up from it? Things aren't getting better. They're continuing to get worse. As someone who has returning for ever launch, even if just to participate in it as a cultural event, I have never felt more alienated. They're telling me that I'm too poor for them to care. It's disgraceful.
@@SamoIsKingthey also during that time stole money from players in overwatch 2.
@@SamoIsKing it is far better than legion. there's no AP grind, no artifact weapons and no hilarious legendary system
@@henrikhumle7255 While it's not good, I think you're overblowing it with this "extremely predatory" claim - these 3 days won't matter to 99.9% of the player base after the first two weeks to a month when everybody would have their main and maybe an alt or two to max level. It won't matter than much for professions either because it's always extremely few no-lifers that get the lion's share of gold-making in early expansions anyway. If anyone thinks EA is why they won't make millions of gold, get real
As someone who has played since vanilla almost exclusively for lore, they have a long way to go to get my trust back. Having metzen back i think will help, hes a long term thinker. Itll be hard to reconcile the lore of both WOD and shadowlands going forward but i hope they can.
Metzen is a brilliant creative but I don't think we can ignore some of the worst pieces of WoW lore also happened on his watch. His departure from Blizzard was recent so he contributed as much bad as anybody...
I think people forget how badly tbc was received lorewise retconning the legion, demons and draenei, kaelthas etc. Or the fact metzen started cross media narrative. Or how badly mop was received. Or cata. All under metzen.
Wow lore has been butchered so savagely that there is no patching it up
Vanilla WoW was this cool interesting world-building spin off to the RTS lore. Major lore characters were treated as cameos, the bosses you killed were all WoW originals save Kel'Thuzad, who was the boss of the game and didn't actually die. It's first expansion, TBC, was when there was a dip in quality and we started killing off lore characters because loot, though there were other more drastic ones (Cata with forgettable Deathwing and replacing the world buildign with meme quests, WoD with... well, WoD, etc.). Ironically MoP, if you can get by the "hur dur silly kung-fu pandas" atmosphere, was probably the best expansion lore-wise. It introduced a bunch of new stuff that didn't really screw up and retcon stuff, Pandaland was actually a pretty good continent, and I don't remember it butchering any characters. Some claim it butchered Garrosh, however I don't think so, I think Garrosh was always going to end up there, it's just in Pandaland his fall happened way too quickly, it went from A to B to C to Z, but I don't think it was out of character for him to become a violent warmonger who thinks he could take on the world, I would make the argument that was _in_ character, but again, the change happened too fast. I stopped caring a ton about the lore after WoD though, so eh. I would often just read summaries about it since following it in-game was just disappointing.
@@DrewPicklesTheDark Speaking of the Lore dipping in Burning Crusade a friend of mine pointed out to me in Warcraft 2 we destroy the dark portal. I think there may have been plans (i.e. had classic continued) to have a quest sort of explaining why the dark portal is back.. but we never got it.
I love the Preach-Ion Character arc throughout the expansions, its been a wild ride seeing you two discuss events over the years and how thats evolved.
Especially if you watch interviews with Ion i always get the feeling that he is super relaxed when talking to Mike. He certainly acts more reserved with most other interviewers.
Yeah, jumping on this comment I as I was going to comment this myself. Talking about real stuff - great questions followed by, in my opinion, honest answers. I love the relationship Preach and Ion have now it's it brings out the best of them both.
i would love for them to have some sort of meme event in-game with mike vs ion
I agree with what you said regarding early access for people buying the epic edition. I feel compelled to spend more now because I don’t wanna miss out or be delayed. It doesn’t feel like early access for others, just delayed for those who can’t afford it or don’t want to pay that amount. Such a shame, it does kinda put a stain on it all and them trying to justify it is just insulting our intelligence if I’m honest. Either way excited to see what the worldsoul saga holds!
They answered this in their QA video check it out and give me ur opiniom regarding it, given it's only words there and no details so we can't say for sure.
@@gunshin8244 I saw that, it’s still a greedy move and not fair on those who can’t afford the epic edition or simply don’t want to spend that much. Just cos they added the 70 boost to the base edition doesn’t make it okay, like.. I for one couldn’t care less about the boost I don’t even want it. The levelling experience is the best part of the game imo.
Ye i completely understand, i never rly cared for the early access in any games, this 1 as well, they mentioned it become the norm which is true, but it's bad norm for the industry imo - as for the boost i quite like it, unlike u i hate lvling ( i did it too much ) so i like having it back for sure at the very least tho early avcess is not nice
@@gunshin8244 levelling can become repetitive tbh idk sometimes I like replaying the old zones and stuff. But yeah it rly takes away from the excitement of everyone waiting on launch night for the new expansion to drop live at the same time for everyone. Really a shame cos obviously most of the streamers etc will be playing the 3 day early access
@@OhaiItsLucinda ye launch is always big, ig the biggest drawback in game aside from hype is finding ummm farming spots ig, i hope it's just that not advantage and shit that'd make a lot of stuff feel iffy for a week or 2 at least
I just feel like this 3 days early access kills most of that big launch day hype. where you are all there, be it your friends or wow streamers you happen to watch , everyone is there together waiting for the clock to hit launch time
Tbh i rather have a smooth launch with early acces instead of being a Lagfest like it was in DF and even worse WOD. and since you dont gain any power and dont have any ingame advantage and i was gonna preoder anyway for the beta acces its fine in my book. i get the problems if you get a advantage but the only advantage is you can level a few days earlier.
@@BPStyle89It's really not about that at all, it's all about having to pay double to hang out with your friends, under the guise of "giving value." If Ion wanted to give value, they could add more cosmetics easily - they churn shit out for trading post every month. I would have not minded it so much if the early access was a pre-order bonus for buying the game like at least a month before launch, but this is just telling a large group of the player base that they must buy the 90 dollar pack, or lose out on a great deal of the fun of launch.
@@audiolols So dont buy the preorder and level with your friends whats the big deal? nobody forcing you to play early. and like just farm some mats in game and make some gold and you dont even have to pay with money for that. you can buy the whole thing for GOLD like i did. not 1 $ spent and im still enjoy the prooder bonus.. its not like they force you to pay
It's not about money either lol, it's about the principle of the thing. Some of my friends are going to want the epic edition stuff, some won't. But we're all gonna have to buy it or miss out on day 1 expansion time. You're thinking too much of gameplay and not enough about social dynamics.
Paid early access. In an mmo.. Where the launch of a new expansion is supposed to be the exciting part where everyone goes on an adventure. This should tell you all you need to know about in what kind of hands the game is in.
The monetization is getting worse?! It's so damn sad
Why did that last line of the video have to hit me so hard?
I stopped playing retail the day classic came out, but I wasn’t invested in the game anymore way before that. Wanting to come home really resonated with me because I think I feel the same way.
If getting players to return is the goal, making them start playing 3 days late, or pay double for the new expansion does seem counterintuitive.
If you want to be smart with your money there's literally no reason to buy it. Just look at the DF launch, everyone was farming those rares and there was drama about blizz nerfing it and literally none of it mattered. You could join the last week of mythic dungeons being available before the raid and your character would be just as geared as someone playing from day 1 launch.
I'm glad to see Metzen back, but over the years too many bridges were burnt for me with Activision-Blizzard as a larger entity. I hope this isn't just all hype and bluster. I won't return, but I've got my fingers crossed for those who want to see a return to the quality they hope for and expect, even better.
Good thing activision is out of the picture now.
@@CrzBonKerz21 thank fug for that. Press S to spit on Activision
S
@@CrzBonKerz21Oh 1000% agreed on that. My apprehension years back was SOLELY because of Activision. I've had a grudge with them longer than I care to admit lol.
@@rowdyretromoose I think the idea of them delivering at outlandish monetization is the idea. They're trying the WOW player's limits, and finding they're willing to accept almost anything.
"Come back home!"
"Did you fix the gas leak that made me sick six years ago?"
"I promise we will a year from now."
"You keep saying that!"
"But it's true this time I swear!"
If they can prove that they can write a satisfying story (inside of the game), with authentic characters, i will consider coming back.
Even now WoW is not a bad game.
But I don't JUST want to have fun, I want to fall in love with the world as well
Wow has a story? Don't see it in m+
nope. Since thy want to release expansion per year, charging you 70-90€ per year + monthly fee + HAVING THAT MTX SHOP and WOW TOKEN, It wont make game better... Its incredible hard to find guild, since many, many troubles and problems the game devs created. (on release 8 dungeons and 1 raid, but doubt there will be 4-5 raids per expansion, i would guess 2 to three instead, maybe more if they do one boss raids like in WOTLK)
Bro modern writers in general cant do that
You must be Horde, because the ONLY place where the Alliance win is in lore. If you get rid of THAT, there is no Alliance.
@@GhostAeonWolf no way you just watched a video in which Ion said that there's a 7 year plan for the next 3 expansions and went "they want to release an expansion every year", FUCKING LMAO
What's shocking to me is hearing Blizzard say they didn't really have a long term plan or goal for their Warcraft franchise before NOW, when the game has been out for 19 years already. This new approach should already have been a part since Cata at the latest.
It's hardly surprising given how chaotic wow development has been historically - even Vanilla had its ambitions massively cut short because most of Vanillas life time was spent just keeping the game up and running.
not only the 3 day early access but the overall price of the expansion! the price bloat is insane!
Shadowlands was supposed to be like this too. Then right before launch they absolutely screwed everything up (and didn't fix most of it til the last season). Dragonflight, as you said, has been better in a lot of ways, but it really has exposed some of the weaknesses of the core game. I'm hopeful that DF showed them some things about the playerbase, and that the next few expansions truly do feel like a return home.
because in Dragonflight they listened to twitter about a more grounded story and then found out that its BOOORING AND NOT WHAT THE ACTUAL AUDIENCE WANTS
@@Freestyle80people didn’t dislike the dragon flight story bc it’s grounded. They disliked it bc there wasn’t stakes and build up the way there were for previous expansions.
For me, the question if they can make the story feel like it matters is still the biggest questionmark, like Preach alluded to in the video. I would describe most of WoW Story-telling as "Storytelling on debt". All those amazing moments we really love and think about worked out so great not because those stories were told and developed in WoW, but because they already had their roots established through WC3 etc, which was a much more story-focused game and took it's time to establish a meaningful story. That's why people went into WoW (vanilla). They loved the Warcraft universe, and then got amazing events unfolding in BC and WotLK that gave us conclusions to previous events. But all those things were based on what was established before.
WoW, at least for me, has failed in establishing new lore and I can't say I felt good about anything "new" simply because they don't give it the time it needs. I personally don't see this chaning drastically in the future. They will try but I would be surprised if they can deliver more than those weird moments of enemies turning into besties within 3 minutes of gameplay, which just feels so out of place. If all it took was a 3 minute conversation for the world to be fine it's just not something I can take seriously with how grand they make it out to be in the first place. I knew Illidan and the Lich King were things that mattered because I played through a game for HOURS and HOURS that established why they're important.
I just don't think they think WoW is the kind of game that can deliver a similarly in depth, meaningful backstory and thus leaving us play out only the "highlights" of a story they invision which is a shame.
Leaving retail was the best decision I ever made. It'll take an hell of a miracle in changes to bring me back. My time is precious and is better spent in fulfilling things.
WoW did not invent quest-based leveling.
There were many, many popular MUDs with huge quest systems. XP from quests, even mainly from quests, predates WoW by decades.
Everquest took certain things from certain MUDs. WoW just took different things from different MUDs. They just have slightly different lineages (though a lot of shared lineage too).
I think if you are really interested in the history of MMOs, you need to look at the history of MUDs, maybe talk to some people about them, even play a few of the surviving ones (though most have died and a lot of the remaining ones are hard to get into), etc.
Great video as always.
I can say, though, that WoW will never be my home again. It was my home for a long, long time, but the game just doesn't have that appeal to me anymore. I still like to check things out and and play from time and time with a month subbed here and there, but I've simply moved on from the WoW being my main game.
I have fantastic memories of all the years I've spent in Azeroth, admittedly soured by some pretty bad memories toward the end. I hope the game gets into a much better place and that people can think of it as their home again - but I'll be watching from the sidelines.
Love seeing preach still going. Been watching since 2012 ❤
It’s sad it’s taken them four expansions to figure this out. The flash of legion overshadowed how poorly the game was made. It’s limped on ever since.
players were madge about those incredibly shitty systems since the fucking alpha. They hated endless AP grinding, they hated random drop legendaries, they voiced their contempt with varying degree of NSFW in their vocabulary.
And what happened? A big fat nothingburger. The game shipped with all the crap that was criticized since it was first shown.
@@alewis514 Well of course. After all they got to call the fixes "features" in a later patch. Fixing them early starves the patch cycle.
90 euros to play 3 days early in an MMO.
Promises, promises. Show something first, then i'll consider coming back. Blizzard has just pulled too many dickmoves in the past, promising overwatch pve as a popular example. Now they promise us an epic storyline and a conclusion to so many story paths....and yet, all we got on our hands is a preorder pack for 90 dollars with a predatory buisiness model.
So dont buy the 90$ pack then.. like you dont get any advantage in game you can just LEVEL earlier. and tbh alot of people prolly bought the 90$ pack for the beta acces to test things.
@@BPStyle89 You've clearly not played a whole lot if you believe that. The first 24-48 hours of an expansion is when supply of the new items is low and demand is high, which has a tremendous impact on their prices. You play it right and you can get hundreds of thousands of gold - gold which you can use to buy high end BOEs, gold for GDKPs, gold to make your professions better faster - which solidifies your advantage.
Then you have the issue of gearing. By the time m+ is released you are competing with everyone else to see who can get the highest gear score the quickest so that you actually get invited. If you miss out on that then you will be forever behind and forever unable to get into groups. Same goes for PVP. The "there is no advantage" is a lie.
@BPStyle89 This philosophy only works if you are a dedicated solo player. If you are in a guild, you'll see friends, you guild, start early while you still sit there waiting. You'll fear of missing something. Once you start, you cant share your experiences with them anymore because for them stuff is already three days old. This is a disgusting trend which shouldnt exist, period.
But yeah, you are right i am not going to buy the $90 pack. I am not even preordering the normal pack. As i said in my original comment, i want to see them deliver something worthwhile first. Chris metzen really knows how to rally a crowd, hes incredibly charismatic. And yeah, the plans they showcased look good. Nevertheless, up until this point all we got is promises.
I hope they get it right, but i am not trusting them enough to give them my money yet. Until they have built up trust again, they should deliver first.
@@Happydrumstick93 apperently you have no clue what you are talking about then mate. Gold in this game hasent been an issue for over 10 years. if you think leveling 3 day earlier without m+ unlocked and all the weekly quest and mythic 0 Ids only starting when the early acces is over you dont have any advantage.
then gearing that you think will be an issue make your own group then problem solved. Mythic 0 wont be open untill early acces is over you dont get any more loot than the rest. and M+ wont be release for another 3 weeks when raids are released. just like it was in BFA shadowlands and Dragonflight. and if you are buying preraid BOEs then you are trolling anyway. since you will be replacing then in a matter of hours to a week when M+ is released.
I get having FOMO but in reality you dont have any advantage for leveing a few days early and spending 100k gold for proffessions when a few days later the prices allready drop is trolling aswell.
And if you think i dont play the game cause i dont see leveling early is any advantage then you are straight up trolling.
@@termagant425 Actually im a CA raider that has to have a few chars ready for m0 Weeks so no the philosophy still works. cause when you are in a semi competend guild you will run the m0 anyway with them since they arent open before anyway. the only thing that i agree with you is the fear of missing something or missing out on something. but thats not a game problem, thats a you problem. had many people preoder and still not level on launch night and guild groups waiting for a day later since you cant do anything at maxlevel anyway till your groups are ready.
like i said i understand if you straightup get any advantage in Game then its an issue that should be solved. but since the only thing is getting to level a bit later thats fine IMO
Like a true abusive ex. Pay us $90 for the preorder and COME HOME!!!!
Yeah for the biggest edition. $50 for an expansion is usual
Nothing I've heard of Blizzcon or the current state of WoW seems like anything other than typical Blizzard hype that is likely to fall flat on its face. They know the game is going downhill, and are trying to do everything possible to generate interest in it.
The devs seem to barely know their own lore, which really doesn't bode well for making a compelling story. Having so much lore in out-of-game sources is another major issue the whole IP has, and severely hampers what they have done and can do in game.
The dev team expanding could be good, but could also produce no real changes or even be worse. The saying of "too many cooks in the kitchen" often applies to game development as well.
Dragonflight was a step forward for the game, but a relatively small one. Lots of hype at the launch, and everyone was giving it good reviews. Since then, the only things I've really heard about it is that it's an "okay" expansion. Not "great," often not even "good," simply "okay." And that really doesn't mean all that much when it's coming off the backs of BFA and Shadowlands, both of which were massive letdowns. Taking a step forward is good, sure... but is vastly diminished when that single step is coming after numerous giant leaps backwards.
Unfortunately, like just about anything Blizzard releases, the upcoming expansions will likely see a massive positive reception on launch, regardless of how good or bad they are. This will, in turn, continue to fuel Blizzard doing whatever Blizzard wants to do to milk money from players, because they know that millions of people will slurp down even the worst crap they have to offer, and beg for more.
I started in vanilla, quit in BfA, and will not go back. It's certainly not my "home" anymore.
I wish I shared your enthusiasm, but I too will wait and see what the future holds .
first of all. look at you and your glow up. i mean everybody noticed that by now.bnut you look great preach. seeing old vids of you and the shape u r now in. huge respect. im happy for you. second of all. i really feel like wow is becoming the great game again it used to be under new conditions. im so happy to invest time again now in my character because it feels imr really getting rewarded. and hearing about all the new fetures and quality of life makes me thinka bout this game long term again. im gonna play this a lot over the next years.
My issue is that it feels to me that everything good they do is reactionary. No change feels honest and feels like it's not made because they think it'll be better. Feels like they're forcing themselves to do this because everyone left, and, as soon as they get their numbers back to what they want, they'll restart the cycle of bullshit again
By definition change is reactionary tho. If everything was perfect , they wouldnt have to change. Give credit where credit is due cause in DF , they've had constant Ws. As for the "everyone left" argument, dunno if you logged in lately but game is pretty alive tbh ^^
@georgeadam6744 if it was so good why they have never shown sub numbers again? or why do they keep milking the playerbase with more and more in game store bs, WoW has worse in game store than many f2p MMOs now. People need to stop being fanboy
@@PedroIgori Who even gives a flying fuck about WoW's ingame store? Its cosmetics. buy em or dont, they offer nothing. Dont play the game if you dont want to , just stop being crybabies with a superiority complex. Also regarding player numbers you can easily google that and find out! ^^
@@valvol1ne they mean blizz has no vision and only seem like doing things because of that and not truly believe in new ways
In a word, not genuine
@@valvol1ne if its was CONSTANT Ws there wouldn;'t be mixed reactions about DF and complaints about lacking stuff to do. While DF is a step up from Shadowlands, to make something worse would be impressive at this point. If everyone left the servers would be shut down but to deny a massive and i mean MASSIVE amount of the player base has left retail for classic, hardcore or another game is straight up denial. Baiscally blizzard has ruined their reputation with MMO gamers and will have to slowly earn it back...can they do it sure, but i am skeptical of their ability to succeed.
"Will these expansions be smaller? No, War Within will have 4 zones, 8 dungeons, and a raid! Midnight will have 4 zones, 8 dungeons, and a raid!" Okay, so they'll continue to be the smallest expansions in terms of number of zones and dungeons on release? That didn't make me less worried at all. The quality is much higher these days and the zones are bigger, but imagine if Northrend only had 4 zones but the same size. Imagine if Outland was 4 zones. Or Pandaria. I don't think him saying "They won't be smaller, we'll continue with the same formula - the smallest one yet" was a good move. Patch content is great, and with how much they've focused on seasons, I bet there's some dope stuff coming. But how many people are doing Forbidden Reach these days? Or even Zaralek Cavern?
See guys???? THIS TIME!!! This time Blizzard’s turning things around!! This time!
The wow player base has more faith than some hardcore religious people lol
Dragonflihjt has been head and shoulders better than the last few xpacs so I’m not all that skeptical tbh
Can you imagine people getting this hyped if Metzen didn’t deliver that keynote? He hasn’t been back long enough to change much of anything yet, so that exact speech was going to be delivered by someone else before they drove that dump truck full of money to his front porch. It worked, so money well spent.
I've heard "this time" so so many times. You wow fans stick your hands into the fire time and again and never learn from being burned
you realise a lot of people still play and dont spend their free time complaining about Blizzard on TH-cam right? What is this loser mindset that because you dont play the game anymore it sucks and no one can play it
Metzen will just pull the same shit he did in Cata. He literally gets a boner at the mention of the word "Thrall". He'll just pull some Thrall/horde centric shit again. It is beyond my understanding how anyone still gives Blizzard another chance. They've fucked us over so many times and for so damn long.
Blizzard said all the right things I wanted to hear. The Warbands system alone might be enough to draw me back. However, they really set the expectations high imo. Let's see if they can deliver.
Blizzard needs to address the bot problem that they have ignored for years, they need improve their customer service experience and just because something is "industry standard" doesnt mean that it should be and that everyone should be doing it.
As long as they basically wipe the game with every patch im done with this treadmill. It needs a change of fundamentals to get me back.
They always try to sell us respecting our time, but at the end its all about online time and monetization. And "Early access has no longterm effect" - Bullshit!
The point about storyline being behind renown is a good one. I had no interest in grinding out renown throughout the expansion, so I missed a bunch of the story. Once I realised I was missing some of the story, I just stopped caring about anything after that point. The main story should really be self-contained and not require people to go do a bunch of unrelated filler to unlock.
from 2004 to 2010 I played nothing else but wow. I feel I had my fill and dont ever want to go back
Is it time to come home? I'm grateful for the memories from wow over the years, grateful to have found PG because of wow. Nothing from blizz in the last 4 years indicates a change of behavior or desire to respect player time. Dragonflight is a far cry from good, it beat shadowlands and BFA but still fell well behind MoP. So is it time to come home? No.
I feel sad for all the hype train passengers. But at the same time, you deserve to be disappointed in the end. If you fell for their "We're sorry, we will do better next time" BS after WoD and BFA and Shadowlands and you're now falling for it after Dragonflight, you're a fool. Enjoy huffing on the copium bag and forking out $100+ for 3 days early access.
It's time to come home? No thanks. Wow is like a prostitute. The older it gets the more makeup it cakes on to cover the scars.
The 3 expansion plan had me excited, but that momentum was quashed by drop in quality of story telling for the Guardians of the Dream. Fryakk was disposed of with little fanfare. A villain that has been one of the best parts of DF, and he doesn't even get cutscene death? Yet the Dragon Aspect getting their powers back went on way too long. Quote from another player, "I killed Fryrak and the to stand around serving tea while the Aspects are empowered. Doesn't seem fair, given the Champion has been doing all the work again.
This is how people felt about the last expansion and the expansion before....
Dragon flight was miles better then shadowlands. You take a similar level of improvement from dragon flight to war within and you have a great game
That is some impressive hubris to blame the old guard for the shortcomings of modern expansions, while at the same time cranking out Classic derivatives, never change Ian, you absolute lemon.
We all want to go home, Mike. Warcraft to me, will always be the greatest and most impactful game ever made but damn do they have a long ways to go improving the story and how it's paced and delivered
I feel as though people are getting caught up in the blizzcon hype. Let's not forget this is the same company that's thumbled every new system release in modern history. Let's just wait and see before coming back.
Vanilla gave 2 continents,60 levels
Burning crusade added an area only 10 levels obsoleted all previous work rinse and repeat all the way to current release
I'm inspired by how long you've carried this ancient silly torch. Almost 2 decades later and this is your hot topic. Of the many many criticisms I've seen, I never expected to be surprised again. Kudos to you dude!
wheres the full interview with Ion? please
I was burned with Shadowlands and quit WoW halfway through the expansion. With Metzen back, Account Wide focus, & Hero Talents has me thinking about coming back. WoW Classic+ is also interesting~
Isn't Hero Talents literally regular talent tree but just a more powerful version ? And it's just 10 points. So far I haven't see anything in this new expansion that made me say "Wow they must have spent a lot of time developping this new system/mechanic".
@@Scyths1 10 points? Sorry, I haven't played since the talent tree rework.
its 1 point per level when you level up during TWW. so 10 points. the tree also has 10 nodes. some of which are choice nodes, allowing for differentiated builds where wanted. The DF talent trees (spec and class talent tree with 30+ points each) are of course staying. Essentially the hero talents are artifact weapons meet talent trees minus artifact power@@TsukadaHina
@@tiyangina3571 Ah, I see. Well that seems...mediocre. >
its not groundbreaking, but I think its a pretty elegant solution to the talent tree bloat problem that wow ran into in cata/MoP and thus lead them to abandon talent trees. By putting the 10 points into designated spots in their own little pocket dimension, tuning doesnt get exponentially more difficult. And it gives the opportunity to give us some class fantasies that many always wanted to be in the game, but never made it in. tbh, Im most exited about the visual changes that the hero talents will do to some specs/classes. a zoo of pets as BM, thunder and lightning as mountain thane, and whatever "Bringer of the apocalypse" will look like, but it sound pretty dope lol @@TsukadaHina
Is there a full version of the interview?
It's weird that it's now somehow normal that expansions have 4 new zones to begin with when in the past they'd all launch with 7+. Outland had 7 + 4 for the new races, WOTLK had 8-10 depending on how you count Wintergrasp/Crystalsong/Dalaran, Cata had the entire world revamp + 7 + 3 starting zones, MoP had 7, WoD had 6+ Ashran, etc.
And it's not like the new zones are particularly denser in detail either, WoD and MoP zones had way more treasures and secret stuff than newer ones.
well the difference is not that large. you have to consider that it is 4 zones on release. SL and DF got 2 zones added in the .1 and .2 patches. SL had 5 zones to start with so with the 2 additions (do we count 2nd half of maw?) it is also 7 in total. DF currently has 7 as well (4 standard, caverns, dream and Forbidden reach)
@@yasminmeier8437 ??? Yeah, no shit, if you add all the zones that weren't on release then it'll be more than what it was on release..? I didn't count any of the zones that got added to any of the expansions I mentioned post-release. (And WOTLK still had more on release than the last 2 expacs at their final stage lmao, and twice as many as at their release) And older expansions also utilised existing leveling zones by adding massive new content hubs to them later on which also doesn't really happen anymore, like Krasarang or Icecrown etc.
@@invictus7736 you're also forgetting that the Dragon Isles are bigger than Northrend, so while the number is smaller, you actually got more content in DF than Northrend, just from a zone perspective
I think they settled on that number due to changes in how the team operated and how easy or difficult it was to manage the content quality and pacing. Remember that the old expansions did not have Mythic + for example, that was added in Legion which was also when the zone formula changed. Team members had to be diverted from some areas to others so we essentially exchanged zones for other types of content
@@tobiasb1632 Having a larger, less dense landmass doesn't equal more content. Like a third of the Dragon Isles' size is made up of the empty mass of water west of the ohn'ahran plains and the forbidden reach neither of which served any gameplay purpose on release.
I mean sure, if they were making just as much content then the quantity of zones wouldn't matter, but none of the DF zones have significantly more than old zones, whether we're talking about quests or treasures or whatnot. In fact, looking at the loremaster chievs and storylines even the smaller Northrend zones like Storm Peaks had more quests than the DF zones which have bigger landmasses.. and there were 8 of the Northrend ones. Icecrown had like double the quests of the Waking Shore. And this comparison shouldn't even matter because WOTLK was 15 years ago... (DF should blow it out of the park, but evidently it doesn't.)
Pandaria had similar amounts of quests to Northrend zones but it also had a ton of cool treasures, rares, secrets etc. to find. NOT TO MENTION this was when they made separate questlines for the factions, whereas DF had the exact same for both, so DF was miles behind old expansions in terms of zones' content, and let's not even mention Shadowlands..
The biggest question is are they going to take another important page from ffxiv, and make each expansion payable like it's current content?
For someone like me, who will probably wait until the second expansion, maybe 3rd, to come back and play the story, will we be able to like someone starting ffxiv fresh today can play all of the 3 expansions worth of content as close to if it was current as possible?
End of the video reaction: Same. I would LOVE to come home. I left in the first tier of WoD, I've been gone a long time. But I started at the very end of OG/start of BC. I have fond memories of the game and a whole host of characters I'd like to play again. But they have to show me there's something worth coming back for.
There have been absolutely nothing announced that would make me go back again, good luck to those who do though.
👏 😂
This is all copium. Hype train that will fade 1 month after the release of the new expansion. I wish streamers/content creators valued themselves instead of being sheep. Some people on youtube/twitch actually influence people to play. People will buy and pay and the corporates at blizzard will again think "hey we don't need an actual MMO we can do this hype thing over and over and people will blindly do it again". They haver clearly no clue of what the players want. SOD is not what the community asked. We asked for balance. Not shortcuts and OP new abilities and specs. They are already ruining what made classic fun. Class identity. So much for classic +. I rather stick to my turtle =)
Tbh honest mate , your whole comment sounds like a big baby tantrum "WAAAH I DIDNT GET WHAT I WANTED WAAAH". You need to grow up and realize that you dont always get what you asked for and majority of people are actually excited for SOD. So, play it or dont play it , just dont be a big baby publicly ,its embarrassing.@@DaniDaDevil
Give me a chance to rephrase my answer then. "Blizzard" didn't show anything in that presentation. All we got was promises.Its always the same "we are going to do better" "get ready to be mind blown" "we copied features from other games(even pirated versions of our game)" "we listen to the community". Everybody gets on the hype train and it crashes and burns after 1 month when people realise that they were mislead by the 20x time. It is deserverd when the wow community is more gullible than a 3yo kid and have the memory of a 80 year old person. I am just suprised how dumb this community is. It will be fun to watch everybody cry and the best part is that I won't have to pay a cent.@@valvol1ne
@@DaniDaDevilI mean dragonflight has been both popular and well received.
Where can i watch the complete Ian Hazzikostas Interview?
Love your content. I for one and cautiously optimistic on a bunch of things. There certain things that get me excited and not necessarily the upcoming three expansions. Allowing us to dragon ride in the old zones and Dracthyr getting Dragon Riding system into their Soar kit gets me pretty excited.
A black stain on the industry. What a great way to convey the early access issue. Well done Mike! Sincerely hope that you and other influential persons in this space can pressure Blizzard into reversing that terrible decision
Are they really charging extra for the early access? I'm sure people will point out that FFXIV also does 3 days early access to content if you pre order. But as far as I am aware, it is just part of the regular preorder perks. It's what you would pay for the regular expansion anyways but you get a bonus for giving them that amount early.
@@cynicalmanatee They are not charging more for it per se but only including it in the most expensive package. The package is the same price it was last expansion, but with it only being in the most expensive one, people are arguing that it is trying to drive people to buy that one. Honestly, I want the company to make money so they can stay open and make more content.
It's crazy how happy and stress-free Ion looks since his appearance on the retail deep dive panel, I guess we'll never know how much was just beign stubborn and ''knowing better'' and how much was keeping his overlords happy but what I know is that his panel was a HUGE win for WoW's future and that's not even taking Metzen into account...
I took a look at the rate my country's currency fared against the EURO & US Dollar and decided, nah. I won't be coming 'home'.
Saying "come home" and slapping a $90 price tag on an """early access"" edition...man can this company just put aside it's boundless greed for a SECOND? Even if they pull out Metzen, the biggest hype guy they can get, they just don't realize that WoW is no longer "home" for a lot of people PRECISELY because of shit like this.
Also I have absolutely 0 faith in the story until they can actually put out something. The same writers who disenchanted Arthas and created the Jailer are still working there, why would things suddenly completely change?
Shadowlands literally killed the entire warcraft story
Yeah, it's like coming home to the area you once lived only to find out it's been completely gentrified, fenced in and with bodyguards in shades standing at the toll booth. And then inside it's actually the same neighbourhood it always was, they just wanted to feel fancy and get some cash flow going.
Ffxiv not only has early access, but you have to pay for many good emotes (and bank space) in their store.
I'm not even defending WoW here, but the hypocrisy of some people who get mad at Blizzard about doing what everyone in the industry does (or who doesn't do nearly as bad as others), yet let's everyone else slide is pretty strange.
It's all or nothing. You either are against all AAA studios doing this stuff or not, it can't be one rule for Blizzard and one rule for Square.
@@andrewshandle FFXIV early access is for every single person that preorders the game for no additional cost, and the purchase counts as a preorder up until the official release. Literally everyone gets it for free, it's not even in the same universe as what Blizzard are pulling.
There is no hypocrisy here. You can do an ethical cash shop that is non-intrusive to the actual game experience and fully optional and in no way present in the game (you really don't need more than two retainers for normal play, and if you do, just make a bank FC like you'd do in any other MMO) - or you can do a subscription, in-game cash shop that is permanent in the UI at all times and moving to the top in the new Warbands UI, selling gold directly to your players along with battlepass cosmetics points... These aren't different rules. These companies do things entirely differently.
And I want to be clear - this isn't about Square. Square as a company is fully okay with nickel and diming. This is about CBU3 who make a stand on how hard the game is monetized, what gets put in and what isn't. Blizzard used to have that too, but over the years it turned into an overmonetized hell of a game.
@@thesunthrone "You can do an ethical cash shop that is non-intrusive to the actual game experience and fully optional and in no way present in the game "
FFXIV sells bank slots and emotes. You are tying yourself in a lot of knots to justify it because we all knew if Blizzard did the same you'd be losing your mind.
Like I said, it's all or nothing. You don't get to pick and choose your outrage and maintain credibility.
It is convenient that all these promises come out with the 3 day "early access". This seems like marketing BS to just get you to buy in.
The shortsighted nature of Mike's comment about "salty players who think they deserve" is honestly staggering.
Look, I understand that Mike personally doesn't care about gear, but surely he must be able to understand that most people do, and in fact, the very reason the raiding scene used to be as popular as it was back in the day and the reason why so many people engaged in it was because of gear. If you wanted the best gear in the game, you had to be a raider. Mike has long been a champion of getting people into raiding, convincing them to try the content out, teaching them how to play, making them understand that they can overcome these challenges. That's all fine, but it comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of what people's reluctance is. It's not because people think they can't deal with these challenges (I mean, some can't, granted). I'm sure most people are aware that, if push came to shove, they would be able to put the work in and get on the level of a Mythic raider, even if not Cutting Edge. That's not the problem. The problem is that the effort required to do that isn't worth it.
If you want to get people into raiding, then you need to examine why people raid in the first place, and people's reasons for raiding can largely be divided into 3 pillars:
1.) The challenge. People enjoy the challenge and the exhilaration of overcoming it.
2.) The gear. People like the idea of wearing the shiniest and coolest gear in the game and AFKing in front of their capital's auction house to be envied and admired by passing casuals. Whether you think this motivation is vain or not is immaterial. The point is that it is a significant motivator that cannot be dismissed out of hand.
3.) The prestige. People enjoy the prestige of being a raider, of being part of an elite class of players who are saving the world. Let's face it, the main demographic of MMORPGs are not the Chads who are popular in school. Ain't many prom kings and queens farming Azerite Power. As such, the people who play MMORPGs are generally individuals who have trouble adjusting to their real-life social environment, and want to escape that status quo in a fantasy world. In this fantasy world, they want what they can't get in real life - status, fame, prestige. That's literally the central underpinning of any RPG, fulfilling one's fantasy of being the Hero of the story. Sure, there are many pieces of content that people can enjoy in World of Warcraft, and someone can have fun all day pet battling, but the guy who spends all live long day pet battling, transmogging, or playing the auction house did not save the world. You did. You saved Outland from Illidan, or Azeroth from the Lich King, Deathwing, the Thunder King, and any number of other threats.
These are the 3 pillars that motivate people to raid. Not all people will relate to these to the same degree, some will relate only to one, Mike for instance, who only cares about the challenge, but the fact of the matter is that these 3 reasons, in various combinations and to various degrees, cover the 99.99% of raiders. And the unfortunate reality is that at this point in time, the challenge remains the only element that is still unique to raiding.
Gear? You want the best gear in the game? Cool, you have 2 options. You either commit to a guild and a raid schedule, put in a tremendous amount of work to fit into a social group, to learn your class, optimize your character, optimize your rotation, invest time in becoming the best player you can be and then continually invest time and effort into maintaining that level of skill so as to raid Mythic and get your gear from Mythic bosses...
OR... you can just clear a dungeon each week (doesn't even have to be in time, just get to the end somehow) and get a Mythic iLvL piece of loot every single week. There is NO comparison between a M+ 15 and a Mythic raid boss in terms of difficulty and the extracurricular effort that goes into organizing a Mythic raid run versus a M+ run. My main in Legion ended up at 976 iLvL. Antorus Mythic dropped 960 gear. I never stepped foot in Antorus Mythic. That should simply not be possible.
Prestige? The same thing goes for that. In his podcast with Zepla, Mike said to raiders who complain about LFR that "That content is just not for you". Yes, but it drives away engagement from our content. Prestige is a 0 sum game. If everyone has prestige, no one does. An Aston Martin is a prestigious car not because it's a good car. It's a prestigious car because not everyone has one. Scarcity gives value. Think about the prestige someone had back in the day when they said they had killed Illidan, or the Lich King, or Yogg-Saron, or Ragnaros, or Kel'Thuzad, or C'Thun, or Kael'thas. Think about the prestige someone has right right now when they say they've killed the Jailer, or Deathwing, or Jaina, or G'huun, or Denathrius, or Sylvanas, or N'Zoth, or Azshara. Literally anyone can do it by just pressing a button and entering a queue. Mike himself did an experiment in Mists where he took a fresh rogue (if memory serves) character and managed to kill Lei Shen on LFR without ever typing in chat or pressing a single ability. That's possible in the game right now, in an MMORPG, it is completely possible to kill the final supervillain of the story without ever talking to any of your fellow MMO players and without using any of your RPG abilities. You cannot possibly make the case that that is an acceptable state of affairs.
So, is it any wonder that people stop raiding? I mean, why would they bother with it? If they can get easily get to see all the content and experience defeating the ultimate supervillain in tourist mode and they can easily get the best gear in the game by just running some dungeons, why ever bother with something as challenging as Mythic raiding?
Like I said, the challenge is the only thing that raiding has got going for itself anymore, and yes, I understand that that's enough for a lot of people, but you must also understand that for the overwhelming majority of players, that's not enough.
It's like saying that you only work out for the health benefits. You don't care about aesthetics. You don't care if working out makes you look better or not. Ok, sure, good for you, gold star, but surely you must understand that the overwhelming majority of gym goers work out for appearance-based reasons. If it were the case that starting tomorrow, working out no longer made you look better, or if you could easily achieve an aesthetic physique some other way with no side-effects (even without the health benefits), literally 90% of gyms worldwide would go out of business overnight and it would come as no surprise whatsoever.
Where can I find the whole interview with Ion? Can’t find it anywhere
I really hope they stick the story also. They really need some kind of in game story catch up mechanic like a scenario you can pick a certain expansion and play thru that gives you a condensed version of the story beats from it. A lore compendium in game would be nice as well for those that want to skip a readable version. I've had friends start playing that hadn't before or took a long break and were lost at points in the story.
Awesome Video, really informative! Did i miss the full interview or has that not been released?
Not a wow player myself but hope Blizzard and wow community gets a W here. It's cool seeing the buzz and excitement after that trailer drop
Honestly, hearing a man i have watched since dragon souls also have his passion for ”home” reignited put a tiny tear in my eye!
without watching the video, all I can say is if you refer to it as "home", then you were always destined to come back.
Unless your parents were abusive and you were bullied at school :)
@@SimplyConeh which is why I'm careful about what I call home
*If* I were to come back it wouldn't be to preorder The War Within.
The best I could say at this point is I'll wait and see.
I really enjoyed how this video turned out. It felt particularly well organized and edited, which is funny given the turnaround time on it 😅. Well done!
I played WoW from release to the first patch of Shadowlands, off and on. I have to say, I have no idea what would make me want to play WoW again. And it has nothing to do with whether or not I trust Blizzard to deliver on their "promises". As a fan of the lore, I was really bothered by how much of the story turned out. The Jailer and the idea of the unreliable narrator really bothers me. And when I think about playing again, I think about having to deal with addons and toxic groups and ptr testing/not playing blind (the expectation is there in normal content, I'm sorry, it is), and I really just don't want to bother.
So I don't think WoW is home for me anymore, and that's totally fine. I hope you and my friends who still play enjoy the changes and have fun.
All that said, really looking forward to the RWF!
whats rwf
if going home early costs extra that's not home anymore. for me at least.
I've been on and off with WoW since Cataclysm. I really stopped playing after base BfA, and still to this day haven't completed the Shadowlands storyline. I moved to FFXIV and found a home. It is where my guild is. It is where my friends are. It is where my community is. The announcements and forthcoming changes make me happy, but not enough to make WoW my main game again. That foothold isn't there, even if I will be buying and playing the new expansion. (I have played Dragonflight a bit, but nothing too deep.) WoW will be a nostalgia trip that I will be happy to go on. But that is honestly it. FFXIV is my base, and I am not really sure Ion, Chris and the gang at Blizzard can pull me back in like I was so long ago.
I've had the reverse. I played FFXI for many years before coming to WoW, but WoW always felt more like home to me. Inevitably every time I go to a different game - be it FFXIV or Guild Wars 2, where I've had tons of fun and made lasting memories - a part of me always longs to go back to Azeroth. But after a few months, I just get disappointed in the same old grinding systems and find myself just farming for transmog. Now that they're actually acknowledging open world players and making sure we have something to do at endgame, I am really excited. Wish I didn't have to wait a year!
I'm somewhat the opposite. I played wow and FFXIV both in parallel for a long time. Then during BFA and shadowlands I focused more on FFXIV but always wished I could just go back to wow. And now with wow doing so much good in dragonflight and it looks like they're doing so much more good with the war within onwards, and then FFXIV just being the same stuff except even less content than previous expansions, worse stories, worse class gameplay etc.. I'm probably leaving eorzea for a long time in favour of azeroth once more
Legion was the last expansion since WOTLK that genuinely hooked me.
I do not foresee them topping that - unless they’re ready to commit to a true finale.
there was a time you culd take blizards word for it … never again wow died a long time ago
I do not see it working. Players have been taught for almost twenty years not to care about the story. The few who read quest text are seen as nerds in a mmorpg... And entire addon was created to voice quests because no one reads.
Same video Preach made before DF and then he played it for a like a month and stopped
I think one really important thing they need to look into is get new players into the story that is no longer current or accessible in-game.
About 3-4 years ago in BFA my girlfriend at the time wanted to try WoW. I had played since launch so I was ready to offer any help or advice that I could.
She enjoyed the game but the major issue she had was that there was so much lore referencing to the time before the Cataclysm but she had no way to access this content.
For a new player leveling up it's just so wierd when you level through Northrend and everyone is talking about the Lich King being the big bad that we need to worry about. But once you go and level somewhere else then the Lich King is completely forgotten and not mentioned again.
"Who was Onyxia? What was the significant story behind her?", "Why is Illidan a boss in Black Temple? I thought he was a good guy?", "In this cinematic Garrosh is leader of the horde, but when I go to orgrimmar he is not there? Why is that?"
One interesting thing I heard from a new player was "I thought the Lich King was blue? But when he appears in Shadowlands he is glowing red?". This player had leveled in Northrend. Hit high enough level to leave the zone before even fighting Arthas and just never having that story done because the game told him to go somewhere else.
New players are not interested in going on TH-cam and watching a video to understand what is happening in this game they just bought. The lore from a new players eyes will just be a mess because it jumps around all the time.
Some type of lore recap would be great for new players. Having the Bronze Dragonflight tell you the story of what has happened since Vanilla and have you transported back to experience short versions of the fights and moments that were significant maybe?
And besides this I just want more solo things to do in the game. Grinding M+ is fun for a week and then it just gets old when you have done the same dungeons over and over again.
Raiding is fun but too much of a time commitment and the fights have too many mechanics. I think one of the biggest appeals of Classic is that it's not about the difficulty of the raid but rather the experience and the enjoyment of doing it.
I enjoyed Dragonflight but it was a short enjoyment as I had nothing to do except grinding M+ and bashing my head against mythic raids 3 days a week.
The future looks bright for WoW and I am ready to come home if Blizzard is actually going to come through and make the game into the home we all want and not a crack shack.
WoW stopped being my home long ago. The house has been torn down. Nostalgia has no place in my life (for anything) anymore.
Hopefully the game will be good for the people who still care though.
I'd really like to hear more about the what he says at 5:39 - what did they see in the Classic data that helped inform the change in mindset?
I got Dragonflight when it came out, played it for 2 days and just forgot about it entirely. I didn't even have a big "fuck this game" moment, I just lost interest. I used to at least be able to get a month or two out of a WoW expansion, which was fine for me, but I can't even get that anymore. I had my fun with the game but at this point, there's just so many other things I'd rather play.
Maybe they'll surprise me with the new expansion, but I doubt it.
I’m excited to watch your cata guides again!
I already have a home, its called Limsa Lominsa
For the first time what they're saying is genuinely in line with what I want.
Everything will come down to execution. If they deliver, I'll be there, if not, business as usual (in other games).
Putting all the Emerald Dream quests behind Renown when that was the plot of 10.2 is such a weird decision.
What? Emerald Dream quests are time gated, not renown gated.
@@McLean757 the Questline: Garden of Secrets requires Renown 19 with Valdrraken. It's the stuff that takes place _before_ Fire Season. It's quite an extensive quest line that about 90% of the player base never saw. It also contains a crap ton of important lore, like where certain incredibly important characters are and why.
@@andrewshandlei mean, youve had like a year to work on valdrakken accord rep, i dont think its an issue
@@mynameiscal3478 that's not how people play the game though, they play seasonally, then leave the game for a few months, so most players didn't even know the quests were there.
More importantly, if 10.2 is all about the Dream, WTF are they hiding all the quests behind a rep grind? You _want_ people to be interested in it. I had to explain the entire story to a few guild mates this week because they had no clue the new tree was in the Dream.
It's just bad business to hide story behind rep. The idea that the players should have just grinded out all the rep to see it is so backwards. Those quests are the Trailer for the entire patch, you want players to see it.
It is so evident that Preach has WoW in his heart. I hope that the new trilogy does just that and brings you home.
Love your WoW interviews man. I hope you keep making videos like this.
I tried to come home. But after ffxiv and classic wow, retail is just too fast paced, both in its combat, and in its GOGOGO approach to content. I cant do it, i cant play when it feels like an esport i cant keep up with.
I feel like thats just in your head dude. You dont have to be on the cutting edge of the game just play at your own pace and have fun.
@@kye4216 I know I dont have to be at the cutting edge. But even in normal dungeons, in classic its slow and methodical, in FFXIV it's medium-paced, your rotation is predictable and stable, gcd is managable, and when things are fast its clearly telegraphed. But even just in leveling dungeons in retail, everyones running at 3 times the pace im used to in the others, blasting into packs, before I even know what's happening things are dead and im running again, no one talks, i have no idea whats going on, half my action bar is flashing and the addon to help in dungeons is yelling several things at me, it's too much.
And if im struggling now, in leveling dungeons, theres no way i'll manage at actual endgame.
to clarify, I almost never die. I just dont have a clue what the heck is going on.
@@atinygoose6199 Well yes in low level dungeons people will just melt every pack and speed run the dungeon because its so easy.
But once you get to the harder stuff the enemies have a lot of health and it actually takes a while to kill them.
If you dont like all the noise just dont use those add-ons. All i play with are weakauras for my abilities and Plater.
Mike, you talked about the frustration of locking quests behind renown. I agree not fun! But Wow has always locked the huge climatic ending of an expansion behind a raid wall. Even if I do get involved in the over arching story of any expansion, I have to watch the end of the story on TH-cam. I don't raid (though years ago I did and loved it), Im just not sure why I have to do that again just to get to the end of my story. Other games have handled it much better in my opinion. Raids are still an important part of any expansion but shouldn't hold the key to the ending of the main story line. I don't want to get my cinamatic endings from TH-cam anymore nor should I be forced into raiding just to reach a satisfactory conclusion of the expansion. I haven't found anything that talks about a remedy for this, though I admit that info overload (so many great things) may have casued me to miss it. I AM going home with fingers crossed that I can finally be a **hero** all the way to the end of the story :)
Watching everyone instantly forget and get hyped about shit they are going to hate when it comes out is amusing. "OMG METZEN IS BACK!" from people who didn't even like him when he was current lol. People constantly whined about the stories he wrote and the direction he was going. Cata was crap, mop was hated until it wasn't, and WOD was a big ol fail. All were under Metzen.
Is that so? Or perhaps many people liked what Metzen brought to WoW storywise and you are just not one of them.
Just because people have a different opinion or preference doesn't make them hypocrites.
@@melissakampers Metzen has genuine passion and loves fiction, it's clear in his work. But he cannot write the game alone. Just read through Chronicle 2 and all the INCREDIBLE lore about Draenor... and notice how barely any of it was in the game, because they pulled the crank mid-development and cut budget to make Legion instead. Chris couldn't do anything about it then, how can he do anything about it now?
I distinctly remembering people trashing Cata, MoP, and WoD stories. Forums were nothing but rage posting about green jesus, Cata story reclining, WoD orc fatigue and time-wimey nostalgia exploitation, etc. They said MOP was boring kung fu panda world of dailycraft mists of grinderia.
People consistently hate stuff and then say it was great later after they forget what it was like. People also hated that PVP lead too. Then he left. Then he came back and people were like "finally, someone good!"@@melissakampers
Like you I hate the 3 day early access and will be buying just the base version of the expansion. Another thing that needs addressing is the fixation on pets and transmogs. They’ve gone completely ridiculous with it and as someone who doesn’t give a shit about this stuff I’m not very motivated to climb the renown tree among other things.
Good luck to anyone still playing or going back, I hope you all have a good time. I don't think I can bother again myself, after returning to Dragonflight solely for the sake of friends only to quit in under a week. The game just makes me feel bitter and irritable now. Improvements I notice just make me upset that Blizzard ignored the community for so many years before finally acting on sensible feedback. My deep love of the world and lore is poisoned by the dive in quality and character assassination of the past decade of expansions. My love of chasing upgrades from around the world, shattered by mandatory weekly chores for power and Vault RNG drip feeding me my best pieces, once every week or two. The community is filled with poisonous behavior that is accepted or celebrated, and I have no desire to tank dungeons only to be raged at on day two of a season by the bottom DPS in a +2 group for not knowing about some MDM skip strat he saw on a stream, or having someone quit the group three pulls in for not using this week's third-party optimized route in a low-mid key. I'm also damn tired of Blizzard offloading readability and usability onto addon developers.
I felt the old excitement watching this BlizzCon, but I know where it takes me. I feel like it is just healthier for me to get my competitive drive met in games that are purely designed for competition, and do my lore-hunting/gear chasing in an MMO with less baggage.
When will the rest of the Ion interview come out?
not interested to come "home"
as long m+ and itemisation works like it does it wont feel like a game to play with friends wit hall those crossrealms and anonym shitstuff