Preach’s video contains much of how he feels about WoW and his personal opinions. This article summarizes the key points of what Ion discussed in his interview within the video.
- The focus on account-wide content like Warbands is Blizzard “letting go of old stubbornness”. They re-evaulated their priorities mid-Shadowlands after seeing feedback and how modern players played Classic.
- Blizzard wanted to add features like Warbands sooner, but needed expansion-level work to implement them.
- The philosophy and values the WoW dev team held were inherited from the people who trained them, and they had to learn to let go of it. They learned to evolve their philosophy from player feedback and their own experiences playing the game.
- The World Soul Saga is not “Shrinkflation”. The War Within and future expansions will have the standard 4 zones, 8 dungeons and a raid.
- The one and half year goal for expansions is due to the growing WoW development team. They are aiming to keep pace with the Dragonflight content release schedule.
- With the World Soul Saga, Blizzard is making a commitment to tell a story over multiple expansions, instead of previous self-contained stories in an expansion.
- This allows Blizzard to tell more interesting stories using foreshadowing and having the world reflect events in the story of other expansions.
They may just mean on release, not including the patches; hard to tell from how it’s written though
In the context of the video interview, there was nothing contextualizing what “shrinkflation” meant, so even with the video it was hard to tell to be honest.
But then, Ion had always answered things without answering them, most of the interview didn’t have that (in fact, this upcoming expansion has had the most answers proprerly answered in a long time)- but that question was answered much like the questions of previous expansions as words with 0 answers.
Comment by Alendar
on 2023-11-18T02:40:06-06:00
But, thats NOT the concern players are having in regards to Shrinkflation! Its the number of patches we get AFTER expansion launch- which is a part of what we pay for when we purchase a new expansion.
I’m not sure if they realize this, or do and are choosing to PR spin it and are acting stupid (they may genuinely just not know)
But the answer was really a no response about shrinkflation imo.
This exactly. Would be amazing if they could somehow clarify that we can expect up to X.2 each expansion MINIMUM, but I highly doubt they’ll stick to that specific of a plan for years in advance.
Comment by Cuphat
on 2023-11-18T02:53:56-06:00
The shrinkflation answer seemed straightforward to me: the answer is “no, we do not intend to have quicker, smaller expansions, but it’d be good if we could not have a huge gap of no content.” Just a basic answer that just because they announced the general synopsis of 3 expansions at once doesn’t mean that they are 3 small expansions to be churned through quickly.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that The War Within and future expansions will actually hit that target, and I really doubt that they’d say “yes, we are going to deliver less content” if that was their plan, but the answer was pretty clearly a “the goal is to give as much content as Dragonflight/recent expansions”.
Comment by AngryPom
on 2023-11-18T03:07:58-06:00
Blizzard Is Letting Go Of Old Stubborness vs 80% dragon riding speed in old world. Yea true, absolutely true, I believe in it.
Comment by Luck4
on 2023-11-18T03:08:07-06:00
I would rather pay double and wait three years for a soft-reboot expansion in Eastern Kingdoms/Kalimdor than small yearly expansions that’ll only add more bloat to the game.
Blizzard is missing the big picture. Classic has zero new content and has a large audience, while Retail, with all the resources, isn’t much further ahead. This should be taken as a warning signal, but as usual, Blizzard is too greedy and slow to see the big picture.
It’s baffling now that we see how Classic/Vanilla being good wasn’t just a fallacy, that Blizzard didn’t change Retail in any regard towards that direction. Instead, it only got worse gameplay-wise, and it’s even more baffling now seeing so many people vehemently against Cataclysm Classic.
Dragonflight proved that people don’t care about content release cadence if the gameplay is bad, nor that a good/grounded story was what we needed.
