[DoctorEldritch]

Hello Legion Gamers!

A bit of news! After 7 years, Blizzard veteran Chris Metzen returns to WoW:



In his X/Twiter, Metzen wrote:

It’s been amazing working on Warcraft again. Like coming home. The stories we’re developing right now – how the world unfolds over the next few years… Well, I can’t wait for y’all to see where we’re headed.

SOON… :)

By "SOON" he must be hinting at BlizzCon that's going to happen at the start of November, so it really is only a month away.

Personally, as I am not really a WoW fan, I know this seems big news but have no deep understanding as to why and what were Metzen's previous achievements for the game. @Saka and @Liue, you're adept in WoW, maybe you can shed some light on what Metzer's return means for WoW?

[Saka]

@DoctorEldritch Activision Blizzard pulling Metzen out of the hat probably means that the ship lost its direction and the company is making desperate movements to fix the course. I recall reading that as the result of layoffs most of the people who created Dragonflight are not working there anymore. That would create a major problem with consistency of the plot. While Metzen has not worked on WoW for years, he was one of the original developers and surely has memory of some ideas that never made it live, but were originally discussed in the team.

Metzen talking on BlizzCon would be a good thing. He has always been passionate about his work, which has been lacking in the more resent presentations and announcements from Blizzard. We could use a change of pace from stuff like "don't you guys have phones?".

[DoctorEldritch]

@Saka So in fact the situation is not "he's back to make everything better" but rather "he's back to fix everything that's gone wrong"?

[Saka]

@DoctorEldritch That seems to be the speculation by veteran players, yes. BFA and Shadowlands were quite disappointing and while Dragonflight breathed some new energy into the game, it has gotten a bit dull already. There is not much to keep the player engagement after they clear raids and hit a plateau in dungeons.

[DoctorEldritch]

@Saka It is a constant challenge for MMOs to keep players engaged, and it may be interesting to see why (if that's so) the Guild Wars 2 update you mentioned earlier works better at that than Dragonflight for WoW.

But overall the whole situation is a bit off with Blizzard laying off a lot of people and hiring someone else afterwards. Reminds me of that scene from the Office Space movie:

[Saka]

@DoctorEldritch There is one key difference between those two MMOs, Guild Wars 2 realised the problem early on and even during the core game (pre-2015) they kept most of the content relevant. The progression is horizontal, but also older rewards from previously released zones remain useful. Right now one could spend the whole day running from one event to another despite many having rewards on daily lockout, because there are just so many of them.

World of Warcraft kept discarding older content all those years and I think only recently they started realising that perhaps they should do something about the existing zones as well.

[DoctorEldritch]

@Saka I wonder why WoW did it like that. Then again, the lack of proper long-term planning is the bane of the modern world, not just gamedevs.

[Saka]

@DoctorEldritch In 2004 a lot of games had non-repeatable content. It used to be a non-issue then. Some of the content was also originally replayed. For example in WoW the progression used to be only character-specific. You needed to start from scratch on a new character. There were no catch-up systems or very few. That made people actually clear raids other than the latest one with the best gear. For example, in vanilla World of Warcraft there were still plenty of Molten Core or Upper Blackrock Spire runs for more casual people even after Naxxramas was out (the final raid). Same in The Burning Crusade, the first expansion, Karazhan was the most run raid even though it had inferior rewards to the later instances.

Guild Wars 2 came out when some of the replayability problems started being visible in World of Warcraft. Oh, this is not a commonly known thing, but some of the developers actually worked on the Warcraft universe in the past. The founders of ArenaNet have all since left, but the last one to remain was Mike O'Brien. He president for a long time until 2019, and he was the developer who made the compression format .mpq that was used in WoW until some years back. So for a really long time. MPQ stands for MoPaQ, where 'Mo' stands for Mike O'Briens initials.

[DoctorEldritch]

@Saka When you say "used to be" does it mean that WoW tried to change from that formula since then? Because from what I could gather they seem to be still a bit behind the rest, and so Chris Metzen is coming to help with that, but there may be a need to change the fundamentals even? I guess we'll see what happens in the next few months...

[Saka]

@DoctorEldritch Nowadays some stuff is account bound and each patch there is some kind of catch up that grants gear of at least the entry level of previous patch's raid. I do agree that the gear treadmill formula is a bit archaic these days.

The veteran players have exactly this concern you are describing, there is a limit to how much Chris Metzen can do alone.