Blizzcon Reveals, Initial Thoughts

I bought my first ever virtual tickets this year and was unable to watch yesterday at all, and today doesn’t look good either.  At least I can still see them and catch up.

Battle For Azeroth Expansion    My first thought was “well that’s the most boring expansion idea ever.”  I never played Warcraft 3 or any of the previous Warcraft games, but it seems as if they may be trying to bring elements of the RTS games to WOW, which may be interesting if they pull it off. I’ll wait and see how it plays out.

Classic Servers!!!!  There’s the glorious reveal.  I never played a single moment of Vanilla WOW, so I don’t have any expectations that it has to be some particular variant, I’m just really excited to see what earlier incarnations were like.  I’ve never seen Thousand Needles when it wasn’t underwater.  I’d loved to see Auberdine restored.  It still makes me sad whenever I send a character through the area.

Auto-scaling everywhere.   I thought Auto-scaling would be a good thing, but in truth, I feel like I’m treading water and never getting anywhere in Legion.  I like getting new skills as I level.  Gawd, don’t let there be some Artifact Weapon equivalent so you don’t get to level up yourself (that’s how it feels) but your boring weapon gets all the goodies.

PVP Servers gone, except now they’re everywhere.  I put my characters on non-PVP servers so they don’t have to be vulnerable to some nitwit with bullying issues.  I hate as it is that you can be flagged PVP under certain conditions.  In my mind, the only pvp that should occur on a non-pvp server is in instanced battlegrounds, or instanced anything not part of the general world.  If this change removes the chance of being accidentally or otherwise flagged pvp, then fine.

Those are the biggies.  More after I get a chance to watch the panels.

Side note:  I actually liked Anduin Wrynn in one of the cinematics for the first time since Pandaria when he was a selfish, thoughtless boy endangering his own people as they tried to find and “save” him.  Mass rez!

Blizzcon: World of Warcraft Gets Back In the Game

I thought last year’s Blizzcon schedule really shorted World of Warcraft and showed they weren’t so interested in it anymore.  I think this followed a series of dev departures and promotion of Overwatch and e-sports in my mind.  You hate to think the people making a game you love are bored by it, and don’t want to give it any promotion or thought.

2016 BlizzCon via MMO Champion

When this year’s schedule was announced, it felt like WOW was back in the game.  Even though there are only two more panels, there are others that would be of interest to anyone– the Designcraft, Codecraft and Soundcraft panels–I’ve always loved that sort of “here’s how we built the game” information.  I like know how things look to developers, and how they think.

I wonder if there was some cross thinking (I’m sure I read at one point there was some competition between WOW and Overwatch devs) and the Brawls and Mythic Dungeon Tournaments weren’t inspired by finding a way for the PVE player to play more competitively.  I’m all in favor of that.  There must be many more ways to allow play in groups, and to make competition and cooperation more fun.

Although Legion isn’t a favorite expansion, Blizzard has kept the updates and content coming as they said they would.  That involvement lets an older game evolve and change as it should.