World of Warcraft The War Within Behind the Scenes Look At World-Building and Story | MMORPG.com

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World of Warcraft The War Within Behind the Scenes Look At World-Building and Story | MMORPG.com

Associate Design Director Maria Hamilton, Associate Game Director Morgan Day, and Cinematic Narrative Director Terran Gregory sit down and chat about how World of Warcraft The War Within came to be what it is we see today. 

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emperorhades1

I will condense this. We bowed down to people who think all things should be kittens and butterflies. Alliance and horde have to get along because war bad, together good. We are going after yet another night elf villain and telling it from an alliance point of view, again. We will bring back nostalgia to try to attract our loyal original players that got fed up. But, we won't change the dungeon/raid formula. Or the 4 zone island expansion. We will do nothing exciting and hype the game like its d4.

Neoyoshi

emperorhades1 said:

I will condense this. We bowed down to people who think all things should be kittens and butterflies. Alliance and horde have to get along because war bad, together good. We are going after yet another night elf villain and telling it from an alliance point of view, again. We will bring back nostalgia to try to attract our loyal original players that got fed up. But, we won't change the dungeon/raid formula. Or the 4 zone island expansion. We will do nothing exciting and hype the game like its d4.

Changing the story and character dynamics involves next-to-zero risks; they care about making money, not taking actual risks to make their game better.

This IS still very much a Activision-led company even if Bobby is gone, the damage has been done and people just have to accept that this is the product they pay for now.

The only large billion-dollar company left on this planet that can afford to take risks and headbutt with their executives is Rockstar games.

Angrakhan

Eh, while I agree it sucks that WoW and frankly a lot of our staple IPs these days are stuck in copy/paste mode I will say I have a bit of empathy for the people making the decisions to not rock the boat. It's very easy and, I'll note, risk free to sit back in your comfy arm chair and call out Blizzard executives on the MMORPG forums for not taking risks. I mean what happens to you if they take your advice, take some big risk with the game, have it go completely sideways and tank WoW? Nothing. They, meanwhile, not only lose their job but their entire career as they are now known throughout to industry as the person that tanked WoW. The literal WoW killer. No one is hiring that person ever in the gaming industry. You, meanwhile, end up like that little meme going around of the puppet that side-eyes some disaster and moves on saying nothing.

So yeah in conclusion I'll just say I find it very interesting when people call out other people for not taking risks while simultaneously they themselves are not taking any risks.

Elidien_ga

I like to think of it as a 20 year old game, a 30 year old gaming franchise, has (an estimated) 7 million players leading up to its 10th expansion. (I am going with industry analysis from back in March - not debating numbers).

Regardless of views on the game, thats impressive.

renegeed

Can't fix what you've already ruined. They had this amazing chance with Shadowlands to bring in Arthas for some excellent story telling and they went above and beyond to blow it. The next expansion was essentially a trash tier modern Disney movie. This company can't tell a story anymore.