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WoW Burning Crusade Delayed until January 2007
Wowzer writes "Blizzard today announced that the release date for World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, the first expansion for World of Warcraft, is delayed until January 2007. From the article: 'By adding a few extra weeks to the development cycle beyond its original target date, Blizzard will be able to extend the closed beta test and further refine the new content that will ship with the game.' While disappointing now, what will this mean for the yearly WoW expansions long term? As Blizzard COO Paul Sams revealed plans in August that 'Starting with The Burning Crusade, every year thereafter we plan on bringing out a new expansion set.' 2008, 2009, ad infinitum?"
and as disappointing as this is I'm almost glad, this gives me a chance to actually get some good game play in and get my character leveled up and a chance to make the addiction worse..
So many choices, so little tolerance.
I guess teenage "Thrombo The Orcslayer" will need to sheath his "Daemon Warblade" and come down from his bedroom over Christmas and join mum, dad and Auntie Flo for a family game of Monopoly this year then.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
...sociologists predict many more marriages will now survive the Christmas season.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I knew it, Blizzard has no plans whatsoever to make games anymore. As long as WoW is played, Blizzard are not developers, they are simply maintainers. Don't take this the wrong way though, would you or I honestly continue to make new games if we're constantly making billions on one game?
disclaimer: I've been known to store numbers in my ass for which to dig out when quantities are required.
Sure, as long as the players will pay for it. ;-)
From an economic point of view, Blizzard would be crazy not to milk WOW for as much money as possible. And economic points of view are important to corporations
Of course (and half off topic), it would be smart to use some of that money and invest in something new, because at some point people will get tired of WOW.
C - the footgun of programming languages
I'm not addicted, I'm a level 51 dwarven priest.
Rock is dead. Long live scissors and paper!
Does this mean that millions of people will be able to attend the Christmas family dinner after all... ?
Sig? Who needs a freakin' sig!? Not me!
You must be new to the MMO business model. That's standard practice in the MMO business.
Your claim is sort of like saying that just because you paid for WindowsXP you should have free access to every new piece of software Microsoft releases, because by god, you already PAID for Windows.
If you don't want to pay for the expansion, you can keep playing WoW all you like without the expansion pack. If the subscription fee is an issue for you, you can always play an offline RPG. There's nothing untoward about a company charging for the thousands of hours of dev time and expense to offer (what sounds like) a significant expansion, though.
Rock is dead. Long live scissors and paper!
Thank you for moving the release of this product until after Christmas. By doing so you have enabled my long lost WoW addicted relatives to make a meaningful appearance during the holiday season. There are few things more frustrating than having 2 people ask at the dinner table if they can use your computer.
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
WoW players should feel lucky that the expansion pack was only pushed back until 2007 and not indefinitely like every starcraft project...
I don't understand how this is so 'new' to everyone. EverQuest has something like 11 expansions now for it; previous MMO games also had expansions. But apparently, when Blizzard does it, it's novel or something.
All of the EQ expansions cost 30 USD or so when they first came out; there have been roll-up packs for those who were behind the curve.
I quit after the 6th (when Gates of Discord came out; my machine couldn't handle it and I was tiring of the game.) I haven't looked back. I've since switched to Ubuntu, and it helps me resist the rare urge to go back.
I hate blog links. Here's the real deal: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topi cId=38244050&sid=1.
Question everything
On one hand they are foolhardy for doing this, on the other it is a brave decision to improve the game. Almost every shop around here is full of WoW stuff leading up to christmas - the 15 day trial packs are literally flying off shelves which shows they will have more than enough new players getting the game for christmas and joining in. However there would have been a huge upsell market for the Burning Crusade pack if it was released in time for Christmas, granted most people who play Warcraft will eventually pick it up but Christmas would have been a perfect time for Blizzard to cash in on both new gamers and existing players.
However, by choosing to delay it they have put the playability of the game over the profit they could make by throwing it out there and just continually patching it up to standard (cough, Gothic 3, EA, cough). I'm quite happy to see a game studio finally taking the time to make a game good before cashing in on it, instead of throwing out whatever they have done to make the sales that will occur anyway. I just have to wonder whether this will be the last delay we will see for Burning Crusade, or whether more lay in wait in development hell.
Business Voyeur
I think there's a popular hope out there that perhaps this delay is brought about by uncertainty on Blizzard's part regarding the new UI restriction. Do a Google search for "WoW UI nerf" and you'll find huge, endless threads in which about five sixths of people (and about 95% of healers) rail against new restrictions in the scripting system that will break numerous existing addons, requiring raiding healers to multiply their mouse mileage during raids by orders of magnitude. Now I'm a casual player (10 months and counting to 60...), so this doesn't affect me that severely, but I'm still playing a priest. While I was uncertain whether I'd ever get into raiding before...I think would clinch it.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
Sword of 1000 Truths. No doubt when South Park talked to Blizzard to get permission for the episode they worked together to get the content to coincide with upcoming items (or just simply created them because of the episode).
I misunderstood the title too! It's just that I thought some group of WoW widows were trying for some big bonfire of WoW CDs. That's kinda sad for a /. reader, instinctively taking "burning" literally.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
I'm a long time EQ player and I only have half the expansions. I got in on most of the betas (or a friend did) and if I didn't like where it was going, I didn't purchase it. Simple as that. If you don't have the balls to hang on to your $30 over a game you don't need then you have problems. Not getting a new expansion doesn't stop you from doing what you were already doing.
I felt a great disturbance in Azeroth, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror...and went RIGHT back to raiding again.
Expansions can make a game gone stale get great again. They can, though, also forever ruin a game never to be resurrected again. So Blizzard will definitly make certain that whatever this expansion brings won't cause too much of a ripple in the universe of WoW. After all, it still goes strong, so far the players aren't fleeing in large numbers, and the worst thing a very bad expansion can do is to make them do just that.
Game balance is the biggest issue an expansion has to solve before it may enter a game. Because one thing's certain: Once it's there, you can't make it leave again. An expansion is here, and it's here to stay. Mythic with DAoC was the only company that ever pulled a stunt and unplugged one of their expansions after a lot of complaints and many people leaving or in the process of leaving, and even they only did it by introducing new servers.
So the delay may very well be not a technical problem, be it stability or bug-freeness. My bet would be on balance. You can make or break balance very, very easily with an expansion that often not only introduces new items but also new classes. Classes are maybe the most difficult part of the balancing process in a game. New classes must first of all be that: new. You can't simply recycle some styles and gadgets from old classes and just give it new names, or people will complain. And that new spiffy thingamajigs you give them have to be in check and balanced, not only against the world but also against the other classes for PvP. They must not level faster than the old classes, they must not be stronger in solo fights (and neither must they be weaker), they must not even provide more "group value" than other classes, and of course they may not "replace" an existing class.
Now do that if you can.
Balancing is a very, very difficult task for expansion packs. And, honestly, if I played WoW, I'd rather give them 6 more months and have it done right than demanding it out now and having it break everything there is.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I played WOW obsessively for a year and change. No matter how far I got, there was always some new goal I was chasing (level 60, full tier 1 set, pvp rank, etc). At some point I realized that my time investment in the game was becoming greater and greater. This was just about the time my guild got big and started doing the 40-man raids, and getting in on that would've required me to nearly double my playing time. There was just no way, unless I was willing to just give up on my real life and dedicate myself completely to the game. I wasn't willing to do that. It was right about that time that I realized I had a girlfriend waiting for me in bed, and that with all the late nights I'd been spending on WOW, she'd actually started feeling lonely, abandoned, and betrayed. For once I snapped out of it and actually understood how she felt, and could sympathize with her. So I shut off the game, canceled my account, and went to bed. Things got a lot better between us after that. I hope I never again make the mistake of letting a stupid video game hurt a real-life relationship, especially one as important my relationship with her.
Unheard of!
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
How can something without an announced release date be delayed?
Isn't "player-controlled NPCs" an oxymoron?
My roommate has the BC beta and i've watched him play. Honestly, i'm surprised it's even in beta, i think it should still be in alpha status. Of the 5 or so hours of gameplay i've seen so far, i have witnessed:
/uninstall
1- Loot rolls being won, but the item doesn't go into your bag. The item was 'lost' since he couln't loot the body anymore.
2- Just clicking on a particular elite mob crashed wow to the desktop, twice.
3- There were several mobs that didn't have any animation assigned to them. they were just these floating statues and you couldn't tell who they were attacking or if they were even dead yet.
4- He has mostly tier 2.5 and 3 gear, and is a freakishly amazing pvper, yet he was easily killed by a rogue only 2 lvls higher. he used to be able to just laugh at rogues with his mail armor and shield, now it appears the lvls signify an overpowering leap in stats making it unfair.
5- I don't know about him, but if I had worked relentlessly, giving up my life to get the uber leet T3 armor, and then see GREEN everyday items drop in BC that are actually better the most sought after gear in the normal game......I'd get so bitter i would prolly logoff and uninstall right that second!
I have seen alot more than this, but all i can say is that the game is nowhere near ready for release. They need to realize that it affects over 6million of us now and most of us like it just the way it is. Also, we already have to deal with the dreaded 'patch day' every tuesday where our servers are offine, we can't play and then we get to read about how they changed the game yet again.
This is just my opinion of the game from what i have seen. I mean no harm to Blizz, and i'm sure that with $(6million X $15 / Month) they can afford to devolop the game into truly one for the recordbooks.
GG
Blue posts found here (WoW forums are dead right now):m
;)"
http://blue.cardplace.com/newcache/us/38233956.ht
They will be doing a 1.13 patch still. To quote Eyonix:
"Keep in mind, we do plan to push a content patch prior to release, which could occupy your holiday time quite well." Followed by, "Oh, you know, just a few small things such as a brand new honor system, as well as new talents and abilities along with dozens of other changes and improvements.
So they are releasing much of the changes available to level 60 people prior to the holiday season. It may even include some world event about the opening of the Dark Portal.
Its not what it is, its something else.
Well, aside from new uber loot (which there's an endless hunger for, btw), it's a fact that even the best, most elite, organized hard-core guilds in the game find the highest high-level content very challenging. For the rest of us with an average amount of free time to invest, even the moderately high-level stuff is damn near impossible to experience.
When the level cap raises, stuff like Molten Core and BWL drops in relative difficulty, so average players can finally get a shot at the stuff they could only dream about before. It's a win-win. The jaded hard-core get new challenges, and the rest of us get access to parts of the game that were unthinkable before.
M-
You catch enchiladas by picking them up behind the head and holding them underwater until they don't kick anymore -VeGas