World of Warcraft's Next Expansion: Legion

Today at Gamescom in Germany, Blizzard unveiled the next expansion for World of Warcraft, called Legion. The expansion will raise the level cap to 110 and bring adventurers to a new continent: the Broken Isles. This will include several new zones and be the source of a new demonic invasion. The story will delve deeply into the game world's history and let players use customizable 'artifact' weapons. To fight the invasion, Blizzard is introducing a new class, Demon Hunter, who will start out at a high level and can perform tank- and damage-centric roles.

The PVP system will be getting revamped, and they're introducing Class-specific halls and followers. The expansion will contain the requisite new raids and world bosses, of course. Small dungeons will be getting increased focus in Legion. As with the previous expansion, players will be given a free level boost for one character to the current level cap in order to get started on the new content right away. Blizzard has posted an cinematic teaser, and the full announcement trailer on YouTube. A beta test will start sometime later this year, but no release date has been announced. MMO-Champion has a post full of details known about the expansion.

Comments

Good luck

[buk110]

Numbers are in swift decline from expansion to expansion with the typical "bounce" that temporarily occurs upon release. While I am only one person, I know many that have quit as of late and these are players from vanilla. This expansion will have to blow the doors off and be far better than Pandaria or it's bad times

Re:Good luck

[buk110]

I think one of the biggest problems has been the PvE vs. PvP issue. You have two groups of people, those that like to PvP and those that like to do raids. I know some overlap, but more often than not they didn't. Patches would be made to "balance" for one set and end up "nerfing" the other. The other issue is server migration. While yes, you can cross-realm raid find to raid with any random group of people; it's hard to make solid progression if you're not in a raid group. While this is well & good, some servers are a total ghost town and you must pay the troll toll to server hop. Ultimately, there are too many things they need to fix and I don't have to wait anymore. I played since Vanilla and I think I've finally had enough. There are way too many alternatives out there and the time crunch to raid in anything more than a semi-casual group is too cumbersome

Re:Good luck

[s.petry]

I have hated the Flintstones look of WOW graphics since just about day one. It still looks like the Flintstones today after years of expansions, patches, and "new" stuff.

Re:Good luck

[nhat11]

Final Fantasy 14 is a really good alternative. You're definitely getting your $15 bucks a month with monthly small updates and large content update every 3 months to the dot. They pump out content quick and the quality is there.

Re:Good luck

[buk110]

I think that depends on the individual person. For me, it was less time gaming in general and picking up different hobbies. Whether that be something like gardening, tinkering, sporting events, or a different game, that's entirely up to you. Leisure time is limited and should be used to the best of it's ability. As far as games go? I check out Steam for sales - Banished is my vice at the moment.

Re:Good luck

[Austerity Empowers]

This has been an issue since day 1 of vanilla, but has devolved into a playstyle that as a PvE person I really don't like, and reading posts, I don't think the PvPers really like either. I really don't think hardcore PvE and hardcore PvP can coexist because the fundamental gameplay mechanics that make PvE interesting do not exist in PvP, and vice versa. PvE is algorithmic, strategic and if done right, very complex. PvP on the other hand is highly dynamic and tactical. It's pretty much the difference between watching stunt men mock-fight in a movie versus watching UFC. Both require a lot of skill and a lot of training and superficially look similar, but when the rubber meets the road don't translate well.

There's all sorts of things they CAN do to make the game interesting again, but in my opinion a PvE only game and a PvP only game would end up being far better than their best effort. Unfortunately you're either WoW or you're cloning WoW, nobody has the cajones to do something new. I guess until WoW dies the true death.

Re:Good luck

[Travis Mansbridge]

The EQ1 servers are still up. WoW's will be up for at least a decade after it's relevant.

Re:Good luck

[gstoddart]

I tried an MMO game once .. not 100% sure of which one, I think there was supposed to be some space involved, but I never saw it ... since I'm not a wizard at FPS combat (which is a massive understatement) and I wanted to look around to see what the game was all about and what it had and explore the world and see stuff ... after 30 minutes of constantly getting killed, respawning in the same place, and getting killed again ... well, I disconnected and have never connected to an MMO in the first place.

I had heard there might be an interesting world to explore, some potential to do some interesting role-playing, and see neat an interesting things. In reality, I don't think I ever got past the first 50 feet or so of the starting point before getting killed. Repeatedly, pointlessly, from all angles.

That wasn't a fucking game. Not to me it wasn't.

That pretty much cemented for me that I will never play any form of online game ever again. The rest of the idiots basically preclude any new players from finding any enjoyment in it.

And since I wasn't interested in engaging in combat, but exploring the virtual world, there was literally no redeeming quality to the game for me.

Honestly, now if I want to game, I'll play some Skyrim and ignore the plot and major quests for the most part. If there's a massive open roamer where you can explore and not really do anything with the combat system, it might be cool.

But then I doubt anybody else would play it, because apparently killing off weaker characters is somehow entertaining to far too many people.

If MMO means getting constantly killed by every asshole who does that for fun, I don't want to have anything to do with it.

Re:Good luck

[argStyopa]

Is this the "bad times" where they:
- are one of the very few MMOs that sustain the subscription model, and
- even if their numbers fall by 50%, they're still comparable if not greater populations than every other MMO out there?

Seriously, if they fall to 2 million players (unlikely) that's STILL an income of $360 million/year.
Yes, they won't be able to afford a staff of thousands and big fancy digs, but mainly what that means is they'll have less 'gravy' to carry other feeble projects.

Re:Good luck

[Opportunist]

As someone who has played quite a bit of SWTOR, there's some good, some bad and some ugly.

The good:
Full voice acting (seriously, I'm not kidding, every insignificant idiot NPC got something to say. And I mean say).
Mass-Effect-esque Dialogue system (makes you really feel like you can, ya know, have some kind of impact, even if you cannot)
Every class is a pet class. Seriously, you run around with a "companion" no matter the class. I.e. no longer "leveling a tank sucks for it takes ages to kill anything". Whip out your DD buddy and you're golden. Leveling a healer? Whip out that DD guy and keep him alive. Leveling a DD? Shove your tank buddy ahead of you.
Low/no downtime during questing. No sitting down and regenerating. 2-3 seconds of out of battle and you're back to nominal.
A different, unique storyline for every class (4 mainclassses) per side. Some good (that agent story is just awesome), some bad (the jedi councilor story is a snorefest).
Rather short ways to walk (at least 'til you get a ride... at least if you're a subscriber. See "the ugly" below) with pretty good direction indicators telling you just where to go in case you don't want to find out for yourself.
Streamlined raids. It's a mixed blessing, but let's face it, who really liked the trash groups between bosses? They moved away from the extremes of the last raid batch (where you basically went from boss to boss with a token group of trashies in between), but trash packs of the current raids is still nothing that occupies you for more than 5 minutes between bosses).
Customizeable armor. The stats of your stuff (at least in high level) reside on "parts" that can be put into or taken out of your armor. I.e. you can buy something that you like the look of, then rip out the "stat parts" of your raid gear and stuff it into the clothing you like. Yes, that means you can raid sensibly in Leia's slave outfit...

The bad:
It's basically WoW in Space. Same setup, same stat-optimizing, same triad of tank/healer/dd. You might consider that a good thing if you're just looking for WoW in space and don't want to get into anything unfamiliar, but personally, I was a bit disappointed. And of course pretty much all "the bad" from WoW applies, like...
Usual tank shortage. With the usual moronic fix of "fast pass dungeons" for groups of DDs.
Melee vs range DD problem. I.e. as a melee, don't count on being useful in a raid (especially with the current raids where movement is king and slowing effects are the staple of boss features).
But it does have its unique crapshots, too...
Anemic group sizes. 4 people standard group, 8 people raid, 16 people "double size raid". Yes, that makes the tank shortage even worse, why do you ask?
No plugin support. Seriously, this is 2015 and there is NO support for any kind of scripting. Of course people found a way around this and managed to get some damage-meter going, but more despite EAs efforts. Not because of them.
Crafting bonus depends on the companions you have. So some classes are better at crafting certain items than others. So far that would be ok, if it wasn't for some things only being sensibly craftable on either Imperial or Republican side.
Answers you give in dialogues affect how much your companions like you. The more they like you, the more efficient they are in crafting and mission running (that's how you craft and harvest certain raw materials, companions do that, not you). In other words, your "freedom" to play your character is essentially limited by what your companions want to hear you say (making that Mass-Effect dialogue system a bit absurd).

The ugly:
Completely shot f2p model. Seriously, pay for a sub or just forget it altogether. The f2p is at best a lecture in frustration, at worst a reason to toss the game after a week. I don't even want to get into detail, just ... don't.
The item shop. So far at least there are no items that actually net you a "stat" advantage (nothing you could buy from the real-money shop offer

Re:Good luck

[Dins]

Unfortunately this is not true

Yep. You'd think it would, and original, unmodified vanilla WoW probably would run at like 1,000 fps on today's hardward. But they've added so much graphically with each expansion that it's similar in performance to a modern game. Maybe a little faster, but not much.

Re:Good luck

[RogueyWon]

The grinding out of expansions was part of what lost me. Having all progress essentially reset every time a new expansion came out took away a lot of the "persistent world" thing that MMOs are supposed to do. A faster expansion cycle will do nothing to solve that problem, unless they stop raising the level cap (which they won't).

WoW does seem to be in rapid decline now; there's even talk that its player numbers could cross-over with Final Fantasy XIV's at some point in the next 12 months, which would be the first time in a decade that WoW would not have been the largest subscription MMO in the world.

Personally, I dabbled with vanilla played hardcore from early TBC through to late Lich King and came back casual for late Cataclysm and early Pandaria. I was driven out of hardcore raiding partly by the time-commitment and partly by the constant fucking around with classes and specs by Blizzard, sometimes for multiplayer balance (which I didn't give a shit about) and sometimes for no discernible reason at all. It took any sense of player-agency out of the game. I was driven out of casual play by the massive, overwhelming grind of tedious daily quests that Pandaria used to gate off access to even its casual-oriented endgame content.

I never bought Warlords and, from what I've heard from my one acquaintance who still plays, I missed next to nothing.

WoW won't "die" any time soon. Chances are, Blizzard will still be able to keep it profitable at 500,000 players, if they scale back their investment in development. But if Blizzard want to achieve MMO dominance again, they need an entirely new product now. WoW may not be dying, but it is yesterday's news. Even if you want a straightforward, traditional MMO, Square-Enix are just more competent at delivering that these days.

Re:Good luck

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that WoW was taken over by the kids who wanted to brag about how powerful they are.

When I started playing WoW (shortly before the first expansion) every region was filled with players - including the level 1 regions. People were running about and enjoying uncovering the *content* in the game. Clearing a region and getting to the point that one could actually venture into that nearby region that looked interesting from the border took time - and that was OK because the enjoyment of the game came from taking the time to go explore all the content. Each region had a fairly unique "feel" to it and something that was new/different from what was seen before. Players would form up groups just to go see what some place looked like and the chat was wry commentary on the content that was being found. The virtual world was huge and not easily navigated, which forced one to actually go through the content and experience it (there were a few, fixed transportation sites for long distance travel, but that was it). I still have pleasant memories of finally finding the hidden path near IronForge that let one get up to the incomplete dwarven airfields. Completely pointless from a "make me powerful" perspective, but completely fun from the figure out how to go find that content perspective.

As the expansions came out, that experience was lost. It became more of a dash to see how quickly one could get to the end grinding game. The content was less and less appreciate and viewed more as a nuisance to get through in order to start grinding the same dungeons over and over again to collect enough tokens to buy the next piece of gear so that one could go into PvP battles and feel "powerful". The joy in exploring the content was lost and the game was dumbed down and streamlined to make it easier and faster to get to the end game (quests to go find an item were made trivial by having the item(s) glow in various ways, etc).

By the time that WotLK came out, the initial starting regions were ghost towns. The only level 1 players to be found were alts for existing players who were typically running through dungeons as fast as they could by having a friend escort them with a level XX character who would blow away everything letting the low level character level up quickly.

Now WoW has completely given up on new players and even having the existing players run through new content. One gets the expansion and *boom* your level is maxed out and you're playing the end game grind without having to go through all that pesky "content".

It is truly a shame. I really enjoyed the experience of having some *new* to go explore - finding new content - wondering what would be in the next area. It was the exploration of something bright and shiny and new (and the sharing of that with the other players who were of the same mind) that made the game fun. The end game grinding so that one can fight other players is just not that interesting - and as a PvP combat game, it leaves a lot to be desired (hence why Blizzard is *constantly* changing the class specs in order to "balance" the game - it cannot be balanced because the game was never a good PvP combat system). I miss the original days of happily exploring new content with my snowshoe rabbit. I wish there was a game that would strive to recreate that original experience again instead of trying to rehash the PvP combat aspect of the game.

Re:Good luck

[tnk1]

PvP was pointless after world PvP ceased to be a serious thing. Arenas were "meh" to me, because it rewarded short gladiatorial battles with specialized stats and skills over having to find your enemy, set up a scenario, and attack. Hunting and even being hunted (if you're not completely outclassed) is more fun in world PvP.

I even felt a bit of an achievement when I completed some PvE quests on a PvP server with good world PvP. Yeah, compared to the PvE servers we got everything done more slowly unless we went out as a guild in force to do things, but having to rely on a buddy can make the game more social and fun.

To each their own. I personally dislike raping AI mobs in a repetitive way, and the best way to get a feeling of a different game during the grind was always the ever present possibility of having to defend yourself. Or going hunting.

Of course world PvP stopped being something that people really truly did after the 1-60 vanilla, so I'd say that PvP did become PvE, only with slightly more annoyance afterward.

Re:Good luck

[Anonymous Coward]

I will tell you a secret. It has never been fun, but it has always been highly addictive to some people. You know you do boring stuff, but get rewarded at the end and endorphins are released in your brain and you want more. After a while you only remember the pleasant things from the game. That time you were really lucky to get a real rare item. That other time when you killed 3 better geared characters in a 1 vs 3 fight. The good feelings you got when you finally completed hard content.
 
The old content was always better, because you only remember the good things about it. But in reality it has always been boring, maybe even more, while trying to achieve your goals. It has always been a grind. Boring grinding, but simple and hypnotizing enough to keep on going, while being reward from time to time, filling your brain with the endorphins you were hunting for in reality (and not that particular drop).

Re:Good luck

[Anonymous Coward]

Try the Secret World.

It's a strange game. It can be played as pretty much online single-player game... until dungeons. In fact, it's designed around soloing, at least as far as the initial PvE is concerned.

Then you have huge raid instances and lairs, that pretty much require belonging to a "cabal" (guild/clan/whatnot).

There's also some real "SRS business" PvP but thankfully you can just skip it altogether.

Story, presentation, and characterization is awesome, though.

10/10, would let non-copyright-infringing Cthulhu eat my face again.

Work, work

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

Is there anyone still playing this grindfest?

Re:Work, work

[riis138]

I switched to Guild Wars 2 a few years back along with some friends from work. The game is better suited for us former vanilla players that are now working 60+ hours a week at an IT firm.

Re:Work, work

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

I really disliked the WoW update that changed the player models. It changed by cute doll-face night elf into a bad-looking bitch from hell.

I find the FF XIV universe much more relaxing. And, you know... you get pretty miqo'te girls to look at, too.

Re:Work, work

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

If you like Minecraft, try Starbound and Terraria.

Re:Leeeeroy!!!

[otomoton]

I C what U did there...

Re:Artifacts

[subanark]

They are absolutely nothing like what was described back in the original wow days.
Then: A unique item that only one person per server could have.
Now: A leveling mechanic that allows you unlock bonuses different orders, but everyone will max out at or around when they hit max level. Definatly by the the top tier raid content.

The balance will generally be ignored as it affects only a small part of the experience. Any tweaks to them will be class balancing, treating artifacts as core abilities.

5.6 million

[wxxy___]

Blizzard's most recent shareholders earnings call was 2 days ago, and it revealed that WoW is down to 5.6 million subscribers at the end of Q2 2015. It's the lowest reported number since vanilla, but I'd say its still pretty good for a decade old game, and far above other mmos

The missing M

[Texmaize]

There are many issues with WOW, but the greatest is the missing M. When i last logged into wow, I felt...lonely. No one talked to me. I really did not encounter anyone. There were people in Stormwind, but they could have all been NPCS for all I could tell. I no longer needed to group for quests. I did not need to ever talk to someone in an entire dungeon or raid. Wow no longer felt massive or multiplayer. This breaks my heart, and I will never forgive the people who did this.