From Blackthorne to Warhammer and back

#0 - Dec. 23, 2008, 7:28 p.m.

“When it’s done”

As many years as I have been a faithful Blizzard customer, I’ve learned that quality comes with time, and you usually get what you pay for. I even bought Blackthorne, honest to God. Blizzard is a company worth fully endorsing, and I don’t see that ever changing, ever. They are well known for pushing back a title until it’s done.

But I have to question the timing of the Wrath of the Lich King release, not because of the obvious holiday season, but because of the proximity to the release of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. Since when does Blizzard give a damn about holiday’s? When this company releases product, any time of year, it sells and it will continue to sell for a very long time. I won’t buy that the holiday season was the reason Wrath launched when it did, their sales are nearly guaranteed and we are all fully aware.

I’ve never set foot in a Blizzard corporate meeting, or been privy to insider information outside of simple forum replies. Even still, I get a very strong feeling that at first, Warhammer appeared to be a potential threat, or even a solid competitor to World of Warcraft. I believe that Wotlk was not as close to “complete” (can never be complete or ready) as Blizzard developers wanted, but functional enough to get product on the shelves. Being an MMO, there is a lot of leeway given towards updates, improvements, additional content, balance issues and fixes.

This game will never be complete, never be “fully ready for launch”, classes never perfect, there is always room for improvement, always. Ghostcrawler has stated this many times over.

But, is the real reason we have so many threads on severe gameplay issues the end result of a product being played well before it was ready to ship? Can we blame the Warhammer launch for terrible warlock damage? Can we blame rushing Wrath to stores for the sub-par dps rogues are putting out? Did a competitor instigate hunters playing the expansion before they could finally compete in arena’s? Can I blame Warhammer?

And if I can, then can I blame Blizzard?

(I don’t merit or deserve a blue post more than anyone else, but I think myself and others would like to hear a blue point of view on how a competitor can affect the quality of the game we all enjoy so much.)

#5 - Dec. 23, 2008, 7:52 p.m.

We overhauled the classes for LK moreso than BC and introduced a new class for the first time.

Also remember that when BC launched, nobody knew what Arenas were or what they would do to PvP (or the microscope under which they place class balance).

I also think we have just been more open this time around. Certainly we didn't address the community with this degree of candor when BC launched.

You have to realize that Blizzard is it's own worst critic. From our point of view, we can always improve every aspect of the game. When we talk about bugs or things we still want to work on, that doesn't mean we shipped the game before we were ready. It means that we hold ourselves to a very high standard, honestly a lot higher than most of the players do. If there is something that annoys you about the game, it almost certainly drives us nuts.

WoW is a gigantic game with a huge player base. Please don't mistake our open discussion about things we would like to improve as our feeling that Lich King is in any way a failure. We are enormously proud of it and most players I speak to are having a blast. (Most of those players aren't the ones posting on forums.)