Blizzard has released a whopping eight expansions approximately every two years for its flagship MMO World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade (January 2007), Wrath of the Lich King (November 2008), Cataclysm (December 2010), Mists of Pandaria (September 2012), Warlords of Draenor (November 2014), Legion (August 2016), Battle for Azeroth (August 2018), and Shadowlands (November 2020).
The crown jewel of the franchise is considered to be the “Classic Trilogy”, that is, the base game, The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, which has been released in a new edition since August 2019. The final part, Wrath of the Lich King Classic, is still scheduled for release in 2022. The reason for the success, besides the unbeatably good presentation and the story with many iconic characters for the time, is mainly due to the classic MMO gameplay and the successively expanded talent trees with 31, 41 and finally 51 points for the top talents of the respective specialization. From level 1 to 80, the player experiences each of the three parts largely in its original version, which makes for an excellent overall impression. In addition, the Death Knight is the first new class, which still enjoys great popularity today.
WoW: Dragonflight: New alpha build brings adjustments to dragon riding
The quality of the following expansions varies from poor to very good. Mists of Pandaria and Legion were rated as good or even very good, while Warlords of Draenor, Battle for Azeroth, and – completely unexpectedly – Shadowlands were rated as rather poor or even bad. The reasons for the different reception of the stories and game concepts are manifold, but clearly the Activison-Blizzard merger at the zenith of WoW in 2008 hovers over everything. New projects, cost pressure, bureaucracy, too slow feedback on the wishes of the community or “brain drain” in favor of other franchises of the house take their toll. There also suddenly seems to be this “Us versus Them” and “Too Big to Fail” attitude among project leaders, which is no doubt rubbing off on the developers.
Why such a brilliantly launched expansion like Shadowlands, bursting with original ideas and gorgeous visuals, ultimately failed, highlights what is arguably the biggest design flaw in WoW: time-gating. The sheer amount of “time wasting” to extend the amount of time you have to spend in the game is a huge burden for many players. Waiting weeks on quests to get ahead is a bad feeling. Time-gating things like flying also feels bad – you have to wait up to a year for it after the expansion starts. Developers, meanwhile, seem obsessed with dragging the game out unnaturally by adding doors and walls, rather than designing a game where content consumption feels inherently slow (like in WoW Classic, for example). They’re afraid of players consuming the content they create too quickly, ignoring the fact that most people play casually and just don’t consume everything greedily. Do they care more about the “all-nighters” (the “whales”) here than the average casual gamer?
In an interview, the current WoW Game Dircetor Ion Hazzikostas vowed to mend his ways and promised that “Dragonflight heralds a new WoW era”. The first technical previews look promising, and the screenshots of the new zones create classic flashbacks. According to statistics, every time WoW doesn’t perform as expected, it’s apparently always “all hands on deck” at Blizzard so that the next expansion is guaranteed to be a success. So the signs are good that we will see one of the better expansions again with Dragonflight.
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