World of Warcraft has a problem. Next month, it'll have been a year since Blizzard's MMO received its most recent patch and yet still the game's fifth expansion doesn't have a release date. Admittedly, that's all set to be remedied tomorrow, but considering the developer has openly insisted it's working to shorten the gap between expansions rather than extend them, this is certainly a worrying trend, and one that's starting to see increasingly sizeable chunks of the playerbase up sticks and leave.
It's an issue game director Tom Chilton is putting a lot of thought towards solving, suggesting that the current state of affairs isn't as bad as it looks. Quite the opposite, in fact.
"During Mists of Pandaria we grew the size of the team pretty crazily, from about 150 people to 220," he explains. "That comes with growing pains, however, especially at that number, because it's very difficult to get people who come in creating the content at a level we're used to. So we have to train those guys and get them to speed, which also slows the people you have. So it ends up costing you speed but you need to do it to build that ability to move faster in future.
"Also, frankly, Warlords of Draenor just ended up being a bigger expansion than we expected it to be. Because we were trying to make sure we stay true to the dimensions and size of Outland, it means there's a huge amount of land area to create content for. These days we create content with a higher density for an area than we did in the past, so you're looking at a lot of content. Garrisons also ended up being a huge feature demanding more stuff than we originally thought we were going to do, to make it cool. All those things adding up, growing pains of a bigger team, expansion being bigger in scope than our expectations, means it's taken longer than we planned."
If Activision Blizzard's recent earnings call is anything to go by, however, it's starting to look like the MMO's playerbase is getting fed-up of waiting. 800,000 jumped ship in the last quarter alone, bringing subscriber numbers to below 7 million for the first time since September 2006, before any expansions had been released. Though Chilton claims never-released internal metrics show nothing unusual is going on, I get the feeling it's still a cause for concern.
"It's less that large numbers of people are leaving the game," he begins. "What we find is our churn rate doesn't change dramatically, even in these long stretches, but what does drop is the number of people coming in. So people trying out WoW for the first time goes down, as does the number of high level players returning as they know the expansion is the next big thing coming out, so why return to the game early when they could wait for the expansion? So when there's not so many returning players to offset the fact that, inevitably, people do leave the game."
Despite this claim, it's clear Warcraft's fortunes won't turn themselves around, especially with the launch of so many challengers for its throne, and one thing that's certainly not going to help is increasingly lengthy content droughts. Thankfully, it seems Chilton's assertions that thing's are all set to change are more than just empty promises. Development on expansion number six has already begun and, though he wouldn't offer a hint at what's in store for Azeroth's finest heroes, he did offer a sliver of insight into how the theme and plot of each expansion is selected.
"Warcraft is more about setting than it is about plot," he began, explaining why anyone put off by the decision to return to Draenor shouldn't let it bother them. "It's always been the setting of these older Warcraft games that have been something that seems like it's fun to explore, and it has a lot of appeal to both members of our team and the playerbase in general. Then it becomes about how we make it work. So we like to break things up: we just had an expansion that felt very light-hearted, so we wanted to go back to something that felt like heavier Warcraft-themes.
"In terms of stories, we have a lot of different, almost chapters, I guess? We have the ability to do them in different orders depending on how things feel going forward. We obviously very much know what we're doing for the next one, it's happening and there's zones in production for it, but then we have a number of different ideas for the expansions after that, the order in which they happen... that's TBD."
As our time together comes to a close, I opt to make one last ditch attempt at guessing where expansion number six may take us. While he still refuses to budge, Chilton does admit that it's not looking like the Emerald Dream content, long-rumoured and something I'm personally desperate for, will be arriving any time soon, though it's still very much something the team consider.
"We talk about it almost every expansion," he says. "It's in a weird place in that we feel it could make for really compelling content, but we have a hard time seeing it become an entire expansion on it's own. We'd have to give it a lot more depth than what it's currently conceived to be. For any expansion to be successful you need a mix of different environments, various storylines going on, and the Emerald Dream feels like it doesn't have quite enough to it to be an expansion on its own. So I could easily see it becoming a part of an expansion, if it fits in properly with what that expansion is about, or we have to take that concept and blow it out and do it on its own."
Blizzard clearly has no plans to give up the fight for dominance in the MMO space and, if my talk with Chilton and his detailed ambitions for the game's future proves anything, it's that while my Dream may be off, Blizzard's is most certainly rolling on
En resumen, Emerald Dream no tiene contenido suficiente como para ser una expansión, pero si una parte de una futura expansión.
Están trabajando en la sexta expansión desde ya, de lo cual deduzco que en la BlizzCon no van a decir nada, o tal vez si xD
Quieren reducir el tiempo entre expansión y expansión, es decir, que tienen que trabajar mas xDD
Después de una expansión algo happy quieren un contenido mas pesado y duro, ah y que lo hacen porque gusta explorar cosas antiguas, y que WoD va a ser grande de cojones, especialmente Outland, o eso dice.
Y lo mas reseñable, añadieron 70 personas mas al equipo, pero eso no aceleró las cosas, al menos al principio, tenían que enseñarles sus métodos y eso realentizó todavía mas el proceso.
El que no se lo lea porque no sabe inglés, lo corro a gorrazos que tenéis traductores robóticos en gugel.
