Don’t write Blizzard’s eulogy just yet, 12 million players is more than enough to prove a stable and booming subscriber base. But, alas, there’s a new voice slowly whispering its way up the ranks of weblogs and forums, asking wether the likely unfinished product that is Wrath of the Lich King will herald Blizzard’s slow decline.
Let’s be honest here, nothing lasts forever. And in the world of MMO, all it takes is … one bad expansion. Tom “Kalgan” Chilton, Blizzard’s lead designer knows all about that, considering his deep involvement as the lead designer of Age of Shadows, the expansion many consider the tipping point and reason for the decline and ultimately death of Ultima Online.
Sidenote: Wikipedia edits are fun to read.
Here is, what we know so far:
- Hunter talents won’t be finished. Instead of a working 41-pt talent, Blizzard will move Trap Management into this slot, knowing it’s not functioning. Koraa said as much.
- Riptide won’t be done by launch. Its functionality will be in, its visuals and sounds won’t.
- Druids are essentially underwhelmed by an Expansion which produced many exciting features and changes to classes, yet left them mostly untouched.
- The last point is especially important when measured against the great number of exciting and positive changes, Blizzard made to the Hunter class.
- Priests of both (the healing and DPSing, Country AND Western) persuasions are underwhelmed as well. Theorycrafters question some of the changes and ask for clarification. Which doesn’t garner much response.
- Other classes either feel extremely left out or changed to the point of either ecstatic anticipation or scared running.
Wrath’s new zones and lore are insane and very cool. What I’ve seen of instanced content doesn’t quite live up to the outside (yet!), but is a great change to the same-ol’-same-ol’ feeling we had in Zul’Aman and partially Sunwell.
Yet, considering the premise above - can Blizzard weather the fallout resulting from a great albeit unfinished expansion? Especially in the light of Warhammer: Online’s release this month?
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It’s going to be interesting to see what happens. As a warlock, I’m underwhelmed and confused about what my spec’s going to do once I get to 80, and I fear that all four of the options I’ve looked at are going to underwhelm. My wife is more upbeat about her priest: she’s deeply pleased they haven’t added a cooldown to CoH, and she likes the added challenge of mana management in 3.0.x, so, it’ll be interesting.
“We Shall See” as the kids say.
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