Comment by Someone1234

Cool and Good.

I mean, thats basically what OpenRA is. Or OpenMW. Or many other indie games where they build a modern engine for old assets.

I found it very unfun. You end up in dungeons with a subset of the abilities you're used to. It felt especially bad, when leveling, if I queued for a random dungeon and got into a lower level one shortly after acquiring a new ability.

I don't know much about FF. But a thing with WoW is that new release often brings a significant rework of many game mechanics; they might squish everyone's level; edit stats for millions of items; rework class talents and abilities, sometimes even bringing up the whole new approach to the talents.

So while just scaling down characters is technically not hard to do and there's tech in WoW for that, it's never the same as playing previous expansion. And players want genuine experience.

And preserving all the old mechanics for 12 of expansions would present a whole new class of challenges to a team. WoW is a huge game. They already plagued by lots of bugs.

WoW has been doing this for like a decade. A lot of the old expansion content gets level scaled for new players, many dungeon groups get scaled to the same level, some of their time travel events have scaled old dungeons up for current players, etc.

As a current (albeit casual) player of mainline WoW, I think its biggest problem is how hard it's locked itself into the idea of what an expansion should be. Every expansion has more or less followed the TBC playbook: higher level cap, new landmasses and instanced content, total gear reset.

Of course it's going to become impossible to keep everything relevant when they keep stacking the tower higher for decades.

There's no reason why an expansion couldn't expand on what's already there instead of throwing everything out. They could for example do an expansion that fleshes out current zones that could use more love and expands the game horizontally. That doesn't mean they have to abandon the TBC model, but even if they'd just gone with a repeating pattern of "horizontal-vertical" with expansion releases they'd have a lot less content to try to juggle.

> You clearly haven't played WoW in a decade, judging from this comment.

Funny you say that, my Alunira[0] mount took me almost 50 played hours to farm.

0.https://www.wowhead.com/item=223270/alunira

> You don't buy previous expansions after a new one launches - they roll into the base subscription. After Shadowlands released, buying BfA separately wasn't even an option.

They took so long to make that decision, at least they did right?

> “Keep every expansion fully relevant forever” sounds nice until you think through what that actually means for an MMO like WoW. You would either fragment the player base across twenty years of content or turn gearing and balance into a complete circus.[...]

That's your opinion and you are free to have them, but not your "own facts". GW2 do an horizontal progression that you do not need to farm gears between expansions or even major patches, if you play high-end content in WoW, you must know that with every new raid launch in the same expansion, players need to grind a lot to still be relevant.

You also already know, if you really play the retail currently, that how much "services" are offered for people to get like "AOTC" with gold because it's inhuman how much gear grinding to be able to do that achievement and collect it's rewards.

> Blizzard’s actual approach is much more sane: older content comes back in controlled ways. Timewalking reopens older expansion content with scaling and relevant rewards, and Mythic+ seasons already rotate older dungeons into the current endgame pool. Midnight's Season One, for example, features dungeons from Wrath of the Lich King, Warlords of Draenor, Legion, and Dragonflight.

Have you ever question yourself why are there so many private servers? As someone who plays them on and off an argument that always come is "I just want to play that expansion over and over again, and choose which one". And not play a "mix of retail and classic content in a timed gated window".

My "wow credentials" so you stop assuming wrongly: Mythic Raider (never really got Cutting Edge, what I did most was in BfA) and Mythic+ Dungeons (multiples KSM) ;)

  Blizzard’s actual approach is much more sane: older content comes back in controlled ways.

Agreed. This is one of the things Blizzard actually nailed.

Arrogant yes but don't forget greedy. Call of Duty is absolutely destroyed brand. Unplayable solely by ridiculous amount of battle passes and stupid fantasy skins.

They used that argument for years to avoid doing WoW Classic, and then it was wildly successful when they finally did. Seems to me like the inability to consider how they could work this into their ecosystem is yet another indicator of how far they've fallen since the golden era.

Their entire company owes its history to mods.

HL's engine GoldDrc was originally a mod for Quake. Team Fortress Classic was based on a quake mod. Counterstrike was a HL mod they bought out. Portal was a student game they bought. Dota 2 was based on a WC3 map. Left 4 Dead was a mod made by Turtle Rock while working on CS:CZ (so, yet again a mod, although a mod based on their own engine this time and build in house). Underlords was based on a Dota 2 mod.

Deadlock is original, but based on characters and lore from the game they made from the WC3 map.

Deadlock and L4D are arguably the only true original creations.

Valve knows their bread is buttered by outside creation using tools and platforms they can provide and then fold in if it catches their attention.

DOTA is an interesting reference here because it also was originally a modification of a Blizzard game. Maybe Valve should hire the TurtleWoW people to make a new MMO for them (maybe called TurtleWhoa"?)

I feel like every large public corporation inevitably turns into a rent seeking parasite. How do we build a system that has more calves and fewer blizzards? How do we incentivize that?

That article on Investopedia is from 2021, before the Microsoft acquisition. Activision-Blizzard is no longer a publicly-traded company and instead a subsidiary of Microsoft. Whatever Microsoft wants under this arrangement is what they'll get from now on.

People played Turtle because it was a superior experience to the paid official classic offering. It had properly balanced classes, tons of new, high-quality content, real support staff instead of bots with sub-5 minute wait time for service, policing bots properly instead of ignoring them. Blizzard could offer this quality of service but chooses not to.

That seems to conflict with the idea that Turtle's problem was that they charged money for services related to the game.

They will could have shut down the free service but brought the new gameplay to retail.

It can work. Old School RuneScape runs almost entirely on nostalgia, but the community voting system they have for introducing new content keeps the game alive and fresh, even after 20 years.

if the main product is nostalgia then it’s a derived work and you don’t get to claim moral superiority.

if they created genuinely novel mechanics that can stand on their own then they should do that.

Like you said, DOTA2 was a 1:1 mechanical clone but built from scratch without relying on Blizzard IP. League of Legends was a spiritual sequel with new IP.

Almost all fan projects that get shut down are 99% derived IP and 1% original. That will never fly. Nor should it.

No many hit games started as mods. League of Legends is the one that immediately jumps to mind, but I know there are many more coming from Quake and Doom mods etc.

Counter-Strike

Every MOBA that exists (DotA, LoL, HoN, etc)

Team Fortress

Killing Floor

PUBG

Natural Selection

Undoubtedly, many more that I can't recall off the top of my head.

Ever heard of Dota 2? PUBG? Team Fortress 2?

You don't need to make your own engine to make a hot game from a mod though?

Oh yeah, I remember when they abandoned it for years, third party servers revived it, Blizzard realized they can make money off it and shut the third party servers down.

Completely backwards. The server is where the real logic happens, with the client mostly just doing what it's told.

It's a lot of work to replicate and no, dice rolls and quests are not client-side.

Beyond the graphics, pretty much everything in your post is wrong.

Offline, the client knows movement, graphics, statics (the world mesh, excluding the location and functionality of npcs, doors, plants, etc.) and some localized text. Almost all the gameplay logic is server-side.

There are multiple private server implementations. Blizzard does not hunt them. They are on github, you can run it in your basement and play with bots and some friends. I don't know if that presents a copyright violation, but as a matter of fact, Blizzard doesn't care enough to even submit a DMCA to GitHub.

Funny fact that both Blizzard and GitHub nowadays owned by Microsoft, so in the end, Microsoft hosts private server code for its own game.

But if you're taking this code, host it on a powerful server for everyone to join, integrate shop to extract money from players, advertise it as a separate game. That's basically running a company which extracts money from Blizzard IP. That crossed the line.

I'm not the one to protect Blizzard, but in my opinion they're doing the right thing here. Turtle WoW attracts players who could be paying subscription to Blizzard and play WoW Classic.