Dev Interviews

[AdamSavage]

IGN had the opportunity to talk to some developers recently.

* Players were excited by interacting with heroes from the past in Legion.
* Garrisons were a good idea, but didn't live up to their full potential.
* By the time the team realized the problems with garrisons, they were halfway through the expansion and working on the next one.
* The team doesn't think about subscriber numbers on a regular basis, as it doesn't help to make the game any better.
* The team is aware of the Orc fatigue.
* Sylvanas is back and going to play a huge role in this expansion.
* Thrall will continue to evolve in Legion.
* Creating new characters in the lore that weren't in older Warcraft games is challenging, but the team is getting better at it. Garrosh is a good example of a new character that worked.
* Having a year between the last patch and new expansion doesn't work well, so the team is continuing to try and shorten the gap.

Developer Communication:
Several developers talked about the change in communication in reference to a blog post by another game developer today. Be sure to read the full post for context.

Blog Post Key Points (Non-Blizzard Blog):

* You never get a second chance at a first impression - A first impression is really important. We can’t just show you all of the nasty in-development stuff, because it’s not pretty.
* Timing is important - The marketing department is to get as many people as they can interested in the game at the time it is released, but the public can also get turned off if they get an information overload
* Game development is malleable, fan expectation is not.
* A lot of things get cut during development.
* Sometimes it’s for technical limitations, sometimes it’s for budget limitations, sometimes it’s for licensing, most of the time it’s for scope and schedule.
* The hard core fans especially will take what the developers say as a promise, and we simply can’t make promises during development because features get cut all the time.
* They’ll call us liars or won’t believe us because we SAID we’d do feature B and we didn’t, and so we can never be trusted and we are the worst developers EVER and the game is doomed and so on and so forth.
* People don’t really understand game development, but think they do
* It’s really really easy to be an armchair game developer.
* The general public is never going to have access to all of the information that the developers with which to make their decisions.
* Gamers really don’t understand game development any more than diners understand how a restaurant is actually run.
* Most gamers out there don't really care about the nitty-gritty of game development. They just want to know that the game they want is going to have the features that they want.

http://askagamedev.tumblr.com/post/1269 ... try-is-too

Source: http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/509 ... roes-Patch

[AdamSavage]

The hard core fans especially will take what the developers say as a promise, and we simply can’t make promises during development because features get cut all the time.

Fair enough I guess, but if it's simply a idea then don't share it to get our hopes up for nothing.

They’ll call us liars or won’t believe us because we SAID we’d do feature B and we didn’t, and so we can never be trusted and we are the worst developers EVER and the game is doomed and so on and so forth.

So going based on this, they are saying we have to take everything they say with a grain of salt ? That's pretty bad communication if you ask me.. Perhaps I'm seeing this wrong.. I'm open to another interpretation.

[Lisaara]

That's not bad communication. That's warning you ahead of time to hope for the best but prepare for the worst. That's excellent communication really because they don't want you to get your hopes really high, you know?

Anyways, as someone that knows some of the back-end stuff for developers....all that they said? It's true. 100%. And it sucks. x.x;

[Castile]

"It’s really really easy to be an armchair game developer"

^QFT. Its very easy to say things like "flying is so easy to implement" or "xclass could have this so easy" or "xraid could be sooo much better" when they really don't understand the magnitude of work and effort that goes into even the smallest of things. I think people have come to expect alot for their $15 a month and need to take a step back and realise that we can't have all the things all the time.

That said very excited to see what Legion has to offer