I forgot how good of a speaker Jeff Kaplan was. Dude also understood aspirational content and what it was like to view the game as an average player. Really miss the guy
God.... just watching Jeff talk, making me sad man.... blizzard was so full of energy and love. all the inside jokes that we still understand today. Nothing will ever change that OG Blizzard
odd how the people in charge back then seem more competent than people taking decisions today, priorities were were still in the right order back then.
They were young & idealistic, big money hadn't gotten into the games industry yet, so the games were made by gamers for gamers, and because there was no money the people who got into the business were the most passionate people about making great games. When money began flowing in & gaming became a business, pay improved & being a game designer became a viable career path rather than a simple passion project, so the guys who were down to work all night were replaced with 9 to 5ers. Money increased and corporate structures began to form, HR & PR and the seemingly infinite number of managers, further driving out the truly passionate people. As we get further down the timeline the HR teams became more political & started only hiring people that they agreed with which led to what we have today, people hired for what they are rather than for what they can do. Blizzard also had a big issue when they moved to their new office a bit after WoW launched where before anyone could go talk to anyone else in the building, the lowliest QA guy could walk into Mark Kern (then game director of WoW)'s office, but in the new office they key carded everything so only the execs could enter the exec area, QA was stuck in the dungeon, only devs could enter the dev area, the politics between the teams began to really sour as they were isolated from one another (there are also rumors that if you wanted promotions you had to be in your team leader's guild & play with them otherwise you'd miss out on stuff, though I will stress these are rumors while the rest of it has been heard directly from the horses mouths of ppl like Mark Kern & Kevin Jordan as well as guys like Pirate Software.
It's mainly there's no passion for the game anymore, once big boy activision got involved the OG blizzard died, it was all about money then onwards, and most of the game suffered for it. It's a real shame tbh
jeff kaplan saving the date for onyxia's birth shows the level of care that him and some of those guys had for the game they were making and it showed through and through. literally treating their game like their baby creation. without that, blizzard is just a name
Yeah, these kind of things really shows the love and attention the devs had for their game. I've noticed this as well personally when working in gamedev at indie studios where many devs put in their own kind of easter eggs, small inside jokes, and take pictures of certain milestones. I miss seeing that kind of passion and openness from AAA developers.
all the people in chat be like "they said this and did the opposite." pretty sure there isnt a single person left from the team that did this vs the team at blizzard now...
Amazing video. It is funny how Blizzard's modern design strategy is completely opposite to what it was back in 2004. Also, I wish Asmon would watch this video because I am tired of him saying classic is easy and is catered for casuals. Classic in 2024 is easy, Vanilla in 2004 was HARD (no world buff meta, no optimized builds, a lot of trial and error to find boss strategies, etc...)
WOW was a game for casuals if you compare it to its predecesors, like EverQuest, but still carried quite a bit of challenge. It definitely wasn't "an easy game" in 2004. No MMORPG was, really, and that was what made it so fun. Enough challenge to not get boring but intuitive and easily accessible to the average MMO player.
Absolutely man. Vanilla in 2004-06 was hard. It's weird how no one really acknowledges this nowadays. There seems to be little respect for the challenge when Vanilla was current.
Because at the time, the game was not solved in 2004-2005 and there was no CZcams or guides telling you everything. The game was so much better back then also because it was new to everyone.
I think the biggest lesson we can learn from the last 3 expansions is that over complicating WoW doesn't raise the skill cap. Just knowledge cap. All of WoW's content is accessible in DF on one mode or another, and the only challenge to entry is understanding the complicated systems. I'd love it if Heroic or Mythic raids had additional encounters we couldn't access in LFR. They tried mythic only phases but thats not the same thing.
Wow, such a good video. What's amazing is how little chat was speaking during the middle and end part of the video. Everybody is just dialed in on the design philosophy, which, as everyone knows, was and still is just so compelling, 20 years later.
When you have a team of people who enjoy what they do so much and are excited enough to test a new thing at 11:30 at night on a Thursday, you know you are about to make something great.
1:07 "We don't have experience loss in wow" If I recall, Jeff was an avid raider in EverQuest, and if you died in game you dropped all your gear on your corpse, and you lost experience points, do that a few times, and you could lose a character level. So imagine a raid night, things are not going well, multiple wipes and people in the raid are now de leveling.
Jeff is one of the best talents Blizzard chased away. Great presenter, very friendly personality and a person who pushes back the corporate BS in favour of the players.
I will always remember when Nihilum cleared black temple for the first time. It was such an epic moment for the WoW community. Everyone had they're eyes on them.
My "2200 rating epic shoulders look cool" moment is looking at firedup clips doing crazy things on progress. In League it was seeing a challenger Samira slaughtering the enemy team like she was the incarnation of lore accurate Dante. We can't take back transmog and years of good looking sets devaluing current sets. But we can put more visible(!) skill expression into the game.
If i was able to down illidan and killjaeden back in BC, fudge im not sure i wouldve kept playing. I HAVE BEEN TO THE MOUNTAINTOP (when i beat every version of spyro ever except 1 smdh) and i remember running around, full BIS, i played in the end zone for some time then spyro was forever gone.....I LOVED how absolutely challenging it was and how much respect there was for the guilds who were tackling those raids weekly.
I can tell you another thing that kept me playing as a pvp-er. The fact that i was beating other players who had epics, me being in blue gear, really gave me a sense equality or supperiority. Suddenly i wasn't the noob in stormwind drooling over some guy showing off his epics, I knew i was the underdog in blue gear who could take another pve-er in epics. As a pvper, in hindsight, I think that the separation of pvp and pve was a mistake, because wow vanilla gave you 2 options for growing as a player. Option nr 1 is through pve and farm. Option nr 2 was through increasing your own skill level. There shouldn't have been any pvp vendors. Because boy, the satisfaction of killing a fully geared player, me being in blue gear, can't come close to anything else.
I went like 6 bosses deep in Black temple but it was still one of my best times for raiding and I do not regret at all not killing the bosses. This time of raiding was so much more meaningful. Same thing with Hyjal never got archimonde down but the prog and the fun getting to him and trying him was so epic.
Because at the time, the game was not solved in 2004-2005 and there was no CZcams or guides telling you everything. The game was so much better back then also because it was new to everyone.
Old school sylvanas EU. Kungen in full raid gear. Stood infront of the AH. he always had a crowd. And thats what it was about. Look at me in my shiny's
i bought the game on tbc launch, i cleared black temple and didnt clear sunwell until prepatch witch i dont count, then in wotlk i cleared everything and i quit wow nearing the end of that x-pack. i just now recently picked up wow again and ill say it is fun for a noob who just mostly wants to solo casual play it is not the same game anymore.
Nowadays the devs are "helping" the players by implementing exp boost, nerfing raids (ST), giving players all the abilities they want and removing every other obstacle players might have because of QoL. No wonder people are quitting SoD
To be fair raid nerfs have been a thing since TBC. My guild back then pushed to clear SSC and TK pre-nerf. Boosting was also introduced with catch up content like dailies. Although it was baked into the game and a lot more subtle.
can we stop crying about ST nerfs lol, that isnt about it being aspirational content it was numerically oopsied into oblivion. Jeff even says in this video "we try not to turn the difficulty too high because it causes mass frustration". They want you to feel engaged and somewhat challenged, and primarily used time, RNG and collective problem solving (before youtube/google made it effortless to find optimal strategies) to make a long lasting lategame, not super intense challenge. I agree SOD has gone the wrong way in a lot of ways with abilities, XP boost etc but it's living in a different context as a limited time seasonal/experimental server than Vanilla WoW which originally wasn't even planning to do an expansion model and be evergreen. The #1 reason people were quitting SOD is because we're 3 months deep into the phase, Cata classic just came out, DF season 4 & MOP remix just came out. No need to be a doomer about it And yea like kelpie says raid nerfs are nothing new, Blizzard has always had the mentality of nerfing bosses if they're too hard and leaving bosses as-is if they're too easy, even if a bug is the reason it's too easy
The thrill and awe of good players was so much more back in the day. I havent felt that since like wotlk idc about the crap where they just change the color and the elite heroic gear etc. Just has 0 impact vs what it used to. Titles are also meaningless now because so many you can go back and get. First time I saw somebody in t6 gear a gnome warlock chilling in shat blew my mind lol. Or just encountering someobdy in full blues my first time hitting 20 it was epic..
Heroic lichking was on another different level. My guild could not kill him on 0%, had to wait for the 5%. Even then one misstake was a wipe. And even, alot of guilds still couldnt clear him at 30%
One HUGE, ASTRONOMIC, METEORIC difference between these older gen game devs and modern game devs is the ability to admit fault and own up to mistakes. Not only that, but laugh about it and own it. This even falls on the players as well. There are no more Leroy Jenkins stories that we all had from our own guilds back in Vanilla WoW. Now it's not funny anymore. You wipe the raid and you're punished, it's a serious offense and accidents will not be tolerated. Booooooring.
The problem right now is the entire game is designed for the 1% and it is assumed by Blizzard that the rest just want to play pokemon or pilotwing or collect things.
Watching this makes me sad what they turned SOD into. They grifted us into sod by hinting at zones, previously not accessible areas, etc... when all we got was runes with mostly wrath/cata abilities and some re-worked dungeons turned into raids.
I remember seeing a warrior decked out in T2 and thinking OMG he must be the best player in the world. Now it's like...Oh all purples? From quests rite?.
I miss wow the time when they were developed by professionals such as Jeff kaplan "Tigole" =) wow classic 2005 was such a damn good game!! miss those days! New wow and blizzard/microsoft there no longer any professionals anymore! It's a lot of amateurs who don't know shit about how to design games! We see that with wow retial and SoD! damn how bad it is now!
@@GermanBoy00 not always agree! I hope blizzard/microsoft making new games! We have seen wow in 10 diffrents versions, and Diablo games! Time for introduce something new?? i hope New MMO soon, something we never played before! =)
I don't see what the solution to the "unbeaten content" problem is when the game is 20 years old, you can't just slow down leveling progression because then it gets boring. I think that's just a problem that wont be solved unless they release new raids
Say we slow the leveling down to an unnamed number maybe it’s 8months maybe it’s a year, maybe longer and we have 5 level increments. So you’re stuck at lvl 10 for a year. Does it get boring? No keep releasing level 10 raids and don’t drop the release date of the next 5 lvl part until a month before or alittle less. People want new content but they don’t want to be left behind. SoD failed on both bc Blizzard doesn’t invest enough in their team. Theres huge content droughts, no new bgs, no new raids, unbalanced shaman ruining pvp for one faction so the que is an hour or 10% win rate. And then they bowed to the twitch hypers and they left the dads behind. The people who play now are hoping it’s gonna be good cus it sucks. However there is a chance with phase 4 if they balance the PvP and PvE that for the small remaining players it will be a good experience. It’s just 40k our of 5million left rn LOL
We nerfed the unbeatable content in SoD after 24hrs (ST).... Modern gamers don't want unbeatable content and then complain. They don't realize that maybe that unattainable goal might of been closer to vanilla than people want to think.
@@codywatson9627 for classic that’s correct. People will pretend they want this incredibly “hard” content but every hard raid has been met with lower engagement(I.E. ulduar and ICC). Challenging is okay in that you need good coordination and have people actually using their brain and maybe you don’t clear the very first lockout, but there’s a balance point they should aim for.
@@simonramos5553 so keep releasing new raids and new levels, so you're basically describing an expansion which they have been doing for the last 20 years.
I didn't watch the video but the problem is that the gaming landscape is just completely different nowadays. Not only is there content bloat, the world isn't new anymore, the game has experienced players who have mostly been playing for 5, 10, 15+ years. You're not gonna be amazed by somebody's armor if they've been farming for 15 years. But also, the nature of gaming has changed. Player skill is 100x better than it was. In 2005, the game only really needed to cater to people who dedicated 2-4 hours a day, maybe 8 hours on weekends, and they were BAD and new to the game. Nowadays, there are players who play games for a living (streamers) 12+hrs per day, even tons of casuals work from home and can log in at 4pm-11pm or whatever it is. People speedrun this shit on launch day. Long story short, you simply cannot replicate the feeling of WoW vanilla in 2024, and we should stop trying to.
@@chc2650 Bro! It's the reason people often say "I wish I could watch this movie/series/listen to this song for the first time again." People want Neuralink to improve our experience, we want Neuralink to remove our experience 😂
I've seen this vide so many times, this is how it should be done. Unfortunately the way they designed then wouldn't work now. For many reasons, one major one is the general pacing of society as a whole and how people are used to their fast dopamine kicks and instant gratification systems every single medium have today. And that's just the baseline before we even go into any specifics about games.
@@ahetzel9054 Oh yes, the experience was better. I remember being in Ventrilo and you had someone always on Thottbot looking up information. You see that the passion was much more there back in the early 2000's. If you think Blizzard is making better games now, you are the problem lol
All the brilliant minds who built the worlds/stories/games of greatness from blizzard are gone sadly... And as fans we are left with the ashes of a once great empire.. burned to the ground by corp greed and shit brainless developers trampling over the legacy of the great minds before them... RIP blizzard. I miss you.. Please come back
Jeff saying that zinger about how they have to be corporate now is like game dev in a nutshell and in many ways is just America in a nutshell. Please explain to my why a pizza shop needs to emulate a corporation. It's just the most mind numbing crap how everything wants to emulate a corporation now, wtf for? These places that are corporate owned are STILL going out of business sooooo yeah, you're emulating them for no reason at this point.
10 man raids were killer, you got to know the people you were raiding with and its like a close group of mates. 25 is a bit too big because you dont have the same time to interact with everyone. On that subject too when you have a server that hosts 1000 players you have 100 groups of 10 players compared to 40 groups of 25, making the world seem bigger and more active.
While seeing someone with cool gear makes people want to play, I also think it is terrible to try and design a game to constantly need to be played too, it's why grinds like the AP grind was taken so negatively. That's why Retails seasonal gameplay is still going strong and we haven't gone back to just linear progression. Most players at this point just want to do their content, get their gear, then go play other games while waiting for the next patch, next expansion, next big thing. Most people nowadays do things too efficiently to have that same old feeling that we used to have. Especially classic wow, the raiding is too easy for most players at this point that have been playing wow for 10+ years.
deffo think 40 man raiding is still feels better even if its 15 players carrying the other 25. They should have deffo jumped between 10 man and 40 as an example if Kara was always planned and so was BT then Kara is 10 man, TK is 10 man, SSC 10 man then BT 40 man. Even if the content is easier that epic feeling of a huge crowd of players is unbeaten.
Nowadays, since times changed, a need to aspire to get that gear. Means "I need to swipe" to get that gear and buy gold/tokens to get that gear. When wow came out there was gold services but most were young people credit cards were not for everybody, you had game cards to get game time. Now the core player base is all older I am sure they get some new blood into the game but not enough. I just think the same values cannot be achieved with the quality of life that today's wow brings, and I realize there will be exceptions. There always is. Also more games are out now, those people that have that gear, don't hang out in Orgrimmar anymore, they log off to play another game, during wow's early days there was no other game, it was THE game.
Glad somebody in chat pointed it out but the whole "visual raid progression" for the sake of looking cool starts to fall apart when you have like 10 expansions up to that point. New players would not care because older gear would just be at the same level of flair and coolness in terms of appearances. This is such a minor argument against transmog that does more harm than good. This only works if the game never evolved in the last decade. It only works in Vanilla WoW because yeah, the endgame is finite. Bottom line, transmog is still a good thing, especially at this point.
Still waiting for the day they completely remove Heroic, Normal and Mythic raid mode. Either you slay the dragon, or you don't. Wow raid philosophy peaked in tbc, except for raid mechanics, which peaked whenever they were hard, but you still didn't need addons, just brains and focus in the moment.
Raids should be tuned for 20 man to win by a margin, but you can bring 30. You CAN run 21 and get more loot per player or less loot but easier with bigger numbers
Ive never seen a community so happy to have People Fired, and that they PAY BLIZZARD to Test the game for them. There was a postion called GAME testers, which were Paid for Their time, you dummys flip it around just so you can have something before other people. And then say it ruins the surprise.
cleared kharazan live, bt, sunwell platue, maghteridon, gruul, was the best time of my life TBH, was 14 and my whole guild was 30+ they kinda " raised me up" and it was just an enjoyable time.... so many memorys. got a screenshot from that time when BC released and we bugged onto SW walls , if u know u know :D.... and made a 50+ ppl screenshoot. sadly nobody playes anymore including me , stoped at cata, came back when MOP, BFA, Shadowlands etc game but yeah maybe the "mechanics improved " but not the nostialgia feeling where u had to connect because no Dungeonfinder etc. i could write an essay about that time ;
Okay then I don’t understand your point There are mythic raids in retails where the last boss is beaten by about 1% of the player base How it’s not fits into your concept of “unfinished” game? How can you do the same effect as in classic 2005 where there were no wowhead/datamining etc and without making raids extremely hard so only 3-4% of players will commit to even try to beat the “unbeaten” content?
All these unbeaten bosses still exists, less then 1% of players clear mythic difficulty and that's usually not until the last month after 50% nerfs to everything lol. People watch these clowns do "race to world first" (More like feed top players gear like its a PTR server) and think the contents easy when they can't even do it on normal lmao the problems are 1.) streamers 2) great vault 3) many others
I forgot how good of a speaker Jeff Kaplan was. Dude also understood aspirational content and what it was like to view the game as an average player.
Really miss the guy
God.... just watching Jeff talk, making me sad man.... blizzard was so full of energy and love. all the inside jokes that we still understand today. Nothing will ever change that OG Blizzard
odd how the people in charge back then seem more competent than people taking decisions today, priorities were were still in the right order back then.
Affirmative action
They were young & idealistic, big money hadn't gotten into the games industry yet, so the games were made by gamers for gamers, and because there was no money the people who got into the business were the most passionate people about making great games.
When money began flowing in & gaming became a business, pay improved & being a game designer became a viable career path rather than a simple passion project, so the guys who were down to work all night were replaced with 9 to 5ers. Money increased and corporate structures began to form, HR & PR and the seemingly infinite number of managers, further driving out the truly passionate people. As we get further down the timeline the HR teams became more political & started only hiring people that they agreed with which led to what we have today, people hired for what they are rather than for what they can do.
Blizzard also had a big issue when they moved to their new office a bit after WoW launched where before anyone could go talk to anyone else in the building, the lowliest QA guy could walk into Mark Kern (then game director of WoW)'s office, but in the new office they key carded everything so only the execs could enter the exec area, QA was stuck in the dungeon, only devs could enter the dev area, the politics between the teams began to really sour as they were isolated from one another (there are also rumors that if you wanted promotions you had to be in your team leader's guild & play with them otherwise you'd miss out on stuff, though I will stress these are rumors while the rest of it has been heard directly from the horses mouths of ppl like Mark Kern & Kevin Jordan as well as guys like Pirate Software.
Because most of them were hardcore MMO gamers! It was their world their passion
It's mainly there's no passion for the game anymore, once big boy activision got involved the OG blizzard died, it was all about money then onwards, and most of the game suffered for it. It's a real shame tbh
L
literally says "28 October 2005" on the panel hahahaha
Probably 2009 XD
Xaryu is LOCKED IN xD
Man is genuinely blind, he's like this in all his streams
jeff kaplan saving the date for onyxia's birth shows the level of care that him and some of those guys had for the game they were making and it showed through and through. literally treating their game like their baby creation. without that, blizzard is just a name
Yeah, these kind of things really shows the love and attention the devs had for their game. I've noticed this as well personally when working in gamedev at indie studios where many devs put in their own kind of easter eggs, small inside jokes, and take pictures of certain milestones. I miss seeing that kind of passion and openness from AAA developers.
First time I heard about WoW, was some kid in my computer class telling me about Onyxia, level 500 dragon boss and how epic fighting her was.
all the people in chat be like "they said this and did the opposite." pretty sure there isnt a single person left from the team that did this vs the team at blizzard now...
Amazing video. It is funny how Blizzard's modern design strategy is completely opposite to what it was back in 2004.
Also, I wish Asmon would watch this video because I am tired of him saying classic is easy and is catered for casuals. Classic in 2024 is easy, Vanilla in 2004 was HARD (no world buff meta, no optimized builds, a lot of trial and error to find boss strategies, etc...)
WOW was a game for casuals if you compare it to its predecesors, like EverQuest, but still carried quite a bit of challenge. It definitely wasn't "an easy game" in 2004. No MMORPG was, really, and that was what made it so fun. Enough challenge to not get boring but intuitive and easily accessible to the average MMO player.
He watched it on stream years ago.
Absolutely man. Vanilla in 2004-06 was hard. It's weird how no one really acknowledges this nowadays. There seems to be little respect for the challenge when Vanilla was current.
Because at the time, the game was not solved in 2004-2005 and there was no CZcams or guides telling you everything. The game was so much better back then also because it was new to everyone.
It felt hard because we the players were mostly trash
I think the biggest lesson we can learn from the last 3 expansions is that over complicating WoW doesn't raise the skill cap. Just knowledge cap. All of WoW's content is accessible in DF on one mode or another, and the only challenge to entry is understanding the complicated systems. I'd love it if Heroic or Mythic raids had additional encounters we couldn't access in LFR. They tried mythic only phases but thats not the same thing.
Wow, such a good video. What's amazing is how little chat was speaking during the middle and end part of the video. Everybody is just dialed in on the design philosophy, which, as everyone knows, was and still is just so compelling, 20 years later.
When you have a team of people who enjoy what they do so much and are excited enough to test a new thing at 11:30 at night on a Thursday, you know you are about to make something great.
We all miss Jeff Kaplan's passion at Blizzard
1:07 "We don't have experience loss in wow" If I recall, Jeff was an avid raider in EverQuest, and if you died in game you dropped all your gear on your corpse, and you lost experience points, do that a few times, and you could lose a character level. So imagine a raid night, things are not going well, multiple wipes and people in the raid are now de leveling.
Jeff is one of the best talents Blizzard chased away. Great presenter, very friendly personality and a person who pushes back the corporate BS in favour of the players.
I will always remember when Nihilum cleared black temple for the first time. It was such an epic moment for the WoW community. Everyone had they're eyes on them.
now a day we want EVERYONE doing the raid while eating pretizals
The moonbrook defias pillager lmfao 16:28 they were deadly
Jeff was wow dude.
My "2200 rating epic shoulders look cool" moment is looking at firedup clips doing crazy things on progress.
In League it was seeing a challenger Samira slaughtering the enemy team like she was the incarnation of lore accurate Dante.
We can't take back transmog and years of good looking sets devaluing current sets.
But we can put more visible(!) skill expression into the game.
If i was able to down illidan and killjaeden back in BC, fudge im not sure i wouldve kept playing. I HAVE BEEN TO THE MOUNTAINTOP (when i beat every version of spyro ever except 1 smdh) and i remember running around, full BIS, i played in the end zone for some time then spyro was forever gone.....I LOVED how absolutely challenging it was and how much respect there was for the guilds who were tackling those raids weekly.
The gear envy went out the window when they started doing transmog
I can tell you another thing that kept me playing as a pvp-er. The fact that i was beating other players who had epics, me being in blue gear, really gave me a sense equality or supperiority. Suddenly i wasn't the noob in stormwind drooling over some guy showing off his epics, I knew i was the underdog in blue gear who could take another pve-er in epics. As a pvper, in hindsight, I think that the separation of pvp and pve was a mistake, because wow vanilla gave you 2 options for growing as a player. Option nr 1 is through pve and farm. Option nr 2 was through increasing your own skill level. There shouldn't have been any pvp vendors. Because boy, the satisfaction of killing a fully geared player, me being in blue gear, can't come close to anything else.
Jeff was WoW and OW was Jeff. Times were great
good take from the streamer here. I was a vanilla naxx raider which who was impressed by some random 60 rogue I saw in auberdine when I started
I went like 6 bosses deep in Black temple but it was still one of my best times for raiding and I do not regret at all not killing the bosses. This time of raiding was so much more meaningful. Same thing with Hyjal never got archimonde down but the prog and the fun getting to him and trying him was so epic.
Amazing Tigole (Jeff) saying kick the bad players from the guild cause they are just stealing loot. Modern Blizzard would call that toxic.
Because at the time, the game was not solved in 2004-2005 and there was no CZcams or guides telling you everything. The game was so much better back then also because it was new to everyone.
Old school sylvanas EU. Kungen in full raid gear. Stood infront of the AH. he always had a crowd. And thats what it was about. Look at me in my shiny's
People forget in p3 Onyxia calls in warders to defender her. She dies so fast these days no one sees that
Never seen her do that. Pserver or wrath thing
Nop defenders were WotLK
P3 Vanilla was just tank and spank + AoE lava and fear
2005-02-11 was a special day
I remember when I got the Paladin Judgment shoulders and helm and I would purposely go afk in high traffic areas just to show off
Miss you Jeff! Sadly the game will never have this passion again... We really need something new
There are like two more videos from that same blizzcon on youtube, they were very interesting to watch.
Xar should def watch them too!
i bought the game on tbc launch, i cleared black temple and didnt clear sunwell until prepatch witch i dont count, then in wotlk i cleared everything and i quit wow nearing the end of that x-pack. i just now recently picked up wow again and ill say it is fun for a noob who just mostly wants to solo casual play it is not the same game anymore.
Nowadays the devs are "helping" the players by implementing exp boost, nerfing raids (ST), giving players all the abilities they want and removing every other obstacle players might have because of QoL. No wonder people are quitting SoD
To be fair raid nerfs have been a thing since TBC. My guild back then pushed to clear SSC and TK pre-nerf. Boosting was also introduced with catch up content like dailies. Although it was baked into the game and a lot more subtle.
can we stop crying about ST nerfs lol, that isnt about it being aspirational content it was numerically oopsied into oblivion. Jeff even says in this video "we try not to turn the difficulty too high because it causes mass frustration". They want you to feel engaged and somewhat challenged, and primarily used time, RNG and collective problem solving (before youtube/google made it effortless to find optimal strategies) to make a long lasting lategame, not super intense challenge.
I agree SOD has gone the wrong way in a lot of ways with abilities, XP boost etc but it's living in a different context as a limited time seasonal/experimental server than Vanilla WoW which originally wasn't even planning to do an expansion model and be evergreen. The #1 reason people were quitting SOD is because we're 3 months deep into the phase, Cata classic just came out, DF season 4 & MOP remix just came out. No need to be a doomer about it
And yea like kelpie says raid nerfs are nothing new, Blizzard has always had the mentality of nerfing bosses if they're too hard and leaving bosses as-is if they're too easy, even if a bug is the reason it's too easy
Bro shoulders and t2 weps were the reason I started pvp and arenas
GDKP took away that "wow i need to aspire to that" feeling. you can just buy it all in every form of content wow has. from classic to retail.
Literally just explaining what makes hardcore so good.
When blizzard had vision.
1:34 also important that it is earned, not bought.
The thrill and awe of good players was so much more back in the day. I havent felt that since like wotlk idc about the crap where they just change the color and the elite heroic gear etc. Just has 0 impact vs what it used to. Titles are also meaningless now because so many you can go back and get. First time I saw somebody in t6 gear a gnome warlock chilling in shat blew my mind lol. Or just encountering someobdy in full blues my first time hitting 20 it was epic..
Heroic lichking was on another different level. My guild could not kill him on 0%, had to wait for the 5%. Even then one misstake was a wipe. And even, alot of guilds still couldnt clear him at 30%
One HUGE, ASTRONOMIC, METEORIC difference between these older gen game devs and modern game devs is the ability to admit fault and own up to mistakes. Not only that, but laugh about it and own it. This even falls on the players as well. There are no more Leroy Jenkins stories that we all had from our own guilds back in Vanilla WoW. Now it's not funny anymore. You wipe the raid and you're punished, it's a serious offense and accidents will not be tolerated. Booooooring.
I miss Papa Jeff ;_; Old school Blizzard really was something special
The problem right now is the entire game is designed for the 1% and it is assumed by Blizzard that the rest just want to play pokemon or pilotwing or collect things.
Watching this makes me sad what they turned SOD into. They grifted us into sod by hinting at zones, previously not accessible areas, etc... when all we got was runes with mostly wrath/cata abilities and some re-worked dungeons turned into raids.
I remember seeing a warrior decked out in T2 and thinking OMG he must be the best player in the world. Now it's like...Oh all purples? From quests rite?.
the devs should be watching this shit.
This is blizzard when it wasnt part of a corporate overlord. this will never happen from them again
first three bosses normal difficulty, next three heroic difficulty and the last two mythic baby
i like having all size of raid, but removing 40man raid is not a good move, we need 10-20-40
I remember I would play arena every single season just to get shoulders and I would feel badass.
I miss wow the time when they were developed by professionals such as Jeff kaplan "Tigole" =) wow classic 2005 was such a damn good game!! miss those days! New wow and blizzard/microsoft there no longer any professionals anymore! It's a lot of amateurs who don't know shit about how to design games! We see that with wow retial and SoD! damn how bad it is now!
don't always blame the devs. they just do what the capitalists behind them tell what to do.
@@GermanBoy00 not always agree! I hope blizzard/microsoft making new games! We have seen wow in 10 diffrents versions, and Diablo games! Time for introduce something new?? i hope New MMO soon, something we never played before! =)
Illidan was very hard before Sunwell. But extra gear made it possible for others like me to actually down him before expansion end.
Kaeltas was more hard.
“If I’m a warrior am I single tanking or off tanking”, neither. You are meter topping.
Its funny that any casual gamer understands that "content for the 1%" is a must for an rpg but Blizz devs are so out of touch they dont get it
I don't see what the solution to the "unbeaten content" problem is when the game is 20 years old, you can't just slow down leveling progression because then it gets boring. I think that's just a problem that wont be solved unless they release new raids
Say we slow the leveling down to an unnamed number maybe it’s 8months maybe it’s a year, maybe longer and we have 5 level increments.
So you’re stuck at lvl 10 for a year.
Does it get boring?
No keep releasing level 10 raids and don’t drop the release date of the next 5 lvl part until a month before or alittle less.
People want new content but they don’t want to be left behind.
SoD failed on both bc Blizzard doesn’t invest enough in their team.
Theres huge content droughts, no new bgs, no new raids, unbalanced shaman ruining pvp for one faction so the que is an hour or 10% win rate.
And then they bowed to the twitch hypers and they left the dads behind.
The people who play now are hoping it’s gonna be good cus it sucks.
However there is a chance with phase 4 if they balance the PvP and PvE that for the small remaining players it will be a good experience.
It’s just 40k our of 5million left rn LOL
We nerfed the unbeatable content in SoD after 24hrs (ST).... Modern gamers don't want unbeatable content and then complain. They don't realize that maybe that unattainable goal might of been closer to vanilla than people want to think.
the solution is to get a life and stop living inside the box 24/7
@@codywatson9627 for classic that’s correct. People will pretend they want this incredibly “hard” content but every hard raid has been met with lower engagement(I.E. ulduar and ICC). Challenging is okay in that you need good coordination and have people actually using their brain and maybe you don’t clear the very first lockout, but there’s a balance point they should aim for.
@@simonramos5553 so keep releasing new raids and new levels, so you're basically describing an expansion which they have been doing for the last 20 years.
Imagine being that guy in the chat trying to catch Xar's attention about something spelled wrong.
Back when "blizzard made games they would want to play"
I didn't watch the video but the problem is that the gaming landscape is just completely different nowadays. Not only is there content bloat, the world isn't new anymore, the game has experienced players who have mostly been playing for 5, 10, 15+ years. You're not gonna be amazed by somebody's armor if they've been farming for 15 years.
But also, the nature of gaming has changed. Player skill is 100x better than it was. In 2005, the game only really needed to cater to people who dedicated 2-4 hours a day, maybe 8 hours on weekends, and they were BAD and new to the game. Nowadays, there are players who play games for a living (streamers) 12+hrs per day, even tons of casuals work from home and can log in at 4pm-11pm or whatever it is. People speedrun this shit on launch day.
Long story short, you simply cannot replicate the feeling of WoW vanilla in 2024, and we should stop trying to.
You could recreate the feeling with a Neuralink brain implant that wipes your mind of anything WoW related every 2 years.
@@chc2650 Bro! It's the reason people often say "I wish I could watch this movie/series/listen to this song for the first time again."
People want Neuralink to improve our experience, we want Neuralink to remove our experience 😂
I've seen this vide so many times, this is how it should be done.
Unfortunately the way they designed then wouldn't work now.
For many reasons, one major one is the general pacing of society as a whole and how people are used to their fast dopamine kicks and instant gratification systems every single medium have today.
And that's just the baseline before we even go into any specifics about games.
I think everyone who likes wow should watch the blizzcon panels of this year, the year for tbc/wrath and even cata
Can we go back to the early 2000's? I'm not even feeling nostalgic at this point, games were just better.
They weren't better, we just weren't as smart and didn't have CZcams 😂
@@ahetzel9054 Oh yes, the experience was better. I remember being in Ventrilo and you had someone always on Thottbot looking up information. You see that the passion was much more there back in the early 2000's. If you think Blizzard is making better games now, you are the problem lol
@@ahetzel9054 The guide meta sucks tho
All the brilliant minds who built the worlds/stories/games of greatness from blizzard are gone sadly... And as fans we are left with the ashes of a once great empire.. burned to the ground by corp greed and shit brainless developers trampling over the legacy of the great minds before them... RIP blizzard. I miss you.. Please come back
21:10 going from 10 to 20 man raids why my guild quit SoD.
Jeff saying that zinger about how they have to be corporate now is like game dev in a nutshell and in many ways is just America in a nutshell. Please explain to my why a pizza shop needs to emulate a corporation. It's just the most mind numbing crap how everything wants to emulate a corporation now, wtf for? These places that are corporate owned are STILL going out of business sooooo yeah, you're emulating them for no reason at this point.
10 man raids were killer, you got to know the people you were raiding with and its like a close group of mates. 25 is a bit too big because you dont have the same time to interact with everyone. On that subject too when you have a server that hosts 1000 players you have 100 groups of 10 players compared to 40 groups of 25, making the world seem bigger and more active.
bro, WoW was fun back when it started...too bad it devolved from back then :(
Back when they cared about the player experience and quality of the game.
"so they're a bunch of noobs..." LOL
back when devs cared for their games.
We need to go back to our old ways!
Just don't play retail and go back to the old game.
@@Kanoog sometimes thats easier said then done
to some degree yes.. the decision makers for the gaming industry are LOST.
@@Kanoog it dosent matter it the same sub
@@TatsuyaWow so you want Classic to be complety free ?
While seeing someone with cool gear makes people want to play, I also think it is terrible to try and design a game to constantly need to be played too, it's why grinds like the AP grind was taken so negatively. That's why Retails seasonal gameplay is still going strong and we haven't gone back to just linear progression. Most players at this point just want to do their content, get their gear, then go play other games while waiting for the next patch, next expansion, next big thing. Most people nowadays do things too efficiently to have that same old feeling that we used to have. Especially classic wow, the raiding is too easy for most players at this point that have been playing wow for 10+ years.
deffo think 40 man raiding is still feels better even if its 15 players carrying the other 25.
They should have deffo jumped between 10 man and 40 as an example if Kara was always planned and so was BT then Kara is 10 man, TK is 10 man, SSC 10 man then BT 40 man. Even if the content is easier that epic feeling of a huge crowd of players is unbeaten.
Nowadays, since times changed, a need to aspire to get that gear. Means "I need to swipe" to get that gear and buy gold/tokens to get that gear. When wow came out there was gold services but most were young people credit cards were not for everybody, you had game cards to get game time. Now the core player base is all older I am sure they get some new blood into the game but not enough. I just think the same values cannot be achieved with the quality of life that today's wow brings, and I realize there will be exceptions. There always is.
Also more games are out now, those people that have that gear, don't hang out in Orgrimmar anymore, they log off to play another game, during wow's early days there was no other game, it was THE game.
Harder to see if everyone is on flyng mounts cata+:)
👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯
I think bringing in Transmog killed the aspect of finding people in amazing current gear that you want to obtain.
Turned the game into a collect-a-thon
Just because you are a game developer does not mean you are good game developer. The Classic devs were good. The devs now don't have what it takes.
That panel makes me incredibly sad, every single time.
Glad somebody in chat pointed it out but the whole "visual raid progression" for the sake of looking cool starts to fall apart when you have like 10 expansions up to that point. New players would not care because older gear would just be at the same level of flair and coolness in terms of appearances. This is such a minor argument against transmog that does more harm than good. This only works if the game never evolved in the last decade. It only works in Vanilla WoW because yeah, the endgame is finite.
Bottom line, transmog is still a good thing, especially at this point.
transmog should only be visible to urself
So like... When is Jeff Kaplan coming back? That's when I'll resub.
The distinction between raid and pvp gear is lame.
You can see a dude fully decked in raid gear and know he probably sucks in pvp and vice versa.
Well also the fact that "fully decked" raid gear is just a recolor of the easy mode raid gear.
one of the reasons every raid doesnt last a day nowadays... PTR...
bro blizz was so amazing before they really loved their game
Still waiting for the day they completely remove Heroic, Normal and Mythic raid mode. Either you slay the dragon, or you don't. Wow raid philosophy peaked in tbc, except for raid mechanics, which peaked whenever they were hard, but you still didn't need addons, just brains and focus in the moment.
Raids should be tuned for 20 man to win by a margin, but you can bring 30. You CAN run 21 and get more loot per player or less loot but easier with bigger numbers
man remember when Ebay was super relevant?
and nowadays they wanna make content so easy that everyone get the mytic gear........... 💀
nice vid, but most viewers will still continue to leave raid Gros upon the first wipe anyway xD
Ain’t nobody saying wow he’s got x gear in cata lmao. Really only happened in classic and tbc
idk man，the orange dragon staff and daggers are pog
Even in wrath. You'd see people with cool titles and mounts and we didn't have transmog yet. Transmog changed all that.
Praising rewards for the 1%. I wonder what Asmongold has to say about that.
Ive never seen a community so happy to have People Fired, and that they PAY BLIZZARD to Test the game for them. There was a postion called GAME testers, which were Paid for Their time, you dummys flip it around just so you can have something before other people. And then say it ruins the surprise.
zul guroow
cleared kharazan live, bt, sunwell platue, maghteridon, gruul, was the best time of my life TBH, was 14 and my whole guild was 30+ they kinda " raised me up" and it was just an enjoyable time.... so many memorys. got a screenshot from that time when BC released and we bugged onto SW walls , if u know u know :D.... and made a 50+ ppl screenshoot. sadly nobody playes anymore including me , stoped at cata, came back when MOP, BFA, Shadowlands etc game but yeah maybe the "mechanics improved " but not the nostialgia feeling where u had to connect because no Dungeonfinder etc. i could write an essay about that time ;
No low level raids. Fucking LFG...
cool video really makes you wonder how the game turned to shit in the end.
Okay then I don’t understand your point
There are mythic raids in retails where the last boss is beaten by about 1% of the player base
How it’s not fits into your concept of “unfinished” game?
How can you do the same effect as in classic 2005 where there were no wowhead/datamining etc and without making raids extremely hard so only 3-4% of players will commit to even try to beat the “unbeaten” content?
All these unbeaten bosses still exists, less then 1% of players clear mythic difficulty and that's usually not until the last month after 50% nerfs to everything lol.
People watch these clowns do "race to world first" (More like feed top players gear like its a PTR server) and think the contents easy when they can't even do it on normal lmao
the problems are 1.) streamers
2) great vault
3) many others