Whether WoW, Starfield or Battlefield: Bitter when devs don’t understand their players
As early as December 2018, I had asked myself in a column, whether Blizzard still understands its fans and target group at all. The reason then? The disastrous announcement of Diablo Immortal, the questionable communication surrounding the announcement and the various problems that existed in Battle for Azeroth at the time (e.g. because the Blizzard developers still refused to respond to the feedback and suggestions for improvement from the community) .
Has anything improved in more than 3 years?
Over the past three and a half years, Blizzard has made a number of promises to do better in the future. And in fact, the devs are now releasing WoW patches that were just about to fulfill requests from the community. Nevertheless, the impression remains that Blizzard does not fully understand its own players.
On the one hand, this was shown by the announcement of WoW (buy now ): Wrath of the Lich King, with the addition that they want to do without the dungeon finder from patch 3.3. I continue to be certain that prior to the announcement, the Classic team assumed they would be celebrated for this announcement within the Classic community. Instead there was a lot of negative feedback and a whole bunch of players who just want to do without the Northrend adventure. How can this discrepancy come about? Well, the developers just don’t understand what worries many players and why certain things work for players in a certain context and not in another context (in WoW Classic and at the beginning of TBC Classic the dungeon finder would have been an absolute no-go).
A second example remains Diablo Immortal. After the 2018 shitstorm, Blizzard could have proved it to everyone by releasing a mobile game for one of their main franchises that oozes the old Blizzard magic (“gameplay first” and such) and does most of the mobile-typical Systems and mechanics that trample on the fun of the game (and the time or wallet of the player) are avoided.
Instead we got a pretty typical mobile game that admittedly plays well, but otherwise offers all the mechanics, systems and tricks you would expect from free2play mobile games these days. And that’s not all: Some endgame systems are such a deep hole in terms of possible investment that even well-heeled whales flee.
And then game director Wyatt Cheng (you know, the one with the “don’t you have cellphones” line at BlizzCon) gets bogged down in another exchange with the community, where he doesn’t cut a very good figure. With his hair-splitting (legendary gems are not part of the equipment) he wanted to defend a statement in which he had claimed that you could not buy equipment or equipment upgrades for money in Diablo Immortal. Someone here clearly doesn’t understand how their own community ticks.
The size of Starfield
But there are other examples that show that developers and players are often not on the same wavelength. You must have seen Todd Howard on stage at the Xbox/Bethesda Showcase proudly presented the first gameplay of Starfield.
The personal highlight (that’s how it seemed to me) was saved by the chief developer for the end: The universe will consist of more than 100 systems with more than 1,000 planets. He said, internally (my impression): “Holy shit, this is going to be epic!!!” Most players like this (in my impression): “Oh man, really? This is going to be really boring. Less is more!”
I still am though good things and am really looking forward to Starfield, but I can understand the concern. One of the most important aspects when it comes to the allure of Bethesda RPGs is entering the open world and getting distracted by it and all of its points of interest. You never know where it will take you and what to expect. Can this also work in a huge universe? If you no longer ride past ruins, camps, settlements, individual huts or imposing opponents, but chug through space in a spaceship and let planets pass left and right, most of which will probably be rather boring?
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