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[Interview] World of Warcraft: Greg 'Ghostcrawler' Street Talks Escalation
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
With the latest patch deployment, World of Warcraft players have seen new features and systems rolled out. Blizzard has been keeping tabs on reactions. We sat down for a chat with Greg Street about Escalation. See what he has to say and then leave your impressions of the latest update in the comments.
Greg explained that Patch 5.3 is one of the smaller updates for the game. What the team does is try to alternate between the bigger and smaller updates to keep new content on an even flow. With 5.3 one of the biggest successes they have had among players is the Battlefield: Barrens. The team likes how much it brings players back to the open world and gives them a series of events to explore. This is something the developers are excited to see working as well and could lead to more updates of this nature. Fan feedback is critical to Blizzard and Greg said the Barrens update has been a solid high point for the patch.
Read more of Garrett Fuller's World of Warcraft: Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street Talks Escalation.
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Comments
Greg 'Ghostpopulation" Street = Catalysm, "even if it is voted consistently as the worst xpac" - he laughed.
Battlefield Barrens was great the first time. Second time, I just logged off in boredom and really didn't feel like chasing down annoying champions for a few pieces of lumber, meat and stone.
The legendary quest, I'm still stuck on getting the 10 mystic legendary pieces and the 10 other ones I can't think of the name of. I've had 2 drop in a total 2 weeks of running LFR. They need to make the droprate for a quest like that higher if not 100% just so I can get to the next step in the legendary questline.
Brawler's guild, for me at least, is horrible and not fun. But I'm not a challenge player, never have been and this facet of the game seems to be all about just beating a really hard boss solo. Fine for those who like it, but I just can't stand it personally.
I think games need to be careful not to make their open-world content simply a test of "do you have the right scanning add-ons" rather than actually adding gameplay. Personally, I'm still not entirely comfortable adding 3rd-party software to my PC.
I'd be curious to know how participation in the brawler's guild correlates with participation in other aspects of the game. The concept sounded rather hostile to introverted personalties with it's "everyone is watching you fail and fail again" setting, but perhaps I misjudged how many people would be put off by that.
"Blizzard is looking into updates for all of the character models."
Will get released along with the "Dance Studio".
And the 'Path of the Titans' alternate advancement system.
It's a sad day indeed when a family is too afraid of reprisals to publicly thank somebody for saving their lives.
"One of the things he said is that many players still play on very low requirement machines. WoW keeps their system requirements low because of this on purpose. He said the numbers would surprise people."
Wouldn't surprise me at all, I've always thought this was one of the main reasons for WoW's success. What is a surprise is how other developers seem determined not to learn this lesson.
Me too, and I've been saying that for about five years or so. The game wouldn't have done nearly as good as it did if it wasn't for the hardware accessibility.
A sure sign that you are in an old, dying paradigm/mindset, is when you are scared of new ideas and new technology. Don't feel bad. The world is moving on without you, and you are welcome to yell "Get Off My Lawn!" all you want while it happens. You cannot, however, stop an idea whose time has come.
"One of the things he said is that many players still play on very low requirement machines. WoW keeps their system requirements low because of this on purpose. He said the numbers would surprise people. Therefore they do not want to go too heavy into UI changes and risk forcing people to upgrade their PCs one day in order to play a patch."
Something all developers could learn from. This is one of the major reasons why WoW is so big, you can play it on a smart phone probably if they supported it lol.
Nothing wrong with WoW, I think alot of people, including myself did not like the direction it went after the Lich King.
Too each their own right?
Its not AFTER the Lich King, current direction was set DURING Lich King and it became more apparent at Cata.
i still play wow and have tried to leave for other games quite often in the past when i get burned out but I always come back to wow because A it has the best story and B I have yet to play a game as polished or just fun as wow . GW2 at times comes close until you run their dungeons and outdoor raids at 80 and realize how you miss the organization of wows class system. While I think Greg Street can be a true idiot at times and is way to cocky for his own good , I feel like the 2 million sub lose this last quarter is a true wake up call for the wow team and I think next expansion and content patches until then are going to be a much stronger venture.
Also some of you guys dissing barrens and the scenarios get over it seriously. The only other attempt at casual end game content came from Rift with chronicles , at least wows scenarios are story driven and have fun mechanics. The new heroic ones are challenging enough for good players to so its not like they just make everything super easy all the time.
I hold this man responsible for losing interest in WoW.
The moment he got the scepter things changed so much in wow.
All class ability's changed for the worse.
Retarded amount off CC added
Boring raids
No fucks given about death servers / low populated servers
Cross realm zones
Cataclysm + MoP the least impressive expansions
daily's daily's daily's daily's daily's daily's daily's daily's daily's daily's
He kicked the pvp community in the balls with 5.3
To be honest i can make a list so long that one need to spend the day reading it.
All in all this guy has a iron plate infront of his head, and one will see that it will go from bad to worse, unless he can retain asian players in netcafe's who pay 3 cent per hour and (boost) his so called subscriptions again.
I swear if Tigole / Rob Pardo was stilll leading WoW this mammoth would have grown bigger and bigger.
But the most importand thing, WoW would still be epic to play.
I lost interest in WoW after Cat hit and although I checked MoP out I didn't stay long it's just far to cuddly for my taste. WoTLK had such a good story, epic battles, great looking zones that I wanted to invest time but both Cat and MoP have just been meh. Dumbing down of the talents is a pretty big mistake too, I used to love testing out builds but now everyone is the same with little choice (regardless of what they tell you!).
Really? Doing that would just be the same as the 'reward by token system'.....Its meant to be an EPIC item.
TSW - AoC - Aion - WOW - EVE - Fallen Earth - Co - Rift - || XNA C# Java Development
Not for that leg of the quest chain. It's pretty dumb IMO. Epic item is fine, I mean I'm running the raids with other people, but now they compound it by making me run the same raid 10+ times, which isn't feasible with lockouts every week and having a job and family. Fine line between challenging and frustrating and this one leans on the side of frustrating.
What exactly does Blizzard do with all its money? It gets, what, $50,000,000 a month, and produces some of the worst expansions and slowest lamest updates to an MMO I know of, whilst games like EverQuest 2 are on 4 times the number of expansions in the same time, and games like Guild Wars 2 release some of the most exciting monthly updates in an MMO, and yet these make a fraction of Blizzards income.
So, where is all the money? And I know, staff costs, servers, Activision etc, but that still leaves a sizable chunk compared to its competitors. Did they plough it all into "Project Titan" (and then scrap it and start again) or did they just line their pockets, leaving the paying customer to put up with sitting waiting for the tiniest patch?
Some of us still fondly google "WoW Player Housing" from time to time and smile at the interviews just after launch promising a patch "coming at some point in the future, yes"...
"When people don't know much about something, they tend to fill in the blanks the way they want them to be filled in. They are almost always disappointed." - Will Wright
i think a lot of us that still play are really hoping for another burning crusade expansion through all the dark portals next expansion as we also want that epic feel back to wow. MOP is kinda lame compared to all the other xpacs other than the designs of scenarios and the horde alliance war. The new talent trees are superior IMO and ive played all the revamps myself. It takes away a lot of the fluff abilities yes but you still get them in the form of spell passives as you level for each class but some of the new talents and changing on the fly helps a ton more in raiding and mobility. All classes have a decent theme now and offer a bit per class to the group etc. Back in the day you kinda had to be a cookie cutter talent build to get into raiding progression.
Why in the world should something labeled as "Legendary" be simple to get? This is why MMOs are basically garbage now because it takes no effort to get anything anymore. It should take you months to get something "Legendary".