Blizzard Sees More WoW Expansions

[hcheung]

Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime is already talking about future expansions to World of Warcraft.

Blizzard Sees More WoW Expansions : Read more

 

[falchard]

Many Runescapers disagree and view the $5/month subscription is superior, seeing as how they have the 2nd highest amount of subscriptions with a crap mmo.

 

[Tindytim]

Jeez.

You would think at $15 a month you would get new content for free. I find all of this expansion non-sense to be a little greedy. I know it's an MMO norm. But the whole point of a constant fee it that you get new content and new experience. Why should I have to pay an extra $20 just to get a few more levels and extra areas?

 

[MadCraiZ]

I use to play asheron's call. They use to roll out updates on a monthly basis. Eventually they rolled out a paid expansion pack or 2, but they still kept releasing free content monthly.

 

[dieseldre2k]

yea WoW gets yearly update targets while SC2 takes 10+ years to get 1 part out -_-

 

[Guest]

They better start combining the expansions or something because no one is going to buy all five exansions at $20 in the foreseeable future.

 

[Guest]

I don't know if many of the naysayers actually play WoW, but there are frequently big content patches every few months. Those are free, and different from expansions. Expansions so far usually add a race or a class to the game, in addition to a full continent and 10 more levels. That's well worth the money.

 

[Mromson]

[citation][nom]Nattie[/nom]I don't know if many of the naysayers actually play WoW, but there are frequently big content patches every few months. Those are free, and different from expansions. Expansions so far usually add a race or a class to the game, in addition to a full continent and 10 more levels. That's well worth the money.[/citation]
lol, Listen to what you're saying.

 

[enewmen]

When will the graphics get updated? Even the low-end PCs keep getting more performance. Will expanstions raise the bottom or raise the top? This needs to be done at SOME point.
I personally got turned off by the 10 year old "Ultima-9" visuals. - Even for a game that released 4 years ago. (I fully understand this is a MMORPG with huge maps, this needs to run on the largest number of PCs possible, etc) I'll wake up when WoW visuals are near "Oblivion" levels.

 

[giovanni86]

Keep um coming! I would say it would be nice if they lowered it to like 10, and gradually lowered it to 5. That would be sweet, and it would take a load off especially during these economic bad times. Graphics wise, i would also say the game does need a upgrade, but saying that, i don't want the game to not be playable. you got remember not everyone upgrades every two years, some ppl keep the same machine for 5 or more years, this goes back to how the economy is going. If they gradually kind of made some improvements that would be nice as well. I still love the game even though it does get boring and repetitive its a game with a world that is very alive and very fun especially raiding cities with friends, and just questing it up around azeroth.

 

[midnightgun]

The graphics were updated with this expansion. I doubt WoW would hit Oblivion level, the game needs to work on both new and old hardware for everyone.

 

[yipsl]

Lord of the Rings Online is a good deal. My wife and I started at $15 a month, but quickly went to $199 lifetime for their one year anniversary. Now, the graphics are improved with Mines of Moria. I admit, the minimum graphics of a Radeon 8500 seems a bit low (my wife played it for a couple of weeks on 690G integrated graphics), but when a newer card is added, they improve.

What I like about MMORPG's is that they roll out new content for free, plus major class and regions with expansions. I didn't think I'd like playing online, but it's kind of romantic when you play with your spouse, plus helping out players you'd never get to meet in real life can be fun too. Sure, there are griefers, and gold spammers, but the games are getting better at policing and allowing a good experience for everyone.

The only thing I envy WoW players is the new expansion has destructable buildings. Rag doll FPS hysics didn't work for me in Oblivion (ever try to set a table in your house?), but more interactive environments are something I hope to see in the future in LOTRO.

 

[neiroatopelcc]

[citation][nom]Tindytim[/nom]Jeez.You would think at $15 a month you would get new content for free. I find all of this expansion non-sense to be a little greedy. I know it's an MMO norm. But the whole point of a constant fee it that you get new content and new experience. Why should I have to pay an extra $20 just to get a few more levels and extra areas?[/citation]
There's content being added all the time. Karazhan and Quel'danas were added in updates, and I'm sure quite a lot of the other content was too.

[citation][nom]enewmen[/nom]When will the graphics get updated? Even the low-end PCs keep getting more performance. [/citation]
Graphics were updated with the 3.0.2 patch a month ago. It's still directx version ancient, but the visibility range has increased a lot, and more differenciated spell/event effects have been added. It's still got crappy texture sizes and a crappy graphics engine, but the visual appearence of the game has increased considerably since the patch.


@ thread: As for the fee, I'm playing the game, and I actually think it's rather steep. I didn't buy the last expansion, cause I already pay so much for so little. Sure the game has a lot of content - but much of it is recycled content. You do the same kinds of quests and events over and over again. And after a month of playing you're level 70 and have little to nothing at all to do. Well now it's 80 so that adds another week, but still. You pay 15 bucks a month for doing the exact same thing you did last month. The mobs have just changed colors and drop new items that happen to be the same thing they did before, but with two stats altered.
If there's a feature they should add, it isn't content, but an ability to freeze the "playtime left" when you tire of the shit.
Since they've got no intention of adding such feature (I asked billing services, who replied a few weeks later), I've decided to hunt for someone to buy my danish account ... cause I can't pause game time, and I can't get a refund (of remaining 3 months playtime) for deleting it.


Bottom line - even though I have a house on my own and serveral cars and shit, I still find the 15 bucks a month a high price. And it obviously has nothing to do with wether or not I can afford to pay it.

 

[Guest]

I use to play WOW, but found a lot of the players so finatical about the game, it turned into a big turnoff. WOW has the most intolerent players of any mmo and NOT worth $15.00 a month to hear the same crap over and over again. Bunch of pixel nerds that would rather sit in front of their computers for 8 hours than go outside and be with real people, doing real things. The whole scene is a turn off.

 

[Guest]

Lol, as soon as Blizzard realized people like Nymh were still playing... they could make as many expansion packs as they like cause theres too many players LIKE nymh to not buy their expansion pack

 

[Guest]

What people don't understand is that these expansions nearly double the size of the game when introduced. They aren't little tidbits of the game. Thats what content patches are for. These new expansions have thousands of quests, items, and monsters added, creating another potential 100+ hours of gameplay. Blizzard would be stupid to give this for free.

 

[fuser]

I think $15/mo is the bargain of the century. You can play as often or as little as you want for the price of a single movie and a soda.

I play EQ2, which offers much better variety and content than WOW, but the concept is the same. I spend more money per month on soda, so why would I worry about the price of the MMORPG?

 

[fuser]

What I want to know is what the hell Blizzard does with all of that cash! They have > $150M coming in each month, you'd think that they would have improved the graphics engine so that it would scale with the computer system.

EQ2 runs beautifully on a $40 video card and if you turn on all of the environment features it can bring an SLI rig to its knees. A future proof graphics engine that runs on your mom's computer. What could be better? Haha

 

[EVILNOD]

they want to make sure the player with low end gfx card still able to play the game. want it more?? max the view distance, it look alot different when u do that. however, my old computer handle it so i stop in midway.

i play wow when it first come out and stop 3 month after. i can tell you there big different in gix compare when it first come out and the gfx of wotlk. people complain becuz they just used to looking at the same screen and hard for em to tell any improvement

 

[elbert]

With World of Warcraft surpassing 11 million players, will Blizzard lower to the monthly subscription fee of $14.99? Not a chance, says Morhaime. He contends that players are pretty happy with the current rate and said there really isn’t a better value that you can get in entertainment.

That kind of odd as there are over a thousand private servers. Retail see a short term pop from those leaving private servers for the new content. Many of the players private servers have left the retail servers. Many private servers have upwards of a thousand players. One has even broke away from the average and has more retail like numbers. Wowscape averages about 5 thousand players each on its 3 servers.

You have 3 competing server emulations filling the gaps monthly price has caused. Mangos, Summit(wowscape), and Arcemu are the 3 server emulations and there are so many database development teams for these 3 that I cant keep track. The servers using these emulations are seeing million of dollars in donations from there players. Players donate for levels, rare items, and vip access among others.