I am still exploring this issue in my head, but that never stopped me from writing something down. And, frankly, sometimes writing it down helps solidify my thoughts. We’ll see.
I mentioned the idea of Cataclysm Classic in my questions for 2023 post, and was prompted to think about it again by the Activision Blizzard Q4 2022 financials.
A day that will live in infamy…
Things were going swimmingly for the Blizzard side of the house coming out of Q4. And well it might be, Blizz having launched the Dragonflight expansion for retail WoW. Quarters with WoW expansions tend to be earnings peaks for the company.
Eventually though the board… or maybe at some point Microsoft… will want to know what Blizz has done for them lately. WoW expansions don’t hold onto subscribers for a full two years.
okay, explain this then…
Well, RECENT expansions… like every expansion after Wrath of the Lich King… has seen subscribers drop off, some more than others.
Of course, we don’t actually know what the subscriber base is for WoW because after Warlords of Draenor crashed after its first year Blizzard declined to mention subscriptions ever again, opting for Monthly Active Users, or MAUs… which then also began a downward spiral quarter after quarter.
JFC, if you’re going to cherry pick a metric, go with one that makes you look good, right?
Anyway, my point is that no matter how spectacular the current retail player base thinks Dragonflight is, it still fell short of sales expectations (again, from the Q4 2022 financials) to the point that Blizz was offering promotions to come play before it was a month out of the box, so it seems like a safe bet that Blizz cannot depend on it holding its own for two years no matter how many pretty road map graphics they put out.
So they need something else and they’ve got… WoW Classic, which pulled their chestnuts out of the fire previously.
Only they have arguably shot their metaphorical bolt on the WoW Classic front since the most reasonable definition in my book for the Classic era of WoW is “before Cataclysm,” or, maybe looking at that chart above “expansions that grew the user base during their two year reign.”
Which might lead one to conclude that the WoW Classic revenue stream is not… if not dead, at least not going to be able to bring enough weight to the table to offset a second summer collapse of another retail WoW expansion.
Sure, Blizzard can continue to fiddle around with some more fresh start options for vanilla and such, and that will probably pay for itself and make some profit, but nothing is going to match the epic return to the game that came with the initial launch of WoW Classic. The pent up demand has been sated and unless Blizzard takes it away again for another decade, there will be no huge tidal wave of players keen to relive their glory days.
And yet, there are still expansions, good expansions, in the mix that would arguably be fun to go back and relive the way they were before Blizz took away the borrowed power of the month to promote the next big idea. Legion with legendary weapons for example. I would be up for that.
I would go so far as to say that Cataclysm is a pretty good expansion.
In hindsight I think the thing that I and many others were pissed about was the destruction of the old world, replacing it with a completely different experience. It isn’t that one version of the world was necessarily better than the other, it is that the one we knew and loved and were invested in was taken away such that we could never return… unless we went and played on one of the many WoW pirate servers that sprung up to keep that old world alive for people.
It was also the first expansion where Blizz decided to fight the expanding level cap by limiting it to just five additional levels with Cata, which felt odd.
But I have played through all of the Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms zones post-Cataclysm… there is a series of posts about that from ages ago… and the zones are pretty fun. Some were changed dramatically, some were given a lighter touch, but the overall effect was to give them each a story to play through that lacked many of the gaps or sudden stair steps of quest levels that was part of the Vanilla experience.
I think the main problem with them was that the level curve by that point for 1-60 had been compressed so much that it was difficult to play through a whole zone before you out-leveled the quests.
And, of course, Cata added five new zones, including one of the prettiest zones they’ve ever done in the game. Vashj’ir, the under water zone was just spectacular… though like all such zones, prone to producing motion sickness in some if you were not careful.
So it feels like there ought to be a path forward with Cataclysm in the vein of the WoW Classic theme. The complexity of possible outcomes does vex me however.
You don’t want to force happy Wrath Classic people into Cata… that was how we got in this mess. But would it popular enough to warrant its own stand-alone, fresh start server? One can certainly argue that you can go play those zones RIGHT NOW in retail. The problem, as pointed out previously, is that you cannot play anything but the current expansion with the classes and talents and borrowed power that existed in any of the old expansions.
In order to unlock “classic” versions of all those previous expansions I feel like Blizzard has to start with Cataclysm.
But I am not sure that it would be worth the effort, or that Blizzard would want to have yet another branch of their code to support yet another launcher tab for yet another version of World of Warcraft. Certainly the internal argument against any such move is going to be the level squish and how you can play all that old content from level 10 to 50 now obviates any need to have any further deviation retail WoW… so long as you want to play the old content with the Dragonflight classes, specs, power, and whatever… even the UI fights against the feel of the old content.
So I am undecided still on this as an idea.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 