The WOW expansion Shadowlands has been officially delayed. It was only about 4 weeks away when the announcement came, which is a huge disaster for Blizzard. The state of the game on the beta has me convinced that Blizzard did the right thing in delaying and most everyone seems to agree with me. People are pissed that it is happening, but given where they were they were either going to ship a shoddy product or delay. No third option presented itself.
Much of the delay has to be chalked up to polish and bugs and such, but I won't talk about that here. They need to do the work, they will, no big deal.
However, a significant part of the issue is that endgame balance is a total shitshow and they have no good way out of the mess they have created. The core of the struggle is this: They created an expansion that works great for an MMO game, but is a problem for an action RPG. When WOW launched it was way more of an MMO, and it has slowly evolved away from those roots.
In an MMO things are unbalanced. Some classes are just good and others aren't. There are plenty of suboptimal choices, and many decisions that are made for flavour torpedo your character's power. In an MMO you can fuck up big time, and it takes forever to do things. The world feels big. Content is extremely easy, built for lore and effect, though often crushingly time consuming.
WOW has shifted away from these things. You can switch specs easily. You can find groups through a special group finder window, and usually this will simply teleport you to wherever you need to be. Decisions are easily reversible. The world is small and simple to traverse. Content is hard, tightly balanced, and designed for challenge. This is more of an Action RPG feel.
In Shadowlands there are four major groups called covenants. You have to pick one to ally with. This choice gives you several powerful spells, one of which is common to all people who ally with that covenant, one of which is different for each class. Then these covenants give you several trees of bonuses you can work on which have variable rewards based on class and spec.
In an MMO this is great. The covenants have differnent visual themes, distinct philosophies and goals, and they each offer a different home zone. This choice fits in, and getting a bunch of your abilities from this choice makes sense in this particular world. You make a choice, it matters a lot, and you live with it. In an action RPG this is a disaster. For each spec there is going to be an optimal choice of covenant for each content type. Kyrian looks superb for paladin tanking, but garbage for paladin dps. I can't have two covenants, so if I want to maximize my power in high end content I literally need two characters.
Balancing in WOW has always been a challenge, but this is a whole new level. In the past if a spec was overperforming you could just nerf an ability or two. But if a covenant power is too good for a particular spec, what do you do? If you nerf it, all the other specs that use it get hit for collateral damage. Then people want to swap covenants, but they are already invested in their current one. Any tweak you make to the system affects a whole variety of specs in ways you can't easily predict, so balancing them becomes a terifying prospect. Each change causes a cascade of other problems that all have to be corrected for in some other way. We may well see logic like "Well, Divine Toll is too powerful for prot paladins. However, we can't nerf it because it would hurt ret paladins, so because Divine Toll is too good, we will instead nerf some other ability instead." This of course means that anyone *not* using Divine Toll gets hit even harder, just because Divine Toll was too good!
In addition to cross spec issues, you have cross activity issues. There is no way you can make cool new spells and abilities and have them work for raiding, dungeons, and pvp. You can have them all be bad and not worth using, or be extremely bland and similar, but those solutions both totally fail on the lore and feel fronts. If you want those abilities to be powerful and unique you are going to face down people who pick a covenant that is excellent for raiding and then realize they are 20% worse than other people at pvp, which basically removes them from contention for any serious team. Plus even if they get on a team, they will always know they are vastly inferior and that sucks as a play experience. Blizzard has made it clear that swapping covenants and abilities is going to be extremely slow, suitable for someone making a long term choice, and not at all useful for someone wanting to do two different activities in the same week.
Previous versions of WOW had challenges with balance, but they were fairly careful to keep all power concentrated in spec specific buckets. If ret paladins were too good, you could easily fix it without breaking everything else. Even then, it was a thorny problem. With the Shadowlands system it will be vastly more difficult.
All this matters because Blizzard declared that they are going to get balance within a few %. They won't. They never have, and this system is so much harder than any before it there is no way they will achieve their goal. It is a fine goal and all, but the system is so interconnected now that balance changes will be extremely difficult to fully plan, and when you do people will be forced to abandon flavour choices to account for the new numbers, and people *hate* that. It is the Action RPG problem of wanting extremely tight balance for challenging content but located in a game that is ostensibly an MMO.
Some games just have crap balance and content is trivial. Look at Classic WOW - people clear new raid tiers within a couple of hours of the content going live, and then wait half a year for new content. Some classes are obscenely overpowered and make others look like jokes *cough* warrior and mage *cough*. That is an MMO. Roll a good class if you want to perform... but you don't have to, because everything is easy. You spend your time farming or cybering, not practicing.
In modern WOW though people expect tight balance, they expect challenge, and Blizzard has committed themselves to delivering it. They are going to fail.
I am not saying that tilting more towards MMO type design is bad. It sounds like a cool set of choices they are setting up, and a world that has important lore. But if you want to have big decisions like this that have big consequences, and you want people to have to stick to their decisions to make those decisions feel impactful, then you aren't going to have tight balance. Period. I think the key in these situations is to admit what your priorities are and go with them. Pretending that you can just do it all is simply setting yourself up for failure and disappointment.
You can ship a game where everyone just tools around and beats the stuff they want to. In that game you can have choices like covenants and it works just fine. You can have a game of high challenge and finely tuned balance. In that game this version of covenants is a disaster.
Have your cake, or eat it. But not both.
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