All That's Past is Prologue

Sometimes I wonder if Blizzard's legacy of an RTS game developer has unduly influenced their World of Warcraft expansion design.

Oh, not that WoW is going to turn into an RTS, despite what a subset of the player base might want, but where --or more precisely who-- the emphasis is on in an expansion.

Compared to some RTS games, such as Age of Empires, Blizzard's RTS design incorporates leaders into a story and makes them the central part of the story the Warcraft and Starcraft games told. Sure, you're there as the player, but the story revolves around these central characters. 

From Starcraft Remastered, you can
see that the leaders are incorporated into the
mission design and not just cutscenes.
From resetera.

Not only did the polish and gameplay set Blizzard's RTS games apart, but the stories they told influenced their design of the Diablo games as an action RPG with a defined plot.*

From Diablo 2 Resurrected.
Screencap from Ars Technica.

Blizzard's second last RTS game, Warcraft III, went all in on the story and leaders, where more RPG elements were added into the RTS design than ever before, more tightly integrating the story with the RTS game itself. 

So Blizzard did something unexpected, they pivoted and created an MMO that doesn't have any of those central design tenets.

***

The release of Vanilla World of Warcraft was not only a departure from Blizzard's RTS core, but a change in design emphasis. Sure, there are faction leaders and other important personnel around throughout Azeroth, but the game design didn't revolve around them. There wasn't a main story in the same way that other Blizzard designs had, but a bunch of smaller stories that were strung together with quest chains. Instead of a tightly integrated story with an emphasis on the leaders as main characters, the player was the main character in a vast world with minimal emphasis on the heroics of the few people in charge.

I guess that wasn't bound to last, because a decentralized game world wasn't in Blizzard's DNA. 

It took a few expansions, but by Wrath of the Lich King WoW had pretty much returned to the Blizzard fold in that the leaders and a central story were tightly integrated into the game, and it's been that way ever since. This is what Blizzard is most familiar with developing, and your job as the player is to basically facilitate the story that the faction leaders are involved with. Like or hate the story, this is the pattern that formed in the Warcraft and Starcraft games, and that is what Blizzard knows best. 

People --myself included-- rail against the so-called lobby-based nature of Retail WoW, but when you consider it is the spiritual successor to the earlier RTS and ARPG games that built Blizzard's reputation, it's not a great surprise. When you throw in the lobby-based story found in shooter games such as Call of Duty, Blizzard is providing what they believe gamers expect out of a game. 

In the same manner that turn-based isometric RPGs are tightly integrated into Larian Studios' business, what we are seeing out of Retail WoW is in Blizzard's. It would take a monumental effort to break out of that design philosophy, and I'm not altogether sure it would be a good idea for Blizz at this point to do so. As much as I prefer Classic Era, Blizzard's fanbase doesn't expect that decentralized, non-story-driven design out of them. They expect lobby-based story beats with an emphasis on the faction leads and the other chief protagonists. If anything, the leveling process in the game world is the anachronism here: it's a nod to an era when Blizzard broke out of what they did best as a company to try something new with different design parameters, and Blizzard can't bring itself to shed that vestige of it's old MMO design. Instead, Blizzard uses the leveling process to move the story from the introductory phase to the "why" of group content at the end; it's not an end in itself, as it was in Vanilla WoW, but in service to the endgame, which is where the real story in Retail WoW begins.

No, I was NOT going to put that line from
South Park in here. If you want it, you can go
find it via a quick search. From YouTube.

It is kind of funny in its own way that the Retail WoW player base argues about details in expansions such as systems, whether the group content is any good, or the quality of the story, but they have simply accepted the larger design philosophy as-is. What you see out of Blizzard now is what you will get, because they have no incentive to try anything truly new. Even Season of Discovery isn't that new; it's just a reshuffling of the cards, as it were, but keeping the same basic design in place. Since Blizzard is now the "MMO and Action RPG developer" in Microsoft's stable**, they are most likely destined to stay in their lane and only work on those items. If you've a dev team that wants to try something new, don't expect to find yourself under the Blizzard arm of Microsoft Game Studios; you're better off going independent.

*Yes, I know, I'm not that fond of the plot in Diablo. There's a lot more "action" and a lot less "RPG" in the Diablo games. That doesn't mean there's no plot, however; "no plot" is more akin to playing Gauntlet than Diablo, despite the mechanics' similarities.

**Apologies to The Elder Scrolls Online, but Zenimax/Bethesda is known for first person RPGs, not MMOs. In my opinion, it wouldn't surprise me if ESO eventually gets moved under Blizzard because "they're the MMO developer" for Microsoft. Never mind the game world or the corporate culture; there's always a bean counter somewhere who wants things to align perfectly under their proper silos.