Situation Normal All Effed Up, Part Whatever

We all knew it was going to happen, right?

Well, there you go. Jason Schreier reported yesterday that XBox is going to cut 3200 jobs and either sell or divest themselves of 5 studios.

An internal email from Asha Sharma, the current CEO of XBox, outlined everything. She also said that she wants 1 billion players per day for XBox overall (this starts at the 4:58 mark in the video above). She also mentions that they want to focus their investments in XBox, which pretty much means for these bigger studios to shed projects that won't generate as much profit and eyeballs on screens. 

From what it sounds, XBox Game Studios and Zenimax will be hit hard by layoffs, and Activision Blizzard King less so but still impacted. The overall number of jobs being lost is 3200, but only 1600 right now. That translates into waves of layoffs going forward, including divestiture/sale from the studios already identified. (Apparently Arkane Studios is also targeted, but Microsoft has begun the divestiture process with the French Work Council, as they can't summarily be canned without due process.)

What does that mean for those who love the two big MMOs that these studios manage, Elder Scrolls Online and World of Warcraft? Probably job cuts and scaling back of the staffing for both teams. 

For all those expecting Classic Plus, here's hoping that these cuts don't kill it off.

I would expect, however, far more monetization of both properties to try to boost profits. So, if you've been dismayed at some of Cash Shop options from World of Warcraft, hold onto your hat. You ain't seen nothing yet.

There will be a lot more integration of these various game studios with the Microsoft parent organization, so that Zenimax or Activision/Blizzard or King (it's marked separately from A-B in the email) will lose a lot of their independence and corporate culture. Will that impact the end product? Yes, it will; you don't change corporate culture without changing the product itself. Hell, this happens all the time in Corporate America: the old enshittification process writ large. The back office jobs, or those not labelled "critical" to a game studio are about to get cut.

Let's hope that these studios aren't saddled with having to use a single engine for all of their development in the same way that Bioware got trapped by EA into using Frostbite for their game engine for the past several games, despite it being NOT built for RPGs or ARPGs at all. 

I noticed that Jason didn't mention Obsidian with the letter, but I have to think that it won't have escaped unscathed. Helluva time for Tim Cain to move back to California to rejoin Obsidian after being in semi-retirement.

Wanted: A Living Breathing Instance

In the MMO world where it seems that speed (and loot) is king, my fondest memories of dungeons/instances are those that simply feel alive.

I've made my feelings pretty clear on how game developers simply don't make instances on the size and scale of a Blackrock Depths (Classic WoW) or Garth Agarwen (LOTRO) anymore. Instances are now designed as bite-sized chunks for a quick dopamine rush, where the fun is less an experience of an epic place but more of a test of skill in your speed at completing the instance. 

I was thinking about this last night when I responded to Kurn's blog post from Sunday, in which she asked what was people's favorite Classic WoW instance. While I ultimately chose Deadmines as my favorite because of its status as a gateway drug (and the conclusion of the main Defias story throughout the Stormwind territory), I have to give plenty of props to the "big guns" of Classic WoW instances: Stratholme, Blackrock Depths, and Blackrock Spire.

By comparison, Scholomance is a short instance.

Compared to modern instance design, those Classic WoW instances --well, most of them save for Dire Maul and Scarlet Monastery-- are gigantic places that were meant to be living, breathing locales. The devs took their cue from RPGs and the big dungeons found in tabletop games, such as Expedition to the Barrier Peaks or The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, and created expansive places to explore. Yes, you had to make multiple forays into a lot of the instances to complete quests --not just for loot-- and more than one of them were informally gated by level difficulty, such as Uldaman, where if you did the early portion at-level you'd find yourself vastly underpowered at the end of the instance. 

Over time, however, these strengths of the older instances grew to be looked at as less than a key feature and more of a bug, and were consequently smoothed out of dungeon design. I suppose you could say that as MMO design focus changed from the leveling journey to endgame raiding, instances grew to be looked at as a stepping stone for the player. With the introduction of timed challenges (Retail WoW's Mythic Plus) and perpetually increasing difficulty modes, instance design is now far more about the mathematical and skill-based exercise of speed and precision rather than the integration into a game world. At that point, instances have grown to be looked at as an endgame in itself, complete with a story-mode (with or without AI-assisted NPCs) all the way to a perpetually increasing challenge mode (Mythic+). 

***

For all the speculation of a Classic Plus to Vanilla Classic WoW, and for the record I am still highly skeptical that a true Classic Plus is coming*, one of the hallmarks of anything that would classify as Classic Plus would have to be a return to grand, sprawling instances. If Blizzard were to put all of the Classic Plus content after the Naxxramas raid, then the vertical progression would kill off any real sense of a Classic Plus. It would just be an alternative to the official WoW timeline but keeping all of the problems contained therein. 

Of course, I am in a pretty small minority here, because the popularity of the modern instance design speaks volumes. When most people talk about Classic Plus, they speak of "NOT the official timeline" rather than "more stuff for the leveling journey" in Vanilla. It's a reaction to how things are now and deciding that taking another fork in the road is a better idea.

From  the Star Trek: The Next Generation
episode "Relics". (via Tenor).

Answering the question "What does Classic Plus mean" will go a long way toward understanding what Classic Plus we might get, and knowing the Blizzard of today I'm not sure I trust them to answer it in a way I'd like. 

*I believe that it's equally likely that Blizzard would announce the ability for people to purchase their own private server software so they can host "official" Vanilla WoW versions. Blizz might even allow those purchasers the ability to manipulate some things, such as difficulty levels and buffs/debuffs to players and mobs to make the experience easier or harder. If there's one way to kill off the private server market, it's that.