Early on in the cataclysm expansion cycle the players were curious about a place known as the abyssal maw. Shortly we all learned exactly what that place was meant to be. A raid instance. The events in the nearby zones of vashj'ir set up a clear story of what was taking place and a bunch of possible bosses, or rather some possible posses.
So what happened, why did we never get the abyssal maw as a raid instance. Why was it that we only got Firelands, as nice as that place was?
The short answer, is development time. It's something that comes up with almost everything I try and discuss related to the game, specifically with things related to projects the developers would need to undertake. This is a commodity. It is extremely scarce and extremely valuable. If something takes a small amount of dev time, then it's much more likely to get into the game. There's a lot that goes into how long it takes to develop a piece of the game, and one of those pieces is how far along you already are in the game.
Imagine you're writting a story. You have an assignment for class or perhaps taking part in NaNoWriMo (Nation Novel Writing Month). You get pretty far along over the first half of the month and then come up with a phenomenal way to change something have already written. You could have this exact same problem when writing any sort of essay for a project. It's much harder to change things once you've already started it. If you had the idea earlier on, not saying that you're bad for not having done so but inspiration isn't something you can control, you could have integrated it in your original design.
When designing a game this problem explodes and fractures into a thousand other problems. In a way it invalidates some previous time spent on the game, and in the game world, especially in an MMO where you are literally racing against the attention span of your audience, you need every moment you can get your hands on. As great as the people at Blizzard are, they are still human and have needs outside of running their game.
When it comes down to it you are left with a couple choices. You can delay the release of your content to change or improve what you have, but you can't do this forever. You do have deadlines and you do have to beat that attention span of your audience. You can drop the change or improvement you want to put in, provided it's not vital and you have the time for it. This is what happens a lot and while it's unfortunate, it often leads to better games. You can sometimes put it on the side-burner and work on it later. This is what they're doing with things like character models.
So unfortunately, as we saw, the abyssal maw was dropped from the raid release schedule. I'm not entirely sure I buy the whole "we wanted to see if 7 bosses would last people 5 months" argument because clearly that's absurd. There just wasn't enough time for the developers to bring enough new fights to cover two instances, at least not to do that and have it up to the same standard of quality we had been used to before then. Dragon soul was really a let down. In addition to the dev time to design fights for the raid, there was art time to make a cohesive set of armor for both instances. Sure they had the fire and water thing going on between the two, but that really restricts what you can do and forces you to make a lot of decisions that a lot of people might not be too happy with. The artists likely didn't want to create and entirely new zone that already has a fairly set theme to it. That's still a lot of work.
I haven't actually worked for or on any games that got past the "this is a great idea" phase, but my understanding is that this happens all the time. It's hard to see in games because part of their job is to make the game feel complete, to avoid making it feel like something wasn't included. It's really a shame because a lot of times some small adjustments might take a lot of work and there just isn't enough time in the day to get everything done.
Hopefully when asking for content in the future we can all be a bit more understanding of what goes on behind the curtains. They aren't trying to cheat us out of game material and they aren't slacking at their jobs. They work just as hard as you would, and are trying to put out the best game they possibly can.
I think there's more to this topic than what I've mentioned already, and specifically regarding the abyssal maw and firelands, but I'll save that for next time. Next week is rough with Terrace launching but I hope to have something more for you guys before too long.
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