Last year, ArenaNet took my nod for best developer communication. It’s been solid all year. Really, any MMO putting out regular blog posts and roadmaps and actually sticking to them deserves kudos here, and that’s a lot of the major ones. But at the risk of ticking some folks off, I’m gonna take this post to point out that Blizzard has really upped its comms game in 2022.
Now, I reserve tremendous amounts of side-eye for Blizzard for all the obvious reasons, and I also think that when the company reps are talking, they are saying very dumb things, often to hand-picked influencers who don’t/won’t/can’t call them out, but that’s not what I’m praising here. I just want to note the fact that Blizzard used to be one of the worst MMO studios for telling players what to expect in WoW outside of carefully scripted events, and now the company is to the point where it’s putting out frequently recap dev blogs that are literally redundant, which is frankly a good thing because it just means all the info was presented already and competently. Heck, I can now set a clock by the quarterly Diablo IV blog posts. I’m a fan of this cadence. Keep it up.
Was Blizzard the best? Probably not – but it definitely caught my attention.
Bonus points to Blade and Soul, of all games, for creating a state of absolute clarity around all of its updates this year. The game may be shrinking, but by god, I know the names of every single patch it released in 2022 thanks to its detailed posts.
Which MMO studio would you say had the best dev communication in 2022?
At the turn of every calendar year, the MassivelyOP team assembles a traditional feast of annual content for your table. We recap the year, issue awards, highlight our favorite (and least favorite) stories, and gather your opinions together to send off the last year and welcome the new one. Grab a plate and take a bite out of this year-end Daily Grind!
