I think the conclusive answer is: Not early enough.
I know everyone loves to compare it to previous expansions as far back as 15 years ago and their dev cycles. They do not seem to take into aco@#$% that game development changes in terms of tech at quite a rapid pace, especially in something like a 15 year span. Then you have to take into account how their team has changed, how much resources they actually have and so on. You could churn out an expansion every 3 months if there were enough resources on an efficient team. You could make an expansion for 3 years and have it suck big time. Comparing df without knowing the changes is kinda moot. Their team has changed so much over (especially last few) years.
Knowing how game development works, i think "development" of the expansion started right after shadowlands landed, with conceptualization at least a year before sl.Sandbox and initial testing may coincide with the date expressed here anyway.
Now what I would like to know is how early the story for an expansion is created. The base ideas, that is. But that is most likely only discernable from Blizzard directly, not from data =/
Which means 11.0 is probably on a whiteboard right now and zone designers will really dig into it by mid next year. Possibly the same time they build 10.2-10.3.I have a running theory that every xpac lately is soryboarded to have 3ish major patches but they cut down the scope depending on reception and push resources into the next xpac.All that said, team 2 works incredibly hard to push out new content as often as they do.*edit: also of note to the pace of game development, they don't have much iteration time relatively speaking
You know what? WoW is over 15 yes old and I still love it. So Blizzard are doing some things right, and overall, we are lucky to have so many people still working on our favourite game.
As soon as SL started to go wrong, which gives us why 9.1 took almost a year.The legal problems also changed plenty of things. According to their own info from the company and employees, they were not working on anything related to wow for sometime because of the allegations. They also started to change their pipeline to address as many problems as they could for WoW to get some favor back with the community (the big customization patch) and they probably changed plenty of things from DF as soon as they had to do something about borrowed power and etc. The way the features were really crude, especially the talents hints at some big changes within the development.So, yeah, this DF probably started after 9.0.
"These indexing additions highly indicate that the work on the open-world features of Dragonflight started almost 18 months ago."So April-May 2021 when the game started to feel long in the tooth, and we had no certain date of 9.1 (even though it was on PTR)? Around then was when they were solidified into making the dev builds of the overworld maps we have now?
The expansion is ready for launch but the main question is are the patches after launch ready? We need new content every 4-5 months, 7-8 month long patches from Shadowlands were the worst thing about that expansion
Wow, that's honestly impressive!
DF was for sure in pre-production some time before releasing SL. They might even have a road map years ahead for a new release (xpacs, big patches and so on) like Respawn does with Apex Legends so they have some sort of plan ahead of them. Bare in mind, that during pre-production not everyone on team needs to be on board. I think team responsible for BfA at the last leg of the xpac was slowly shifting to DF. Programmers were maybe the last bunch due to constant bug fixing ;)
Ion Hazzikostas stated in an interview that "Dragonflight has been in development since way before Shadowlands was released", and Shadowlands was released in November 2020.So saying "Dragonflight development started around Q2 2021" is a blatant lie, and looks like Blizzard is using Wowhead to push this idea to justify the current state of Dragonflight before release. It's just a lie, no other way to say it, specially when that interview was featured here in Wowhead in the second 00:42 of the interview. It's pretty clear.