Emerald Dream will NOT be an Expansion

[Sam the Wiser]

No, why must people keep bringing up a dead topic!

[iadamson]

it'll be a large patch as part of an expansion.

although potential for being an expansion.

if MoP has taught us anything it should be to never say never to possibility.

[Apology]

I'm getting flashbacks to pre-MoP. "How can you justify an entire expansion on pandas! There's nothing there! You can't have a whole expansion based on something with no lore!"

Or even the new classe / race combinations in Cataclysm. "Tauren's can't be paladins! That makes no sense! And night elves can't be mages, either!"

I don't understand why people can't seem to comprehend the fact that new lore can be made to make it work. It could easily be a whole expansion if they really wanted it to be. That's not to say it's likely. But it's not flat out impossible as some people seem to suggest.

[iadamson]

The Emerald Dream could include many things that are just pure awesome. It would be like MoP but they could crank the awesome meter to max.

We would get an entire zone/ leveling questing/ world pvp zone based on Azeroth before the sundering.

We could see Drakonid as a neutral race!

And Dragonsworn as a class!

[mysticx]

Actually if that's the case, it IS possible to make an expansion from that very easily.

Imagine a Primordial Azeroth visited.

It'd almost be liking going into the past.

Yeah, a past before towns, cities, nasty converted-into-hellhole-temples, basically one big old Azshara, and we all know how much content there was out there, right? :P

[Xiphan]

Blizzard always say they find the Emerald Dream a compelling idea to further explore, and I think after how well they fleshed out the footnote that was Pandaria it's entirely possible they could execute an Emerald Dream expansion with finesse.

The idea that it's just Azeroth but green isn't really right either. It's Azeroth in its original state as a continent, with deeper layers of scrapped ideas the Titans had in mind for the landscape - there's so much Blizzard could do with it. There would be creatures roaming around that went extinct thousands of years ago, things like Manta and whatever the owners of those huge skeletons in Tanaris are. The Nightmare could make a really gritty and compelling main antagonist. I can see why it doesn't seem very interesting to many people though.
The only real qualm I have is the idea that nothing can change it permanently so founding settlements there is out of the question. I'm sure they could just have Ysera change that though or be able to make exceptions with the realm in such peril.

We'll definitely see the Dream in some substantial form besides a couple of quests at some point, I hope they don't confine it to a raid or patch.

[Flaks]

I was going to say that there won't be but then I realized that Blizzard scrapped already established GOOD lore for the crap we have now based entirely on players begging for it. So Emerald Dream doesn't seem too far-fetched. Hell, it'd be better than China being ported into WoW with no actual coherency.

[deviantcultist]

So glad people are finally getting over the whole Emerald Dream nonsense.

[Keoren]

I still see it best fitting as a storyline to go along with an Azshara expansion, leading to the coming of the Legion. Ignoring it completely would seem as silly to me as the wasting of Azjol-Nerub does.

[Kasami]

Don't the dream simulate the world we're jumping from ingame? Like in that Icecrown quest where you're finding a cure for the plagued crusader: you went into the dream/nightmare state instead of your surroundings just changing dramatically. In that case there's no super continent in the dream, since the backup copy isn't old but being constantly replaced with the ongoing, living world.

Having said that, I think the blog is still right about the similarities and the thought of MoP being the Emerald Dream -expansion. It's simply a case of Blizzard having too many ideas and too much work on their hands.