A world revamp? - Speculation and discussion, plus poll

[Romarii]

hopefully it happens with the level squish modern wow just feels like an endless collection grindfest from the last 8 expansions.

[Gaidax]

No thanks - for me old areas are done deal. I have no issues with spot revamps that make sense like Darkshore or Silithus, but I want them to focus efforts on offering genuine new content and zones with every new expansion. I don't need Silverpine Forest re-imagined upteenth time just to make level 15 guys blazing through it happy for the whole 20 minutes they will spend there.

[Splenda]

It may happen again but I hope it doesn't. I felt like it took too many resources. I have bad memories of Cataclysm. Maybe as a major patch instead?

[PenguinChan]

A soft revamp, with introduction of scaling and repeatable content like World Quests will massively improve the world health. Blizzard seems to be going that direction, so that you aren't hard locked to JUST do the current content - just heavily encouraged for an hour or two with what you want. I don't see them doing another Cataclysm revamp though, that degree seems impossible now.

[rda]

Don't want any revamps of the old world. What they did with zones in Cata was NOT worth it - the zones ended up good, the quest flow better than before, sure, but the benefits of that were small compared to the effort put. Cata would have been a much better expansion if instead of putting effort into the revamp, they put it into the gameplay.

Don't want any level squishes either, while we are on this. We had two stat squishes and aside from solving a technical problem with mobs HP overflowing 32-bit integers which was the entire reason we had the first stat squish (and which they solved for real shortly after that first squish, so the second squish was entirely unneeded) - the squishes resulted in nothing positive and a lot of negative with things breaking and behaving idiotically, and having to be fixed (and many things are unfixed and will remain unfixed by design - eg, the gear progression during leveling was destroyed and is never coming back). The level squish will similarly achieve pretty much nothing and will just break things. Unless they actually reduce time to level / rework leveling to be more interesting - but they can do all that perfectly well without the level squish.

For the poll, my position is "I don't want the revamp and don't know whether it is coming", this option does not exist, so I went for "I don't want the revamp and I think it isn't coming" as an approximation.

[SaneOstrich]

With level scaling they could revamp the entire world and still let it be relevant. You lvl to the 'new max' (either from '120' or 1) in any of the reworked zones. And since you would not need all the new zones to reach max lvl it's a great way to encourage lvling alts, since you could probably lvl several alts to max without touching a zones you have done before.

Weave in spread-out world content like WQ's, warfronts (which can easily be expanded beyond H/A), island/scenario like events, and it all stays relevant. We've seen them sending us back to older content more and more in the last two expansions. Even if it is only for a little while to get your artifact or herd vol'jin to his next object of interest.

I just really hope they will make zone stories stand on their own, so they stay relevant and logical for longer. Most vanilla zones had a contained story. Cataclysm made it all relevant only for the duration of cataclysm. Which is fine when the expansion is rather contained, like northrend, pandaria, legion and bfa, but the weird mix of zone relevances, timelines and whatnot is really confusing in kalimdor and EK.

The only problem with this is, how to tell a coherent expansion story, if you want to make all the zones stand on their own. but a man can dream

[Caerule]

I really really want this. But there need to be some conditions to make it worthwhile:

1. A new class.
People aren't going to see the new world if they don't get motivated to level through it. If we get a new class, the majority of players would try it out. Meaning most players would journey through the new content. If we get class skins or something that start from scratch, that works too.

2. Relevance of leveling zones at max level.
There needs to be a way to lure people to the new zones. This can be many things. Some options:
A. World and Emissary quests. Like, how about a different zone every day or week on both Kalimdor and EK has World Quests to complete for some reward?
B. Zone invasions. Like the Legion Invasions that were the pre-Legion events, perhaps a random zone on each continent is under a max level invasion?
C. Challenge Zones. With the new scaling tech, they could make one zone a week a Challenge Zone. Make it scale up to max level and offer reward for completing all of its storylines?

3. Old Content accessible.
Nostalgia is a powerful force. People will want to explore the content as it used to be, before the revamp. Same way people want to explore the classic quests. If they make the old content still accessible through a timewalking guy, that would be ideal.


The rewards for doing another world remake would be many.

1. The story continues.
Cata did a great job in building on the original zone's lore and progressing it. It would be great to see that again.

2. See the effects of past expansions.
So much has happened. The world burned in a Legion invasion. Ships crashed onto Azeroth. The Emerald Dream got corrupted. Sargeras' sword unleashed great earthquakes and annihilated Silithus. Azerite burst forth everywhere. The Alliance and Horde had a giant war that displaced whole races. Huge Warfronts took place. I'd like to see the consequences of this as I explore the lands.

3. New and updated capitols.
It would be the perfect chance to give the Night Elves and Forsaken a new place to call home. And to update the existing capitols to the current standard. Hopefully including Silvermoon.

4. Much better looking game.
Graphical update to the old zones would be magnificent. For new players, there is a sharp contrast between the ugly old zones, and the great new ones. Almost everything that walks around in the old zones is receiving model updates already. If we can update the base game to the same standard we've seen in BfA's zone updates, this can be a game that will be much more graphically appealing for the coming decade, than it currently is.

[DeicideUH]

Since it's clear most people, haven't read the OP, here are some thoughts for those who think it can't happen:

- This year is WoW's 15th anniversary and Warcraft's 25th. Perfect moment to announce an expansion that features a soft reboot of the franchise
- A revamp will need to happen at some point. Blizzard can't leave the game's leveling as is, as it makes it unappealing and unfriendly for new player. Better to happen now and reinvigorate the franchise for another decade or so.
- The WoW team is much larger now than back in Cataclysm, and they have built assets over the last expansions that greatly reduce the resources needed to revamp the old world.
- The BfA patch cycle is way slower than Legion's. By this time in Legion, we were already seeing 7.3 PTR, while 8.3 PTR is most likely to come only in November. It's almost like they are buying time for next expansion.
- Both Legion and BfA are expansions that clean and reset the world, with major implications for the setting.
- Blizzard likes to drop hints for future expansions. Like the Zandalari/Kul Tiran prisoners in Azsuna. I think BfA's hint is Uther's Tomb, an area that was revamped for seemingly no purpose.

I'm not saying it will happen for sure. But it can happen, no doubt.

[Darkarath]

Yesterday I just wrote a post about this. We share some ideas OP. I put the link to the post right here in case that you want to read it (long post).

https://www.mmo-champion.com/threads...-be-introduced

[mojusk]

id like to see a massive rework of every zone in every expac.
the lore doesnt make sense, it should be about the aftermath of the expansions and the quests should be about preserving peace and order, preventing baddies from rising up again etc.
and maybe some WQs/invasions scaled to low level, like the pre legion invasions, to make levelers feel part of the current content.

but is would be a massive task to do, so i doubt itll ever happend.

[Low Hanging Fruit]

When it comes to WoW these days I always tend to think the likely direction will be what is cheapest, quickest, and easiest. World revamps don't seem to fit in that spot very easily.

[DeicideUH]

Yesterday I just wrote a post about this. We share some ideas OP. I put the link to the post right here in case that you want to read it (long post).

https://www.mmo-champion.com/threads...-be-introduced

We share some ideas indeed.

I think the world revamp will more like "Azeroth after 10 years of apparent peace" than "Black Empire rises". I think a world revamp that, while set in a particular time frame, is more about rediscovering the world and its cultures will few more "timeless" and avoid one of Cataclysm's pitfalls: a world that got old quickly. The expansion could of course have areas dedicated to its big threat, and patches could be more story-focused, but the revamp itself should be about world-building, not a world-ending threat (that may be over by expansion's end).

About leveling experience, I imagine something like this:

We are squished to level 40 or so. New cap is actually 60, so we are mean to explore and enjoy the world more this time.
Starting a new character, we appear in the new world. You can talk to a bronze dragon nearby and go back to the old world, if you so choose to level up there.
You can level 1-40 in the designated "low level areas" of the new world, which are mostly the racial areas.
At level 10, you can choose to level in any of previous expansions. This is a choice. All previous expansions scale from 10 to 40.

In the new world, there are mid-level areas that scale 20-60 and high level areas that scale 40-60.

- - - Updated - - -

When it comes to WoW these days I always tend to think the likely direction will be what is cheapest, quickest, and easiest. World revamps don't seem to fit in that spot very easily.

I think they'll make an extra effort for the Warcraft 25th anniversary announcement, thought.

[Low Hanging Fruit]

I think they'll make an extra effort for the Warcraft 25th anniversary announcement, thought.

I think the effort is already known. First one is WC3 remake. Pretty much the staple game from the series that got the ball rolling on WoW. No announced date yet but I suspect it will be pretty close to Nov 19th if I had to guess. A nice nearly the holidays combo with the anniversary. Then you have Classic dropping about 2 months before that allowing you to spin a tale of beginning to now, full circle, roll the montage rolling though the expansions. Not to mention announcing a content cycle release date in Classic. All of this leads right into the final patch info on BFA and then announce the next expansion after BFA. Probably some store mounts and pets that have to do with the 25th.

I am not trying to be pessimistic only because they already got a pretty big lineup of things for it combined with a typical bag of tricks. I seriously doubt they are going to go big on an expansion that technically won't be releasing until the 26th anniversary range? Maybe?

[Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang]

An even more radical level squish would be to simply forget about levels per say :
-since WoW post-classic is all about the endgame and not about the leveling, why bother anyway? (its true that they do sell boosts...)
-instead, similarly to how things are drifting with crafts, each expansion would be self contained : you create a character, and you can directly work to unlock its content
-this is more or less how content has been working for the last 2 expansions : you unlock storylines and grind AP levels during most of the expansion instead of XP levels

For gameplay reasons they could keep the levels up to something like 20, so all chars would be on an equal footing to an AR character, and that would also work better with the starting zones of Worgens, Goblins and Pandarens.

This would be the simplest way to avoid the continuities aberrations of forcing Dark Irons to face their kin or Nightborne to do either the BC or WotLK battles.

Plus I assume it would work much better with the current gaming crowd.

[rda]

- This year is WoW's 15th anniversary and Warcraft's 25th. Perfect moment to announce an expansion that features a soft reboot of the franchise

Taking just this one point and not trying to be argumentative.

If they do a soft reboot, they will just kill the franchise. The reboot will eat a lot of resources and as a result their product will be a repeat of what they already have - a second BFA. This will just end it right there and then. Nobody will play yet another boring take on the same exact concept of just zones and instances. They are promising great changes to classes. That could work. But that's a lot of work on its own, and you are talking about a soft reboot meaning redoing zones and things like that which decreases what they can spend on classes (and they need to spend a hell of a lot because things are screwed up very thoroughly).

[DeicideUH]

Taking just this one point and not trying to be argumentative.

If they do a soft reboot, they will just kill the franchise. The reboot will eat a lot of resources and as a result their product will be a repeat of what they already have - a second BFA. This will just end it right there and then. Nobody will play yet another boring take on the same exact concept of just zones and instances. They are promising great changes to classes. That could work. But that's a lot of work on its own, and you are talking about a soft reboot meaning redoing zones and things like that which decreases what they can spend on classes (and they need to spend a hell of a lot because things are screwed up very thoroughly).

First off, class work has nothing to do with world-building. Completely separated teams.

Second, a soft reboot has nothing to do with repeating BfA, which has nothing of reboot in it.

[spleen1015]

Reposting this here.

A revamp of leveling is definitely needed. I've thought for a while that this should not be an expansion feature but more of an on going project. Every new patch has 3-5 zones revamped. They could even group them by expansion if they wanted.

When they did the level scaling they should have made it so that you could level in any zone up to the last 2 expansions, ie everything before Legion could be used to level from 1-100. Then when the next expansion drops, add Legion and make all zones 1-110.

If they do it that way, then revamping zones becomes much easier, IMO.

[rda]

First off, class work has nothing to do with world-building. Completely separated teams.

Second, a soft reboot has nothing to do with repeating BfA, which has nothing of reboot in it.

You are asking for big things. Big things make teams expand. When team A expands, team B cannot expand or it shrinks. Everything is connected. "Completely separate teams" works only up to a point and after that point it morphs into "there is actually a common pool of resources, speaking at large".

The second reboot that you are asking - if I understood you right - is a big rework of zones / quests / visuals. This will take resources off everything else. This will make the reboot similar to BFA in that there are no new features added, just existing features extended and polished somewhat. That's what I meant by the reboot ending up same as BFA.

[Sondrelk]

Just a few niggles with your worldbuilding in the intro.

1. Horde and Alliance should not be hostile: They can be cold towards each other, but having them be openly hostile, especially with having, say, the mag'har attack the Draenei, means the potential growth the Horde is going through this expansion is for nothing, if after a timeskip the Alliance gets even more grievances and reasons to distrust the Horde then it just becomes even more unbelievable that they gang together for the next big threat.

Continuing on from that, i was actually quite shocked to see you had many of the same ideas i had for Plaguelands, though i would have personally gone for a future where Forsaken who were not loyal to Sylvanas has moved to Andorhal and established a new government, much of their story would focus on them now not having much of a direction to move in, seeing as they have no great enemy, and Sylvanas who they admired was shown to not have their best interests in heart.
The forsaken story would therefore be about whether they should reconcile with their human kin, or if they should cut themselves off completely, eventually dying out.

I would agree that Draenei should move away from Azuremyst and reestablish themselves somewhere else, moving to large uninhabited areas like Twilight highlands would fit well. If you want the reason they moved to be Mag'har attacking, then you would have to make them the villains, since the Mag'har have no legitimate grievances against the Draenei of Azeroth, Lightforged maybe, if you stretch it a bit, but still.



A theme i always thought would be amazing to tap into would be if Alliance is the sole military power left, having imposed something similar to the treaty of Versailles on the Horde, preventing them from having a standing army.
After that, have a major enemy show up, and show the Alliance fail to defeat them alone, but equally not wanting to trust the Horde to help them. This would be fertile ground for giving actual insight into why the Alliance and Horde needs to work together, and why none can go it solo.



As for the technicals, i do believe Cata was mostly made with reused assets, Twilight highlands certainly was. And i do think doing simple steps like updating the tree models, or simply going over each zones geometry with a cursory update would work wonders for the graphical fidelity overall.

[Briselody]

The second reboot that you are asking - if I understood you right - is a big rework of zones / quests / visuals. This will take resources off everything else. This will make the reboot similar to BFA in that there are no new features added, just existing features extended and polished somewhat. That's what I meant by the reboot ending up same as BFA.

The biggest part will be quests, as the zones and visuals will be much quicker work than Cataclysm, since Cata involved reworking the zones from the ground up to allow flying (which the vanilla zones were never designed for). I really think you over-estimate how much effort a new world revamp would take.