Expansion based on old but revamped zones...?

[Popikaify]

I wish we get an expansion with updated old azeroth (or even outland,northrend) zones but scaled and relevant to current level,that would help cure my nostalgia,but would it work ? cant see any exp theme that would fit.

[lagiacrux]

"no, thats just lazy. they cant even bother making new zones. lazy lazy lazy" - some random forum poster

[Popikaify]

At this point,not a single thing should be concidered lazy,wow is in shit place,they need to do something really crazy to fix the game.

[Nutri]

I'd much rather have an expansion with the SIZE of Azeroth.

Every Xpac just felt small compared to vanilla. And that's not flyings fault, flying north to south on Azeroth still takes a long time.
Shadowlands made it even worse with the four non-connected zoned.

Give me a big landmass, and actual 'world to explore'.

This is an old post made during Legion, but this illustrates how small all the xpacs have been:

Edit: I see this gets quoted a lot for how much extra work it would be and how spread out vanilla was. I completely agree on these points! That said, I'd gladly wait 3-4 years for an expansion of that size if the current expansion accommodates that with continuous patches instead of a 2.5 year long final patch. Also, their worldbuilding is (I assume) a lot faster/more efficient than it was during the vanilla days. With a 4 years development cycle I'd guesstimate they could make an expansion of Azeroth' size that is actually more filled than vanilla was. Perhaps even by locking off sections and unlocking it as the xpac progresses.

[Kumorii]

I'd much rather have an expansion with the SIZE of Azeroth.

Every Xpac just felt small compared to vanilla. And that's not flyings fault, flying north to south on Azeroth still takes a long time.
Shadowlands made it even worse with the four non-connected zoned.

Give me a big landmass, and actual 'world to explore'.

This is an old post made during Legion, but this illustrates how small all the xpacs have been:

Original world we're in development longer than any expansion. Getting a world at the size of azeroth would take more than 2 years, maybe even longer than 4. Because you don't just require big zones but you also need to fill them with stuff to do, such as quests. Which require some more lore etc etc.
Amount of work just goes racing off.

I don't think players will be happy to wait for that long to get new content. Content that will be obsolete quite quickly anyway. If they are not going obsolete. Add a lot more development time.

Also, making a size of that magnitude usually warrants an entire new game...
Not trying to be a Debbie downer. But players have to accept if they want more shit it's gonna takes lots of time. Players tend to also want things now.. Its a conflict.

[EntertainmentNihilist]

Original world we're in development longer than any expansion. Getting a world at the size of azeroth would take more than 2 years, maybe even longer than 4. Because you don't just require big zones but you also need to fill them with stuff to do, such as quests. Which require some more lore etc etc.
Amount of work just goes racing off.

I don't think players will be happy to wait for that long to get new content. Content that will be obsolete quite quickly anyway. If they are not going obsolete. Add a lot more development time.

Also, making a size of that magnitude usually warrants an entire new game...
Not trying to be a Debbie downer. But players have to accept if they want more shit it's gonna takes lots of time. Players tend to also want things now.. Its a conflict.

Technically it is entirely possible. It won't happen because of human nature - but they could cut the salaries of a bunch of higher-ups and such and hire a bunch of extra people.

[Caerrona]

I wish we get an expansion with updated old azeroth (or even outland,northrend) zones but scaled and relevant to current level,that would help cure my nostalgia,but would it work ? cant see any exp theme that would fit.

I have seen a couple theories about a light vs void xpac, maybe some shit happens all around azeroth with the void invading (I guess it would legion type invasions) but on a world scale.

Another I have spotted floating around is we lose to the jailer and he fucks up the universe/azeroth. Out of all the theories I have seen I hope this one is true (even if it is unrelated to the next xpac). Due to the fact that (to my knowledge) the jailer is basically second in the universe (first ones > "protectors of the realms" (jailer and fam of death)

I just don't know where wow goes if we "beat" the jailer so thats my guess. We return to azeroth and it's mangled.
*if the next xpac were based around existing zones*

But all that would be kinda garbage to me, unless they added insta teleports everywhere. Travel time isn't "engaging" content and neither is a "world to explore".

[Kumorii]

Technically it is entirely possible. It won't happen because of human nature - but they could cut the salaries of a bunch of higher-ups and such and hire a bunch of extra people.

Technically yes. But I'm also trying to be realistic.

[Progenitor Aquarius]

I would love revamped zones but I wouldn't really like the new expansion there. Battle for Azeroth felt to me like a second Mist of Pandaria already and this is something I don't want. Rather explore new zones.

[Ivarr]

Because you don't just require big zones but you also need to fill them with stuff to do, such as quests. Which require some more lore etc etc.
Amount of work just goes racing off.

Blizzard doesn't need to 'fill' them at all, they only believe they do due to some new design philosophy that crept into the company. Everything is dense, everything is a quest area.

Of course the zones are small if every square inch has to be interactive and come with its own lore. But to the player this makes the new continents feel claustrophobic. They can't wander around in a location without stepping into another densely packed quest zone.

For an MMO, it's totally fine, even desirable, if it comes with large areas where nothing is going on. It can be filled with appropriate creatures, it can still look beautiful, but it doesn't have to come at the same design cost as crafting gameplay content takes.

Such areas of 'nothing' are important. It gives players a space to catch their breath. To plan their travels and to make the next point of interest more meaningful.

I wish we get an expansion with updated old azeroth (or even outland,northrend) zones but scaled and relevant to current level,that would help cure my nostalgia,but would it work ? cant see any exp theme that would fit.

Yeah. It would benefit WoW if the insanity of Cataclysm (and I like Cataclysm content for levelling) would be 'buried' underneath a revision of Azeroth where things are less crazy. There should still be signs Cataclysm happened some time ago, but most of it has now settled, aged and eroded.

This new, 'mundane' Azeroth can then be a place for more perpetual content. It shouldn't rule out epic catastrophes either, but these catastrophes would instead be phased events rather than permanent. The world should keep coming back to normal once an event concludes.

[Hitei]

I'd much rather have an expansion with the SIZE of Azeroth.

Every Xpac just felt small compared to vanilla. And that's not flyings fault, flying north to south on Azeroth still takes a long time.
Shadowlands made it even worse with the four non-connected zoned.

Give me a big landmass, and actual 'world to explore'.

This is an old post made during Legion, but this illustrates how small all the xpacs have been:

First, this pixel comparison isn't really all that accurate. They've cut out the big portions of open half-made terrain areas, but left in tons and tons of mountain ranges, cliffs, etc. that in the original game were inaccessible, or only accessible via specific exploity wall jumping, and all of those areas are literally nothing but mountain peaks., I also don't know why, for example, they are counting the trunk section of Teldrassil simply because you can fall past it, it's a literal flat low-textured cliff with occasional branches.

Second, the issue isn't dev time as Kumorii brings up, because this older style of design is actually much easier than the new world design approach. Most of Azeroth and Kalimdor is completely empty. A huge chunk of Kalimdor is the Barrens, Desolace, Tanaris and Silithus, where the terrain is literally just flat nothingness desert with the occasional wild mob. They've simply moved away from this approach--I think players have too: people will literally whine about having to spend 30 seconds more on a flight path or throw a complete fit like what happened when the portals were cut back, how do you think they'd react to suddenly going back to zones where most of the zone is just empty terrain they have to cross to get places?

Don't get me wrong. I'm not opposed to a return to that style, I just think it's important to be realistic about what that style entails. There's infinitely more actual "exploration" in any post-MoP expansion than there every was in Vanilla's original continents, because they were just padded with empty terrain with nothing in it. In that entire 57M pixel area there's maybe a dozen and a half actual hidden little areas and most of them are "You walked 15 minutes out of bounds to this location, here's a one room cave with nothing in it".

The sense of exploration came from being completely new to the game, which isn't going to come back even if we got two brand new continents that were collectively 60M pixels. You simply don't approach the game in the same way. You aren't lost and confused anymore, you have a strong grasp on how systems work, how quests work, you look at maps and previews before hand, you think about gathering all the quests for a region before completing them, you know how to immediately recognize a hostile town from a friendly one (or estimate where one will be based on the zone's setup), etc., etc.

[Cæli]

nostalgia mustn't be cured at all, it's something needed and wanted by nature and evolution

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I would like to see the old cities revamped to to reflect current lore.

• Stormwind: implement the scrapped Warriors District in Stormwind, and rebuild the Night Elf quarter. Also build a Little Pandaria/China Town for the Pandaren, Jinyu, and Grummles. Expand the harbor to show more ships coming and going to trade with Kul'Tiras, Gilneas, Pandaria, etc. Also show one or two Alliance airships circling around Stormwind and sending out squadrons of Griffons and Gyrocopters to patrol the skies over Stormwind. And that fleet of Zandalari ships we saw protecting Zandalar in that cutscene at the start of BFA? Stormwind should have at least that many naval ships protecting its harbor.

• Westfall: can the dialpidated fields be restored, soldiers returning home to populate the towns and countryside, and buildings fixed up?

• Gilneas: show it retaken and reconstruction efforts under way.

• Lordaeron: retaken by the (living) humans of Lordaeron and reconstruction efforts under way. The Undercity is filled in. New capital being built.

• Stromgarde: show reconstruction efforts under way.

• Theramore: show reconstruction efforts under way.

• Gnomergan: why haven't the Gnomes retaken it or built a new city yet?

• Exodar: show it repaired and flying/hovering over the ground.

• Night Elves: either show their new world tree city, or move them into a Night Elf quarter in Gilneas or Stormwind.

• Orgrimmar: if Blizzard is going to keep insisting that the Orcs are no longer fascist now that Garrosh (and Sylvanas) are gone, then actually show Orgrimmar's architecture reverting from the harsh, black steel and iron style and back to the more naturalistic look under Thrall's rule.

• Forsaken: need a new place to reside now that they've lost the Undercity.

• Bilgewater Harbor: show it having built up even more sense Cata.

• Gadgetzan: revamp it into the huge metropolis seen in the Hearthstone expansion. There are impressive Goblin cities on WoW private servers.

• Dawnchaser Tribe: show their new village settlement in the Vale of the Eternal Blossoms.

• Wandering Isle: allow us to return to the Wandering Isle and see Ji and Aysa's family.

[Airlick]

I'd much rather have an expansion with the SIZE of Azeroth.

Every Xpac just felt small compared to vanilla. And that's not flyings fault, flying north to south on Azeroth still takes a long time.
Shadowlands made it even worse with the four non-connected zoned.

Give me a big landmass, and actual 'world to explore'.

Azeroth was empty. The total area might have been 3-5 times bigger than that of xpac continents, but 70% of that area had a couple of trees, ruins or random useless mobs at best. No NPCs, no quests, no easter eggs, they were just empty. So the only thing you'd usually find while "exploring" a place was that there was nothing to find in the first place. Xpac continents barely had any truly empty areas.

[Ivarr]

A huge chunk of Kalimdor is the Barrens, Desolace, Tanaris and Silithus, where the terrain is literally just flat nothingness desert with the occasional wild mob. They've simply moved away from this approach--I think players have too: people will literally whine about having to spend 30 seconds more on a flight path or throw a complete fit like what happened when the portals were cut back, how do you think they'd react to suddenly going back to zones where most of the zone is just empty terrain they have to cross to get places?

That's exactly what I want. And indeed, fewer portals. Portals make the game feel more deserted. And I bet it's going to piss people off. But I wager these large stretches of land is what people came back to Classic for after not having played this game for years.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not opposed to a return to that style, I just think it's important to be realistic about what that style entails. There's infinitely more actual "exploration" in any post-MoP expansion than there every was in Vanilla's original continents, because they were just padded with empty terrain with nothing in it. In that entire 57M pixel area there's maybe a dozen and a half actual hidden little areas and most of them are "You walked 15 minutes out of bounds to this location, here's a one room cave with nothing in it".

The sense of exploration came from being completely new to the game, which isn't going to come back even if we got two brand new continents that were collectively 60M pixels. You simply don't approach the game in the same way. You aren't lost and confused anymore, you have a strong grasp on how systems work, how quests work, you look at maps and previews before hand, you think about gathering all the quests for a region before completing them, you know how to immediately recognize a hostile town from a friendly one (or estimate where one will be based on the zone's setup), etc., etc.

The current system doesn't leave us much choice. The game developers deliberately keep the player's quests in efficient batches and encourage the player to methodically move through each zone. It's quite different from Vanilla where quest givers seem to deliberately try to throw a player off track by frequently sending them on a quest across the world before they are done with the current zone. And that was great. You keep doing what quest givers say and before you're know it you're on a different continent not knowing what you're doing anymore.

It's that sense of being lost that makes the old content thrilling.

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Azeroth was empty. The total area might have been 3-5 times bigger than that of xpac continents, but 70% of that area had a couple of trees, ruins or random useless mobs at best. No NPCs, no quests, no easter eggs, they were just empty. So the only thing you'd usually find while "exploring" a place was that there was nothing to find in the first place.

Yes please more of that. Rather than stepping into the next hectic questing area right after having left another, I'd like to travel, roam and not having any idea where I'm going. It makes the next encounter that much more meaningful.

[Hitei]

That's exactly what I want. And indeed, fewer portals. Portals make the game feel more deserted. And I bet it's going to piss people off. But I wager these large stretches of land is what people came back to Classic for after not having played this game for years.



The current system doesn't leave us much choice. The game developers deliberately keep the player's quests in efficient batches and encourage the player to methodically move through each zone. It's quite different from Vanilla where quest givers seem to deliberately try to throw a player off track by frequently sending them on a quest across the world before they are done with the current zone. And that was great. You keep doing what quest givers say and before you're know it you're on a different continent not knowing what you're doing anymore.

It's that sense of being lost that makes the old content thrilling.

Again, I think you are conflating two feelings that have separate sources. I'm not opposed to that design, but you are not going to get that sense of being lost back, ever, precisely because you know better now. If you get a breadcrumb quest that sends you across the continent to some higher level zone's random camp to talk to an NPC for 20 seconds, make that trip and talk to that guy and he is just like "Okay now take this letter back", and there are no quests for you there or anything for you to do, you're not going to be lost and full of awe--because you understand how zones and quests and the other fundamental game systems work now, you're just going to be confused (and a large portion of the playerbase are going to be downright furious and scream about how Blizzard is trying really hard to pad MAUs with pointless walking back and forth or what not).

To give two examples from my own early game experience:

My first character was a Night Elf, and I somehow completely missed that Teldrassil was a tree. I also didn't know that you could press M and just open a map of that zone, discovered or not. I was under the impression that Teldrassil was just a regular forest area and that off in some direction I could probably keep wandering and eventually get to the human zones, or whatever. At some point I found myself on the bridge above the little dry creek that is along the main road to Darnassus (just before the cottage where the road splits north for the harpies), and when I stopped on that bridge, I remember looking North along the little ravine which goes off to the hills to the north--and thinking "Wow, one day I'm gonna follow this up past the hills into the mountains I wonder what I will find up there." That sense of wonder and being lost and exploration had absolutely nothing to do with the design of Vanilla zones or systems, it was because I was brand new to the game and just didn't know any better. If I had just known that pressing M would open my map, I would have learned in one second that there was nothing in that direction besides some more hills, because Teldrassil is an "island" and walking 90 seconds in that direction would have brought me to a giant cliff dropping off into the air.

If you get those random breadcrumb quests now, you're not going to get lost. You're going to glance at the map, think about the best way to get there, make sure you stop and grab flight paths along the way so you can get back and forth easier, keep an eye out for higher level mob areas so you don't wander into some dead-end full of things that are going to daze and kill you, etc. You can't get back to that state of ignorance that was the foundation of the sense of exploration.

The zones being bigger and emptier again isn't going to bring back that thrill, though it might produce a better sense of world scale.

I agree with @Airlick that ultimately, all Vanilla did with exploration was feel kind of disappointing. The answer to "What is over there?" was almost always "Absolutely nothing."

[Kumorii]

Blizzard doesn't need to 'fill' them at all, they only believe they do due to some new design philosophy that crept into the company. Everything is dense, everything is a quest area.

Of course the zones are small if every square inch has to be interactive and come with its own lore. But to the player this makes the new continents feel claustrophobic. They can't wander around in a location without stepping into another densely packed quest zone.

For an MMO, it's totally fine, even desirable, if it comes with large areas where nothing is going on. It can be filled with appropriate creatures, it can still look beautiful, but it doesn't have to come at the same design cost as crafting gameplay content takes.

Such areas of 'nothing' are important. It gives players a space to catch their breath. To plan their travels and to make the next point of interest more meaningful.



Yeah. It would benefit WoW if the insanity of Cataclysm (and I like Cataclysm content for levelling) would be 'buried' underneath a revision of Azeroth where things are less crazy. There should still be signs Cataclysm happened some time ago, but most of it has now settled, aged and eroded.

This new, 'mundane' Azeroth can then be a place for more perpetual content. It shouldn't rule out epic catastrophes either, but these catastrophes would instead be phased events rather than permanent. The world should keep coming back to normal once an event concludes.

Disagree... If they don't there is no need for it to be there. Having a big world and then have it contain nothing except in a few areas. I see no difference between having just those few areas that have content. Having big world omfor the sake of a big world is just wasted development time. Not gonna wait longer to get content so they can increase amount of non-content.

[Lochton]

I wish we get an expansion with updated old azeroth (or even outland,northrend) zones but scaled and relevant to current level,that would help cure my nostalgia,but would it work ? cant see any exp theme that would fit.

I would love for a world-changing expansion to update the world as to how it is perceived within their content (Gadgetzan being a huge city, life in Pandaria having changed much more than it was, capitols updated with the addition of more races, etc) but I'm afraid that many would just complain more because we're brought back to our roots. I mean, that IS how Cataclysm was received. Update all the world zones on Azeroth, maybe at a stretch, show Outland crumbling and being even smaller, as for Draenor, well, more overrun by Yrel and her crazed crusade?

[Ivarr]

Disagree... If they don't there is no need for it to be there.

Our Earth has lots of land surface that has no purpose. We pay large sums of money to explore it and at no point do we expect a random strange to jump from behind a tree or a rock to come help him on a mission.

a big world is just wasted development time.

Just generating terrain isn't nearly as big an investment as you'd think. After all, no new assets need to be created. The textures, foliage and rock formations already exist, nothing has to be added but filler.

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I would love for a world-changing expansion to update the world as to how it is perceived within their content (Gadgetzan being a huge city, life in Pandaria having changed much more than it was, capitols updated with the addition of more races, etc)

Yeah that's how I would envision a WoW 2. The premise would be that WoW itself was just an abstraction of the actual World of Warcraft, a proxy. Instead the actual world is huge, cities are huge, forests and mountains are huge. It's all what we already have, but it's so much bigger and impressive.

[Kumorii]

Our Earth has lots of land surface that has no purpose. We pay large sums of money to explore it and at no point do we expect a random strange to jump from behind a tree or a rock to come help him on a mission.



Just generating terrain isn't nearly as big an investment as you'd think. After all, no new assets need to be created. The textures, foliage and rock formations already exist, nothing has to be added but filler.

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Not sure what real world has to do with a game. I mean, I get that you might enjoy it. But if there is no reason its mostly wasted, to me.

And just creating terrain won't create fun things to explore though. Its the touch by artist that makes the terrain beautiful. The generation is just foundation... And yeah, a foundation without anything is just that, foundation. No value unless utilized.

To add to that.. "big world but nothing in it", is a common complaint to bug games that focus on size rather than content.

Same argument still remains for me. If there is areas that are just there, it's a waste of time. Agree to disagree.