10.0 Revamp - Seems extremely likely now

[someguy233]

Danuser and Ion, those both losers only care about horde.

All good stuffs goes to horde, better racials, better race (just look allied races, alliance got 2 that they already had LMAO)

change my mind

I get it, alliance has been pretty bland for awhile now. Horde allied races are in the same boat though.

Both ally and horde got 2 races that are virtually identical to already existing options (DiD, KTH / HmT, MHO) and another that’s a little more different, but still very similar (MG / ZT).

Ally needs some love, but regarding allied races the blue boys have it better than the red. Void elves are much more appealing than nightborne for example.

[SinR]

Timeskip into 100 years in the future and the Protoss are invading

[darklogrus]

You'll have to understand that I respectfully disagree with the notion that Blizzard's design philosophy is "fuck the people who pay for our game."

It's like you have been living under a rock or something. The company thinks very little of its own employees, so what gives you the impression that think any differently for the common player..

[Musta]

At this point, idk, anything can or cant happen. Would i like to see a revamp? yes, but have little faith it will happen and IF it happens, i have even less faith it will be good.

[Jinpachi]

Seeing as how all Blizz does is borrow ideas from other games and make it their own, they will ape ARR's storyline and WoWify it. mark my words.

[C20]

A revamp would be welcome, but not like Cataclysm.

For me, it wasn't even that Cataclysm was 'unfinished', it was that there was such a lack of engaging content. They may have remade the old world, and a lot of people were excited at the improvements to levelling it would bring, but ultimately it lacked significant end-game content. People level alts through the content, and then they're done with it. The fact that it was possible to queue for dungeons all the way to max level and bypass the levelling meant that most of the old world revamp was wasted for many players. I personally LOVED the old WPL and EPL quests (Horde side) much more than I like the post-Cata versions.

I do agree that I'd like a refresh, but I'm really not sure what I'd want from it. I unsubbed in spring 2021, and I haven't bothered to resub - the longest time I've ever been continuously unsubbed from WoW since I started in 2007. Even in my casual years from 2011, I still played the game fairly frequently. To bring someone like me back to the game, it'd have to be groundbreaking.

I liked the storytelling of Shadowlands (yes, even the Maw intro), and even though it was introduced in 8.1.5, I liked that Wintergrasp was an epic BG. Being able to go into it in 9.0 and be on a roughly even footing to other players felt great. Having a large scale battle that wasn't AV felt fantastic, and it got me interested in the aspects of PVP I loved the most. I'd even say that despite a few flaws, the PVP gearing and upgrade system was relatively well designed. I'd even say I was a fan of Torghast because it brought crazy levels of power to a small portion of the game.

However, the novelty of things fell off quickly. Grinding anima to unlock the things around your base just felt boring to me, and finding my Kyrian troops constantly losing 'easy' battles compared to Night Fae felt frustrating. Being unable to visit UC or Darnassus without going to visit the bronze dragonflight NPC's made me very sad because UC particularly was my favourite city of them all. It was the first city I discovered when I started playing WoW. The conduits felt great in some places, but much like talents, I quickly picked my favourites and rarely changed them.

So yeah, I'm not really sure what I'd want from a refresh. Please, not another remake of the world. Not another 'grind this resource just for the hell of it'. True-cross faction would be welcome, but that alone wouldn't be substantial enough to bring me back. I'd love to see more large-scale PVP battles, perhaps bring in the AI they used for island expeditions to a few huge hybrid PVP-PVE battlegrounds. I want content I can jump into and instantly start enjoying without it being absolutely necessary to continue a storyline. I want to enjoy something as I'm doing it - not slowly grinding my way up to something where the end-result is disappointing or feels necessary to progress the game.

Perhaps they should consider bringing back the older-style PVP to the game. Collecting marks from specific battlegrounds. Bring back old AV (pre-2.3, perhaps even as far back as Korrack being in the game) as a permanent feature instead of a yearly thing. Fighting over contested points in the world, with some real fun incentive to do so, even if that incentive is just 'we raided crossroads because we felt like we were fighting over territory and it felt awesome to have a huge number of players fighting for the hell of it'.

Maybe something like Planetside 2, where the battlefields in the world are constantly shifting, but introducing something like stronger guards if one faction is severely outnumbered, and in areas near a faction-specific stronghold/city. Bringing back the ability to toggle PVP on or off anywhere should definitely be reintroduced. People didn't used to enable it because it granted them an XP bonus, they enabled it either for ganking or because they wanted to fight off a bunch of people in some relatively mundane area. WorldDefense used to be enabled by default, but I think it got disabled by default a few expansions ago. I'm sure I wasn't the only person who would travel across an entire continent if I saw a lot of '[X] is under attack!' pop up because there was a chance of some random uninstanced PVP where I wasn't sure what to expect.

Timeskip into 100 years in the future and the Protoss are invading

This would just be the Necropolis invasions, but with pylons that we destroy. Congratulations, the expansion is done!

[Swnem]

*looks at about the last two speculation threads.*

*looks at Awakenings last cycle.*

Yep, it only came to exist because of Shadowlands.

Awakenings is a 2 week old leak.

Sigh... i really am tired of people being stubburn for stubburness sake.

My opinion. Don't agree? All good. Moving along.

[Baine]

Uh... why?

Well, because it has no game purpose other than getting your decorated home, which has very limited gameplay potential. Besides, I don't think the dev team seeks to create spaces that isolate players.

[SNES-1990]

As nice as it would be, it would require a lot of work.

Modern Blizzard doesn't have that work ethic or competence to pull it off.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

Elder Scrolls Online and Guild Wars 2 have seen consistent growth since 2019. FFXIV is obviously exploding massively before it's expansion is even out. Lost Ark will obviously grow even more after it's official regional release and it's positive beta reception. Roblox is a culture hit akin to Minecraft and Fortnite on the younger audience. Even Runescape is trending upwards still.

I don't know which staple MMO isn't growing except WoW.

What are you basing growth off of?

The elder scrolls online for example seems to have been treading down since April of last year if the steam charts are any thing to go by.

https://steamcharts.com/app/306130

[Toby451]

Elder Scrolls Online and Guild Wars 2.

lol those games are dead as fuck compared to even CURRENT WoW, which is down (not nearly as down as people on here seem to think but down nonetheless). And final fantasy... I literally don't know anyone that actually plays/watches that game on twitch. I see it mentioned a million times on WoW forums but no one seems to actually play or care enough to watch on twitch. But im sure its totally because they are all sooo busy playing the game, definitely not because its a snoozefest boring game.

[Relapses]

It's like you have been living under a rock or something. The company thinks very little of its own employees, so what gives you the impression that think any differently for the common player..

Apparently I'm in the minority around here with this opinion but I'd say it's almost like billion dollar titans of industry aren't designed by complete idiots.

[Nachtigal]

Then keep playing it. Player housing has no business being in WoW. Blizzard should focus on improving the things the game already does different from other games instead of trying to make it just like every other MMO on the market.

Silence, slut.

[HumbleDuck]

If things keep going the way they have been for the past couple of years, I bet we will see "the console port" and "the mobile port" before any major overhaul ...

[shise]

Ok, to clarify i mean no to an expansion being set in the same old continent in Azeroth like Cataclysm, which seems to be what the OP wants. A new landmass in Azeroth? Totally possible and likely.

- - - Updated - - -



Have they? With WoW? Never seen it. Care to clarify?

Well, WoD was cut short. That expansion started like something huge, with a ridiculous potential to be massive and...ended up suddenly and rushed.

That to me is a course change somewhere in there...

[EntertainmentNihilist]

Well, WoD was cut short. That expansion started like something huge, with a ridiculous potential to be massive and...ended up suddenly and rushed.

That to me is a course change somewhere in there...

Good riddance, honestly.

All that time & effort and content with crappy Garrison systems and (more importantly for me) set in an alternate timeline BS version of past-outland? No thank you. Spending so much time on such a bizarre side-branch story always rubbed me the wrong way.

[Huehuecoyotl]

A revamp would be welcome, but not like Cataclysm.

For me, it wasn't even that Cataclysm was 'unfinished', it was that there was such a lack of engaging content.

You could write a book about the things that Cataclysm did wrong. But the biggest one for me, the one that caused me to quit the entire game, was moving to the "on rails" zone design. Taking away all player choice in how to play a zone and replacing it with a tour guide style romp through the exact story they wanted to tell was NOT an RPG approach. It was the complete opposite.

If they want to reboot WOW, they need to remember what makes an RPG. And the biggest thing, for me, is meaningful player choice. Choose how to experience content. Choose how to progress. Choose how the story they experience plays out. Blizzard needs to stop deciding what fun is, and give the players the environment and tools to go out and decide for themselves.

And for gods sake, stop linking all the content together. Torghast could have been a great little roguelike sat inside WOW. A fun way to spend some time, with cosmetics as rewards. But no, they have to link it to their power systems, forcing people to run it regardless of whether they actually enjoy it. Meaning they have no way of getting useful metrics about whether the content they're producing is actually popular. Break those links, produce standalone content, then Blizzard will start to understand what their players really want, and they can direct their development resources accordingly.

Oh, and RNG is great in manageable amounts. Whoever keeps deciding to stack it on top of more RNG needs to be thrown out of an aeroplane with a random chance of having a parachute, which has a random chance of opening, which then has a random chance of failing. And their landing spot has a random chance of being a swamp randomly populated with designer eating crocodiles.

[crusadernero]

Elder Scrolls Online and Guild Wars 2 have seen consistent growth since 2019. FFXIV is obviously exploding massively before it's expansion is even out. Lost Ark will obviously grow even more after it's official regional release and it's positive beta reception. Roblox is a culture hit akin to Minecraft and Fortnite on the younger audience. Even Runescape is trending upwards still.

I don't know which staple MMO isn't growing except WoW.

Well duh, ESO & GW2 dont need ALOT of new players coming in to see growth. Im saying that respectfully and I do play both those games regularly. But to say these two games have the same growth/success like wow is just SO wrong. I know its difficult to stay away from the wow-is-dead-hate-train, but come on.


That said - sure, times change. As such, MMORPGs have two options:
1. Either change & adapt to the new times in an attempt to get the new(young) gamers in.
2. Stay with it, trust your established playerbase and formula for MMORPG.

- - - Updated - - -

You could write a book about the things that Cataclysm did wrong. But the biggest one for me, the one that caused me to quit the entire game, was moving to the "on rails" zone design. Taking away all player choice in how to play a zone and replacing it with a tour guide style romp through the exact story they wanted to tell was NOT an RPG approach. It was the complete opposite.

If they want to reboot WOW, they need to remember what makes an RPG. And the biggest thing, for me, is meaningful player choice. Choose how to experience content. Choose how to progress. Choose how the story they experience plays out. Blizzard needs to stop deciding what fun is, and give the players the environment and tools to go out and decide for themselves.

And for gods sake, stop linking all the content together. Torghast could have been a great little roguelike sat inside WOW. A fun way to spend some time, with cosmetics as rewards. But no, they have to link it to their power systems, forcing people to run it regardless of whether they actually enjoy it. Meaning they have no way of getting useful metrics about whether the content they're producing is actually popular. Break those links, produce standalone content, then Blizzard will start to understand what their players really want, and they can direct their development resources accordingly.

Oh, and RNG is great in manageable amounts. Whoever keeps deciding to stack it on top of more RNG needs to be thrown out of an aeroplane with a random chance of having a parachute, which has a random chance of opening, which then has a random chance of failing. And their landing spot has a random chance of being a swamp randomly populated with designer eating crocodiles.

So true. Thats what Blizzard failed to understand. They forced "choice" upon us with the covenants, but that never really was a choice. The examples you give are choices players should make in a RPG. The cool thing about classic zones is that you venture through all zones and can pick & choose what quest to do at any given time. Of course, it helps alot when EK/K combined have ALOT of zones, but still. Its a open world feeling were you can just venture out in the world and go whereever you want. In retail its just a trainride from A-B. I also think this limits the devs options and creativity, cause every quest gets shoehorned into the story. Sidequests mean next to nothing.

In classic we get presented the world and get told: "Here is the world. Go out there, explore it, fight mobs, do quests and have fun with it! Your choice."
Retail is "do this, in this order".

Torghast is also a great example. It could have been a nice side activity(like mage tower), that players could do for fun, whenever and how often they wanted. But nah, Blizzard dicates us to go there. Hated the place since the first couple of weeks in SL, cause I had to do it. It SUCKS logging in knowing I have to do it.

[Asrialol]

The evidence is definitely all there at this point. The devs are talking about a "return to Azeroth" about "a more grounded story," Classic is continuing to kick Shadowland's ass, and we have datamined HD assets for OG Human architecture.

Though we've been burned on this stove so many times before I hesitate to say confirmed until it happens.



Question is will it work or will it flop. There's a lot more wrong with WoW than just "the leveling is convoluted." The game lost its soul long ago, the class design has been stubbornly kept stagnant so long that the very foundations of most classes are rotten, the story's become incomprehensible to most and offensive to those who can understand it, and the players drive a culture of "speed speed speed rush rush rush world first world first world first." If Blizz doesn't also address those, no amount of pretty buildings will save WoW.

Source on that?

[Mojo03]

I’ve been saying it forever now.

I bet they do a WoW 2.0 with 10.0 the way they’re doing OW2.

It’ll still be the same game and everything will carry over, but the engine and core mechanics will get an overhaul.

They’re more open to taking risks since the die hards have the classic games now (and most the player base is gone)

It’s clear as day they’re going to do a revamp of some sort with whatever happens with the jailer.

I don’t think they’ll do a Cata 2, but rather they’ll update the shit that’s been broken in the world since Cata, and patch things up in the world so it looks normal ish and updated to current time again, which is not nearly the undertaking Cata was and do able.

I’d wager the dragons will be involved somehow too next expansion. Maybe Dragon Isles, which they’ll probably retcon to be near undermine and tel abim, the last 2 (I think?) major places we haven’t been yet.