11.0 - Reshaping of the World

[huth]

Especially as it just froze me on PTR with red text coming on screen saying something like "freezing player for seamless teleport to map xxxx" due to the lag we're experiencing on PTR from EU right now.

Should have added "just pretend you're not seeing this and everything was instant".

[Nymrohd]

So I can't sleep and I decided I'll just post random musings here about a World Revamp. Hope I end up coherent.

I will preface this by saying that I would love a world revamp. There are two things that keep me in WoW. My guild and the world itself. I used to care about the lore but I don't think it's salvageable. I used to care about the factions but they never figured out how to make faction conflict work narratively or in gameplay.
But I also understand that for many people who play the game, the world isn't what is important to them. What they want is content.
A problem almost every game as a service faces is the speed of content consumption. Dedicated players eat through world content in a few weeks at most bar artificial timegates. They go through instanced content fairly fast as well. When it comes to instanced content it fares somewhat better because of difficulties; with raids each difficulty feels quite different and for most people clearing the content in the difficulty best suited for them can take several months and since they are at any point progressing on a different boss, things change. There is an issue in raiding with granularity; the jump from heroic to mythic and from flex to rigid 20man can be very rough as the skill ceiling of the game increases radically between almost 20 years of experience and the constant addon warfare vs the raid encounter team. It lasts long but rarely can they deliver the next raid at just the right time which means some people are stuck on farm and others are stuck progressing on bosses beyond their skill level. PvP is made by the players more than the devs which is sad; PvP needs BGs more frequently even if they are just reskins. M+ is a unique beast; for competitive people it really is a leaderboard sport. For most the game caps and then goes on farm. Two issues I have here is that you can easily get to the spot were all affixes are applied; you spend the longest time climbing the gradual increase in difficulty where the mechanical changes are minimal until your group caps their gear progression. For most players it is very repetitive.

What we all need is more content. Far more than they can develop within the time constraints that simply cannot be changed. You cannot just throw devs at it; teams past a size just get impossible to manage, moreso creative teams.

So what I think a revamp should do is provide seasonal content variety for all types of players. They could already test this if they wanted to with timewalking. Imagine if Timewalking did not last for a week. Imagine if it lasted for about 8 weeks. Each time a timewalking season rolls in, 4 dungeons from that season join M+. A Raid joins not just TW normal, but also LFR and Heroic. And the zones associated with it get their world quests and events upgraded to give rewards up to the same level the current expac world events give. Add some small spin to the dungeons and raids; a unique affix related to the current expac like the Fated season did.

If that works, why stay only with expansions though? Why not slowly utilize the old world? I am not saying revamp the entire thing in one go. Instead separate it into blocks and slot them together with TW. Obviously those zones do not have world quests, do not have the same types of vignettes etc. Well you do a graphic update on them. Add NPCs and minor interactions but not full questlines; just place what makes a modern wow zone end game in them. Add 2-3 weekly events to spice things up. Do it slowly; one or at most two such blocks per xpac. Uplift some dungeons and raids; would you want to see a Khaz Modan block that has a weekly event to punch Deathwing in the face in Badlands, a BRD megadungeon with wings on M+ and a BWL retuned like a current raid? I would.

And yes, we have done those dungeons and raids before . . . but we've done the current dungeons and raids before after the first couple of weeks. Heck with M+ I swear most of us have run any single dungeon of the last four expacs more times than we have run the all dungeons of any single previous expac combined; at least if you were raiding or doing PvP back then. The antidote to repetition is variety.

Alternatively I like the partial revamp expac idea but I think it has serious issues. Pick a large block of zones, combine some since current zones are far bigger than older ones and make it the current expac. And usually people pick Lordaeron for that.
And ofc they do. Because Lordaeron is different. First, Lordaeron is geographically separate from the rest of EK. It only connects at the Thandol Span. Second it has the most potential by far; there is unexplored space with Stratholme Bay and the Hills of Mashiara, a chance to give one of the most popular races in the game a proper capital and actually allow flight there. Plus it is the one visible block where most of the playerbase could be engaged thematically. It has things for Humans, Dwarves, Worgen (heck even Night Elves if they go there with Seradane) and then Forsaken, Blood Elves, Orcs (Alterac) and ofc Trolls (give Revantusk allied race!)
No other block offers that. Khaz Modan is fairly clean geographically but it is really only important to the Dwarves and everyone else would have a tertiary involvement. And I don't even get how you do a partial revamp of Kalimdor; it is one continuous land with no visible breaks. You can make an argument for Northern Kalimdor but that's the same as Khaz Modan; it's Night Elf territory and the rest would feel like guests.

Several of us like to dream of the evergreen world revamp. The entire world redone. Possibly even scaled up. New storylines that try to be timeline agnostic; reference the past but do not end up in crisis (no Westfalls). And then as endgame, standard WoW fair. And say they had the resources and did it. What would the playerbase do with it???
Where would you go play? Because that world would be VAST. And this is an MMO. I do not think this means we need to group up with people to do things but it absolutely means we should be seeing other players while playing. Add that much content and you would end up playing a CRPG because the playerbase would be spread thin. You need a mechanic to concentrate the playerbase. It is why in WoW only the current xpac matters and it is why a game like ESO where the entire world matters adds constant events to make 2-3 zones matter more; to keep people in the same area so they can play together.

So to sum it up. Test if you can add seasonal variety to all content and not just M+ by expanding Timewalking as a concept. And if that works consider making seasonal blocks out of the old world by doing mostly visual updates and then upgrading local instanced content to current quality.

Hope it was all coherent.

- - - Updated - - -

It seems to be slightly more involved than that but I won't go too off-topic, but I'm sure that was one of the biggest challenges yeah. Especially as it just froze me on PTR with red text coming on screen saying something like "freezing player for seamless teleport to map xxxx" due to the lag we're experiencing on PTR from EU right now.

On-topic: I don't think a full world revamp will happen, but do expect updates to old assets over time to happen (such as the human house assets) with some content being refreshed/updated here and there.

I sometimes wonder, if they upgraded world assets in such a way that they were geometrically identical so that they would fit in the exact same area and allow an NPC to move through them in the same way without hitting a wall, could they just batch replace them? Just doing that with housing and trees would be massive. Terrain would need a more personal touch (and zone borders need the most love of all things in the vanilla world) but anything you could automate would be huge.

[Marlamin]

I sometimes wonder, if they upgraded world assets in such a way that they were geometrically identical so that they would fit in the exact same area and allow an NPC to move through them in the same way without hitting a wall, could they just batch replace them? Just doing that with housing and trees would be massive. Terrain would need a more personal touch (and zone borders need the most love of all things in the vanilla world) but anything you could automate would be huge.

Yup, that's pretty much exactly what those new human buildings are. A batch replace is definitely possible but it'd be important to still do a pass as to not have an old building that wasn't updated right next to it which would look pretty bad (and worse compared to the old situation).

Terrain definitely needs more work, texture resolution is one thing they could 'automate', but tlhe texture scaling/height texturing added in MoP is noticably missing from older content and truly makes a world of difference in quality, but is an entirely manual process.

[Nymrohd]

Terrain definitely needs more work, texture resolution is one thing they could 'automate', but tlhe texture scaling/height texturing added in MoP is noticably missing from older content and truly makes a world of difference in quality, but is an entirely manual process.

One thing I find very against a revamp is how they did Arathi. They changed the world objects and the textures but they did not touch the borders of the zone. And I get not touching the borders with the Hinterlands and Hillsbrad since those would affect the zones on the other side. But they made no effort to change the zone to make more sense geographically to the south and east either, leaving the massive flat area in the east and not connecting the zone to its coast. It was an extremely conservative update and if they had been planning something greater down the line, they would have to have been working on it for a long time and thus could use ready work for those updates.

[Lazerbrain]

The cardinal sin of Cataclysm was not allowing us to "resolve" those situations. They're in a state of cataclysm in perpetuity. They should have been "fixed," where possible, upon completion of the zones. Destroying these places that were so important to us was a good choice, on its face. It was impactful. But making that dramatic point was not worth putting the world into this perpetual state of destruction. Which is especially flagrant when the rest of the story moved beyond Deathwing.

This, I never understood why we never got to phase-fix the world with the quests.

For me this is what wow needs, a expansion that focuses on using the old stories and letting us finally end the storylines that are left open.

[Sauredfangs]

Wish they would cut and paste Quel'thalas and the Draenei islands to the old world.

[Lahis]

Wish they would cut and paste Quel'thalas and the Draenei islands to the old world.

It is stupid that they were on a separate map to begin with, but I quess that was what they had to do to limit those zones only for expansion owners back then.

[Sauredfangs]

It is stupid that they were on a separate map to begin with, but I quess that was what they had to do to limit those zones only for expansion owners back then.

Yeah they should've just put a phased gate that's closed for players who didn't own the expansion, and phased open for people who owned the expansion. Though I'm not sure if that was technologically possible then.

[huth]

Yeah they should've just put a phased gate that's closed for players who didn't own the expansion, and phased open for people who owned the expansion. Though I'm not sure if that was technologically possible then.

Phasing wasn't introduced until the expansion after. Terrain phasing wasn't introduced until Cataclysm.

So no, it wasn't.

[Biomega]

Yeah they should've just put a phased gate that's closed for players who didn't own the expansion, and phased open for people who owned the expansion. Though I'm not sure if that was technologically possible then.

It was not. Phasing came later in TBC, ironically to fix a bug It wasn't until WotLK that phasing was actively used for quests etc. so when TBC and the Blood Elf/Draenei zones were made, this technology wasn't available yet.

The time to change things should have been Cataclysm, really. Maybe they ran out of time or something and it was a lower priority, who knows. And now it's kind of... just there.

[Lazerbrain]

There was phasing in vanilla, terrain phasing came in cataclysm, then it got updated in wod i think, and now its getting another update it seems like.

[huth]

There was phasing in vanilla, terrain phasing came in cataclysm, then it got updated in wod i think, and now its getting another update it seems like.

There was no phasing whatsoever in vanilla. They developed the basics of the technology during TBC, then made it a proper feature in WotLK. WoD stuff isn't quite the same thing, as that also involved a server transfer. Besides, you can be sure they worked on improving it continuously since WotLK.

[Luck4]

I know some people are against another Revamp expansion of Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms, but seeing these places and stories abandoned makes me depressed.

Back in the day, most expansions had a strong bond/connection with the old world/races/lore, for instance when we visited Outland we found settlements from Vanilla races there, both new and old, the same thing with Northrend and Cataclysm, but suddenly we started visiting places that had nearly zero connection with the established world and to make matters worse the playable races barely made any new establishments in those zones/places, Pandaria and Draenor still had some newly made establishments but they were only connected to Orcs and Humans for the most part, the Legion came and despite being in Azeroth had only a minor Night Elf presence in Val'sharah, BFA again had only minor "OG" Human and Orc presence in the new zones, and after that, we had 0 "zero" playable races presence in Shadowlands and nearly zero in Dragonflight if wasn't by Baine questline.

The lore is bland because the characters that represent the players are not present, we're just seeing random short story after random short story about races and places we may never see again, and we don't see any characters grow from OG races as well, feels like Warcraft entered an era of spin-off/filler expansions about random places and characters we've never seen before that only last for a couple of months/years.

The last characters that had good story development were Garrosh and Varian, mostly because only Orcs and Humans had a presence in most expansions, we don't have anyone being developed in Dragonflight, everyone is absent, we barely see Khadgar that's Neutral, and Baine/Tyrande/Malfurion appeared only for a couple of quests.

This is lame as F...

[Lazerbrain]

There was no phasing whatsoever in vanilla. They developed the basics of the technology during TBC, then made it a proper feature in WotLK. WoD stuff isn't quite the same thing, as that also involved a server transfer. Besides, you can be sure they worked on improving it continuously since WotLK.

there was though, obviously not as advanced as in tbc, but a very basic version, one of many examples; the gong in in AQ.

[huth]

there was though, obviously not as advanced as in tbc, but a very basic version, one of many examples; the gong in in AQ.

That wasn't phasing. That was just changing the map for all players. That's always been possible.

The particular benefit of phasing was that it allowed them to present different scenarios based on your own personal progression through the story; that you could have two players in the same area seeing two different situations.

[Lazerbrain]

That wasn't phasing. That was just changing the map for all players. That's always been possible.

The particular benefit of phasing was that it allowed them to present different scenarios based on your own personal progression through the story; that you could have two players in the same area seeing two different situations.

Yes in vanilla the phasing was seen be everyone, then later it became personal, that's the same tech though, just evolved.

[huth]

Yes in vanilla the phasing was seen be everyone, then later it became personal, that's the same tech though, just evolved.

No, still not the same tech. Adding or removing doodads to the world for everybody isn't hard to do. GMs can just spawn stuff if they want to. That isn't phasing nor in any way related to phasing.

Phasing is the personal thing and runs on a different base. It was only introduced in WotLK (not TBC, and the prototype tech was only used in the final patch), and did not change the enviroment until Cataclysm.

[Lazerbrain]

No, still not the same tech. Adding or removing doodads to the world for everybody isn't hard to do. GMs can just spawn stuff if they want to. That isn't phasing nor in any way related to phasing.

Phasing is the personal thing and runs on a different base. It was only introduced in WotLK (not TBC, and the prototype tech was only used in the final patch), and did not change the enviroment until Cataclysm.

technically its the same.

[Sauredfangs]

Yes in vanilla the phasing was seen be everyone, then later it became personal, that's the same tech though, just evolved.

I was gonna say put an invisible wall for non expansion buyers, but that probably need phasing to be turned off for other players.

[Marlamin]

technically its the same.

As someone who has datamined/reverse engineered the game since WotLK and has done it for a living for a few years now, that's like saying a car and a wheel are technically the same. Phasing can spawn/despawn objects in the same way a car has wheels, but it's most definitely not the "technically the same".