Originally Posted by
Eurhetemec
The cold reality is that steampunk/gnometech/goblintech themes are just have much narrower appeal than beauty of nature/dragons-type themes. Far fewer players are going to get excited about an expansion themed around tech than they are about one themed around more straightforward fantasy. People can call it "bland" or whatever, but they're blind to the reality that this sort of slightly-generic fantasy is popular in part because it's slightly-generic. It's why in Dungeons and Dragons, the most popular settings are all slightly-generic and bland ones, rather than more specific ones. The Forgotten Realms, Exandria, Eberron, they're all between bland and specific, but leaning towards bland. That's what lasts, that's what succeeds - stuff that's more specific - Dark Sun, Planescape, Spelljammer, that might be successful for a short while occasionally, but then it fades again, and doesn't come back for decades. Whilst boring old Forgotten Realms just keeps going from the 1980s to now. WoW is far more towards the FR side of things. We just had an expansion which tried "risky" aesthetics and it did not full pay off (though I thought it looked pretty cool tbh - too much goddamn time in the Maw though - a zone which managed to combine "boring" and "ugly" extremely effectively).
I think the only way you get a tech-themed expansion going is to go "full magitech", which means not really steampunk as WoW has tended to be when tech-centric, but something probably more elegant and flashy, and with less exploding/sparking/pumping steam/smoke, and more glowing and looking impressive. More Exodar, less Gnomeregan. You could still have your dreadful tinkers as the class introduced, of course.
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Part of the problem is Blizzard seem to have been primarily inspired by two sources when it comes to tech in WoW:
1) Warner Bros cartoons, particularly Looney Tunes, and generally that whole era of animations, which means gnome/goblin tech always looks like a joke, and always evokes Wile. E. Coyote.
2) Tinker Gnomes in Dragonlance. Whose entire concept is "they build wild devices but they usually go horribly wrong" - you see this repeated over and over and over with WoW's gnomes. It's a really lazy trope but ties in well with the WB aesthetic.
And yeah, it's not aesthetically pleasing. Blizzard often has aesthetically pleasing tech in the game - whether it's the Exodar/Draenei tech, Titan tech or whatever, but for some reason that's always backgrounded and not really seen as "tech" (even though it clearly is), where gnome/goblin stuff is frequently foregrounded.
I think if they did a techy expansion they'd absolutely have to go with an attractive kind of tech as the "main" tech rather than just continuing with gnome/goblin stuff. the BfA Mechagnome area did kind of show what more-competent gnome tech might look like, with less broken/dodgy robots and more complete/functional ones, but I doubt they could extend that aesthetic sufficiently.