The War Within 11.X Patches & World Soul Saga Speculation Thread

[Wangming]

The only people I see clamoring for a WoW2 also want it dumped into some other modern game engine to get some bland grey/brown hyper realism slapped on it.

You do know there is a middle ground between hyper realisem and a repurposed WCIII engine that does super mario jumps cause proper animations are too sci-fi? Right? Riiiight?

[Skildar]

--snip--

This new technic they're using may be time efficient but the result is not there in terms of artistic direction and wonder. Even Kul tiras and Zandalar worked better. The only new technology that is impressive this expansion is their new fog and climate, which BfA would have needed immensely.

World revamp doesn't solely mean updated look. It means change of look and stories. The old world terrain cannot be kept as such. Updating it of course means breaking the borders and reshaping the stories. So hiring environment artists will do nothing if the world is empty.

Breaking the world again and having some areas beyond reach is the way to go imo. Make the whole south of Kalimdor occupied by dangerous presence that darkens the place for instance and we will know that it will come ina later expansion.

By that logic only a small portion of both Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms would be updated in the same expansion. Or only a third of either continent and nothing on the other.

But seeing today as we're still working on warcraft 3 threads, crafting stories is definitely not blizzard's forte in wow this last decade. Warcraft 3 was done with passion and love but it still amazes me that we are seeing items like wowhead.com/item=204185/the-old-gods-and-the-ordering-of-azeroth-annotated this last patch

[AOL Instant Messenger]

- snip -

This is all fairly nice, though I admit that I'm mainly in the Lordearon camp for now. I'm inclined to err on the side of caution with the world revamp thing all around, of course—I want to emphasize that I really want it (and this is even accounting for an expansion set in Lordaeron alone), but I don't want to get too set on it as a likelihood, since everybody's been saying it'll be the next one for sure ever since the end of Legion.

My main reasons for assuming it if we get it, it will be exclusive to the Lordaeron region are that Lordaeron is the most likely set of zones to have gone through a serious, physical alteration since Exploring Azeroth, that it has just around the right amount of zones for a new expansion with the general average of 5-6 on launch, with additional room for patch zones (i.e. going into Quel'Thalas, or maybe Alterac depending on the specific scale of it), and also because it's a region with a prominent history in the Warcraft 'verse. With hints re: the Scarlet Crusade (though that's been going on for several expansions now), I can't help but think there's something there.

[Luck4]

But seeing today as we're still working on warcraft 3 threads, crafting stories is definitely not blizzard's forte in wow this last decade.

That's for sure. The last time we had good lore was in 2017 IMO, which ironically closed probably the last major thread of Warcraft III since the Lich King.

I think that's probably why they brought Metzen back because the last two expansions have been a complete trainwreck narratively speaking, shallow, boring, and inconclusive.

While Dragonflight isn't on pair with Legion narrative it's definitely better than both BFA/SL. The only lame thing about 10.1 is the last boss, a generic Dracthyr.

[ChairmanKaga]

You do know there is a middle ground between hyper realisem and a repurposed WCIII engine that does super mario jumps cause proper animations are too sci-fi? Right? Riiiight?

If you actually think the engine resembles anything from WC3 at this point you are deluding yourself.

[Marlamin]

Blizzard has the techniques to make zones more efficiently than they were a decade ago. For Dragonflight, Blizzard's environment artists have created a new technique where rather than hand sculpting by hand the entirety of a continent's geometry in WoWedit, they instead have created modular pieces of terrain that they can quickly copy paste together.

Thanks for posting that, I've never actually seen that concept map of the Waking Shores before and I love that kind of stuff.

[Shadowferal]

The game seems to be one step away from maintenance. Reinventing and reinvestment in the game should start from servers on up, and this includes tossing the current lore which went way off the rails...and is to me unsalvageable.

[AOL Instant Messenger]

The game seems to be one step away from maintenance. Reinventing and reinvestment in the game should start from servers on up, and this includes tossing the current lore which went way off the rails...and is to me unsalvageable.

In my mind, the survival of the game is reliant on Blizzard's capacity to continue the positive trends that emerged as a result of Dragonflight. I think any further alienating decision-making in the spirit of Shadowlands or BfA could have terrible consequences and result in even more lost subscribers—the pattern of failure followed by success followed by complacence on Blizzard's part and subsequent failure is one we've seen before with Legion salvaging WoD, then the rejuvenating playerbase being alienated by BfA and later Shadowlands. Part of it is that Blizzard seem very short-sighted, imagining that any problems will evaporate once they have temporarily placated the playerbase, leading them back into their old tricks and further chipping away at player engagement.

I don't think we're beyond salvaging – if anything, Dragonflight has proved the opposite – but Blizzard must tread very carefully to win back subscribers and return to a period of growth. Hopefully the loss of the Chinese market will at least incentivize them to keep up trying as hard as possible.

[Nymrohd]

For me the real question which only Blizzard can answer is just pure numbers. How many new accounts are created. How many old accounts have been renewed. What really is the make up and the demographics of the playerbase. They have those numbers.
People say world revamp would be about new players. I am not really sure the new waves of gamers even touch MMOs. All the games I see successful with Gen Z and forward are games that require minimal committment. That is just not WoW and you could not transform it to be that without making it unrecognizable. If what Blizzard mostly sees is chances to reactive long dormant accounts from the tens of millions created over the decades, the nostalgia of offering a world revamp should be able to match and exceed what was offered by past expansions. The question is retention. The general idea seems to be, tons of people buy the expansions, far fewer actually stay past the first two months. So what most people want to play is the RPG part of the game; look at the world, do the quests, maybe do the dungeons a couple of times. Probably don't even enter the raid (doesn't help LFR takes months to fully unlock). Which is the expensive part. The dungeons and raids that people play 20-30 times each (more if they have alts) are probably much cheaper (though they tend to be more polished).

So should we sacrifice a raid tier? If it means enough content to keep the people who just join for the launch an extra month or two, then yes, sacrificing a raid tier sounds like a good financial decision if the numbers are there (and they might well not be). And this is with just World Revamp giving more questing and more space to explore than usual.

[guro-tchai]

Though another issue with an old world revamp (assuming the size was the same) would be how immersion breaking it would be to hop on your dragonriding mount and soar from one capital city to another in 20 seconds. It would totally kill any pretense of you living on a massive continent. The continent's size would have to be multiplied by 10x just to get us back to the current time it takes to fly from one city to another with old flying mounts, and even then it still feels ridiculous. The map would have to be 50x to 100x larger to make flying between cities at 800% speed feel like you might vaguely be flying across a continent to different kingdoms and countries. Maybe adding an hourly day/night cycle like in GW2 or FFXIV would help sell that sense of travelling across a continent too, rather than visiting everywhere in a single afternoon.

yes, that's my main concern with the potential world revamp. the locations are way too small and the quality between modern land and classic is uncomparable - the latter is so outdated that rather than fixing it with several coats of paint, it might be easier and more productive to recreate the original continents from scratch. even if we compare a relatively successful Arathi update in BfA with, say, Drustvar, the difference in quality is too obvious - Arathi is tiny and empty.
but remaking and enlarging even Lordaeron, from Sunwell to Thandol Span, might be a task too daunting for them. so even if they respond to this popular demand, i don't think i will be satisfied with the result - just as i was let down comparing wc3 Theramore with the original wow one so many years ago.

[Nymrohd]

yes, that's my main concern with the potential world revamp. the locations are way too small and the quality between modern land and classic is uncomparable - the latter is so outdated that rather than fixing it with several coats of paint, it might be easier and more productive to recreate the original continents from scratch. even if we compare a relatively successful Arathi update in BfA with, say, Drustvar, the difference in quality is too obvious - Arathi is tiny and empty.
but remaking and enlarging even Lordaeron, from Sunwell to Thandol Span, might be a task too daunting for them. so even if they respond to this popular demand, i don't think i will be satisfied with the result - just as i was let down comparing wc3 Theramore with the original wow one so many years ago.

Yeah the idea of just combining 3-4 zones together and calling it a day makes the revamp sounds plausible, at least if it is one continent at a time but it also means that everything will just be small. We'd need to at least double the zones and then combine two instead imo. And capitals should be part of story content. After Suramar the fact that they failed to use Boralus for questing on a greater scale was just crazy to me. Capitals should be part of the questing experience and count as a zone by themselves.

You could do the world justice but it would take 4 or 5 expacs and realistically you cannot have multiple expacs in a row just revamping shit. And every subcontinent but South Kalimdor has significant player interest (Lordaeron has Forsaken, Worgen, Blood Elves, Khaz Modan has just Dwarves, Eastern Kingdoms/Azeroth as it was originally called has just Humans, North Kalimdor has Night Elves and Draenei and Central Kalimdor has Orcs, Trolls and Tauren). And if the excuse is Dragon riding, you need to have it all else what, you are hitting invisible walls or walls of fog?

[Shadowferal]

For me the real question which only Blizzard can answer is just pure numbers. How many new accounts are created. How many old accounts have been renewed. What really is the make up and the demographics of the playerbase. They have those numbers.

Ya...numbers would be indicative of whether there's genuine growth or not.

People say world revamp would be about new players. I am not really sure the new waves of gamers even touch MMOs. All the games I see successful with Gen Z and forward are games that require minimal committment. That is just not WoW and you could not transform it to be that without making it unrecognizable.

And yet here we are. Far from the days when players would spend investing in hours of play on a daily basis.

If what Blizzard mostly sees is chances to reactive long dormant accounts from the tens of millions created over the decades, the nostalgia of offering a world revamp should be able to match and exceed what was offered by past expansions.

And this is why I advocate rewriting the lore. Familiar names and faces, but characters going in different directions. Horde and Alliance, but different races and metric that includes independent factions.
Provoke curiosity and make it interesting...and fun. (A Scarlet Crusader teamed up with a Tauren Sunwalker? How did that happen?)

[ImTheMizAwesome]

And yet here we are. Far from the days when players would spend investing in hours of play on a daily basis. [/i]

Speak for yourself, me and many others in my guild(casual players) already spent more time in starting point of DF than we did in SL or BFA in their starting points/release windows.

Already have my third month of sub and with 10.1 releasing in may speculation it will be soon to be 4th month, when in SL i had 1 month on release another one in 9.1 then i didn't come back until 9.2.

And im not even that big of a fan of DF story, it's alright and chill but there are very boring points like dracthyr story, in my opinion heritage questlines story beat those stories of DF easily.

The game just plays better.

[Shadowferal]

Speak for yourself, me and many others in my guild(casual players) already spent more time in starting point of DF than we did in SL or BFA in their starting points/release windows. Already have my third month of sub and with 10.1 releasing in may speculation it will be soon to be 4th month, when in SL i had 1 month on release another one in 9.1 then i didn't come back until 9.2.

And I'm sure Blizz exults over the few of you.
But I'd bet hard cash that it's far from the millions of players that Blizz used to have.

[ImTheMizAwesome]

And I'm sure Blizz exults over the few of you.
But I'd bet hard cash that it's far from the millions of players that Blizz used to have.

I wouldn't say "few of you", it might not fit your narrative which i don't really care about, but there's a lot more likeminded people such as me and some peps in my guild that play a lot more compared to previous two expansions.


Betting a hard cash on a obvious thing? There's a lot more games to play now, times changed, wow will never have the same amount of players it had in the past.

[Shadowferal]

I wouldn't say "few of you", it might not fit your narrative which i don't really care about, but there's a lot more likeminded people such as me and some peps in my guild that play a lot more compared to previous two expansions. Betting a hard cash on a obvious thing? There's a lot more game to play now, times changed, wow will never have the same amount of players it had in the past.

And you're the reason why I've said elsewhere that Blizz is likely to go the cheaper easier maintenance route, rather than reinventing and reinvestment, which wouldn't be cheap in time and money, or easy. They'd need new servers while keeping what remains of the current playerbase happy enough to pay the bills.

[ImTheMizAwesome]

And you're the reason why I've said elsewhere that Blizz is likely to go the cheaper easier maintenance route, rather than reinventing and reinvestment, which wouldn't be cheap in time and money, or easy. They'd need new servers while keeping what remains of the current playerbase happy enough to pay the bills.

Looking at your loud bullshit statements such as "one step from maintenance mode" i would say that you're the type of player, blizzard won't ever need again to be honest or cater to.

Or maybe i should say "doomsday forum player", since looking at your post history it seems like probably 5000 of your posts is about the same subject, trying to convince people to your weird narrative on various subjects, that doesn't have any backing whatsoever.

But enough of that, im going back to play the actual game, but i will probably see you here 5 years from now with 100k posts on your account doing the same thing, unless blizzard specifically caters to you.

[Schwert]

Updating the old world and combining the max level and leveling experience would actually be huge, and worth it for the long term health of the game. They aren't sacrificing as much as people think they are either; the new development tools exist, and there's less work needed to be done in the planning stages - all the old zones have their themes and story threads sorted out. It's actually faster than developing new zones entirely from scratch. Fan-fiction is easier to toss ideas out for than something wholly original.

Chromie Time is atrocious for new players, and BFA being the starting experience is also terrible because it doesn't introduce you to the world - just the basic Horde vs Alliance angle, which gets cut off pretty quick because apparently, war story in war IP is bad.

Unless you have somebody holding your hand, you don't get to learn about your race and get invested as a new player anymore. And this is bad.
That RPG magic most of us had cannot happen anymore, and people still do get gripped by these things. Other MMOs are still pulling it off.

Updating all the old zones, then slapping the starting zones for every race - potentially including (some / all) allied races - into them and building the story up again in modern times, with modern questing mechanics? Huge. And it'd mingle leveling characters and max level characters together, making the world seem lively while leveling again too.

I play Warcraft for Warcraft, and recently we've been going off the rails and straying further and further away from the things we actually know.
I don't care about these new NPC races.
I care about the things I actually play, and their stories being stuck in a 10+ year old stasis that's also outdated and broken mechanically at times? No thanks.
Update the old zones.
Make it an actual world.

[ImTheMizAwesome]

Updating the old world and combining the max level and leveling experience would actually be huge, and worth it for the long term health of the game. They aren't sacrificing as much as people think they are either; the new development tools exist, and there's less work needed to be done in the planning stages - all the old zones have their themes and story threads sorted out. It's actually faster than developing new zones entirely from scratch. Fan-fiction is easier to toss ideas out for than something wholly original.

Chromie Time is atrocious for new players, and BFA being the starting experience is also terrible because it doesn't introduce you to the world - just the basic Horde vs Alliance angle, which gets cut off pretty quick because apparently, war story in war IP is bad.

Unless you have somebody holding your hand, you don't get to learn about your race and get invested as a new player anymore. And this is bad.
That RPG magic most of us had cannot happen anymore, and people still do get gripped by these things. Other MMOs are still pulling it off.

Updating all the old zones, then slapping the starting zones for every race - potentially including (some / all) allied races - into them and building the story up again in modern times, with modern questing mechanics? Huge. And it'd mingle leveling characters and max level characters together, making the world seem lively while leveling again too.

I play Warcraft for Warcraft, and recently we've been going off the rails and straying further and further away from the things we actually know.
I don't care about these new NPC races.
I care about the things I actually play, and their stories being stuck in a 10+ year old stasis that's also outdated and broken mechanically at times? No thanks.
Update the old zones.
Make it an actual world.

Also updating every race mounts would be nice for new players and existing ones.

It's a shame that if you want updated saber cat mounts, you would have to go to some expansion and do this and that, pray for lucky rng drops, some new players that lets say started with NE that like cat mounts, won't even know something like that exist for quite a while.

I think it's a long overdue, and overall i agree with your points.

[Varodoc]

Updating the old world and combining the max level and leveling experience would actually be huge, and worth it for the long term health of the game. They aren't sacrificing as much as people think they are either; the new development tools exist, and there's less work needed to be done in the planning stages - all the old zones have their themes and story threads sorted out. It's actually faster than developing new zones entirely from scratch. Fan-fiction is easier to toss ideas out for than something wholly original.

Chromie Time is atrocious for new players, and BFA being the starting experience is also terrible because it doesn't introduce you to the world - just the basic Horde vs Alliance angle, which gets cut off pretty quick because apparently, war story in war IP is bad.

Unless you have somebody holding your hand, you don't get to learn about your race and get invested as a new player anymore. And this is bad.
That RPG magic most of us had cannot happen anymore, and people still do get gripped by these things. Other MMOs are still pulling it off.

Updating all the old zones, then slapping the starting zones for every race - potentially including (some / all) allied races - into them and building the story up again in modern times, with modern questing mechanics? Huge. And it'd mingle leveling characters and max level characters together, making the world seem lively while leveling again too.

I play Warcraft for Warcraft, and recently we've been going off the rails and straying further and further away from the things we actually know.
I don't care about these new NPC races.
I care about the things I actually play, and their stories being stuck in a 10+ year old stasis that's also outdated and broken mechanically at times? No thanks.
Update the old zones.
Make it an actual world.

Agreed, I don't know why people in this thread are acting like Blizzard has to SACRIFICE something to update the old world. When they actually GAIN from it.

Updating an already-existing world is obviously much easier and less time-consuming than creating a whole new continent from scratch.

For instance, going back to the famous "Kingdom of Stormwind" zone idea;

- We already know what the main settlements are (Stormwind, Goldshire, Sentinel's Hill, Lakeshire, Darkshire);
- We already know what the main aesthetic is (mostly forested area, arid plains in the west, mountains and a big lake in the east, shadowy undead wood in the south);
- We already know what possible threats could be used (a resurgence of the Blackrock orcs, a resurgence of Undead necromancers, a new Gnoll war, so on);
- We already know what the music could sound like;
- We already know what types of flora and fauna we could find.

So why exactly is Blizzard SACRIFICING something to update the world lmfao? How is updating the world not much easier and less time-consuming than creating a whole new continent from scratch, where you have to come up with new themes, aesthetics, races, settlements, music, etc.? Blizzard is only saving time if they update an already-existing world, instead of coming up with a new one from scratch.

Beyond that, people love these zones and this is a fact, so people wouldn't complain that Blizzard is recycling old zones instead of coming up with new continent from scratch.

Another fact is that this will be a good setting for a Light-centred expansion. 1) The Scarlet Crusade can resurface in an updated Lordaeron, coming into conflict with Calia Menethil of the Forsaken (and tying into those BfA pamphlets hating on Calia) ; 2) The Lightbound can invade Stormwind through the Dark Portal; 3) and a third Light force can invade through the Light-infused Sunwell, in an updated Quel'Thalas. An updated Eastern Kingdoms will be the perfect setting for an expansion where the Light begins their invasion of Azeroth, to claim the Soul of that world.