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

[Nymrohd]

We already have all racial mounts updated. For PvP.

[Alanar]

The First Ones ain't going anywhere bro

Maybe they will reduce their overarching role to mere myths for example, after the many complains.

First ones are stupid.

[Black Rider]

I would love a world revamp. Just don't rush it. Split it up into 2 addons. This would also solve the problem of more and more islands popping up and overcrowding the map for a time.

You could easily merge a lot of zones and have the old zones be subzones. That also makes stories feel bigger, when they tie together these bigger zones. Also make everything available to both factions. With elves and furries everywhere and fading restrictions it's no use anymore.. Both factions have completely lost what made them unique. Give spotlight to the races and make the alliance and horde take a backseat.

Eastern Kingdoms Addon:
+Hinterlands/Arathi/Hillsbrad/Alterac
+Gilneas/Silverpine/Tirisfal/Tol Barad
+Plaguelands/Unused space north of them
+Ghostlands/Eversong/Quel'danas
+Wetlands/Loch Modan/Twilight Highlands
+Dun Morogh (there is a lot of unused space)
+Badlands/Burning Steppes/Searing Gorge
+Elwynn/Westfall/Duskwood/Redridge
+Deadwind/Swamp of Sorrows/Blasted Lands
+Stranglethorn

Kalimdor Addon:
+Azuremyst/Bloodmyst/Teldrassil Remains
+Darkshore/Moonglade/Felwood/Ashenvale
+Winterspring/Azshara/Hyjal
+Desolace/Stonetalon/Mulgore
+Barrens/Durotar/Dustfallow
+Feralas/Thousand Needles
+Tanaris/Uldum/Un'goro
+Silithus (Make use of all the space and include the bg island from bfa)
+Maybe Kezan (not just the small chunk from cataclysm)
+Maybe a Tinker class

That are still a lot of zones but not all have to be there at release. 2-3 could easily be patch content.

I think old zones must be revamped with patches.
Just put out roadmap that in 2023 we will update this and this and these zones.

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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.






I don't think biomes/zone aesthetics would need to be consolidated as @George Lucas posited. Look at the Waking Shores, a zone which has two biomes/tilesets. If you overlay the Waking Shores onto Kalimdor, it covers the same area as Ashenvale and Winterspring, which are also two biomes/tilesets.




The density of different biomes or zone aesthetics has not changed, the only difference being the quantity of zones/size of the continents that Blizzard releases with every expansion every two years. Kalimdor is about 1/3rd larger than the Dragon Isles. Perhaps if Blizzard hired a few more environment artists, they could release a remade Kalimdor. Though, IMO, I would rather go visit brand new lands with new stuff like Pandaria with the Pandaren and Mogu and Mantid and Saurok, or the Shadowlands, rather than revisit boring old lands. I've already seen Orcs and Quillboar and Centaurs and treants too many times.

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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.

Dude, really interesting points, thanks for posting

[micwini]

There's a big difference between 'let's add some new models' and 'let's remake entire maps'. Those are on completely different levels of effort, difficulty, expense, and - most importantly - cohesion. You can't just have some zones revamped, and other zones being old - not only because that'd be jarring visually, but also for technical reasons, such as terrain boundaries etc. You'd have to either keep the base map the same (in which case are you really revamping?) or you'd have to change it once to fit with bordering old maps and then again each time one of those old maps are updated, which would further balloon the cost of the endeavor.

There's a reason they did it all in one swoop with Cataclysm - it's actually easier than redoing zones one by one over time.

Also: you'll have to spend development resources either way. Spending $500,000 now and $500,000 a year from now doesn't change the fact that you've spent $1,000,000 and that money needs to come from somewhere. You're not thinking in terms of a business. The issue isn't "they can't find the cash in their bank accounts". The issue is "if I spend X money I need to get at least X+Y money back or I'm being a bad business" - which means the money either needs to come out of existing budgets that are recouped by the usual expansion stuff, or it needs to come from newly added revenue. And the problem is that neither of those equations would be likely to work out, currently. (and that's not even talking about the fact that in all likelihood doing it in phases over time is actually more expensive, for various technical and logistical reasons)

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And the business mechanics are different, too. WoW has a lot less players. But it's not like developers now make a lot less money. You don't just get to say "technology!" as if that suddenly means things are free, especially the biggest part of it which is work hours. Has technology progressed? Yes. Does it mean it would be cheaper now than it was 13 years ago? Possibly. Does it mean that this suddenly makes the business math work out? Unlikely.

There is a reason I used 'shortsighted' instead of a mean word like 'stupid'. If we're talking business, how viable is it to never updated your office at all in over 10 years? Same thing here. EK and Kalimdor look wildly outdated, even compared to something that came one expansion later (pandaria). It also saves them time on the 'idea' phase they would normally have for new expansion areas. As someone said before, they don't make zones like they did back then. They use a modular structure. And seeing as we've seen lots of assets that could be used in a ravamp, i'd say the most work is in the quests and content itself, not the art. And as we've seen with DF, they can easily put massive amounts of content into a large mass for one expansion. Now imagine them working on it since WoD and there you have it: World revamp.

[George Lucas]

Regardless of the scope I would expect Blizzard to start from scratch and leave the old world be available. They could expand the ingame zones vastly, making Elwynn for example as big as modern zones. They could also combine multiple zones into one or even come up with new zones inbetween. Doesn't really matter.

Immersion isn't an argument regarding size. Goldshire is like two houses and newer locations also wouldn't make any sense if they were intended to represent the lore accurate size of a place. To appeal to nostalgia they would just need to bring over some points of interests in a recognisable way.

The Cataclysm revamp was just badly rushed, barely touching the landscape, not even bringing it to the levels of Northrend. The new zones from Cataclysm were on a completely different level.

Recreating old zones from scratch with verticality and density levels from modern WOW would make it feel like new zones and not just some cheap rehash with new fetch quests.

[Skildar]

A recurring theme of the last expansions is that Blizzard is still figuring out what their players do and what they want to do.

Their focus have shifted heavily in legion after MoP that was full of farm and Draenor devoided of one. Neither extreme worked, and their new Legion formula encouraged them to create new gameplay experiences and I really hope that they are able to tell this time around what was interesting for players in Dragonflight and what deserves to be iterated upon.

I don't want a Kinook 2.0 like the mission table that was iterated upon 4 times. Though I like small activities like Kinook, hunt, etc. and would continue liking them if they're small enough and available for the people that roam the world for fun.

The most pressing things to take a look at that have not been addressed in Dragonflight imo are the following :
- questing texts that are not engaging and often times long and repetitive. Just by presenting the text window like if your character was having a real conversation when it is one xould be a huge leap forward
- guild and communities today they are just forced social constructs in the game that don't provide any social experience. I play in a guild and have great friends in it but it is the raiding experience that drives us to play together and engage. They definitely are some areas to explore surrounding guilds activities and challenges. Also making their management a lot more easier would be sweet.

- faction and race story needs to be creative and move forward a hell lot faster. Every patch I'm asking myself, could I summarise all that has happened under 20minutes and it's close. I want more political intrigues, we used to have that a bit and it worked. Every race has some challenges, but for now we only get quick little nods to them like it couldn't make for anything more. Ofc people want to know what the forsaken council has led to since it has been put in place, Ofc people want to know what Gilneans will be able to salvage from their land after half of it has been contaminated and the other half put under water. Even void elves are interesting enough if you give them a place to find what makes them move their ass out of bed, but we don't even know if they have a bed as they're immigrants with a void storage.

- expansion story is usually ok with a lore building that is very interesting. I understand that the expansion story is usually fairly simple because it's like an afterthought of a marketing product. We need people to identify strongly with this next chapter, what should it say upfront ? Then what can story can we tell about it? I'm not against it but they should make for better writing of what the character say and how, stop having bad guys resort to I'm going to enslave/kill/mangle everybody because some people emprisoned me last time I fought for my rightful mission is already getting old.

- activities that don't require wowhead guide or handynotes is it really that impossible for blizzard to leave breadcrumbs and hints, etc. for people to play the game and find rewards in a satisfying way? Who the hell in their right mind conceived profession knowledge points and thought that it would be interesting to have many sources and no indicators on if you've got all you could with no catchup? Why do you still have achievments of stuff nobody can find on their own without a list of coordinates? Even zone sidequests were really hard to find. I didn't want to check in wowhead where to start them byt ended dokng so cause I couldn't find the gnoll king in Azur span.

[Biomega]

There is a reason I used 'shortsighted' instead of a mean word like 'stupid'. If we're talking business, how viable is it to never updated your office at all in over 10 years? Same thing here. EK and Kalimdor look wildly outdated, even compared to something that came one expansion later (pandaria). It also saves them time on the 'idea' phase they would normally have for new expansion areas. As someone said before, they don't make zones like they did back then. They use a modular structure. And seeing as we've seen lots of assets that could be used in a ravamp, i'd say the most work is in the quests and content itself, not the art. And as we've seen with DF, they can easily put massive amounts of content into a large mass for one expansion. Now imagine them working on it since WoD and there you have it: World revamp.

I get what you meant, but it's not that simple. The longer-term you plan, the more uncertain your predictions. Making big long-term investments increases the risk substantially, because you don't know what's going to happen. No one can predict gaming 10 years from now. Even 5 years. You're positing that somehow a massive investment like that will pay off eventually - you have no way of knowing that. If anything, WoW's dropping player numbers speak AGAINST an investment like that, and the general age of the game makes a more conservative strategy far more attractive. No one is saying WoW's collapse is imminent or anything like that, but after 20 years it's not exactly a good time to be making massive investments into a product like this; even the best-quality game will outlive itself eventually. Whatever they may have planned in terms of succession we don't know, but even assuming they just keep on going as-is it would be an extremely shaky proposition to think that something on that level is ever going to generate the necessary returns.

There's a reason many businesses now focus on short/medium-term planning - it's safer, it's more attractive to investors, and it's far more easily controlled.

[Revamp Man]

Update one capitol city each
Make ziidormi phases for 5 zones
Each patch add another zone

Not a full remake but preserves the past while giving new content

[Skytotem]

With Jorin Deadeye saying he's bringing the Outland bleeding hollow members to Azeroth in the orc heritage quest, I wonder if they plan to revamp a swamp/jungle zone next or what?

[Nymrohd]

With Jorin Deadeye saying he's bringing the Outland bleeding hollow members to Azeroth in the orc heritage quest, I wonder if they plan to revamp a swamp/jungle zone next or what?

I mean Dustwallow is an ugly zone and without Onyxia and Theramore it has not plot hooks. The ogres never really fit there anyway. Make it look more vibrant and bring the bleeding hollow.

[Biomega]

Who said it was a huge investment? The size of the continents are just as large as the islands of the latest expansions. Knowing that the zones already exist, it would go much faster to redo them because less effort and resources are required unlike for a new zone out of nowhere.. You start from the premise that it's a big effort, when it certainly isn't.

You're casually speaking of creating an expansion with new expansion zones AND with two new continents each of which are, by your own admission, the size of those new zones. That's three times the size in maps alone.

On top of the terrain redesign, you then also need the NPCs, quests, and so on, all of which needs to be both true to the old spirit AND related to the old world. In many ways, that's HARDER than making entirely new stuff, because there at least you can do whatever you want with little care for cohesion or integration into preceding layouts or events. Not to mention that since those are lower-level zones, it all must be tuned to work in a 1-X level scaling environment, reflecting the appropriate complexity, routing, and so on. And that's not even going into the technical challenges of redoing existing stuff rather than making new stuff, as databases have to be modified, ported, reorganized, etc. etc.

You are VASTLY underestimating the actual scope of a project like this.

[Skytotem]

I mean Dustwallow is an ugly zone and without Onyxia and Theramore it has not plot hooks. The ogres never really fit there anyway. Make it look more vibrant and bring the bleeding hollow.

The stonemaul have been there since TFT so I dunno about moving them out entirely, but having them keep a token presence with some of the Mok'nathal while Jorin and the Bleeding Hollow take the former Grimtotem towns for themselves would be cool.

A Dustwallow revamp would also be nice since Onyxia's lair can provide ties to Dragonflight.

[Nymrohd]

The stonemaul have been there since TFT so I dunno about moving them out entirely, but having them keep a token presence with some of the Mok'nathal while Jorin and the Bleeding Hollow take the former Grimtotem towns for themselves would be cool.

A Dustwallow revamp would also be nice since Onyxia's lair can provide ties to Dragonflight.

Honestly I want the Ogres to get some proper place instead of dwelling in other races ruins. We saw how an ogre city would look in WoD and it is pretty damn awesome. As fairly large creatures they seem to prefer open areas so they could move somewhere else. A swamp just doesn't seem to fit them. they are not shrek

[Skytotem]

Honestly I want the Ogres to get some proper place instead of dwelling in other races ruins. We saw how an ogre city would look in WoD and it is pretty damn awesome. As fairly large creatures they seem to prefer open areas so they could move somewhere else. A swamp just doesn't seem to fit them. they are not shrek

I'd split the difference and have them move into some of the mountains between Dustwallow and Barrens, or Dustwallow's border with 1k Needles.

I dunno if the Stonemaul would be able to reproduce Highmaul's style though since they had a bunch of Apexis Crystals to make their Ogres smart.

[Biomega]

I think you overestimate that. Precisely they already have a base of work, and concerning the quests there is nothing easier to do.

Are you suggesting they just leave all the quests etc. the same?

That's not how a revamp works. They'd have to redo EVERYTHING in those zones. Otherwise what's the point.

[Biomega]

Excuse me, are you on purpose not to understand or am I expressing myself badly? There was never any question of leaving the quests, when I say that these are easy to do that obviously does not mean that we leave the old ones. Of course a redesign addresses all aspects...

The reason I'm confused is because you're suggesting that redoing all quests in all zones in EK and Kalimdor is somehow "easy to do".

You are out of your depth here, mate. You are so far off how much work this actually is it's frightening.

[Reive]

They're never going to revamp the old world. Which is good because i don't trust these devs with anything.

[Paula Deen]

Its really refreshing seeing a bunch of people on MMOC arguing about a supposed world revamp than complaining about current content. I feel like thats a really good sign.

[Luck4]

Are you suggesting they just leave all the quests etc. the same?

That's not how a revamp works. They'd have to redo EVERYTHING in those zones. Otherwise what's the point.

There's no need to keep the same quest density though, as the leveling experience is pretty short these days. This time around questing should be tied to high-end/high-level content and focused on the narrative, like today's campaigns.

The point of the Revamp isn't leveling or graphics, it's meant to advance the lore surrounding the OG races and to give us evergreen zones that can be used to host more events in the future, back in BFA we had many events that happened in Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms offscreen because of how outdated these zones are aesthetically and chronologically speaking, for instance, in 8.3 Blizzard picked Uldum a CATA zone and Vale of Eternal Blossom a MOP zone to host its events, meanwhile, in 8.0-8.1 they used two Vanilla zones (Arathi/Darkshore) but not before Revamping both of them.

The fact that the old world isn't on pair with anything from 2012+ is making Blizzard avoid telling any stories in Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms, which is pretty bad, since these places are the foundation of this franchise. We should be seeing story updates, events, dungeons, and even raids in those places from time to time, which btw was the case in The Burning Crusade/Wrath of the Lich King/Cataclysm/Mists of Pandaria, but since Warlords of Draenor Blizzard is avoiding like a plague to use the old world for literally anything other than pre-expansion events.

Didn't you guys notice how the story is imprisoned in the new landmasses of the current expansion since WOD? This is not fun nor healthy for the game/franchise and makes it feel small and generic.

Another good example is the Legion Artifact Quests, as most quests that happened in the old world had some hidden vaults and small places built from scratch while the ones that happened in expansions use existing assets/places.

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Its really refreshing seeing a bunch of people on MMOC arguing about a supposed world revamp than complaining about current content. I feel like thats a really good sign.

I wonder what Blizzard thinks when they see people hoping for a World Revamp before every single new expansion announcement.

[AOL Instant Messenger]

Its really refreshing seeing a bunch of people on MMOC arguing about a supposed world revamp than complaining about current content. I feel like thats a really good sign.

Indeed. For all the shit I've given this expansion and its sickeningly saccharine setting, it does seem like the game is in a good state if people are arguing vitriolically about what they look forward to instead of what makes the game a slog.

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Didn't you guys notice how the story is imprisoned in the new landmasses of the current expansion since WOD? This is not fun nor healthy for the game/franchise and makes it feel small and generic.

I'm inclined to agree with you there. A world revamp would do wonders for keeping things evergreen and the old world relevant, especially now that leveling can finally be put back into something resembling chronological order.

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To toss in my own pair of pennies, I'm personally of the mind that a world revamp would be a very good and desirable thing, and that it is very possible, though I am also of the mind people are getting a tad too confident about it. We've had quite a few false alarms thus far, and those who are in that camp are getting far too confident, I think. Still, I'm holding out hope for it myself in spite of that.

A realistic middle-of-the-road solution that I'd at least be satisfied with and I think does fit the scale Blizzard is mainly going for would be a Lordaeron revamp alone, though. I think that has just about the right amount of zones and a sufficiently good amount of storytelling potential. Still, a world revamp would be plenty welcome and it would be a pleasant surprise if they actually put in the effort for it. It'd definitely win subscribers back, in my opinion.