Next 20 years of WoW and Blizzcon - what will come next?

[Capivara]

AU azeroth would be even worse. "Lmao, nothing you did ever meant anything"
Then you try essentially do the same thing you do at every expansion release, except you gut your succesful product first.

Not to mention resetting collections just because you wanted to reset for absolute no reason.


This is some "how to commit a suicide on company level" shit.

it is a fair point.

i see 3 ways of moving forward,

1 - Apocalypse/Reset
2 - Veiled sea and new continents.
3 - Cosmic and new planets.

and honestly, all 3 of them would have alot of criticism in a way or another.
a Reset like this, don't mean losing your colection, it is just like the alternate versions of maps, they can just make an npc and he sends you to the past version.
in the lore we can't go back, but for in-game purposes just talk to chromie and its done. lol

[Ghostile]

it is a fair point.

i see 3 ways of moving forward,

1 - Apocalypse/Reset
2 - Veiled sea and new continents.
3 - Cosmic and new planets.

and honestly, all 3 of them would have alot of criticism in a way or another.
a Reset like this, don't mean losing your colection, it is just like the alternate versions of maps, they can just make an npc and he sends you to the past version.
in the lore we can't go back, but for in-game purposes just talk to chromie and its done. lol

So nothing really changes and it's just another cataclysm expansion which they said was fucking terrible to make and not really worth the effort?

[Biomega]

right?
im always surprised these two especialy did not surpass wow, like these are probably two of top 10 if not top 5 fanbases, i would expect bigger intersection with mmorpg players

They suffered from the usual slew of MMO problems - lack of content, lack of polish, etc.

SWTOR actually did reasonably well, generating well over a billion dollars. But of course nowhere near what people thought it would, in part because of devs being absolute delulu - I'm talking "we expect people to take a month or two to get to max level" and people doing it in two days and then finding out there's almost nothing to do. SWTOR is a great game - but it's not a great MMO. It has some great story stuff etc. if you just want to abuse it as a single-player game but its MMO elements are... not exactly good. And it's quite dated at this point, too.

Making a successful AAA-quality MMO is arguably the most difficult challenge in game design. I've said it many times, but I think at this point you need at least $2b and 10 years of dev time to have an actual shot. Almost no one can provide that, and so the people who wing it with less just end up flat on their face. There's just so much work, so many elements to get right, so many diverse player types, and so little room to fuck up. You get it even a little bit wrong people jump ship, and in an MMO, once people start leaving you are often D-E-D dead, son, because you need people to keep the world alive and once the exodus spiral begins and people abandon the game it's usually incredibly hard to sustain or reverse. And of course the daunting task of any live service game, keeping up the content flow. Work work work, on every level, at every turn.

Riot is one of the only companies who even has a chance - and even they appear to be struggling. Maybe AI will solve it all and provide some kind of content engine that'll keep a load off the devs, but who knows. It'll take years for that kind of tech to truly mature to a useable state. Until then, expect anything with "MMO" in its description to be an MM-NO before you can blink.

[Capivara]

So nothing really changes and it's just another cataclysm expansion which they said was fucking terrible to make and not really worth the effort?

IT Would change, it would mean "this chapter of azeroth is closed" now azeroth is a titan/god and will help us survive in a new way/new place.

i'm just saying i would find it interesting, but i know it is very risky.

[czarek]

I think stay in here but after apocalypse.

[Jshadowhunter]

But whats the catch to bring people to this new thing?
Might aswell kill the product if you're reseting for the sake of reset.

What's the catch for the current setting that will bring people in? I came back in the last patch of Dragonflight, after I was away since the 1st patch of Shadowlands. I had hopes that the future with the Worldsoul saga would change things, but now it seems that the current people handling the writing are doubling down.
It's not like having a 2nd Cataclysm would kill the game, and you'd still be able to go back to the previous setting, now that timewalking and phasing are a thing.

We need to bring back the animosity and antagonism between factions, because fighting cosmic threats can only be fun for so long. With the TWW we get the entire thing with Arathi and their "emperor of light", and you can just tell that the current writers will want to make him the next antagonist. But what if people WANT to be on his side? What if people want to be warriors of light, and they know they're in the right? Let people be zealots for what they believe.

Sounds awful, and given how Age of Sigmar was received, yeah, we don't want that at all.

"Yeah fuck you everyone you know and care about is dead. Including all of your mortal races. Your human you've had since Vanilla? Dead.". Such a 'great' option to give

Age of Sigmar is hated because Games Workshop killed the original Warhammer fantasy in order to revitalize it, and they made an awful story series that explained how we got to it.
On its own, Age of Sigmar is interesting. I like the idea of Mortal Realms and how magic functions and the effect it has on the people of any chosen realm (I like Ossiarch Bonereapers, aka Nagash's IRS). It's the part where it has the stigma still attached to it of what was sacrificed to make it popular.

Besides, what does it matter? Most known and/or loved characters in the series are either dead or on ice, and in worst cases, their legacies are being destroyed. And besides, it's not like there's any character from the original Guild Wars that is still alive several hundred years later in Guild Wars 2, so that's a non-argument.

i like the idea of full apocalypse, azeroth wake up, and use its powers to send us to a near unhabited planet, we have to rebuild everything, just new maps and new monsters and new wildlife that we know nothing about. maybe an alternate timeline.

Not heros, not champions. just explorers and refugees.

Just being on splittered landmasses in orbit of the broken planet is already enough. We don't need another Ka'resh situation. Isolation alone is enough, and the magical explosion would likely warp some of the wildlife.

[Mic_128]

But to be honest, i wouldn't mind a complete apocalypse where we just lose and have to be refugees in another planet or something like this.

I always kind of liked the idea of Azeroth 'hatching' and destroying the world in the process. Could have an expansion about trying to reconstruct the planet by re-joining the 'shell' of Azeroth. (Or fight to lobotomise the Titan to keep it form hatching, although that is a pretty damn dark goal.

[rrayy]

bahahaha no. If anything I am a centrist. I just call it as I see it

LOL that is what all extremists call themselves. They also use the phrase "I jsut call it as I see it" too.

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I mean it's all culture war insanity. For some reason people on the right can't accept they've labeled everything they don't like as "woke," thus stripping the term of meaning the same way that liberals calling everything "racist/sexist" stripped those terms of power and meaning.

But the culture shift that happened circa 2012ish the extreme social justice language is undeniable, it percolated through all culture and elite institutions at an insane rate (saying this as someone who went to grad school and thought this would stay contained in the academia lab). The backlash to this has obviously exploded, and now we're in the ultimate stupid land where right warriors can't understand they are all brain poisoned and left warriors are still in denial that anything ever happened.

We really need to go back in time and destroy the internet, or at least Zuckerberg

Left warriors are just as brain poisoned. And the internet had nothing to do with. The left warriors went incendiary in their rhetoric to the point of bullying and silencing those with viewpoints they did like. That created right warriors who retaliated. This would have happened without the internet because it was already happening pre-internet. Internet just made it easier.

[Ghostile]

Yeah, the left has some real incendiary rhetoric like, "maybe we don't mulch brown people relentlessly in the pursuit of profit" and "perhaps it's a bad idea to hate people for immutable characteristics." I can see why the right weaponized hatred to combat this extremist language!

Fucking crazy leftist warriors want to shutdown the peaceful stormfront community :rolling_eyes:

[Doffen]

...not with that attitude.

edit: upgraded him to better reflect "modern" audiences

There we have it!

[Mecheon]

Age of Sigmar is hated because Games Workshop killed the original Warhammer fantasy in order to revitalize it, and they made an awful story series that explained how we got to it.
On its own, Age of Sigmar is interesting. I like the idea of Mortal Realms and how magic functions and the effect it has on the people of any chosen realm (I like Ossiarch Bonereapers, aka Nagash's IRS). It's the part where it has the stigma still attached to it of what was sacrificed to make it popular.

Besides, what does it matter? Most known and/or loved characters in the series are either dead or on ice, and in worst cases, their legacies are being destroyed. And besides, it's not like there's any character from the original Guild Wars that is still alive several hundred years later in Guild Wars 2, so that's a non-argument.

People were upset at them killing Warhammer Fantasy. No matter how AoS's story was, they'd be upset at that

And of course it matters. Folks are attached to their characters. What, you'd just delete all of your mounts, all of your characters, your achievements?

There's a heck of a lot more stuff to earn in Warcraft than in GW1, people absolutely would hear "Oh you're shifting several thousand years in the future and we're losing all of our items?"

AU azeroth would be even worse. "Lmao, nothing you did ever meant anything"
Then you try essentially do the same thing you do at every expansion release, except you gut your succesful product first.

Not to mention resetting collections just because you wanted to reset for absolute no reason.


This is some "how to commit a suicide on company level" shit.

Okay but hear me out here on an AU Azeroth. Did you play Shadowbringers from FFXIV? The story there is we get shifted over to a world that's similar-ish to the main one but very different.

So an AU Azeroth you've got all your stuff, but you're in somewhere completely new, an Azeroth were some important events never happened and there wasn't the heroes running around. Given how people talk about Lordaeron and wanting it, naturally that Azeroth that Nozdormu spoke about once where the Scourge never happened, Arthas never fell. Just mess with stuff like that, I reckon that'd be a fun expansion

[Nymrohd]

I want them to slowly revamp the world. Pick a few zones to revamp, add some additional zones so there is something completely new and make an expac out of it. I can think of good concepts for every zone block. As for the story, I am resigned that I just won't like it that much. But at least let me fly around a better looking version of Azeroth.

[Capivara]

Just being on splittered landmasses in orbit of the broken planet is already enough. We don't need another Ka'resh situation. Isolation alone is enough, and the magical explosion would likely warp some of the wildlife.

You mean, like argus in legion but currently in azeroth, it could work. but IMO a completely destroyer azeroth and we going to thousands of years into the past and having to deal with amani and night elf empires or dealing with titans when they arrived in azeroth after "losing our home" would be more impactful for an apocalypse if we had one.

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I want them to slowly revamp the world. Pick a few zones to revamp, add some additional zones so there is something completely new and make an expac out of it. I can think of good concepts for every zone block. As for the story, I am resigned that I just won't like it that much. But at least let me fly around a better looking version of Azeroth.

an expansion dealing with undead vs guilneas and revamping the zones arround would really work and bring some faction war back.

[Ghostile]

Okay but hear me out here on an AU Azeroth. Did you play Shadowbringers from FFXIV? The story there is we get shifted over to a world that's similar-ish to the main one but very different.

So an AU Azeroth you've got all your stuff, but you're in somewhere completely new, an Azeroth were some important events never happened and there wasn't the heroes running around. Given how people talk about Lordaeron and wanting it, naturally that Azeroth that Nozdormu spoke about once where the Scourge never happened, Arthas never fell. Just mess with stuff like that, I reckon that'd be a fun expansion

That just means nothing we did means absolutely nothing because nothing was really at stake, we could have just found a dimension where none of this bad exists.
Someone dies?
Oh just pick a new one from a dimension they live in.
Oh no, a bad guy got the very important item we need!
Oh well, I'll just pull it from the dimension where its safe.

Alternative dimensions and timelines are the worst story element, ever.

[Jshadowhunter]

People were upset at them killing Warhammer Fantasy. No matter how AoS's story was, they'd be upset at that

And of course it matters. Folks are attached to their characters. What, you'd just delete all of your mounts, all of your characters, your achievements?

There's a heck of a lot more stuff to earn in Warcraft than in GW1, people absolutely would hear "Oh you're shifting several thousand years in the future and we're losing all of our items?"

You just repeated what I said.
And the Warcraft characters that we love and people are attached to, most of them are either gone or are unlikable shells of their former selves. THe last several expansions ruined them, or they have introduced new characters that are either meh or unlikable to begin with.

Who said anything about removing what you're already earned?
Not even a 1000 years is necessary. 200, maybe even 100, is already enough.
And if the argument is "what about your character"? Have them get stuck in some sort of temporal anomaly, and they unfreeze/are released in the present day.
Meanwhile, new characters start in the new present.

[username993720]

None of the above.
I want WoW to go back to its roots, not change drastically or come up with new, unfitting lore.