9.0 General Discussion

[LemonDemonGirl]

-snip-

the possibilities are endless, and eventually Blizzard will have to do it, seeing as they are quickly running out of reasonable places to have an expansion.

Do you think Blizzard will eventually make a WoW 2? Like if they can't do any more expansions they'll just make a new game?

[puddypounce]

Source telling me shadowlands is getting the Titan treatment and being spun into an auto chess game.

[Georg Von Vitzthum]

I would argue that now that we have the new levelling system in Shadowlands there are MORE reasons to do a level revamp.

With the phasing technology it is now easily possible to support 2 or maybe more instances of the same zone, meaning that a level revamp could have you level in the old zones, and then have the max level content in a revamped version of the same zone. Or maybe as i had in a previous thread i made, just have the new revamped zones be the levelling zones entirely. So instead of changing zones from a fresh character you stay in the same zones to max level, earnign rewards as you go.

I suppose there is also the very real possibility that Blizzard just revamps a few zones instead of all of them. Like having an Arthas focused expansion and revamping the northern part of Eastern Kingdoms, or an expansion where only the zones around Desolace are revamped, the possibilities are endless, and eventually Blizzard will have to do it, seeing as they are quickly running out of reasonable places to have an expansion.

if its going to be a revamp it will be in 10.0 for number senses, i do think they are saving the revamp for an expansion like that, the "10.0" could be a symbol to "wow 2"

this will be supported by how the starting zones are going to be disconnected to the general zone lore, everyone will be doing the same, atemporal

[Sondrelk]

Do you think Blizzard will eventually make a WoW 2? Like if they can't do any more expansions they'll just make a new game?

Personally i don't think so. At least not while WoW is still reasonably active. What i think is more likely is that WoW will be considered "done", in some sense of the word. Maybe in another 3-4 expansions, then we will have at least 5 years from the last major update before we might see WoW 2. Making an actual competitor to WoW while WoW is still active is just silly when you think about it.

[Queen of Hamsters]

Blizzard has to make a world revamp eventually. They might be able to squeeze out a maximum of 2 solid expansions set in entirely new continents until any new ones set on Azeroth would feel like an asspull. And at that point they have to start reusing zones, which honestly is not a bad thing. WoD is one of the best looking expansion continents, and that was basically a revamp of the Outland zones.

There are also inherent problem with creating a WoW 2, instead of creating one giant expansion. And honestly, if Covid-19 forces Shadowlands to launch in 2021 then Blizzard has the perfect excuse to put lots of resources and possibly even half a year extra of work into revamping old world zones..

Indeed.

WoW2 ain't ever happening, why risk a cash machine with lots of dedicated customers on a reset just to hope and lure those who left?
No, a world revamp is inevitable. 10.0 Would be the perfect opportunity.

[Sondrelk]

if its going to be a revamp it will be in 10.0 for number senses, i do think they are saving the revamp for an expansion like that, the "10.0" could be a symbol to "wow 2"

this will be supported by how the starting zones are going to be disconnected to the general zone lore, everyone will be doing the same, atemporal

In my opinion i would say there are 2 meaty expansions set in completely new areas before Blizzard has to start reusing zones heavily, those being Dragon isles, and Backside of Azeroth. With Dragon isles more likely being either a patch island or just a few zones alongside another continent. Not that this is a bad thing, there are a great many expansions that could be wrung out of WoW using reused zones, like resurgence of Yogg-saron in Northrend, or making an actual south seas expansion with the south seas islands we have gotten as expansions before, they just won't be entirely new unseen areas most likely.

- - - Updated - - -

Indeed.

WoW2 ain't ever happening, why risk a cash machine with lots of dedicated customers on a reset just to hope and lure those who left?
No, a world revamp is inevitable. 10.0 Would be the perfect opportunity.

I can see it happening, it just won't be as a direct followup to WoW. It will insteaad be Blizzard cashing in on WoW nostalgia when WoW has been in development limbo for a few years, which is quite a long time in the future.
Specifically, if we assume for sake of discussion that Shadowlands is the last expansion of WoW then i don't think we would see WoW 2 before at least 2026, and most likely even later than that.

[Synical123]

Indeed.

WoW2 ain't ever happening, why risk a cash machine with lots of dedicated customers on a reset just to hope and lure those who left?
No, a world revamp is inevitable. 10.0 Would be the perfect opportunity.

Even though I agree that this is the most plausible scenario, I personally believe they just need to do something similar to what a WoW 2 would do. I know a TON of people hate this suggestion, but I honestly think that they need to just basically delete everything, send everyone back to a starting level, and just start from scratch on how they design their game. IMO theres just too much stuff littered around this game that are just echos of previous expansions on top of new systems and junk like 'corruption levels' that just make the game feel clunky.

Think of it like this, a while ago their plan was to make leveling more relevant again and making traveling to places more relevant right? How did they do this? They just removed a few portals here and there and made leveling take quite a bit longer. These small changes do NOT work when we are at a point in the game like this where there are 120 levels and everyone has a million 5000% flying speed mounts and portals scattered everywhere that people are use to.

Just rip the band-aid off, delete everything through some crazy event, and just have everyone start from scratch.

Of course, this will NEVER happen. Because people are too attached to things like their mount collections or other nonsense that makes it almost impossible to actually fix a game they want to fix.

[Sondrelk]

Even though I agree that this is the most plausible scenario, I personally believe they just need to do something similar to what a WoW 2 would do. I know a TON of people hate this suggestion, but I honestly think that they need to just basically delete everything, send everyone back to a starting level, and just start from scratch on how they design their game. IMO theres just too much stuff littered around this game that are just echos of previous expansions on top of new systems and junk like 'corruption levels' that just make the game feel clunky.

Think of it like this, a while ago their plan was to make leveling more relevant again and making traveling to places more relevant right? How did they do this? They just removed a few portals here and there and made leveling take quite a bit longer. These small changes do NOT work when we are at a point in the game like this where there are 120 levels and everyone has a million 5000% flying speed mounts and portals scattered everywhere that people are use to.

Just rip the band-aid off, delete everything through some crazy event, and just have everyone start from scratch.

Of course, this will NEVER happen. Because people are too attached to things like their mount collections or other nonsense that makes it almost impossible to actually fix a game they want to fix.

What you are suggesting would be developmental suicide. WoW has been going on long enough that it has basically become the ultimate collectors game, whether that means achievements, transmogs or mounts. Wiping that all away would be insane, players would be completely outraged that all their hard work and achievements are gone. And as much as i agree that player interest dwindles as their options for exploring new avenues of the game grows thin, this would not fix it.

Now if you mean in the sense that you should have a world revamp that places every player back on a level playing field, then sure. I could accept it if Blizzard put all players back at level 1 for a world revamp expansion, but deleting all their progress would not work.

[Georg Von Vitzthum]

In my opinion i would say there are 2 meaty expansions set in completely new areas before Blizzard has to start reusing zones heavily, those being Dragon isles, and Backside of Azeroth. With Dragon isles more likely being either a patch island or just a few zones alongside another continent. Not that this is a bad thing, there are a great many expansions that could be wrung out of WoW using reused zones, like resurgence of Yogg-saron in Northrend, or making an actual south seas expansion with the south seas islands we have gotten as expansions before, they just won't be entirely new unseen areas most likely.

dragon isles i bet is going to be now

regardless, 10.0 could be the world revamp, all zones into the atual lore, then 11.0 and 12.0 they could start going to the other side of azeroth, and with that, those zones could be the ongoing levels, 80-90-100 and so on.

[Eurhetemec]

Do you think Blizzard will eventually make a WoW 2? Like if they can't do any more expansions they'll just make a new game?

Blizzard said their conditions for making WoW2 a number of times back around 2010. The main one is that the engine WoW is using can not longer be updated to accommodate the kind of content and interaction that they want.

What does that actually mean to us? It means it would take something like VR taking over as the dominant way people play games to cause a WoW2 to happen. You need a technology so transformative that you couldn't just update WoW with better graphics and so on, and get a good result. VR is one such tech. WoW being a third-person game (and reliant on being third-person and zoomed out at higher levels of play), with a hotbar-based interaction system, no physics, and a ton of extremely fast movement, is extremely ill-suited to VR. Yes, you could technically make it so you could view WoW in VR, but it'd be shit as a VR game. A far smaller company could come in with a purpose-designed VR MMO and make people a lot happier.

So until we see a change on that scale, which we haven't yet and probably won't for a decade or more (VR may become more popular with the next gen of consoles and PCs, but we'd need to be seeing like 50% of the market being on VR for this to be worthwhile), we won't see a WoW2.

So don't expect it before the 2030s. And for better or worse, Blizzard will be a very different company and may not even still exist. WoW may well be F2P or something by then.

No, a world revamp is inevitable. 10.0 Would be the perfect opportunity.

It is not inevitable, and every single expansion-after-the-next is the "perfect opportunity" according to people who want such a revamp, which includes me!

Chromie Time actually makes a FULL world-revamp less likely. You only have to level up a character once. You can pick the expansion, and not go to another one whilst levelling. If you pick the old world, you're probably only going to do a fraction of the zones anyway. So even if they did a revamp of parts of the old world, why would you assume they'd revamp the entire thing? I mean, realistically, at a normal density of quests and so on, you're going to to go 10-50 in say, less than 10 full old-world zones.

So if they do revamp, they're probably going to redo a similar number of zones. Even they're feeling very generous, and do separate Horde and Alliance experiences, they're going to re-use some of the zones. Not counting the Cata zones, there are what, 45-50 old world zones? They might redo 15 of them. I could see that. But all of them? Especially all of them and the Cata zones? I very much doubt it. Why would they? It's unnecessary.

Don't get me wrong, I WANT to see a revamp, but inevitable? It's anything but. Right now, all characters who aren't DKs or DHes or boosted at least SEE the old world (even if only from the inside of a dungeon or the like), because they have to do 1-60 or 20-60. But in Chromie Time, a much smaller proportion will. You can just do the new starting experience for 1-10, then go to say, Legion, or BfA, or WoD or TBC or whatever your preference is and level via that content, and if you're an entirely new player, you aren't even ALLOWED to see the old world! You go to the new starting experience, then BfA, period.

If they did a revamped old world, how many characters would even see it? I could see an expansion mostly set in Azeroth at max level revamping the old world AT max level, but the leveling old world? Nah.

[Queen of Hamsters]

Even though I agree that this is the most plausible scenario, I personally believe they just need to do something similar to what a WoW 2 would do.

Why would they need to do that, exactly? Did you miss the fact that BfA sold records in copies?

As a 11-year player with sub never lapsed, I'd take that sort of shit as my exit. Screw starting over, I can do that in other games.

[Synical123]

What you are suggesting would be developmental suicide. WoW has been going on long enough that it has basically become the ultimate collectors game, whether that means achievements, transmogs or mounts. Wiping that all away would be insane, players would be completely outraged that all their hard work and achievements are gone. And as much as i agree that player interest dwindles as their options for exploring new avenues of the game grows thin, this would not fix it.

Now if you mean in the sense that you should have a world revamp that places every player back on a level playing field, then sure. I could accept it if Blizzard put all players back at level 1 for a world revamp expansion, but deleting all their progress would not work.

No I mean exactly what you thought.

And it isn't insane, games do it all the time, the problem is the people who are too attached to these collections. Honestly, what good is having these collections when the game is suffering and basic systems just turn into annoyances and boredom for the majority of players?

I remember going back to classic and at the start I saw a priest with an epic mount already and I stood there for a bit and thought, 'christ look at that mount and how cool it looks compared to mine, I want to farm money so I can have that exact mount'. Now in retail there are SO MANY damn mounts they are basically meaningless to the majority of players. Some 'cool' new mount can come out and I look at it and don't even blink or care to know how they got it.

It isn't an insane thing to do, people just think it's insane because they are afraid of losing something that they will lose at some point in time anyway. At some point in time, this stuff is going to be gone. There's no reason in my eyes not to just do it now, and wipe the game so you can start from new and make the game better.

And it's not developmental suicide, it's developmental rebirth.

[Aeluron Lightsong]

No I mean exactly what you thought.

And it isn't insane, games do it all the time, the problem is the people who are too attached to these collections. Honestly, what good is having these collections when the game is suffering and basic systems just turn into annoyances and boredom for the majority of players?

I remember going back to classic and at the start I saw a priest with an epic mount already and I stood there for a bit and thought, 'christ look at that mount and how cool it looks compared to mine, I want to farm money so I can have that exact mount'. Now in retail there are SO MANY damn mounts they are basically meaningless to the majority of players. Some 'cool' new mount can come out and I look at it and don't even blink or care to know how they got it.

It isn't an insane thing to do, people just think it's insane because they are afraid of losing something that they will lose at some point in time anyway. At some point in time, this stuff is going to be gone. There's no reason in my eyes not to just do it now, and wipe the game so you can start from new and make the game better.

And it's not developmental suicide, it's developmental rebirth.

You severely underestimate how much people care about their collections.

[Synical123]

Why would they need to do that, exactly? Did you miss the fact that BfA sold records in copies?

As a 11-year player with sub never lapsed, I'd take that sort of shit as my exit. Screw starting over, I can do that in other games.

The 'record copies' thing is really not what you need to be looking at. Of course the copies sold in the first 24 hours are going to be more than expansions like wrath of the lich king where you had to go out and physically get a copy. Not to mention the preorder nonsense going on now. They need to do it so they can bring back new audiences and old players so the game can actually be playable to the general population again.

There is almost no reason to start wow right now as a new or returning player. There is just SO MUCH STUFF you have to dig through in order to get to a point where you feel at par with most people it just isn't fun or attractive anymore. They constantly have said they want to make the game more X or more Y (like with them wanting leveling being relevant, travel being relevant, wanting classes feeling more unique) but the moment they try to make even a slight change people freak out because all the other systems and nonsense that are in the game don't align with these changes.

You say you would quit, but I highly highly doubt that. If they started from new, maybe even made some completely new base classes and races, removed a ton of the races atm, did almost a completely new wow with a clean slate and make things they want to make relevant again, relevant (such as leveling, traveling, class uniqueness or whatever they want) I truly think they could make a better wow if they actually put some effort into it.

Of course I don't think this is going to happen because that's too much money and work, and it's just as easy to keep releasing these junk systems into the game and make it seem new and improved and just keep offering new little store mounts and critters to people collections and collect easy money that way. This formula isn't going to make the game better, I think this is fairly known by now with the content we have been getting, but it's making them money with little to no effort so that's what they are going to follow.

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You severely underestimate how much people care about their collections.

No I don't, I understand there is a lot of people who care, the issue is that this number could be higher if you just redid your whole game. Christ classic itself made wow's sub count TRIPLE. That's a clear sign that retail is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the population it could be.

The collectors would be ok, this isn't some crazy new thing that's never happened in any video game. Christ look at games like COD, people collect and care about the new skins and stuff and drop it like an old hat and buy the new cod every single year.

Collectors will always collect, releasing a new wow like this will just have those collectors start collecting in the new game. If the only thing holding back a good game is the fear of ruining a collectors collection then we really need to take a step back for a second and realize we are talking about a video game. Some day, this stuff is going to get deleted anyway, we all know that.

[FlubberPuddy]

Source telling me shadowlands is getting the Titan treatment and being spun into an auto chess game.

you should give that source all your money and belongings for being so undoubtedly correct.

[Aeluron Lightsong]

No I don't, I understand there is a lot of people who care, the issue is that this number could be higher if you just redid your whole game. Christ classic itself made wow's sub count TRIPLE. That's a clear sign that retail is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the population it could be.

Classic surged but it isn't going to last. Its an old version of a time that has gone by it won't last forever.

[Synical123]

Classic surged but it isn't going to last. Its an old version of a time that has gone by it won't last forever.

I completely agree, you must have missed my point. That surge shows you that people are still interested in WoW. They need to make the game more accessible and attractive to that surge. Because the same thing happens to retail when a new expansion comes out, they get a surge then people leave. The thing about it is BfA's 'surge' is getting 3mil copies sold. WOW WHAT BIG NUMBERS. Keep in mind, these were new or returning players. This number that tripled the sub count is completely ignoring the people who already had a sub to wow.

[Georg Von Vitzthum]

No I don't, I understand there is a lot of people who care, the issue is that this number could be higher if you just redid your whole game. Christ classic itself made wow's sub count TRIPLE. That's a clear sign that retail is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the population it could be.

The collectors would be ok, this isn't some crazy new thing that's never happened in any video game. Christ look at games like COD, people collect and care about the new skins and stuff and drop it like an old hat and buy the new cod every single year.

Collectors will always collect, releasing a new wow like this will just have those collectors start collecting in the new game. If the only thing holding back a good game is the fear of ruining a collectors collection then we really need to take a step back for a second and realize we are talking about a video game. Some day, this stuff is going to get deleted anyway, we all know that.

as a collector myself, fuck wow 2, i don't want leave my stuff behind

classic triple the number in the release, after, it became stable.

[Synical123]

as a collector myself, fuck wow 2, i don't want leave my stuff behind

classic triple the number in the release, after, it became stable.

Still que times on select servers but yes it did go down. I'm not suggesting classic is superior in anyway or trying to assert some sort of opinion here, I'm simply saying there is a HUGE audience out there WANTING to play WoW and these numbers proved it, but they don't continue to play because of how the game is structured as of this moment.

If we just remove all the nonsense and make wow new again it would bring back a ton of people and make the game fun again.

Also I hate to break it to you, but your collection is going to disappear someday, the excuse to not delete it now and hold the game back is sort of silly.

[Queen of Hamsters]

There is almost no reason to start wow right now as a new or returning player. There is just SO MUCH STUFF you have to dig through in order to get to a point where you feel at par with most people it just isn't fun or attractive anymore. .

So... starting a game with tons of stuff to go through and discover, is bad?
No, you're obviously looking at it from the point of view of a jaded player. There's every reason to start the game, same as any other iteration. Looking at it as a jaded player rather than how one felt when new, is just asinine.

I've seen plenty of new players during the 100% buff so far alone. With SL, they'll have a more adapted starting experience to boot.

Jaded people wanting a fresh start should not dictate how the game is handled. And they're not. Thank God for that. Regardless of how one feels about the systems, there's more effort going into the game than ever before in terms of development and variety in content for the many kinds of players. Giving feedback to make them improve >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> a restart.

Armchair devs without insight into player engagement, player numbers and sales are nothing more than nobodies with opinions. And the opinion that WoW needs a restart "to lure players", is pants-on-head idiotic. Especially when considering the current climate for MMORPGs all around.

Classic's there for those wanting "a fresh start and nothing but the basic". Retail = for those of us loving this game still a decade later, and those wanting to experience an evolving MMORPG.