Jul 24
World of Warcraft : The Next Expansion
Tobold joked about it, and then took a more serious run at it. Now, I’d like to take a crack at it. The features of the next WoW expansion have to be well considered. BC was a lot of fun, for about two months, and then people got over it. Above and beyond that, it’s turned raiding and the end-game into something people aren’t happy with. So what should the focus of the next expansion be? Tobold think it’s going to be Northrend, and he’s almost certainly right.
My inclination, though, is to make the next expansion have a more lasting impact on the game. Howabout “World of Warcraft: The Legion Invades”?
High Concept: An expansion entirely dedicated to revamping/expanding on ‘old world’ Azeroth. WoW, as a game, is not just about the end-game. Because it’s so quick to level up, making and alt is one of the primary (not secondary) joys of the game. Blizzard should recognize this by providing buckets more content for the level 1-60 experience. Bring lessons learned from patch content and BC into the old world, and revitalize the places all WoW players love.
Story Concept: Whipped into a frenzy by the actions of heroes in the Outlands, the Burning Legion streams through the gate into Azeroth. A number of zones are fundamentally changed, new areas are opened to questing by the actions of the legion, and previously passive parties have been forced to take a stand.
Zone Revamps: The actions of the Legion leads to numerous changes across Azeroth. Desolace, Azshara, and Strangelthorn Vale are all somehow affected, providing new content within those zones. Small changes are made to almost every zone in the game, with an emphasis on creating “BC-like experiences” from level 1. Improvements in quest design, mount ‘previews’ (ala Vanguard), and some effort to include PvP battlegrounds in zone quest lines are all on the table. Geography is up in the air as well, thanks to the power of the Legion. One result: remap the old world to allow for flying mounts.
New Zones: Areas of Azeroth that were previously blank spots on the map are filled in as various groups come under attack by the Legion. Similarly, the Legions actions lower Dalaran’s shield and wake a sleeping evil beneath the ruins of Alterac. Over the whole of Azeroth both factions should have new zones allowing alternatives to previous leveling paths. IE, there should be at least three zones for any given span of ten levels, with one brand new. The other two (at launch) zones should be revamped as mentioned above to allow for added re-playability. No new continent, though islands and such around Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms makes a lot of sense.
New Races: Under assault by the Legion, several races stand up and take the fight to the demons. These races are unaligned at character start, and can choose to become friendly with either Horde or Alliance over the course of their careers. Faction gained with one side eventually causes faction loss with the other, until the character is as much “Horde” or “Alliance” as an Orc or Human. Each race has a starting city with 1-20 zone content. My personal favorite ideas for races are Goblins, Worgen, and Pandaren.
Pretty It Up: Revamp every player race to use as many polygons as the Blood Elves and Dranei. Add new emotes; new dance routines? Burning Crusade zones are crazy beautiful, add some of that pretty back into the old world. Whatever happens to Desolace … make it less desolate!
New Dungeons: I like Tobold’s idea of a new five-man dungeon for every ten levels, with “easy” ten-man raids at levels 60 and 70. I would also love to see the old world end-game given a new purpose. I suggest adopting the “raiding for faction sets” strategy used in Outlands. Former level 60 raids are retooled to have a ‘hard mode’ that can challenge level 70 raiders. Successful completion of raids nets you faction with various groups which will sell you set gear instead of forcing you to hope you get it. Make efforts, as with PvP, to incorporate dungeon crawling into the casual gamer’s understanding of the game.
Player Housing: Rip off EverQuest 2’s model whole cloth. The housing instances lead you to your own personal abode, which can be upgraded from a one-room cottage for a fee. Incorporate quest rewards for your home, as well as craftable items by most professions, throughout Azeroth and the Outlands. Allow trophies to be taken from raid bosses and notable mobs. Allow pets to be stored in a visible format within your home, to get them out of your inventory and show them off. Include access to your bank vault and the ability to purchase/craft crafting stations for within your home. Allow non-usable replicas of weapons and armor to be created from a character’s inventory, for display purposes only. Ideally when the content first goes in we’d be able to have replicas made of any item we’ve ever had bound to us, but I doubt Blizzard has kept that data.
Encourage Community: Add functionality to encourage community-building both in and out of game. Expanded guild support should include instanced guild housing along the lines of player housing, with banners and baubles available to celebrate guild triumph (another reason to go back to Molten Core). Incorporate guilds elements more fully into the Armory, and the official forums: ideally, allow guilds to host their websites on Blizzard servers. An auto-updating guild blog that shows in-game triumphs like boss downs, quest chain completions, max-level dings, etc. Key goal: don’t just make it about raiding. Incorporate more UI/design to make it even easier to shoot machinima; buy FRAPS and incorporate it into the client, if you have to.
Max-Level Quest Line: Level 70 characters work their way through a lengthy quest line that sees them working to foil the Burning Legion’s efforts in Azeroth. Works through several new level 70 zones in old-world, and includes some dramatic encounters in lower-level old world zones. Offers the chance to play your max-level character in familiar stomping grounds, and to show off for the lowbies. Branching storyline could increase replayability; choose which region to protect and you face different foes. Who doesn’t want to protect Duskwood from even greater evil? The goal this time is aim for that two-month cycle with max level characters, instead of aiming high and falling short. Keep em’ involved for a few months then let them do something else … like roll a new unallied character. An additional goal: don’t further inflate the power of items. Now that there’s a new standard set by BC gear, use this expansion as a chance to retool itemization across the whole game to mesh with BC-level gear.
No New Classes: No heroic classes, either. As a “pie-in-the-sky” idea, it might be nice to allow players to respec their character into a new class and maintain a portion of their progress. Respec from 60 Priest and become a 30 Warlock?
The bottom line is that the next expansion may be Blizzard’s last chance to really address some issues in the old world before things get away from them. Most expansions are going to add a ton of new virtual land to the world; this next one is a chance to think about systems, revamping existing content, and telling a story in the world all of us ‘grew up’ in. For more on this subject, WoWWiki has a lengthy page on possible expansion concepts.
Is there anything you think *has* to make it into the next expansion? Besides Northrend, that is.
15 Comments so far
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The Boat…get rid of the damn boat!
Until you find a mage to port you to Shatt to make it your hearth central, the boat is a constant annoyance. I was told that during the WoW beta period, there was no boat and instead the players would just talk to a Captain on the dock who would port them from Menethil Harbour to either Theramore or Auberdine.
Bring the Captain back! :)
I would also love to see talent profiles to allow the player to keep and maintain 2 seperate talent builds that can be activated on the fly. Blizzard can name them whatever they want, but in effect it allows you to switch between a raiding build and a leveling build depending on what you’re doing.
Or, perhaps whenever you enter an instance, it automagically sets your profile to the raiding one…whatever.
And for the love of god…add a flypoint in northern STV
Those are all great ideas and would certainly get me interested in the game again.
One idea…some sort of world event that brings the two continents back together again. This would change plenty of zones and advance the lore in a very interesting way.
Nice ideas, but the work required to bring many of them about would be enormous. Re-mapping the old world to allow for flying mounts would require an almost complete revamp of the existing zones. I don’t believe it’s something they could do in the time frame for the next expansion.
I agree whole-heartedly with bringing the max levels back to the old world. Hopefully the new expansion makes Azeroth a fun and necessary place to be again.
Maybe I’m missing something here, but how do you revamp the old world in a paid expansion set? What happens to the people who don’t buy the expansion? Do they all get shunted off into an instance of the old world that is unchanged? Or do they get the benefit of the bulk of the expansion content for free? *scratches head*
“These races are unaligned at character start, and can choose to become friendly with either Horde or Alliance over the course of their careers.”
Or you could have Alliance/Horde members go bad and join the Legion! That would give you a third side to PvP against. Would make for some interesting quest-lines too,I’m thinking.
“I was told that during the WoW beta period, there was no boat and instead the players would just talk to a Captain on the dock who would port them from Menethil Harbour to either Theramore or Auberdine.”
Slightly off-topic, but this was Captain Placeholder and it wasn’t during beta, it was shortly after the game was released. There was a bug with the boat system and they used the Capt as a temp fix until a proper one was put in place. Pretty much everyone misses him. :)
1. People are not done with TBC. We now know that. A lot more people are playing TBC than the original game. And that is without China throwing in their weight as they don’t have TBC yet.
2. More people are enjoying the end-game of WoW post-TBC than ever before. Player activity is up and it is staying up.
A lot of what you mentioned is really stuff I would like to see Blizzard working on between expansions. When an expansion is launched, I would like to see Blizzard have a plan for updating the pre-expansion content. When TBC launched, all of Azeroth mine as well been dumped off the servers. Every level 60 that didn’t upgrade should have gotten a “You lose.” card in the mail.
There is no reason that a player should become restricted in max level if an expansion increases the cap. You should be able to use the existing content to level above 60 currently and it is a slap in the face not to allow experience gain past 60 with the original box.
When you buy an expansion, you should be buying content, new races, new classes, etc. You should never be paying to continue the growth of your character when there is plenty of content available to progress your character in the old world.
Between expansions Blizzard should focus heavily on updating the previous end-game content into new end game content. Level 60 dungeons converted to level 70. Etc. etc. This is horribly needed with the way TBC revamped the end-game. A lot players skipped the level 60 garbage and are now having a blast in the 10-25 man content of TBC. Let these players go back and experience the old stuff as well, but revamped to fit the new focus!
I know you said no new classes, but you know what would make me play through the old content all over again, and not require new leveling zones? A new class.
My alt-a-holism stems from the love of many classes in WoW. For the most part, they’re all fun to play. But by this time, I have one of each in the 40s . A new class would get my heart thumping for Azeroth again.
I love a lot of these ideas. But whatever they do the next expansion needs to reward group play. The game has turned into world of solo craft. Don’t get me wrong, its great to be able to get on and solo no matter how long you have to play but what made the original release so great was meeting new people . Now PUG is a dirty word becuase it’s considered inefficient.
And don’t forget Heartless for all the wieght china has they aren’t going to pay for the BC expansion and the US base makes about 3 times the income on 1/3 the infrastructure that china does. The only thing China brings for blizzard is numbers to throw around in press releases. If they spend too much time focusing on what china likes they’ll lose in the end. The bottom line is any MMO that can get 3 million US and EU customers will make more money with less overhead than blizzard makes off of WOW right now.
Hi all,
Just a couple of small ideas… Maybe there could (instead of a lengthy lv70 quest line) there would be a lv65 quest line that would take you up to level 70 (eventually)? Also, to prevent some boredom, there could be different paths you can take to have different results?
But 1 major thing: The quest must be optional.
And there should be some sort of Guild Auctionhouse, just for selling items that fellow guild members may want, for cheaper prices than on the normal Auctionhouse. (I understand that there are addons that can sort of do this, but it can be extremely difficult to find a good one, and that is easy to use)
Just something I thought of in a few minutes ;)
BTW: most of those ideas above are great. I’d also love to see some new classes, like a Necromancer or Bard, etc.
- Howie
i think all of them are good ideas but,it would be cool for new flying mounts and land mounts. now if any of u guys come up with flying mounts aloud in azeroth it would fun but not good cuz of air attacks and raids. it would be chaos!
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