Hey everyone, this post is intended to start a discussion about roleplay in WoW - but even if RP isn’t for you, some of the features discussed in here might be of interest to you!.. because unfortunately, it is unlikely we will see features specifically targeting roleplayers, who make up a very small portion of the playerbase. But we can still hope!
Edit: Here are a few useful links to other posts on the community council forum that I thought was relevant to this post!
A brief disclaimer: this initial post will only include my own, personal wishlist, and I might have to update it over time in case there’s something I hadn’t thought of already. I am planning to reach out to the many RP communities over time and include their wishes as well, and I hope my fellow council RPers will share theirs too! Now, without further ado.
Expression
More character customisation options - and not just new hairstyles, but new types of customisation. How about a height slider that changes the size of your model by a few percent one way or the other? Body types? Face shapes for all races? Prosthetics? And can we make glasses part of customisation options and not just as transmog? I never take my glasses off if I am going to wear a hat!
Transmog!.. Oh boy, where to start, I don’t want to get too specific about particular pieces (except the Kul Tiran beanies, give us those), but let’s get more civilian clothing available at the very least. How about transmogging gloves and boots separately, just like we do with shoulders? Can we get models for necklaces and rings? Can we get better options for showing and hiding hair, horns and other things when wearing hats and helmets?
Class customisation! You’re a mage, why shouldn’t you be able to have your eyes glow when you cast spells? A warrior might have a lot of battle scars! And how about customising our spell effects to be better tailored to our characters? Actually, I will make a thread about this sometime…!
Better toys and consumables - primarily those that transform you or add another effect on your character. Many of these have a very limited duration, and that’s quite annoying. If I want to be a ghost, I either have to spend a fortune on spectral potions, or use multiple separate toys with different appearances.
More animated emotes - personally I really want to be able to customize your stance, walk animations, and perhaps facial expressions when idle. And there’s a whole lot of emotes that already exist in-game that you could apply, such as leaning against a wall! The list goes on.
Player housing. I’m going to make a thread on this to elaborate…!
Better guild customisation. All the old icons and colours haven’t aged particularly well, I would like to see both more options for existing customisation, and new ways to show off your guild! More guild mounts, pets, banners, toys, and transmog?
Guild housing… cough cough
Systems
Cross-faction accessibility! I think this topic is best discussed elsewhere, but let’s make it easier to play with others of the other factions!
A dungeon master mode. This mode would allow you to temporarily phase an area so that you and your friends can temporarily roleplay in that area by yourselves. Heck, let us place objects and NPCs in there, all under the control of the dungeon master! Is this a big ask? Yes! But how cool wouldn’t it be.
Dungeon and raid area accessibility. Let’s add a new dungeon and raid difficulty, allowing us to wander around the dungeon and raid environments without worrying about being eaten by Deathwing or N’zoth. And while we’re at it, let’s allow full 40 man raids inside dungeons in this particular difficulty only!
A phase toggle for raids, allowing everyone in the raid to be in the same phase. You can already do this with party sync, but this does not work for raids.
World
Let’s at least get some graphical updates for Stormwind and the other major cities, they look particularly dated in comparison with newer zones. Speaking of…
Give us back our cities!.. and a few more while we’re at it. Gilneas, Suramar, Undercity, Gnomeregan, Mechagon, Teldrassil(?) and more. And why not add all the functionalities provided to us in the capitals, such as the warmode toggle and access to the portal room while we’re at it.
I’d very much like to see resolutions to many questlines and raids out in the world. Once you complete the quests in that area, let’s say you cleared out some gnolls, those gnolls won’t be there next time you visit. Silithus was crushed by a sword, so this is certainly possible!
Better weather and new skyboxes. I know we technically have rain and storms in Stormwind now, but I haven’t actually seen it yet. Why not make weather more immersive in all zones, and give them better skyboxes? Some of the cloudy skies in newer zones are gorgeous, and it is painful to go back to the ‘clouds’ we have home on Azeroth.
That’s all I can think of to start off with! I will update this post if I happen to come up with anything else, and now I hope to hear from the rest of you! Stay tuned as I’m planning to reach out to the communities out there :>
Edit1: I forgot to add a note about cross-faction interactions, best discussed in detail elsewhere.
Edit2: Added links to other threads on the Council Forum, and changed title of the thread.
Great suggestions! These echo some of the suggestions I had written down/received as well. Reading some of these gets my RP nostalgia goin’!
Some “easy win” (aka not a lot of effort) additions/notes:
Generic two seater mounts – being able to ride a horse with two people vs. having to always summon a fancy mount would be pretty neat. This could be either new mounts or mount equipment for existing mounts.
More emotes – Definitely echoing being able to use the leaning/bar emotes that only NPCs have. Being able to play certain combat animations - either through chat-less emotes/states or toys, would also be a great addition. I distinctly remember (and I’m certain this still happens) where fights would mostly consist out of people awkwardly staring at eachother. There are duels, but those only really work 1on1 and can only go on for so long in a certain area before someone is forced to give up. Being able to emote one’s character better in these situations would be amazing.
Dungeon/raid accessibility – Having a way of invisibly flying around dungeons/raids in “no-clip” (aka just let us use the existing commentator mode used in tournaments) would also make this idea very useful to machinima/fan artists. To prevent abuse, this might have to be limited to the earlier mentioned “RP dungeon difficulty” though.
Built-in OOC chat on RP realms, maybe with an indicator or different color. I’m aware some addons can do this, but having a /ooc or something would be useful.
Less easy wins that will require some effort:
Character customization – Definitely a bigger ask on dev time, but being able to specify colors for certain things (e.g. eyes, hair) vs selecting from a list of predefined colors would be cool (and save on a few prebaked color textures). Shoutout to Kruithne whom I definitely didn’t steal this from.
Transmog – Can’t go without mentioning the whole “armor dye” idea that’s been floating around the community for a while. I would like to add that I wouldn’t actually choose to recolor entire armor but maybe just certain parts of armor – for example just the blue part of the Imperial/Stormwind armor set.
RP dungeon difficulty – Definitely a great idea, but would obviously need to disable loot, achievements and any other form of reward to prevent this being an option to “cheese” certain things. Maybe a trivial difficulty with all these things (maybe even enemies or respawns) disabled would be a great way to start with implementing this.
Even more effort:
Built-in TRP3-like profiles – Big ask and would require a lot of UI additions as well as new moderation tools to moderate these profiles, but addons like TRP being a standard on RP realms alone is enough reason to consider adding something like this in a built-in manner.
Multiple character voices – All characters of the same race/sex currently sound the same, adding some new voices one could pick from would be yet another way to set your character apart from others.
I shall make a forum about emotes and customization and models later on. But this is all great. one thing that keeps getting repeated from every RP community is;
More emotes
Customization
Updated models
Cosmetic Armor
Race/heritage items
Player and guild housing
RP-friendly toys
A rewamped world
Pushing for these things is incredibly important for the RP community. It is strange and not very immersive walking with a high resolution pet (hyena, boar, wolf) around a forest with a square trunk. There is immense changes that could be made and WoW could do a lot better with this. This is a highly RP friendly game, but as time goes, things start lacking.
Lore is incredibly important to the majority of the RP community and having a consistent lore that makes sense is also important, there needs to be some clarification on a lot of major points that should be spoken about at a later forum post.
Just know we are reading and following your posts, many great ideas and suggestions have already been thrown my way and I know the others as well. I am glad and relieved we are all mainly on the same page on a lot of these things, and most of the things we all ask for are not majorly big things (e.g; emotes, customization, cosmetics)
There are a lot of RPers in WoW and it is important they are not left out for the sake of other aspects of the game!
If we do end up getting Player / Guild housing at some point, here’s a suggestion I received.
“I have a small addition/suggestion about the housing (if it comes). It would be cool if you could do two new professions, lumberjack and carpenter. These could produce furniture, among other things. In combination with a possible scaling for all dungeons and raids, you could drop various recipes in the respective theme. Of course, you could also extend this to other professions, so a tailor could also make cushions and carpets or a herbal flower arrangement.”
“This is only a small idea but would make professions more attractive again and also houseing directly with consideration.”
Time for an update before I take a break for the holidays :>
I’ve been sampling some more information from my own community to add to the list, and I have some useful links to share from the forums. I am unfortunately not able to add a complete list of everyone’s wishes, but I do suggest checking these threads to start out with!
(The latter links to and has been referenced in the former, but I figured it was a good idea to link them both either way.)
I have been reaching out to fellow players from my personal corner of AD-EU, here’s a condensed list - with some added opinions :>
Customisation
More colour options, for hair, skin, et cetera.
Upright worgen, trolls, forsaken. See ‘body types’ in my original post :>
Options for more undead races. The suggestion given suggested this as an option for the forsaken race. I’m not entirely sold on that idea, I would rather give us options to play as undead versions of other races (without having to play DK :>).
Demon hunter wings! Either as toys, transmog or a toggle-able spell, such as the worgen human form.
The ability to hide Forsaken boney toes sticking out of boots.
More gnome customisation options!
Emotes
More dance variations!.. this has been a bit of a meme since WotLK. I imagine it takes a lot of resources to make new dances, for all the different races available, though!
Targeting should make you look at the character’s face, not their core. Let’s just say it sometimes looks a little awkward…!
Transmog
More NPC transmogs available to players. I touched on this in my original post.
Less restrictions for transmog on armor class. This might be worth an entire post of its own…
Old unobtainable transmogs being obtainable somehow. The BMAH isn’t all that accessible to most players, so it would be nice to have another way to earn them. There were also some wishes to get an option to earn old, more prestigious rewards again, such as old glatiator sets and mounts.
More cosmetic gear options!
Update old armour to be higher resolution / better models. This one might be a bit harder to do; replacing existing transmog with higher fidelity versions will be welcome by some, and not by others. Worthy of a debate in another place.
Dyes for armour.
More white/grey armour transmoggable. Examples given were the new starter gear sets!
Toys
Tents, tables and longer duration for bench toys. Generally, the ability to place objects that stay there for a while, such as Vulpera tents, is highly requested. It would be nice to set up camps out in the world!
Minigames you can play with others! We technically have some already, but the more the merrier.
Mounts
Boat mounts with passenger seats! Boats already exist in the game, but they aren’t very boat-like. Can I also add that ships would be fun, even if they might be more challenging to implement?
Systems
RP/Exploration mode. There’s some discussion on how this would be implemented, but the gist of it is a warmode-like mode you can opt into, so you can explore and RP in a world without having to worry about NPCs et cetera. I do not personally think this is the great solution RPers are having with a lot of the problems presented when talking about this, but that is a discussion for another time. More on that here: Exploration Mode
Garrison customisation! I have my doubts that we will see more updates to the garrisons, I also think player/guild housing might take care of that.
Invite others to Tillers farm! I’ll also add the ship yard in the garrisons.
Profession booths: okay, so this takes a little explanation. Imagine you have a toy where you set up a work station, much like how Feasts and Cauldrons work, to allow players to interact with you over that.
/Ignore to phase players out. This one I think… is technically very difficult to implement, and also might be a little antithetical to the game, i.e. prone to being abused. This was primarily suggested as a solution to get rid of players who are trolling you with their massive mounts or otherwise.
Roleplay profile addon features in game. I think this one is a little unlikely to be implemented, as all RPers are using these anyway, but many former addon features have been turned into actual features in-game before. If any features from these addons would be implemented, something like surnames or gender could be nice to have.
More open houses in capital cities. RPers are mostly stuck to using buildings as they exist in the overworld, and there is a limit to how many there are.
Update cities to better correspond with how things are now. Older cities haven’t seen many updates since they were introduced (Exodar, Silvermoon) and others have been removed entirely (as I pointed out in my original post).
Update Azeroth! It would be nice if the old world was updated to better reflect the current state of Azeroth - both in terms of lore, storytelling, and graphics.
Put Azeroth in one single instance. I think there are some serious technical limitations to this, so I do not think it is entirely doable and/or worth doing. Maybe for “WoW 2”…
More cities/urban environments!.. Like Mechagon, or Suramar.
Reveal the rest of Azeroth. What’s that over the horizon…?
If I have not added any feedback already given here yet, it is either because I haven’t seen it, have brought it under the umbrella of another suggestion, or that I’m trying to figure out how to put it in here. I’m still going to post more wishes here in the future, so keep the suggestions coming. Thank you :>
More wishes from the community, a shorter list this time around.
Looser class/race restrictions. Personally I am in favour of opening all classes to all races - but I do also recognise some valid points against the idea. A lot of work would be required (such as making new druid forms or animations for each race) in order to do that, and there are story/lore reasons why some race/class combinations do not exist. I think the latter argument is somewhat less valid, just because the culture you live in does not believe in something does not mean that you cannot. Although, having more story/lore explaining new race/class combinations could also just resolve that; we got night elf mages that way, after all!
More guild customisation. The guild tabard designer has barely been touched in years, and we haven’t gotten any new guild transmog since Cataclysm. How about a guild shield, for example?
A toy that allows you to take the appearance of various NPCs. This exists to an extent through the disguise rogue glyph, but only works on enemies that you can pick pocket. I think a limitless system that would allow you to transform into ANYTHING might be a bit much, it’d be really weird to run into Deathwing’s final form while you’re trying to visit the auction house - but there’s certainly a case to be made for a lot of other, lesser creatures.
I’m late with this one as winter veil is over: new cosmetic “ugly” winter veil sweaters to collect every year!
More casual clothes, specifically winter and summer clothes. Jackets, hats, fuzzy gloves and so on. How about hawaiian shirts?
More shirts, in general. Also adding new colour variants for existing shirts. There’s a severe lack of shirts in the game, compared to other forms of transmog.
More hunter pets that aren’t all that vicious! There are some cool dog models in the game, for example, those would be really cool to have as hunter pets. Also: a lot of old models are very blocky and square - either replacing them or adding new variants of them would be great! BFA did a lot of this, which was great!
This 100% needs to be done, I thought a interesting way of introducing more class / race combos this time would be a short questline via your class order hall where you are called back to help recruit and train some new recruits and where it is explained that due to the losses of the recent conflicts (Legion, BFA, Shadowlands) we need to be less strict in who can be a Paladin (for example). Maybe even have a few recruits who are struggling with their training that your help out via a few quests. Not saying it should be a huge and long quest line or anything, maybe just similar in length the allied races quest line.
And of course, this would be totally optional. Although I am also all for just giving us the new race / class combos but I feel a short questline may help advance the lore of the classes a bit
So in a recent interview, Ion Hazzikostas said this about customisation and transmog:
Ongoing expansion and customization of it is something we are looking to do certainly by Dragonflight, possibly before then is rolling a lot of the white and grey quality items into the transmog system so that you can choose from a lot of simpler, humbler civilian attire-type looks. We want to keep adding in more options for customization and self-expression.
Rejoice roleplayers, we have been heard and we’re getting grey/white armor and more ordinary clothing for transmog! Here’s hoping we can get that Kul Tiran beanie I want so badly :>