I want to explore Warcraft the way I imagine it. Sprawling mountains and hills, vast plains and deserts, strange and creaking swamps and bogs - I want it all.
As an MMO, it’s doing it’s best. There’s plenty of little flavorful set pieces and homes, npcs with some pretty fleshed out daily schedules - but it’s not enough.
I’m already writing a book of WoW flora, utilizing the existing known plants and adding a bunch of my own - I really really want to see a world where I can walk through a field and…feel like it. Where it’s not just a zone where skinnable animals spawn - I want it to be a living, breathing world. Where we as players are sharing it with the NPCs, instead of just…utilizing them for function.
I want a warcraft game where you are both a stranger to the world and tied to it innately. Where you can stay in an inn, and come out the next day to see a flash flood has washed out the bridge crossing the Thondroril River. Where you could watch the nearby towns work to get it repaired - and help out to get it done faster. Where the threats aren’t…solvable by the sword. Not permanently - not without an insane level of blood and pain upon your hands.
I want a game where the classes are tied deeply to the world. Where you’re coming up against NPCs as an equal. Where you have to out-smart, out-power, or simply out-last your opponent. Or bribe them. Or not fight them at all.
Idk what you’d call it. These are just the feelings I get whenever I log in. There’s this sense of longing, of wanderlust - that I desperately want to engage with and create a space for. I want to design an Azeroth Sim where I can just - walk around and help folks out. Nothing world-ending - I just want to heal someone who took a bad spill down a cliff. I want to make sure SouthShore has enough smoked fish for that winter, and talk to the local magistrates about how much they’re exporting for the alliance compared to what they need. I want to listen to the forest trolls and hear what their histories are, the lives they lead, what their hopes and dreams are. To talk to the gnolls and get why they are where they are - to help them stabilize maybe. I dunno.
These are the kind of things that make me roll my eyes at big indie game reveals.
It sounds lovely, it really does… but people want a game, first. Without infinite time, infinite money, and infinite storage space or compression for your files, you do need to focus your game in on something.
That’s all I want tbh. Though maybe even more than the Elder Scrolls ever did. Like I’d like as much focus on engagement with the world and it’s people as there would be with the player character development…
I wanna have a little farm somewhere in the Hinterlands and trade with the dwarves and trolls there. Maybe get to know a couple elves and learn how to make wine from them :3
Understandable!!! Honestly this is why I don’t expect it and why it’s a personal project. My kind of game isn’t a game for everyone - just a very complicated gigantic one for this one particular freak of nature who uh - wants to make separate animations for harvesting each and every edible/useful herb in warcraft
Like Earthroot!!! I feel like you’d clear dirt away, check the roots, and then need to wash and peel it when you get home. Chop it up like ginger. Maybe even has that kinda sharp tangy flavor. :3
I really like survival game mechanics, but they tend to be heavy on the sandbox and have zero story. There needs to be some good story elements to really keep me engaged.
I like your writing. I would say, from where I sit, that in things like this it is not so much as what the game brings to you, but what you bring to the game (it it called head canon?).
Players use their imaginations for some great things, I think I read of a guy who collected eyeballs in the game and kept them in his bank and would invite people to join his guild for ten minutes to look at his museum of eyeballs.
People make up their own backstories, maybe instead of a great leader like they call us in the game but instead a mercenary for hire who has no idea of the lore or the why of the fight, only that there is a reward at the end.
I could not begin to tell you what those tmog guys are thinking when they walk through town, but they are seeing the world differently than I am.
So, when you do stop and look around, you can ask, “What happened here? Ashenvale is on fire.”
So a WoW Kingdom Come Deliverance or TES/Witcher-like game.
I dreamt of a game like this for WoW around 20 years ago while doing deadmines for the first time. Sad to see after all this time they never made a single-player RPG set in Azeroth, but I guess WoW still works for the most part.
Quite! This is just my own little wistful wish. I am, however, working on a personal project that I’m hoping will one day satisfy this itch. Never going to be able to share it - but it’ll be nice.
I didn’t really have a safe home growin’ up, but Azeroth was pretty much it. This place is where I end up coming back to whenever I’m feelin’ homesick.
Oh goodness eep I do plenty of this. I have a whole AU (that is the basis for the aforementioned game I’m workin’ on) that runs off of the idea that the kingdom of Alterac was historically mistreated, and sided with the remnants of the second war horde upon learning that they’d more or less been mind controlled and…had no home to go back to. Got a whole bunch of alternate histories - I just…wanna interact with them physically. Put them into reality. :3
YES! And no. Single player in this game imo feels bad because you’re not meant to be alone in this game. It’s not scaled that way and everything is built around the idea of this world being populated with players. Because it’s an MMO. Ain’t a bad thing.
I’m looking for something where…you do really feel like a traveler. An adventurer who does in fact need to rent an inn out for a few days because sleep is a necessity. Who does quests in that hub because you’re stickin’ around there anyways and you need to buy food. A surival game that kinda…captures the soul of warcraft and expounds on it.
Skulls are a good thing to collect - I collect every bit of text in the game. :3 Anything anyone’s written. There’s this note I found in Maldraxxus - the one from a kyrian who remembers her girlfriend - who fought to hold onto those memories even as she had her final death. It’s tragic, but something I want to hold onto.
It started as a joke between me and some friends back in Vanilla. It just turned into a thing, now across all my alts they usually carry at least 1 skull with them in their bag.
One of my favorites is
And my DK still keeps his from the starting area in Wrath
Thank you for the suggestions - I specifically want to walk around Azeroth with that level of detail though. :3 They and games like Red Dead 2 are inspiration for sure - but ya girl’s got a craving for Warcraft that Blizzard’s never satisfied.