I thought it was too early to be talking about this, but Blizz already sent out the Cata feelers so I guess I’ll put this out there now. First the idea, and I’ll follow up with the why in a subsequent post.
At the end of Cataclysm, when you fight Deathwing, instead of him just dying, he uses some ancient dragon magic with his final breath that is going to destroy Azeroth (all you need to do is change the final cutscene?). Oh no! all hope is lost, except…
Chromie opens a portal in the caverns of time to send you back in time to thwart his plans.
So we get teleported back to Vanilla-era (lore-wise), but something went wrong. Some key events are different in this timeline. I’m no lore person, but the point is you could do some really cool stuff that would impact the world in a big way. Just some ideas:
Change some skills/spells for classes
Quest/zone changes
Dungeon/raid changes
etc. - the sky is the limit
This perfectly sets the stage for Classic+ with solid continuity. There are so many things you could do and so many places you could go. Imagine Classic+, TBC+, Wrath+ and beyond. When you teleport back, everyone goes back to how their character started (level 1? or maybe 20? not sure about the right thing here but don’t make them max level – the world has changed! and you can go explore it anew while leveling). Plus reimagined Vanilla endgame would be awesome! I would love a Scarlet Crusade raid Expand on some ideas that didn’t make it the first time around.
I think it would be cool to go back to the old Azeroth, with a level 60 cap but reimagine the classes in the spirit of Wrath/Cata. I say this because the classes are so much more complete and more fun to play once you hit Wrath. Still have a 60 cap, but change up the skills/talents in a way that makes sense for the Wrath/Cata era.
After that… assuming it’s popular (I believe it would be immensely), you go into the next “expansion”. You could do TBC+ or go somewhere else entirely. Again, go big! Take some risk. See my next post for why you need to.
They retcon everything in retail to keep old characters relevant because they have no ability to write a story anymore. There is no way they will try to write an all new story for classic if they wont for retail.
To Blizzard: You need to expand the content beyond just re-releasing it. At some point, many players lost interest (for me it was MOP, and again in WOD after which I never came back and never will go back to retail).
You can only get so much playability out of the old content. Sure, a good chunk of players would stick it out for a round two if you did it again, but then what? Nobody is going to stick around to play the first 4/5 expansions over and over until they die. No King rules forever…
My worry: Up to this point, Blizzard is (likely) making a huge return on investment in Classic. No new game to develop, yet they get the full subscriber price. Sure, there are costs involved but it would be nowhere near what it costs to develop a new expansion. Going with an idea like this is more costly and more risky. Unless the decision makers are convinced this is the best way forward, we’ll probably end up going to MoP, WoD, etc. until the survey responses tell them to stop.
If you are wanting to keep your classic playerbase engaged or even GROW that population, you need to take some risks. I’m sure there are other great ideas out there, I’m doubtful mine is the best. But please, take the design & philosphy of the legacy game and do something drastic, exciting, or at least new with it.
I would request you keep conversation in this thread relevant to the topic. If you like the idea, give it a like or share it. If you get the opportunity to take a survey, tell Blizzard your interest in reminagined legacy content.
Thanks for your time. I’m curious what others think.
Any kind of + content is just big hopium at this point.
Blizzard cant afford making it if it turns into a flop because then they have to maintain 3 copies of the game and produce new content for two of them. With the amount of staff they have layed off there is no way they have the man power to manage that… hell WotLK pre-patch is still fraught with bugs because they just dont have the people to maintain a LEGACY copy of the game.
Continuing classic is the easiest way for them to bring in guaranteed $$$. Because the cost and hours required to produce legacy content is much much smaller than developing new content. Even if cataclysm looses 50-60% of the playerbase, given the resources required to spin up a cata server vs make new content, they would still make a much larger gain than if they made new content.
So i am expecting they will just see what they can do to make cata more palletable to those who didnt like it, since minor changes that make cata more appealing are easier to make than 1-2 years of brand new content.
I do think they will keep a wotlk legacy server, or do a SOM style approach to wotlk. But i would say cata is 1000x more likely than any kind of wotlk+. Sorry but as much as I too wouldnt mind experiencing a wotlk+, you cant ignore the buisness element behind the classic project.
WOTLK has far superior class design. Classes are so fun in WOTLK. Cata comes along and pretty much destroys this. yes, we still have talent trees, but they’re not… as good to say. This is my biggest reason why I don’t want cata. Cata is the start to retail when it comes to how classes are played.
Next reason I don’t want cata is the world change. It’s horrible and wasn’t needed. They simply just needed to update the artwork. They didn’t need to redo the whole world. Zones were fine, towns were fines, quests were fine.
Garrosh “War Crimes” Hellscream is definitely for kids!
Let’s let those kids see the nuking of Theramore and the victims’ despair and trauma after the matter, or the brutal conquest of foreign lands, or the purging of a single race from a neutral city (the blood elves from Dalaran), or Anduin getting hit in the leg by a huge bell (okay maybe the last one was for the better)
I would rather they make a WoW 2 at this point. Riots mmo is coming out soon and they have vast lore to pull from that people have invested years in. I know people have said every random mmo will kill wow but I really think that one is going to have longevity.
I couldn’t disagree more, these are terrible takes. Stopping at Cata is an awful idea, MoP is way more popular than Cata and to just leave that money on the table would be stupid. Speaking of money, creating new content requires people, and people require salaries. Why would they choose to invest money in a highly risky product that’s target audience can’t decide on what it should remotely look like, especially when they have the option to just take the free money?
You say they can’t keep tapping this well but they absolutely can until their surveys start coming back with so little interest that it’s not worth the money to churn out a rerelease. At that point, they’re probably safe to just restart the classic treadmill but they can send surveys to test for that too.
WoWs always been a kids game. Surely you’re not running around the same game as us and thinking “Wow! So mature! ” MoP was WoW at some of its best.
I would expect Cata to not cater well to the classic player base because it was the expansion that put some teeth into its raid content.
It was the dawn hundreds of pulls for a boss becoming the norm. Now retail is at a point if a raid doesn’t have multiple 200-300 pull bosses the raid is a joke.
I disagree with this. I think people want hard content but the reward has to be worth it. Mythic raids in WoW do not do this well. You can get the same ilvl gear out of the M+ weekly and the only rewards that carry over are a mount (every other tier) that people can solo farm to get in 3-4 years, a title that usually any 20 people can go get after the next tier or two, and a feat of strength that doesn’t even add achievement points.
FFXIV on the other hand does this very well. Ultimate raids are very difficult, individually more difficult than WoW’s raids IMO, but obviously easier to organize since it’s 8 people instead of 20. If you do them in the patch they come out in you get the highest ilvl weapon in the game. But there is also no FOMO since they all scale and stay challenges long after they were current content. Meaning you can always go back and get some of the best weapon transmogs in the game.
Expand on some ideas that didn’t make it the first time around.
” MoP was WoW at some of its best.