WoW originally had a lot of every day busywork features like having to keep up with your food and water (which mad conjure water actually really useful) , buying arrows, crafting poisons as rogue, leveling weapon skills… even just having to read the quest text to know what to do… there were a lot of these adventuring RPG slow burn elements. And they were (in my opinion, rightly) removed over time, because they didn’t fit with the pace of the game and feel like unnecessary clutter an busywork. But a lot of people resented that, they like that type of thing. In fact it’s part of the Classic nostalgia thing. Now don’t get me wrong, I didn’t like those features and I’m glad they’re gone. In fact I also don’t like crafting and I don’t like survival games. However, I feel there is a place in the world for this slower gameplay loop.
And thinking about this I thought about plunderstorm. An entirely different mode where you don’t even play a class. So what if there was an entirely separate, slow burn, survival mode? Make it so he goal of the game is not raiding and getting purples and keeping up with the hamster wheel, but just surviving in the world. This would of course have to not be a huge resource sink, too.
I thought of 2 ways of doing his:
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Close-to-retail: Keep all the same world and quests from retail, but deliberately add a lot of inconveniences: Must eat food and water (possibly remove regular food and water and make it so you have to craft it except for mage water), must make the arrows or gunpowder, craft the poisons, add some inconvenience to every class. Make it so there’s no flight, no quest markers, remove all quality of life features, the game is now about dealing with it. This is the one I’m least likely to try out myself but I know there’s people who would love it.
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Similar to plunderstorm, but in reverse: use an existing landmass, possibly even with inhabited cities and everything. Basically: similar level of complexity to plunderstorm, but instead of being a fast paced, hectic PvP space that tries to force people into each other to make them fight, this is a big, slow paced, sparsely inhabited worldspace where people would naturally spread out to look for resources out in the world, and where people interacting would come from trading resources or using the different abilities of their characters together. Instead of avoiding the storm like in plundestorm, you have to endure it.
You have to level up every skill, from stabbing to lighting a fire. Maybe having no class like in plundersorm and you have to choose which abilities to pick, magic or melee, or maybe you pick from out of basic ones: warrior, hunter-rogue, mage-warlock, priest-shaman. Most of your abilities are for survival rather than war, so if you’re say, a mage (be it by build or class) you might have 2 damaging spells and 6 utility spells (yes, the idea is like plunderstorm, so similar amount of development time and effort, so also a similar number of spells and abilities).
Worldspace could be existing places. Let’s say it’s the Eastern Kingdoms. You can go to existing cities, but they have different services: Portals to take you somewhere at random, trading spaces for the resources you collected in exchange for ones you’re missing, places to craft magical reagents, things like mills to grind down seeds faster. But to live you have to go out into the world and collect things, while having to keep up with dwindling resources like hunger or heat.
Alterntively it could be a new worldspace like a zoomed out version of dragonblight or something, with no towns. O maybe survival in the plaguelands, with the whole zombie thing.