Ion hints at possible Overworld revamp

Community General Discussion
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Ion: I mean, so I think sometimes we’re doing a bit of that deliberately, right? I think one of the interesting parts about world-building and storytelling in a franchise that’s gone on for as long as it has is that we have our own internal passage of time in the world, and we can revisit locations and characters that featured prominently a dozen years ago and see what’s happened with them since.

Ion: I think there are still vast parts of it that we have yet to see. Obviously, in our most recent expansion, The War Within, we’re delving beneath the surface of the world, and there’s untold adventures to have there. But also, as I mentioned earlier, we’re able to revisit locations that were introduced in the past, like our next expansion, Midnight, is going to return to the Blood Elf lands that were introduced in the Burning Crusade expansion. A lot of time has passed, a lot of change has happened, there are new stories to tell and adventures to have, and I think something that we’ve thought a lot about on the WoW front is we’re actually doing ourselves and our story an injustice if we can’t tell new stories in those places.

If Stormwind or Orgrimmar, the great capitals of our world, feel like they’re forever locked in time, however many years ago, that’s not really the living world that we want to be in. So while, of course, we’re going to keep finding new places to explore, I think there’s a lot of richness and depth in places that are already discovered.

https://www.wowhead.com/news/revisiting-legion-holly-longdale-and-ion-hazzikostas-look-beyond-30-years-of-375193?utm_source=discord-webhook

I feel like this is the first time that possibility has been publicly acknowledged by something other than a Doronsmovies clickbait video, if I am not mistaken?

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The Cataclysm touchup round 2?

:open_mouth:

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finally lets see stormwind up to scale with our character models. i know for sure our characters grew 30% compared to original models

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could be.

they do need to show the passage of time in the EK and Kalimdor, it’s been stuck in Cata for over a decade.

I figure we’ll get EK in Midnight since they are redoing Quel’Thalas then, and maybe we get Kalimdor in TLT along with Northrend.

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It isn’t. This is what they’ve been talking about since Blizzcon. They’re not revamping the world. And they’ve been doing phased crap for a while now.

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Booty Bay has been half-destroyed and covered in seaweed for quite a few years now…

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I sincerely doubt that we’ll see another Cataclysm type update, even one continent at a time.

This makes it sound like they’ll just keep doing what they’ve been doing since BfA and update zones on a case-by-case basis whenever they become relevant.

We might wind up with fully updated zones eventually but I’d be very surprised if they do a all-in-one sweep.

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It’s possible, but I doubt they will be updating the entire world map.

More likely he is referring to the updates we know are going to happen with Quel’thalas in Midnight and Northrend in TLT.

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IMO hes just hinting at doing certain zones (We know silver moon is coming etc.)

The cata revamp was more or less a failure IMO because they bit off too much at once. The old world still looks ridiculous from an aerial perspective with our increased render distances. All of the jagged mountains and unused terrain that divide zones looks very sloppy. Also all of the zones are far too small for the current pace of travel.

It would be a tremendous amount of work to bring all of these zones into the modern era, and it would actually take a creative reimagining of their layout to eliminate all of the jagged mountain borders.

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The general assumption here is that Silvermoon will be something of a hub for Midnight and that Stormwind and Orgrimmar will be getting broad updates with the introduction of housing.

Updating Stormwind and Orgrimmar will be a huge boost for the RP servers, and I think everyone playing the game in any capacity will appreciate seeing those brought current.

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cant wait to set me hearth to silvermoon inn as alliance

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I hope they can also fix the lag in the major cities. Stormwind on Moon Guard has awful lag.

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This is a bit of a weirder speculation, but I think what they were talking about is wanting to add more dynamic elements to the world. Because listen to the interview and think about it, the “passage of time” - Ion isn’t talking just about the past and how the world seems stuck at whatever expansion provided the latest update but he seems to be talking about going from the past to something.

To me, and with the most popular thing in MMOs as of recently, that might be him talking about adding dynamic changes. Because they aren’t going to do another Cataclysm, it was a disaster for them for the amount of work was put into revamping the world and whilst it was necessary back then the question is … what necessary change would be needed now’a’days?

In Shadowlands they tinkered with professions to bring them up to snuff, which really didn’t work. But they tried again in Dragonflight and it did provide us as players, whether one like it or not, a way to dynamically make our characters become better at a specialization. As well as in Dragonflight we were given the first type of free-dynamic movement in WoW’s history that could be used anywhere with Dragonriding.

In TWW we didn’t really get anything more but… precisely where did the D.R.I.V.E. idea come from? Dynamic flight combined with Goblins and their cars, so we got a vehicle that has a boost, is able to drift, and can accelerate and deaccelerate. Now one can discuss whether the thing was well-implemented or not but I think my point is relatively clear:

They are adding more dynamic systems to the game. If they want to rework the world in a way that doesn’t create the same issues that the Cataclysm did, namely it being stuck in time, would they add a way to dynamically change/update the world? Are they talking about adding something like, I dunno, weather layers to the continents? Do they want to revamp the world to actually go back and make old zones have relevant content again, Cataclysm style, but maybe maintain that? Not quite like in ESO where everything is evergreen but more so the idea that they go back and add world events like the ones we see in pre-patches to old zones? But if they did do that, then we’d need better zones which means that they’d need to be revamped but revamping the entire world is a lot of work for very little gain so…

Are they just revamping some zones like Elwynn Forest, Westfall, and Stormwind - as well as the other (currently existing) capitals around the world?

One can speculate endlessly and be both excited and make up a bunch of stuff. I have no idea what Ion might have meant, if anything, but if they are doing something I don’t think it’d be something as simple as just an update to old zones but likely adding something that allow said zones (new or updated) to change dynamically.

Still though, me want to know more from Blizzard themselves if they have any plans at all first.