The game gets smaller every time it gets bigger

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I’m a returning WoW player, flew over Draenor for the first time. And my god is it beautiful. I quit during Cataclysm and returned for TBC Classic. Logged on to my old mage with the 280% Netherdrake and explored WoD’s zones to see how Outlands used to look like before it was destroyed. The lands are wildlife are gorgeous and varied. There are snowy zones that remind me of Northrend in WoTLK.

But it’s completely barren. Not once in my hour of flying around did I come across another player. This is such a shame because there is so much beauty in the world and a lot of creativity and artistic detail went into it.

I don’t play retail because retail in its current form killed the “World” aspect of World of Warcraft. Dungeon finder was one of the worst additions to the game in my opinion, though I’m sure many people like the convenience of it. But it makes these instances feel like they are mini-games instead of actual places in the world.

Since installing and logging in I haven’t done a single quest and I leveled from lvl 33 main (Cataclysm) to lvl 42 ONLY using the Dungeon finder. I have no context about them whatsoever. I don’t know why they’re there, where they are, what the lore is behind them. I just hop on WoW once in a while when I get bored of TBC Classic, do a dungeon, log out. Sure it’s convenient, but I don’t feel invested in the world or its players at all.

Are summoning stones still a thing? Do people still PvP outside of instance entrances? I have no idea. As beautiful as the world is, it appears all the criticism about retail is justified in that it feels lifeless.

Blizzard, in the next expansion, rather than create yet another universe-ending threat with some big bad and make complex grindy chores, rather than simply adding another continent or planet or whathaveyou while making all the previous content irrelevant, I would instead love to see a radical redesign of how the game plays and feels, and for there to be actual reasons to go out into the various, beautiful zones that have been created over the last decade.

We’re on version 9 of WoW and the playable world is now big enough to fit several servers worth of population. There is no technical problem that Blizzard doesn’t have the resources to solve in order to make it dynamic, relevant, vibrant and full of life. It would go a long way to bringing back or retaining players. MMO’s are a niche genre in gaming, and the most successful ones have always been the ones that bring people together. People come to be awed and to have fun, but they stay because of community.

With each new expansion, more players are leaving the game than are joining. All that development and marketing, only see the game decrease in popularity. That tells us very clearly that the old formula isn’t working. Why isn’t Thunder Bluff or Dalaran just as populated as Stormwind or Oribos? Why does the world seem to get smaller everytime the world gets bigger? It’s just so mysterious why Blizzard still hasn’t caught on to what makes an MMO an MMO.

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Well, just like with any MMO, most people don’t go back to old zones that they already quested through.

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I believe Blizzard needs to take a page from GW2’s book and make all old zones stay relevant in some form. I logged into GW2 yesterday and all the old zones still have plenty of players in them, because the events and rewards keep them relevant. I saw a bunch of 80’s try to help me take down a bandit champion in a level 30 zone and we got stomped.

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One thing that came to mind, and I know there are probably technical challenges to this: make the retail servers and instances work like they did in the original games and how they currently work in Classic.

  • Remove or minimize sharding, especially in large towns. Less of this cross-server stuff where the guy you bumped into yesterday is nowhere to be found because he magically “phased” into some alternate universe. Back in the day, every server had their celebrities that you could always find logged in on that same rooftop in Orgrimmar or Stormwind. It made the world feel persistent and real.

  • Make them bigger, to the same magnitude that the world has become bigger, by merging several of them if necessary.

  • Make every dungeon from Vanilla to Shadowlands have a heroic mode, and give the older ones a face lift. Take a page from Riot Games as they have revisted and reiterated their old assets repeatedly and consistently, keeping them up to date with new models, visual art, sound, even as they expand on new ones. Their growth trajectory is the OPPOSITE of WoW’s sub numbers.

  • Make the dungeon finder form groups for you, but not teleport you instantly.

  • Create cosmetic, economic, story-driven and practical incentives to visit the older zones.

Changes like these would require some technical wizardry no doubt, but would breathe SO much more fresh life into a dying game, and would require less resources than creating entire new continents. If Blizzard did these things, I wouldn’t be playing classic, I would be buying every expansion.

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