Reboot doesnt work because it would mean people losing access to X race in Y faction.
And if you dont do that, it get messy and ugly
The actually answer to this is a 100 year timeskip minimum, cause i would put 500 years. Say some catastrophe rolled back azeroth civilization and technology, so it keeps in the medieval/steampunk/sorcery fantasy.
With that much of time skip we can re-shape the world and status quo, making something akin to vanilla again to explore
But i honestly doubt they would put resources on that, its easier to just make a new continent out of thin air or do WoD 2.0
Even for other reasons, why its a general bad idea
WHY WHY do yout think the people that write current story and think its best thing ever, and have contempt for stuff they dint write and and stuff that got people into wow/warcraft in first place
WOULD EVER be interested in doing a reboot? OR think that it somehow WOPULDNT be even worse
Youd if anythign see MORE alot more of their cosmic power ranegrs stuff and for azeroth !!! and like almost none of the races
A excist or
B ever do anything at all ever, even less then now
Honestly, this is why I gave classic a try. Im not sure about reboot but something pretty major needs to happen. However, i think what a lot of people don’t understand is this game is over 20 years old at this point and the story was really never its main focus anyway.
Personally I think WoW peaked at the end of Wrath, and while I like the idea of a reboot to/around that time period I’m not sure how that could be done while still preserving the elements of the story I like (Worgen, for example)
I’m hoping Classic+ will be a soft reboot of the franchise that, if popular enough, would continue forward as a separate sort of game of its own.
When WoW began, the Devs weren’t expecting it to take off the way it did. They weren’t thinking of long term narratives. As a result, they did whatever seemed, ‘cool,’ at the time without thinking about how it would affect the game in the future.
The result? The broken mess that is retail WoW.
I’ve seen some people suggest a lengthy time skip would fix everything, but it won’t. A time skip doesn’t change the Burning of Teldrassil, Garrosh and Sylvanas, etc… It doesn’t give those characters a chance to be written to by people who aren’t having a personal spite war over who’s favorite character is better.
A reboot really is the only way to course correct all of WoW’s glaring issues where the narrative is concerned. I just don’t see Modern Blizzard taking the risk of a reboot. Classic+ is probably as close as we’ll get, but that has its own issues, namely the name, ‘Classic,’ attached to it. A lot of Classic players are die-hard classic fans, and that survey that flew around about a, ‘Classic+,’ included stuff almost universally panned by that crowd. By the same token, their enthusiasm drives off a lot of casual players.
Assuming a reboot was on the table, there is also the question of the writers. So long as the writer’s hands are tied by HR/Marketing/Accounting deciding which topics are safest to write about for the sake of profit, we’ll never have a game with anything close to the experience we all fondly remember.
The only solution to this is for Blizzard to stop pretending to have a strict magic system with ‘rules’ and to leave cosmology and most stuff vague enough that there’s wiggle room.
The reason there’s so many retcons is because Blizzard always wants to set up a ‘bigger bad thats the biggest bad to ever bad’ and they constantly write themselves into corners because they’re always too strict and conclusive with what they do write.
But even still, there will be retcons.
A ‘reboot’ will fix nothing. But a timeskip that soft-reboots the franchise possibly with an RTS game or some major story thing taking place during the interim would be the path.
Biggest thing to throw out with a reboot or otherwise: all the main characters being flawless ‘goodguy’ world leaders instead of real people who live within the world itself.
I loved Legion, as I felt it was at least addressed in a way that was coherently reasonable — We had the most powerful artifacts in the world (except prot warriors) and teamed up with a number of gods, beings and powers that rivaled such a cosmic power to defeat it.
The others just seem to be oonga-boonga the power of friendship.
Personally I feel like this from BFA onwards.
As for Midnight?
I’m rather disgusted @ what they plan on doing to the Sunwell by turning it into the DaWnWeLL — by having the Night Elves, Nightborne and Void Elves all put in a piece of some power they hold in high regard and change it into something else altogether.
Like what a way to take a colossal on the Blood Elf identity even further, jeeze.
Even a soft reboot would kinda stink because if people aren’t vibing with the new additions enough to make it a palatable option, why would we like the board cleared for even less of the old lore to be relevant?
“here is our take about the lich king, he was a toxic male and…”
“jaina holding the ashbringer for the first time but with the experience of a master, plunges the sword in the heart of Arthas(they forgot he removed his heart) and he as he rest in her arms mutter: i was only trying to stop the… and it ends”
I’ve learned that most of the people who go at-length about how much ‘the old lore was better’ will not realize that most of the stuff they dislike now was in the old lore also.
Or, they just blatantly make stuff up about the old lore and pretend like it was always the case.
Most people don’t realize that WoW’s lore itself used to be shoestring and have barely anything fleshed out. The current cosmology is a relatively new thing.
I’m convinced that this ‘going back to the old lore’ is just a way of saying ‘I want them to retcon Warcraft in to how i imagine it ought to be in my imagination.’
I dunno? I think the general vibe is that while the lore/setting was never that well written, it was competent enough to have fun things built atop it. With the real issue with WoW being that Blizz’s writers increasingly have this tendency of using that setting as a platform for “their stories”. Rather than shaping/crafting new stories for the setting. Resulting in the setting itself being frequently treated as an obstacle, and diminishing it.
Granted, this isnt universally true. There are plenty of sidequests and even zone questlines even now that are generally good at being built atop, and enriching, the setting and lore that helped garner such a following. But the MSQ? Repeatedly? Not so much. Its the main writers RP personal playground.
War3 was a major departure from what was set up before. Suddenly orcs can be good, there’s a whole new continent that is super important with these ‘Night Elves’ that never existed before that all of Warcraft’s history allegedly surrounds.
All the human kingdoms and major orc clans were either killed off, dismantled, or were tossed out of the picture off-screen…
War3 was the birth of the WoW expansion pattern…
New landmass (Kalimdor)
Retcon the lore so that it is important.
New race with 0 ties to the past franchise that are now incredibly important to everything (Night Elves).
Legacy characters, former nations, and past stories are barely touched upon/don’t matter.
New ultimate bigbad villains which are the ultimate big bads that our heroes must fight (The Burning Legion)
I still want a reboot….since even a time Jump won’t fix narrative mistakes, as mentioned earlier.
But blizzard knows that many whom buy new Retail expansions don’t really care much for the story, but focus more on gameplay mechanics.
So the best path forward for “fresh WoW” that is not tied down to what happened in BFA and post, is if Blizzard takes inspiration from TurtleWoW, and goes “Alternate timeline” for Classic+. Not some “oh here are new stories but it’s all just prequel stuff…..TBC is still down the road, etc……”
Most of the Classic world can still be the same as what we are used too, but with some narrative changes. It also works great for RP. One can roleplay in Thralls Horde without certainty that the Horde will fall into the genocidal path in its future. Similar to how Night Elves might have a better future then Retail gave them.
True, to an extent. But I think there is a difference between “changing the lore to expand on what is already there”, and “trampling on the lore, because it doesnt fit the exact story I want to tell now”. You could say that WC3’s “The Orcs can be good now” was “trampling the lore” … but in reality there wasn’t really any lore to the WC1-WC2 Orcs to trample on. There’s a reason the WoW Horde was built upon the WC3 vision of the Faction. As well as why Blizz has to kill off a WC3 legend, than strongarm a warhawk into the drivers seat (that no-one is allowed to question until the plot allows), to “make the Horde go genocidal again”. It wasnt an organic writing choice, but a plot “need” one.
Like, part of what bothers me so much about the WoT, is not just the horrors and legacy of it. But how utterly blunt Blizz was with how they were just using the Horde to “settup future expac content”. The Horde wasn’t even allowed narrative “luxuries” like means or motive to do anything it did in BfA. It just had to, because the plot demanded it; and the Alliance cant have their purity test tarnished enough to help there. Hence the stupidest part of Sylvie’s argument to Saurfang to get him on board was “they might attack us”. No, Sylvie, the Alliance had already repeatedly been attacking the Horde by that point. Its just none of it was allowed to count, because “the Horde had to start it”.
Idk i’v seen pitches for time century long time skips and reboots and they’ve never appealed to me. Kinda just feels like an excuse to remove races and parts of the world you don’t like.
I think Classic+ is pretty much our only hope for any kind of reboot. SoD seemed like a test-run for what a Classic+ could look like on the narrative side of things. That is to say, not necessarily a complete rework of the lore, but rather a mix of recontextualization and additions to pre-existing lore that made those stories more nuanced and better overall.
I’m rather disgusted @ what they plan on doing to the Sunwell by turning it into the DaWnWeLL — by having the Night Elves, Nightborne and Void Elves all put in a piece of some power they hold in high regard and change it into something else altogether.
on the Blood Elf identity even further, jeeze.