So I was feeling masochistic and decided to read the MMO-Champion forums. Friendly word of advice: tread with caution.
Anyway, I noticed someone lambasting the reuse of Vale and Uldum for the 8.3 update and stated it was laziness. There is a valid argument for blizzard being lazy, but here is the question I pose:
Is it better to use the world we have, or keep adding on to it with new zones? What do you think, WrA?
I’m tired of new zones, especially ones that should have been referenced / accessible since vanilla but are somehow just magically there all of a sudden with entirely new cultures that have apparently always existed, we just didn’t know about them.
They’re running out of room on the map, how much more could they possibly add? Shadowlands will add a land of infinite sub-realms and where do we go from there? Space?
I’d love to see revamps of nearly every old zone the same way Arathi and Darkshore got model / texture updates and new relevancy to the current game. The current game story isn’t utilizing 90% of old zones and that’s a real shame. Azeroth is big enough as it is without adding more.
reusing zones is bad, but remaking zones is good.
since blizzard has a dragon to revert things back how they used to be, you dont even have to worry about cataclysm’ing it. you can just… go back.
I am all in favor of re-using old lands in some capacity.
Forging into new frontiers is great, but honestly, I care a lot less about what happens to Kul Tiras or Zandalar than I do about the lands that feel like home. It is even better now that content is never deleted–I can always revisit old Darkshore or whatever through an NPC, so we don’t get the somewhat annoying Cata scenario where old zones get deleted.
That said, the revamps should be, uh… good. I mentioned Cata earlier, and its zone revamps are very much a mixed bag. The memetastic revamps of Westfall, Redridge, Hillsbrad, etc are pretty bad. It is nice that Uldum got retouched in 8.3 because it has transformed a Cata-era meme zone to something with a more respectable story.
It’s a tricky question, isn’t it?
Ostensibly, I think a lot of us are in favor of updating zones. It makes the world feel significant and connected. It provides us new content. It gives us the chance to explore topics that we couldn’t on our first go-through.
Buuuuuuuuuut we all remember Cataclysm.
We all remember the effort to update the old zones. We all remember how a lot of zones got dumbed down and turned into pop culture references. We all remember how the Horde got stories for their zones and the Alliance didn’t. We all remember how even the zones that weren’t totally egregious were still kind of dumber than they used to be.
Hell, the best thing to come out of Cataclysm was the Southern Barrens and that’s technically just a new zone.
Updated zones are great. I love them. But they take work to pull off. And Blizzard does not like work.
Mind you, I think we should update the zones. We should push Blizzard to do so. But we should always do so with the realization that they’re prone to sloth and vindictiveness and criticize and protest them accordingly when they fail.
I would love if everything got a makeover, but I know it is not practical. I do like the BFA approach to old zones; Just remake them to fit a part of the story.
Uldum was kind of a brilliant choice in this. They took a crappy pop culture zone and made it into something more tasteful that I also took as a reference to Lovecraftian horror (Nyarlathotep is a monster with an Egyptian theme).
I will always hope for full on updates but Blizz should be praised when it does something good.
Getting rid of that Indiana Jones reference was a really good move, so redoing Uldum was a great choice. Also it was neat to have incorporated the underground area beneath the Vale into the open world.
But, as nice as seeing zones evolve and change would be, I don’t think WoW’s base game design really allows for it. When the main content for open worlds are world quests and dailies, it’s hard to justify updates to most zones as the story progresses without turning it into some invasion thing. Which sort of takes away the unique themes most old world zones have.
Honestly, I don’t see why it isn’t done more often.
Why is there always a “new” place for us to go? Don’t things continue to happen in places we’ve already been that need to be dealt with in some way?
I’m all for it. With Shadowlands changing how we level and the expansions presented in parallel by Chromie, I’d love to see way more re-dev of the world.
One way they could introduce it, budget wise, would be through a time travel/bronze dragon flight expac.
Make the main state of the world current and add dynamic elements that allow it to be updated for whatever the next expacs are.
Then, treat every expac as a time period and make the world unique for each one.
Eg make scourge invasions a thing for people levelling — or exploring the time of — WotLK. Bring Deathwing attacks back for people in the Cata “world state”. Have caravans of Pandaren explorers for MoP, etc.
Will never happen but I’d enjoy that.
I think this is one of these questions where both answers are right depending on the situation. But generally speaking I think they should be reusing the map. Because there is not only plenty of it, it makes sense that the majority of stuff would take place on the main continents? With that said I do think they should continue to add more just in a different way. Of course we should fill in the places missing on the map however another option they could do is expanding areas in the existing world.
An easy example would be expanding cities to be even bigger and not only LOOK like big cities but feel like them too. Same idea for the feel of other zones. Dynamic events and such in the old world(by that I mean pre BFA Azeroth zones at this point) would go a long way too.
I love this so much. One idea I’ve sort of been knocking around are large battleground like events. Not just world quests in an invasion but something dynamic like an advancing army or giant monster that needs to be stopped from reaching a location.
It would also include ways to contribute to dealing with the threat that players would have to coordinate with each other to help. So say the main force of players are fighting the army. Stealthies might have an option to sneak past and disrupt enemy reinforcements, or solo players could sidestep the group and disable a power crystal or something.
It would be neat to put those in zones for people to work against, along with lose conditions so people have to actually try. Just something to do in the open world outside of chores.
This is actually pretty much exactly the kind of idea I had in mind. This kind of thing would breathe more life into the world in a way desperately needed. The important thing is to not make it feel like a chore but also balance that with rewards. So maybe stuff like mog, toys,titles, mounts and pets? Things that you’d put in work for but nothing that would help you prepare for a raid or push mythic+ progression. I think that kind of stuff would give enough incentive to use the open world more.
Perhaps something similar to battlegrounds where you earn tokens and then buy set appearances or vanity items. It would be cool to have something to use the gear you get from mythics and raids in the open world. Something that isn’t just finishing your world quests faster.
I don’t really think there is. We’ve already gotten eight zones plus two updated zones, and they have an entire new expansion in the pipeline that they presumably want to be better than this one. You could just as easily argue that creating two entire zones for one content patch is a waste of resources and that it would be immersion-breaking to relegate N’Zoth’s “let’s take over the world” plan to two self-contained zones.
One of the things that people cite as being good about Final Fantasy is that you actually go back and visit old zones semi-regularly. I don’t see why that should be good in Final Fantasy but bad in WoW.
I don’t think this is ever a valid argument; these arguments just come from people who don’t understand the time and work that goes into making anything in a video game.
I replied to Ursuola and I quoted Andalyr to better express my own opinion to both. I hope you two don’t mind!
I agree with both of you. Personally, I don’t think its lazy. I love going back to old zones. The argument of Blizzard being lazy is always possible, but I personally do not believe it.
If anything, I’d prefer a whole Cata revamp. I know it’s unpopular, but the game has been Cataclysm longer than it ever was Classic. Please repair my Barrens.
…it just hit me but I wonder why the Twilight Highlands, which has a literal Old God mouth in it, wasn’t part of the patch that featured Old God invasions.
I was thinking more like Ulduar. N’zoth is attacking titan facilities. Imagine an assault in Northrend.
Or would Ulduar be more defended since we cleared it out?
I like it when they reuse old zones.
I think one of the reasons that the world seems so much less populated is greatly exacerbated by the fact that there are just so many new zones beyond Kalimdor/Eastern Kingdoms added in every expansion. Everyone either has to stay stacked in the same handful of zones for endgame/RP, or is spread out so far and wide that bumping into one another is statistically improbable.
So yeah, staying in the old world and exploring pre-existing characters, races, environments, conflicts, etc is always a plus in my book. One of the reasons I especially enjoyed Battle for Azeroth.
I also think many people vastly overestimate just how “reusable” any given game’s assets are. Often times, the work involved in reverse engineering/tweaking old stuff so that it works with the latest stuff is such that it’s generally not that much easier than starting from virtually scratch. It just looks the same on a superficial level, which can give the false impression no significant time/effort was invested. The amount of work you put in versus the actual payout tends not to be worth it, so most time, you do end up just going through the work of making something completely new and shiny instead of trying to make gussy up decade(s) old assets/systems.
To be fair, with their phasing tech, it would not be hard to start people going back over older zones as part of the leveling experience from Shadowlands onwards, and once you reach that point, just have a hearthstone like toy that allowed you to go back to the older phase if you wanted to farm something.
Hell, it could easily be part of the “Hunt for Nathanos” sub-quest chain where the Alliance and Horde are racing the clock to find Sylvanas’s right hand man to not only find out what he knows about Sylvanas’s plans, but where she’s actually gone and where all the missing Azerite from the Horde’s stockpiles disappeared to.
Reusing older content doesn’t require Cataclysm levels of slash and burn to both content and story, a light touch and logical extrapolating of previous story arcs is all that is required.