I’ve been thinking for a while what zones/inspirations blizzard still haven’t explored yet for potential new expansions and one of my personal favorites is a new world/discovering a new, Americas inspired, continent going west of Kalimdor (i know Kalimdor itself to a degree was that exact idea. but thats been a while).
Some potential zone ideas:
-Wild west zone ranging from steppes to Idaho/Montana inspired nature and a cowboy culture.
-Everglades inspired zone with Victorian architecture (Louisiana, Florida, Georgia).
-archipelago inspired by the Caribbeans with a mix of pirate and old French inspired navy
-heavy jungle zone inspired by the amazon, with a big river and a mount Roraima inspired mini zone inside it (potential raid)
-Inca inspired mountain zone right next to the jungle, with cities at the top
-new England inspired zone with a pilgrim culture and Grimm fairy tales. (I know we pretty much had that with Kul’Tiras and especially Drustvar, but I added the idea because I just like that haunting folklore feel and think we can use more of it. The zone would still have a haunting forest but would focus more on a rough, eerie coast line, going inward along a cursed river.
These are just some rough ideas/wishful thinking but I feel like it could be fun (as long as the content’s there as well obv.). It could be us arriving and starting to explore a new continent with some of the zones dropping in patches and there still being unexplored parts of the continent by the end of the expac.
Also if done right it could really give the feeling of adventurers exploring a new, strange and unknown world, which would be awesome. Theres an argument to be made that it leaves the feeling of high fantasy but imo, we’ve already crossed that line a while ago.
I think we need an expansion where we go into the future and get a automobile as a pet. Give it unique controls sort of like a racing game and have racing mini games. Also want an Uzi as a weapon.
I mean we also have un’goro, zuldazar and nazmir. But we’ve got multiple zones that aren’t too far from each other, including snow zones, mountain zones, plains for example. I think Jungles are pretty fun, can be done different ways like one focusing around a river or mountain (mount roraima has a pretty unique esthetic).
An entire zone dedicated to naval battles where you have free reign on how to go about the war would be very interesting if done well, sort of like the warfronts but less scripted maybe.
I think the closest we’ve gotten to American styled anything in game is through the Goblins starting with Cata. They’ve even got a New Yorker-ish accent to their voices. “If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere” is also something they say, and it is a pretty popular New York/big city trope.
I always thought that they should update the Crossroads to be like an Old West town.
Updating Gadgetzan to be truer to its canonical form is just one more reason we need an Old World expansion. A real “return to Azeroth” expansion and not another random freaking island.
