The next expansion will be announced this year, and I wonder if Blizzard will go “old school” with some major changes. They already hinted in some interviews that they went too far with some changes they made over the years.
Some people might get pi$$ed off but I think a lot of people would be happy.
What do you think?
It is too soon to tell, by my figuring. We don’t know how popular Classic is going to be, and we certainly don’t know that Classic’s possible popularity will affect Retail.
If Classic does amazingly well and gets half the current subs for BfA then there might be some changes to the next Retail expansion. But I would rather they stay two separate games entirely.
If Classic is wildly successful and in three to five years time we need more content for Classic, I’d like to see an alternate branch of expansions. I’m a huge fan of Burning Crusade, I think it was the best version of WoW, but it would be excellent if Classic had its own path to break.
I think a lot of people would be super-angry if they rolled modern WoW too close to anything like Classic. It’s been too long, and there are too many creature comforts alongside with its own kind of obnoxious grind-- which is, in my view, more brutal than Classic’s.
Despite admitting to going too far, Blizzard’s standard operating procedure with retail hasn’t really been to try to return to how things were(with the exception that they tried to remove flying from current content).
My guess is that the next expansion will make yet another attempt to fix the follower and AP/Azerite grinding systems, but they’ll still be included in some way.
Even if retail were to get a few things inspired by Classic, I don’t think it would be anything in the way of difficulty or convenience. That ship has already sailed, and the playerbase of BfA doesn’t want to go back.
They may however take a note for class design, since that’s something that was complained about in BfA since beta.
If a large chunk of the player base play classic more than retail, then it probably will.
Any body seen or heard of these Age of Darkness leaks?
If Age of Darkness is more like Classic, and Less like BFA it can only spell victory IMO.
-reintroduce talent trees
-bring back 5, 6, 8 piece tier sets.
-bring back Single Minded Fury
-bring back sockets and socket bonus’s
-bring back epics being epic
-make the world feel dangerous
-remove level scaling zones(no sense of progress)
-remove titanforging and chance to socket
-remove sharding(lots of work would need to be done for this)
-remove auto win events and coupon mechanics
-ilvl scaling should be 5-8 ilvl per patch, 8.2 may as well have been an expansion in itself
Instead of expansion after BFA they should make expansion after classic (classic+) basically an alternate timeline after classic.
I hope it ends up like OSRS… They did such a damn good job sticking to their roots with OSRS and it really brought back life the Jagex.
I absolutely think Wow:Classic will influence the next expansion. To what extent is unknowable at this point of course.
I think that the vanilla private server scene has already influenced retail development in a way. Its certainly spawned many discussions on what has or hasn’t ruined the world of warcraft.
Perhaps the pathfinder achievement for example isn’t just a timegate, maybe its an attempt to help us regain the spirit of exploration that was prevalent in the old game.
Honestly? 9.0 is probably too early for any major changes to hit the game, at least on the scale of making it more like Classic. However, we may see design elements start leaning that way, and then going further in 10.0.
It’s too little too late to backtrack everything retail has done.
I suspect this will never happen, especially since the current talent system doesn’t seem to be quite as hated as it is around here. Plenty of people actually like the current system.
Though at the very least I’d like to see PvP talents folded into PvE. I hate having abilities turn off simply because I entered a dungeon.
how???
the next expansion has already been decided and is being worked on over at blizzard
Probably not.
I think that most retail players prefer there version of the game for all the faults it has. The things they want is not a return to 15 years ago but a return to small things that Classic has IN the modern game.
For example they want class identity but not what classic does by letting you go after certain strange builds.
Hold on a sec while I get my crystal ball out … Oh, crap!!! It’s broken; there’s a big chunk missing out of the globe where it joins to the base.
Sorry; reckon the best we’re gonna get on that question is a guess …
No, because the next expansion’s design is likely already settled, and Classic is currently untested in terms of how long it will retain people.
While yes trees would be good, having them have viable choices like the current talent options in retail would be much better than them having fewer options like it was / will be in classic.
For me and in my opinion. They can’t even do retail right. I am not too sure if I trust them to produce classic+ content at this point. I’d love it but I’d rather see them release TBC servers next after a few years of vanilla.