Hey,
what would you think about a MSQ in WoW like this:
New characters would follow a Chromie-based MSQ where we’ll visit imporant moments in history of World of Warcraft across all expansions to give new players a better understanding of the current state and characters.
You would travel across Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms (maybe teleport even into a classic variant to see the fall of onyxia?). You would witness the fall of the lich king…
You could even talk to Chromie to learn more about the various zones of the time phase you are currently in (including a little cutscene to see the the beautiful art).
Player can - of course - visit each zone as an option if they finished the MSQ (maybe youll hit level 60?).
I feel like we need a better storytelling across all expansions instead to see every expansion as a single piece. Instead of playing through all shadowlands patches we could get the idea of what was happening there by spending 10 levels there and visit imporant moments, characters and features together with Chromie.
You are right, the story experience is busted in a way that makes it all about impossible to get into the lore of anything but maybe whatever the current addon is. The story in the leveling zones might as well just not be there, since even if you manage to get one of the more coherent level experiences, all the important stories were developed through former endgame patches that you certainly won’t be seeing while leveling.
Recreating leveling with a new storyline that actually shows you the important stuff and fits them into a narrative might be a good way to really try to salvage all of their old stories in retail for any player that hasn’t lived through them back in the day.
But it is also an extraordinary amount of efforts. This project would require hundreds of new and streamlined quests and dialogues. There isn’t much you could copy+paste, you’d essentially have to rewrite the whole game. Without any easily produced filler content, because you can’t have filler when you’re trying to condense the narrative. I’d expect this to take more effort than the whole Cata leveling revamp, even if we’d only get a fraction of the number of quests they did back then. Which is why I really can’t see it happening.
What I think they might be trying instead is a bit of a soft reset, where you level through a bit of inoffensive and more or less timeless content and then get to a mostly self-contained addon story, with enough breadcrumbs and reminders to old stuff to have something for the old-timers while not confusing the new guys too much. This way of doing it is more or less throwing away decades of stories, but it’s easy to do, and there is always Classic for people who want to play through the old stories.
The only way I could realistically see them implementing new questlines for old stories would be as independent arcs that are added one after another, and either tied to timewalking or through some kind of story journal. In either case, I could only imagine it as full-feature endgame content.
Hm That is an interesting idea .
Imagine if you start lvl 1 at the current expansion .
After you complete all the quests and finish the story , all other zones unlock via Chromie time .
In Chromie time you can continue questing , to earn reputation , currency , gear etc .
It would definitely be much more enjoyable and popular than the current thread mill of repeated dailies 24/7 in a single cave . It would also make the old zones more lively .
