Minor correction, they’re called botani, not botaani!
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They still look too orc like to me. It’s the faces. Those are orc faces.
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How would that work, in your mind?
Tbh I’d have thought they’d have used the zandalari skeleton and adjusted that but they went with orc one which makes no one happy.
Still I appreciate we can see the moss on them at least.
Either that or the botani finding that they can’t as easily dominate nature because there are so many kinds of natural forces on Azeroth vying for control already (maybe getting their shins kicked in by latent druids of the fang mutations in The Barrens, hunted down by green dragons in Feralas, clotheslined by the Cenarion Circle in Desolace etc) so instead they tunnel down and adopt a more subtle approach by changing their spores into the Light virus in an area where surplus Light would not be as noticable, idk, I’m starting to feel like Blythan talking about ethereals because it would be so dang cool compared to what we got.
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Read some new stuff including the Midnight intro bit and I am thrilled to see the continuation of the “Light very bad” writing with how they’re painting it to be basically Golden Void, Arator going on and on how the Light fills him with rage and how he just loses at one point to have a psycho episode and blow up for some reason. why is that suddenly a thing lol
truly spectacular, that doesn’t take a giant mr hankey on decades of lore at all. why these writers are so determined to homogenize all the magic in this setting I will never understand but I hated it then and I hate it now
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You might be interested in this. Ion Hazzikostas held a panel recently at the Nordic Games Convention talking about how Blizzard develops WoW -
https://youtu.be/3b7uWPEN0Ok?t=14846
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Seems that some level of faction tensions are being fostered once more in Midnight, at least initially. It’s made pretty damn clear that while the blood elves do need aid, the arrangement is temporary and tenuous right from the start.
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There’s a timeskip, perhaps 20 to 30 years, allowing a new generation of heroes and other characters to show up.
= World Revamp & Art-Style =
Reflecting the changed times, they remake Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms with slightly bigger, slightly more detailed zones with high fidelity assets much like what they’re doing with Eversong Woods and Ghostlands. Like Cataclysm, there’d be new quests, and new locales and new threats to deal with.
They could also go through the various Vanilla armour textures and bring them up to a modern standard, perhaps with 3D studs. It wouldn’t be impossible, as many of these armour and weapon sets were made to be simple to adhere to 2004 memory standards and rely mostly on recolours.
Some of these they’ve already made, such as the much higher resolution versions of Darkshore and the Arathi Highlands, and also the upscaled old-monsters they’ve been gradually adding over the past years.
For the new armour and weapons, I’d love them to lean into the heightened Pseudo-Medievalism of Warcraft 2 and 3’s manual art:
https://warcraft.wiki.gg/images/Knight_concept_art.jpg
https://assetsio.gnwcdn.com/warcraft-2-manual-orcs.png?width=1035&height=1122&fit=crop&quality=85&format=jpg&auto=webp
https://warcraft.wiki.gg/images/thumb/Head.jpg/800px-Head.jpg?63b10e
https://assetsio.gnwcdn.com/warcraft-2-manual-human.png?width=1035&height=1322&fit=crop&quality=85&format=jpg&auto=webp
https://warcraft.wiki.gg/images/Warcraft_3_concept_art_Knight.jpg?e21e16=&format=original
Think sallet helms with ludicrously sized beaks, or gothic renaissance collared dresses, black steel with long curving horns. Belts with greasy flasks of colourful potions, ragged dirty black loincloths decorated with skulls. The focus would be on everything feeling muddy, used and baroque in a heavy metal way.
Everything mortal-made has a history, scratched and dented and probably pried from some corpse at one point or another, whilst the people from peon to warchief, peasant to lord-knight are scarred, muddy, and physical, with a sort’ve ‘ugly-hot’ look for the characters.
Clothes should have this patchwork look to them, and there ought to be lots of exposed skin and rugged muscle. It should feel like an 80’s metal album cover, lots of sensuality bubbling underneath the anger. It should also be richly colourful, reflecting both the RTS and early WoW’s aesthetics, plus the late 20th Century Fantasy and comic book art that helped inspire it:
Think something between Larry Elmore and Boris Vallejo and you’re something close:
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwxiOxWqK1MycabezqGZTMZSMPcgoT87YpEbEwZmi0lGp2V5uXMpPZeOFbTg92RgdaQUjojouShC1xmIgqcROhK_9iqahz2pGXnZtwnYPyjY1szEjp1AGo2bGMrCqaXN11bzgVYhbTxK5d/s1253/Achilleos-MERP-cover.jpg
https://cafans.b-cdn.net/images/Category_40410/subcat_162111/Boris_Aztec_Serpent_photo_v2_mid.jpg
https://i.kickstarter.com/assets/042/398/471/18446c3cb23676a85619b1acea4fd271_original.jpg?fit=scale-down&origin=ugc&q=92&v=1695343151&width=680&sig=fGBeTsn6Rr7UhtjnRTiwRX%2BHxruaWpwMLF%2Bo1jNwcHs%3D
https://d1vzi28wh99zvq.cloudfront.net/images/6478/129569.png
Loot from the Eastern Kingdoms could lean more into the ‘medieval’, whereas loot from Kalimdor would be designed to look way more untamed and natural. Feathers, war-paint, skulls, teeth, thick leather belts, horns and spikes. The aim is to walk down a narrow road where feasibly both a Kaldorei warrior or a Tauren could feasibly wear the same stuff.
You might think: “Well that sounds really generic and dull.”
But the aim is to be more like a beef casserole, or a really good cheeseburger. Simple ingredients can create very delicious food, it’s all in the execution.
= Story =
There are two ways they could handle the story:
A. The most likely outcome. Do a FFXIV style thing, a story that weaves you across the continent, The player character bonds with a constantly present cast, whilst The Arcantina acts as a Waking Sands between adventures. They deal with incidents that seem isolated but tie into a larger conspiracy that ends in a dramatic climax (I’m thinking a dragon fight on top of a huge tower, a la Dragon Age Origins).
B. Go Vanilla-style. You’re a nobody with a sword willing to do the dirty work no one else has the minerals to do. Where you go and what you do is mostly up to you, but one way or another, you as the player begin to see the strands connecting everything.
Crucially there’d be no huge cosmic armies or anything, the focus would be on going back down to earth. You’d be dealing with threats like the Red Dawn, Scourge warlords, or marauding Quillboar.
You could re-establish the tensions between Horde and Alliance - in this instance, I’d like it to be the Alliance who are more beligerrant, attempting to establish penal colonies in The Barrens exploiting newly discovered lodes of thorium, right on top of the Tauren’s ancestral burial grounds.
I’d incorporate the Order Halls too, by doing something 2E D&D did, where the higher your level, eventually you begin to earn titles and even retainers. A cleric founds a church, a fighter becomes a lord-knight. They’d train you in your new abilities as you earn them.
I’d want there to be fewer settlements, but they’d be bigger and more detailed. The aim is to be like a Western, or the first Mass Effect. Big, bustling hubs that contrast against an isolated and dangerous-feeling wilderness.
I’d try to incorporate elements of the old RPG. Ratchet (or Gadgetzan, which’d be more appropriate) would become this seedy Las Vegas-style city that’s a blend of all the world’s cultures.
As for the main villain? How about Azshara and Denathrius as a power-couple with belligerent romantic tension?
= Crazier Changes =
If you wanted to go even more radical, I’d make it so that any race can join whichever faction vibes with them best.
These turncoat people are either apolitical mercenaries, or they’ve joined the other team for reasons of political feuding or personal grudges.
For example, the Horde humans could be survivors of Alterac who refuse the Red Dawn and the Alliance, whilst the Alliance Orcs could be driven by a traitorous clan - the Laughing Skull, possibly, who desires conquest, which the Alliance is providing and the more peaceful Horde is not.
They could also be slave-warriors, or just relate to the other faction better culturally, or just be loners who’ve chosen one flag or the other because they felt like it.
I’d like especially for there to be more human cultures, especially ones that aren’t derived purely from Western Europe in terms of cultural inspiration. Possibilities include survivors from Azeroth’s various wars who’ve settled in various places and gone native. It’d be really cool if the Wastewanders for example had their own neutral kingdom in the mountains.
These people would be like the Minor Factions in a Total War game, and are there entirely to provide more flexibility for both roleplayers and quest designers. An important thing to help the world feel big and reclaim some of the mystery is to always ensure there’s someplace off the map the players hear about, or find artefacts from, but never see.
= Narrative Themes =
I’d want the story to be something of a deconstruction, then reconstruction, of Warcraft’s story. It’d draw most from Warcraft 3. No faction is wholly good, no faction is wholly evil, but their conflicts are undeniable. Where there is war, it leaves deep scars that do not heal easily.
A recurring theme would be something like Tolkien’s notion of ‘Northern Courage’ best explained here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_courage_in_Middle-earth)
and summarised as:
“Fate often spares the man who isn’t doomed, as long as his courage holds.” / “Luck served you there, but you seized your chance with both hands, one might say.”
The aim is to do something similar to how Warcraft 3 handled the Legion and Scourge. By and large, evil won, and they kept winning, defiling and destroying all they touched. But the thing that changed the situation were small details, and flaws, holes that the player character themselves end up filling.
Ner’zhul did not expect Illidan to bite him in the rear, Archimonde had not accounted for Medivh surviving death, Thrall could not have expected Grom to sacrifice himself using the very thing that damned him to save everyone.
Fallout New Vegas’ central theme was greed - how people feared to lose what they had, and constantly sought to gain more. In this instance, the theme would be: ‘What is a hero?’
Heroes can win, but it always comes at great cost to themselves and never without sacrifice. Of themselves or others. Good wins, but only at a single sword-stroke.
= Gameplay =
While the Old Pre-Revamp World would still exist, it’d exist in the same way that your character exists on the PTR. You can use the Caverns of Time to go back, but it’d involve opening a seperate version of the game your character would also exist on with seperate gear. Transmog, pets and mounts would be shared between the two versions of the game.
You might think that’s a drastic measure, but the aim with this WoW revamp is not simply to bring things back down to basics, but to offer a whole lot more fidelity. To turn Azeroth back into a world-in-a-box. A playground where the mechanics are there to be toyed with, and where survival and discovery are big central themes.
Professions are intended to be useful - providing you with potions and food needed to keep you at full strength, and the journey of leveling is meant to be the experience far more than the endgame.
The original WoW had far less ludonarrative dissonance, there weren’t half as many menus you had to click through, or as many currencies you’d have to obtain. The aim is to be more like a traditional RPG, or indeed, a playground. You explore, you collect resources such as potions or scrolls you use to survive. Everything can kill you, but you can fight these things off, band together with your friends and face off even bigger dangers.
One idea I had was to borrow some elements from Helldivers 2. The enemy threats wouldn’t stay idle, they’d always try to expand, being beaten back only by quests completed and dungeons cleared. Each zone would have two shards, including one in which the baddies win, burning the main settlement to the ground or turning it into a main base, whilst the friendly NPCs flee to a castle or redoubt that then comes under siege. You could use this to add some fidelity to the faction war too, or even flexibility to the questlines.
World of Warcraft is a world that’s always been collectively created by those who play it, and I’m thinking a system such as that would help reflect that fact.
It would be very hard work and take a long time to do, but if you kept things relatively modular, I don’t think it’d be impossible.
= Class & Combat =
I’d conduct a big study to try and find when every class was at its best, then see if it’s possible to get everyone into something close to that state. Combat-wise, I’d like it to be a combination of Legion and Vanilla-TBC. On one hand, you’d rely on player-made reagents and items to keep yourself at full strength and adapt to situations, but it’d be like Legion in the sense that combat would be fast and depend on quick thinking.
= Races =
I’d open with Outland finally collapsing, with most of its denizens having fled into Azeroth.
For the Horde, I’d give them Amani Trolls and Ogres, completing the Warcraft 2 roster. The Ogre homeland’d be in Dustwallow Marsh, where they’d exist in conflict with the humans of Northwatch Hold and the surviving black dragonkin of the southlands.
For the Alliance, I’d give them Arakkoa. Rather than one tribe, this’d be a reluctant alliance between one faction of Shadowbound Anzu-worshippers (who’d get on well with the Ren’dorei), and a fanatical cult of Rukhmar (who’d align better with the Draenei).
They make their homeland in a new region of Northern Kalimdor east of Darkshore, facing conflict against the resurgent Dark Trolls and fanatical holdouts of Kaldorei driven mad by the War of the Thorns.
Broken Draenei could work as their second race, but I’m thinking a sect of Neptulon-worshipping Naga would be a far more interesting choice. These Naga settle Vashj’ir.
= Other Features =
I’d use the new housing system to create a custom player-made dungeon system. Much like Neverwinter Nights, you’d have these very simple tools you can use to draw out maps and program NPCs and monsters. This’d be fantastic for roleplaying whilst also providing content during droughts.
I’d implement a photo-mode.
I’d also make it so that if you use the /Ignore button, everyone on the ignored player’s account becomes invisible, so they can’t annoy you any more. If FFXIV can do it, WoW can.
At max level, there could also be a private ‘exploration’ phase free of monsters and NPCs, that could be used for roleplaying or photography purposes.
And, I’d also add cross-region play, allowing roleplayers from Moon Guard-US and Argent Dawn EU to interact with each other without needing seperate accounts.
= One Last Thing =
While this would probably be uneconomical and require a lot of bug-fixing, I’d love seasonal changes. Trees and grass that change colour depending on whether it’s spring, summer, autumn or winter.
I recognise I went away from asking your question to answering more broadly what I’d like them to do with WoW. Either way, I think it’s more likely they’ll just visually refresh a lot of the old zones and continue with the storytelling style and vibe they have currently.
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TLDR please?
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Blizz should put some actual effort into making a feasible, grounded WORLD that has a game in it, not a themepark that is creaking at the seams and the verisimilitude is weeping…
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The issue is that the vast majority of players just want a themepark, to the point where Classic has shown us how they take the world at its most vast and grounded and turned it into a themepark, a rote sequence of activities to be performed optimally for the greatest possible sense of of achievement.
So, is it worth creating a grounded world that doesn’t care about being optimally designed for engagement and has a lot of frivolous frills for the sake of feeling lived in and authentic, when the players will boil it all down to an optimal path for maximum completion in the shortest possible amount of time? For better or worse, I can understand why Blizzard’s boiled it all down to a formulaic theme park with a schematic that they repeat expansion after expansion.
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Instead it sounds really amazing and cool.
That’s hot.
ABSOLUTELY BLOODY NOT.
Keep the americans contained!!
All in all i give it 9/10.
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To be fair one of my bigger concerns w/ Midnight rn is all this marketting around story whilst it has main zone campaigns and side quest campaigns with a length that’s even shorter than TWW, and TWW was already pushing the “can we just make an expac without questing” to the limit. Watching Nobbel go through Eversong/Ghostlands and it took him about 4 hours, that was whilst exploring the nooks and crannies, reading all the books and dialogue he came across, streaming breaks etc.
Devs shouldn’t cater to the lowest common denominator when it comes to worldbuilding, tbqh.
If Raiders and PVPers get to whinge about ‘welfare gearing’ I can whinge about welfare readers.
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From what I hear, the storytelling experience in Midnight is different to that of TWW.
TWW wrapped up most of the story and most of the antagonists in the levelling campaign and then it wrapped up the rest with the max level campaign.
From what I’ve seen so far, though I may be mistaken, the Midnight levelling campaign is far less interested in wrapping everything up. Tension remains between the Army of the Light and Silvermoon City, Zul’Jan remains a maverick who might cause trouble in the future, Harandar… Well, after the Lightbloom dungeon and the Chimaerus raid, its problems will likely (and hopefully, as I have little interest in the zone) be solved. However, I get the feeling that the invasion of the void will not simply end with the Sunwell raid and the defeat of L’ura. I get the impression that there will be consequences and additional story to be derived from the raid, and that it will not be as hurriedly self-contained as the 11.0 story was.
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I’m expecting a case of ‘Light is evil, void users are good, both needed for peace and love and hugs’
Because I am expecting them to cram the void elves in somewhere and they do ‘good’ to make their way ‘moral and just and correct’.
Which would suck.
I rather the void elves just be the outcasts who think they know best when really, they are messed up and a danger.
you do remember who the bad guy is right
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I feel like we’re reaching a weirdly nihilistic point though where everything has to have capacity for real cruel stuff otherwise it doesn’t work with the weird yin and yang principle the writers are striving after. It worked great in MoP because it was literally woven into the land, but it doesn’t retroactively fit as neatly in the rest of Azeroth. Like how Turalyon seeing Lothar cut down in battle and flying into a grief-stricken rage to turn the tide isn’t a heroic tale anymore but instead some sort of cautionary story about… overdosing on the Light?
I’m also about 70% sure Xal will continue to loiter around in a gradual villain decay after Midnight, much like Sylvanas.
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The Golden Mean fallacy has been a disaster for Mankind.
“Clearly the answer is in the middle somewhere guys!”
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