This isn’t new though. The Scarlet Crusade was turned into an unwitting weapon for Burning Crusade by twisting their beliefs, warlocks fight on behalf of both the Horde and Alliance despite their grim origins. Teldrassil was grown by druids for egotistical gains, death knights fight for the living.
What is newer is stuff like Velen implying that the Naaru rescuing his people was a morally grey choice. Stuff like paladins giving in to anger is akin to using dark magic, as per Uther. Stuff like the Light’s innate ability seems to be more about oppression and control rather than compassion and benevolence. Now the Light seems like a big bad force that has to be carefully exploited.
That, to me, seems to be coming from the mind of a writer who’s worldview is altogether more nihilistic than Azeroth used to be.
In terms of zones I am always more interested in revamped and expanded upon content in Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms. If they released expansions that revamped four zones each time I’d be content. Outland comes second and then Northrend. I am primarily interested in stories revolving around Alliance and Horde races, characters and zones.
I don’t know where Blizzard got the idea that we wouldn’t like them to update old zones initially. I am to assume marketing told them that.
If all magic is innately corruptive, if all magic can do the same things (open portals, res people, mutate you, etc) then there is nothing to distingush any magic except for the color. That’s why I hate this Light is evil dren. It’s another failure of blizzards attempts at morally grayyyyyyyyy. And it’s just making all the different kinds of magic bland and not different anymore.
Cataclysm marked the end of World of Warcraft’s meteoric rise. It was the point where it went from being the video game of the zeitgeist to being the video game that everyone loved to hate, with people flocking any game that swore it would be the WoW-killer. So for Blizzard, especially for the financial and marketing side of it, Cataclysm represents the game’s fall from grace and anything associated with it must be doomed to fail.
It just so happens that Cataclysm was the expansion of the world revamp, so whenever someone brings up revamping the old world, that probably causes all of the suits around the table to look around the table at each other nervously.
“Didn’t Cataclysm do that?”
“Cataclysm did that and Cataclysm almost sunk this franchise.”
“If Cataclysm did that, let’s not do that.”
I can only imagine how hard the people in charge of Midnight and the Last Titan had to fight, in order to get the suits to go along with a revamped Quel’thalas and a revamped Northrend being the staging grounds for the two latest expansions.
However, revamping all of Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms is almost certainly a step too far for the money men. In their eyes, it would be an exact repeat of what Cataclysm did and Blizzard’s simply unwilling to spend the resources required for a 2010-to-2025 world revamp on such a risky venture.
There was also IIRC the problem that one of main reasons why Cataclysm was disliked back in the day was its focus on old world and not getting brand new continent.
So I think Blizzard had somewhat of a reasonable fear of focusing an expansion on simply updating new zones instead of creating brand new stuff. And given that I´ve seen some reactions to Midnight along the lines of “Where´s new stuff? I don´t care about elves!”, I can´t really blame them. Despite TBC being 19 years old by the time Midnight launches, some people would still rather have random new zone we´ve never heard about instead of getting an update to those areas.
MoP also wasn’t about great metaphysical forces taking the main stage as characters. Most conflicts were very much along the lines of human, too human.
The great villains in MoP aren’t cosmic threats, those are in the background or used as framework, the villains are the likes of Garrosh or Lei Shen.
I don’t think people were particularly upset about there not being new zones in Cataclysm because that simply isn’t true, there were 4.5 new zones - the criticisms I remember from the time were more:
The revamp ruined my favourite zone
Related to above - pop culture reference not funny
People who complained about Vashj’ir made Blizzard get cold feet about underwater zones, and then because of them, we got Nazjatar in BfA
Also, yea Cataclysm ruined some good old zones like Westfall, Ashenvale and Darkshore. And then we also got pop-culture references like Rambo and CSI, alongside questionable decisions like N@zi Goblins in Uldum. Which has been complained about since Cataclysm released, as far as I can remeber!
Also Uldum lead to questionable RP from certain RPers
I actually quite like Uldum as a space and the Tol’vir half of it was pretty neat, it’s just the other half was an extended unfunny parody.
I find it hard to think of a zone revamped in Cataclysm that I actually like the changes of. There’s a few sure like WPL and EPL where it’s neat to see things get slightly better as a result of the vanilla era questing and it was neat to see the death knight bromance face some issues because of Red vs Blue stuff. Duskwood barely changed, Badlands was alright.
At the time I remember thinking heroic dungeons were a big step up in difficulty from late wrath but I also actually kind of enjoyed it.
Honestly the revamp was cool, brought the threat of the main villain up to a world wide scale the likes of which even Legion couldn’t.
the downside however is that now, we still have twilights hammer in almost every zone which only muddles the storyline for new players further.
A careful revamp that won’t hinge on the current expansions theme would be the only way forward if such is in the cards or else we’ll be back to this problem again, some years down the line.
Yea, I didn’t dislike most zones changes! Zones like Westfall and Darkshore stand out for me, in a negative way, due to the eye sore of tornades being in the center of those zones(I disliked most of the changes in Darkshore, tbf!) And CSi-pop culture references
As for the new zones, I really disliked how handled Mt. Hyjal, they added Twilight Cultist and then made 1/3th of the zone look like the Firelands, because it ruined the aethestics of Mt. Hyjal for me and its even now ruined by making the zone half unusable!
Local problems per zone would be the way to go, with a big bad at the end of 1 oe 2 zones!
You could make Darkshore a zone about protecting the zone against maddened Furbolgs, and then have Ashenvale and Felwood work up to it being a bigger problem across the 3 zones, with it ending in a mini-boss fight against a Satyr in Felwood or something.
Classic formula, which could be a problem at any day week or year in Night Elven zones.
Springle in some sidequests about feral Worgen, Druids, Moon-priestessess, Highborne and what not across the zones and have one of each work with you against the Satyr “endboss” and you could use those as future heroes of their races aswell. So you could build up a new generation of characters for the different races, aswell!
Thank you for listening to my ted talk.
