What if WoW Expansions had been separate, unconnected games?

Community General Discussion
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Similar to Punyelf’s thread the other day, about removing Expansions from existence; what if Blizzard had taken a non-Expansion approach to WoW and made every Expansion a totally separate game with zero player continuity from anything that had been previously released (only Lore/NPC story) & you had to start a brand new version of whatever character you’d played for the previous 2 years…

How many of you would even have started playing & if you would, which Expan… sorry; games, would you have played?

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I would say continuity is what keeps a lot of players subbed.

If Blizzard made a clean slate expansion where you would have to start from scratch, I bet majority of playerbase would stop playing.

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There seem to be a lot of players - that have joined in the last 2-4 Expansions - who seem to be used to that style of game & don’t get that WoW doesn’t work like that… why do they still play, once they realise it, and want WoW to change to a game genre it was never intended to be?

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Then we’d have a bunch of dead games. WoW as a whole would be dead.

Think about how divided the community would be.

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You mean there aren’t players saying that already…? :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

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Why don’t you play classic wow?

Retail is a result of evolution over the years where some things have changed from the initial grindy time-consuming iteration into a more QOL-polished product with a faster pace and more repeatable content. It will never go back to what it once was.

It lost some of its RPG charm, but that is mostly result of the fact that the playerbase also changed from 13 year olds with unlimited time to grown up people with jobs and families.

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I’m perfectly happy with Retail the way it is… and have played 99.99% of all the days since I started at the end of Jan, 2008.

I’ve always been curious as to why some who don’t seem to get how WoW is structured continue to play a game they (clearly?) don’t want to.

As for Classic, I played retail in the Classic format once & don’t feel the need to go back, despite a brief foray when it released.

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Similar to what the are going with Classic servers.

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Blizz did the right thing by continuing the game the way they did. Individually these “sequels” would have died and fragmented the player base.

However, I do think you do have an interesting idea - if evolved a little. I think interesting way to go about it is that each peace of content (zones, raids, dungeons, etc.) belongs strictly to 1 expansion. Be it classic, TBC, Legion, etc. And each expansion would have remained as it was, rather than be supplanted by new systems, talents, gearing etc.

So for classic content you would farm up classic gear, TBC content TBC gear and so on. This would extend to abilities, skill trees, set bonuses etc. Character and spellbooks windows would have individual “tabs” for each expansion with its own stats, gear loadouts, talents, etc. So as you travel between expansion zones - game would load different “version” of your character, the one that corresponds to the particular expansion you are in. Additionally you would have separate level in each expansion. So that you are never OP in any single one. You could be lvl 60 in classic, skipped a lot, get to lvl 60 in SL, but be level 1 in BfA.

There would be lot of issues of course with this approach:

  • Mounts, pets, transmogs, toys - are they all locked to 1 expansion? I suppose stuff could be valid in future expansions, not prior ones. So no TBC mount in classic, but vise versa is fine.
  • Complexity of the UI, need to manage each expansion version of your character.
  • No reusable zones as each zone belongs to 1 expansion only. Not sure how player hubs / cities would work exactly.
  • No doubt game engine complexity of having so many combat systems, gearing systems etc. still maintained. All sorts of bugs very likely.

But on the bright side - each expansion would have been preserved in all its glory.

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Would have absolutely had potential. That also means that older content is not available? So levelling up as well as the end game in a new continent?

There would be less old systems which can act up, perhaps it’d be easier to try new things out, change the engine without breaking half the world, toss something else overboard, clean up code, start over some parts, …

It sure has cons but it also would have had potential.

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They should have been like that since expansions came a thing. Ladders and reset after 2 years and continue to polish them. Why the hell Blizzard has 16 buildings in their premises right now? They are making D4 and Overcrap 2 and patching WoW. What the hell they are doing? 2000 WoW employees. Lol…

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They already dividing the community with their classic servers soon we will have vanilla classic, TBC classic and after that Wotlk classic. And if there is demand for it they will continue to pump up more classic servers until we have all the expansions running separately.

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I feel the same way, the thing that I like is that my character keeps on growing. I can also go back and collect things from the past.

If they were all standalone I think I’d probably only played the expansion I tried.

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I would had quit long time ago because if there would be no older zones to go in the current tier game there would be nothing at all to do for me no mounts to collect no older tiers no open world exploration nothing.

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It’s a funny thought because they basically have. Expansion packs usually feature the previous iteration as the base game, but modern versions of WoW do everything in their power to make old stuff irrelevant.

And yet we can’t get rid of many of the things those expansions got wrong.

We have the worst of both worlds.

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Quite the opposite I’d say. Once you levelled past an expansion those areas were abandoned forever.

However what we seen in Legion was a reuse of zones, particularly with the artifact quest lines and BfA story campaign. Blizzard have got better at reusing old zones for new story.

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They’re not reusing that zone. They are deleting it and adding a new one in the same location.

Again, this is not expanding the game, this is abandoning the old version and then replacing it.

Replacing and updating content is fine, by the way, but the point is simply that the game now has over 100 zones that are not relevant to 99% of the players who are in the game right now cause we’re all max level.

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Some zones have been phased and some little extras added to it.

How could they make “over 100 zones” relevant though.

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Problem is the wya expansions is made - Like a complete new game and new zones etc. It throws out ALL of the old stuff and there is no connection anymore
Expansion could have been the " War of the Murlocs" something that expands the current (Classic) world and not replacing it

I think thats the problem - Every expansion totally disconnect from previous expansions/Classic

And all those systems geeeees

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Sorry, but post inc… this is complicated.

Phasing just adds a new zone. The only difference is that the criteria for entering is not only a physical location, but also a quest state. That’s all it means.

But I think we’re talking a bit past each other here, actually. When you say “new zone” I’m sure you meant a completely new location with all new art assets and quests and just near enough everything being new and redone. You’re thinking of it in terms of a product with content.

I’m not. I’m thinking of it as a location in the game world. Not the Warcraft world - we’re not talking lore here. A location in the game world.

So when you phase a zone into two versions, you didn’t replace a zone, you didn’t update a zone. You added a new zone. Even if it’s minor. Even if it’s “added one NPC to 56,34”. If that NPC being added means two players in the same zone can’t see each other, they’ve added a zone.

If we do not accept this premise then we get a lot of fuzzy borders. For example, by common sense logic, Darkshore is one zone with two versions and you enter it using a combination of the Bronze Dragonflight and walking through the zone’s border, but nobody would make the same argument for Outland and Draenor, even though they absolutely could by the same logic.

I get that people are gonna get nostalgic and wanna visit old versions of zones, and I think offering the old zones as a really out-of-the-way place with little to no rewards to compel you there is perfectly fine, but that’s not what they’re doing. They’re actually just straight changing the zone depending on your quest progress. People can be in all the “phases” or zones are once.

So far from us having 100 zones, we actually have thousands of zones. We have a world massive beyond comprehension. Even if you fit 3 million people into one server that world will still feel barren in places - and as a matter of fact we know that’s the case due to how CRZ works and then fails.

Right. There’s no way we can do that. Blizzard have gone down a road I really don’t think they considered very carefully. I don’t think I’d have seen it coming either, but here we are.

I think one of the fundamental aspects of the MMORPG is the notion that time is moving forward always in the entire world. The idea that you’re in one place but there’s tons of people out there and there’s more to meet and more to find than you could ever hope to - but we’re all in the same moment. Just like real life.

But Blizzard sees their content as a linear campaign of story progression and it’s gotten us into some serious trouble, and it doesn’t look like they’re gonna fix it. They’re just gonna add and add and add and add. Never refine. Never update. Never fix. Just add ceaselessly.

If it were me I would update some old world and then I’d just start drawing a really obvious set of lines in the sand and go “If you go to location X, you’re time travelling” and I would considerably tone down the phasing.

The vanilla game world is designed for 25,000 players roughly. The current world is at least 20 times larger when you count all the phases and duplicates and raid zones. So what, 500,000 players? That’ll break the game. They have to start cutting.