We still have no idea what the next expansion for World of Warcraft will look like, which is kind of absurd. We didn’t even have a release date for patch 9.2 until yesterday. Like, not even so much as a “we can’t wait to show you the expansion we’re working on next,” which would be a bit thin but would at least give us a hint that something is coming next. But one of the things I said in our Overthinking column yesterday that it’d be easy to put together a proposal for an expansion that would get people excited, and that’s exactly what I intend to do. Starting with today.
Let me lay down a few ground rules for this exercise: My goal here is to not to hammer out all of the fine plot details or suggest that this is what should be done or anything of the sort. In fact, my goal is to not reuse gameplay or story elements explicitly between these different ideas because the point should be that there are a lot of different options that can be mixed and matched as necessary. With that in mind, let’s travel to the west of Kalimdor to the long-forgotten Sunward Isles.
What are the Sunward Isles? Places that had never before been charted. While player characters were focused on the Shadowlands, expeditions by the Kul Tiran navy with help from the Cenarion Circle and old half-preserved Tauren legends sent ships out and exploring in the seas to the west of Kalimdor, only to discover the heretofore unknown islands that the people of Azeroth had eschewed. On these isles dwells a vast culture of Tauren previously unknown to their relatives, prompting questions that result in a joint Horde-Alliance venture to these islands to explore them, establish relations, and hopefully understand what mysteries might lay beneath the lands.
Needless to say, there are conflicts arising as the result of a cross-faction operation. While Baine Bloodhoof and Jaina Proudmoore led the exploration as cooperative heads, the peace between the Alliance and Horde is still fragile, with partisans still exploiting old hatreds. Can players help forge a lasting peace, or will the Sunward Isles become the site of a new feud, especially with the discovery of the Sundered Earthen threatening the civilization already established from deep underground?
Obviously, all of this stuff is new and not based on established hints in the storyline, but it’s a fine time to expand beyond what land masses we’ve already had expanded. The core conceit of the expansion is about the story of seeing if the Alliance and Horde can indeed move past their checkered history, forging camaraderie in the wake of something new and previously unknown.
This expands as well to one of the major new systems introduced in the expansion, which does indeed allow for cross-faction guilds and open communication between factions… once you learn their languages. The system goes beyond simple languages, however, as the new Skill System replaces and incorporates existing crafting professions, with a new set of weapon-based skills and magic-based skills that can be developed and refined over time to add new abilities to every class.
While there are definite throwbacks in theming to how old weapon skills and the like worked, the emphasis here is not on grinding a number up but performing specific tasks and repeated skill challenges to raise skills. Along the way, you unlock special passive abilities and active ones depending on the weapon you’re using and the skills you learn. This system is also retroactive, encompassing the player experience all the way along and resulting in new abilities along the way.
But it’s also not just relegated to combat; the Skill System also allows you to unlock new movement styles like climbing or swinging. In other words, it’s a new way to provide objectives and challenges that dosn’t require strict gating via quests and the like for players to engage with it.
The level cap does indeed expand to level 70, with each class getting another couple of abilities along the way (not counting the skill system) and Chromie Time being rebalanced to make 1-60 the leveling path including Shadowlands. No new talent points are introduced.
Players also gain access to an “expanded” version of the Great Vault, this time offering players an assured piece once per week and a new upgrade system for gear. A piece can be upgraded into a tier set piece, have jewel sockets added, and see its item level increased via the Upgrading skill; as that skill increases, you can raise your items higher and add more flair onto existing items.
There is, of course, a price. You can slowly acquire the currency needed for upgrades through a variety of means, but the fastest way is to feed unwanted gear into a conversion machine, with better gear producing more resources used for upgrading. Obviously, new items can just replace your old items if they’re better, and you can feed your old items in to provide upgrades for the new pieces.
In other words, players always have a reason to get new gear, and players who do higher content more regularly will have more options and faster advancement, but it’s not strictly necessary in order to gear up. If you’re patient, you can absolutely get yourself fully kitted out without ever needing to worry about raiding or M+ content in the slightest.
Last but not least, no new classes are added in the expansion, but every existing class has an additional spec added to its lineup aside from Druids. More class/race combinations are added as well, and the new specs often mirror old memetic specs (like the new Paladin DPS spec of Reckoner, drawing from the old Shockadin spec) or otherwise take up interesting new ideas (Rogues gain a tanking option called Skirmisher). This means that there are more ways to play than there were previously, which creates the feel of more classes without actually adding something new to the mixture.
Like all of these ideas, the goal here is to create something that’s a mixture of interesting system ideas and evolutions along with some returns to form about new ideas that can be pressed into service. I’m sure that some people would be excited to see a return to skills being a thing you leveled and using them to gain new skills and talents along the way; at the same time, I’m sure some people would be less than enthusiastic. Heck, some of the things that I’ve long said should be a part of the game (like housing) are explicitly not in this particular proposal. But I feel like it’d be enough to create the feel of a new direction for the game, addressing some common complaints and creating a very different sense of where the designers want the title to go.
Still, it does have weaknesses. Some things are lacking, for example, and there’s the obvious issue that it’s very clearly making up new story elements out of thin air to justify other narrative decisions. So let’s go in a very different direction for our next speculative exercise. Let’s go to a place we’ve heard rumors about for a while; let’s do something else very different. We’ll work on that next week.
War never changes, but World of Warcraft does, with a decade of history and a huge footprint in the MMORPG industry. Join Eliot Lefebvre each week for a new installment of WoW Factor as he examines the enormous MMO, how it interacts with the larger world of online gaming, and what’s new in the worlds of Azeroth and Draenor.
