Our story this time starts in a fight we don’t yet know about, so I freely admit that there is the possibility that this particular speculative exercise will be proven wrong very quickly. This is the risk one takes when making these speculative exercises. Nevertheless, I forge ahead because I believe the thesis of this overall exercise is becoming clear, and heck, the point was never to figure out what’s actually going to happen so much as to posit options for World of Warcraft.
So let’s zoom in a little. Our last two speculative expansions in this exercise have really lowered the scope down from the more cosmic scale that the past few expansions have focused on, but this time we’re going in a very different direction. We’re going to zoom in to the confrontation that players will have with the hastily retconned villain-behind-everything in the Jailer, and take a look at what happens during the fight against him.
The Jailer, ostensibly, seeks to control the very engine behind the creation of afterlives and universes within Zereth Mortis. The player characters are, of course, fighting to stop him. But in the midst of the fight, for one moment, he holds the reins in his hands, has the opportunity to do something. He takes control for that fraction of a second and…
…twists.
For a moment, it seems like an attack. But nothing else happens. The Jailer is defeated, and it seems clear that whatever he had intended to make happen in the first place was stopped when he failed to gain control. Everyone congratulates themselves on a job well done, and soon the preparations are made for everyone to go home, including the battered but weakened king of Stormwind, Anduin Wrynn. So he walks through the portal to his home city.
Only to find himself greeted by a very confused and very alive Bolvar Fordragon standing next to a far less regal version of Anduin Wrynn.
Time did not flow differently and provide a new state of Azeroth while players were exploring the Shadowlands. Rather, the Jailer has broken some of the strands of reality in his efforts to seize control of reality and the fabric of same. Now Azeroth itself is slipping between multiple states of being, different options that never took place, possibilities that never came true.
In one version of Dustwallow Marsh is the world we know; in another the capital of the Kalimdor Alliance stands to repel Kul Tiran invaders with its forces of humans, high elves, tauren, and orcs. A version of the Hillsbrad Foothills sees the Scourge launching its assaults against the Horde that has pushed to victory over the Alliance but never found allies with the Forsaken. The Night Elves and Orcs stand united against colonial forces from the Eastern Kingdoms. Across the world, areas show different outcomes, different possible alliances, tracks of history that never were.
It quickly becomes clear that these are not incursions into the central reality but rather a weakening framework, a creation of alternate possibilities made reasonable by the Jailer’s brief interference. The goal, then, is to go these hot spots and reinforce them once again, to understand the alien reality and deal with it, and hopefully provide an opportunity to reassert the central and understood history of Azeroth along the way. But, of course, some things may slip through the boundaries along the way…
The net effect of an expansion of this scope is that it provides an opportunity to actually alter and change almost anything the writers want in the process of supposedly putting things to right. For that matter, it can even be a little insidious about it. Rather than directly planning every little detail, the developers can subtly slip in new ideas about who might become a new fixture, alternate versions of the existing characters. If an alternate version of Jaina gets a big pop, for example, what’s to stop her from being the new version moving forward? Or if everyone is happy to see Varian again, maybe he sticks around. Nobody cares? Then he’s written out.
Yes, that does mean writing a bit by the seat of your pants, but considering that WoW’s team has already admitted to doing this anyhow, why not do so in a context that’s actually helpful to the game rather than hurtful?
Mechanically, this goes hand-in-hand with the destruction of class/race restrictions; every race can now be every class, in keeping with the many changed options providing examples of basically every configuration under the sun. There’s no longer any real reason to say that something is impossible when there are literally examples of every reality permeating Azeroth all over.
In addition, players will now have access to a quest line to change one’s faction. Rather than portraying it as treachery, the idea is that every race has members who have drifted in from other fragments of conflict with different fronts, and so it’s hard to really have a firm line of which race is part of which group any longer. These quests can also be repeated, although there’s a week-long cooldown between changes like this, so you can’t just swap back and forth between the Alliance and the Horde at will.
While the new status quo doesn’t bring in any new classes, it does bring in a new system of subclasses, allowing you to pick up some tricks from one of the other core classes (no hero classes) to bulk out your overall tricks. Subclasses lack specs or anything like that, instead just giving you a few new options for your spec that can be of different value based on your main spec.
Gearing has also been altered to change how players have access to items. While drops still exist and are still the primary gearing mechanism for M+ and high-end raiders, everyone will also have access to a new system wherein players collect Possibility Fragments that can be converted into pieces of equipment over time. Most content in the game, from dungeons to world quests, will award a certain number of Possibility Fragments; from there, players can use the Fragments to both unlock new types of gear and craft them together with reagents found out in the world.
The reagents can be acquired from crafting or random drops, depending on a player’s preferred format; crafting is the most efficient method, but you can also rely on drops or purchasing items and then upgrading the item later. The idea is that gear can be found or shaped by acquiring currency at a steady rate.
The goal here, obviously, is to provide an expansion that can serve as something of a blank slate and a reset portion for the game as a whole, a chance to draw back, try other ideas, and potentially alter course based on overall fan feedback. There’s not a whole lot of stuff being indisputably altered, but there is the potential for a lot more alteration over the course of things.
Of course, as I’ve also mentioned, I can keep doing this for a while… but let’s stop this one at the next exercise. Let’s take a look at something that’s at once less cosmic and also weirder, and then we’ll wrap up this overall series.
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.
