Probably, the thing I was most excited about thus far from Blizzcon 2013 was the announcement of the next World of Warcraft expansion, Warlords of Draenor. There had been a lot of speculation about what the expansion theme and location would be as well as what we would be doing. After watching the panel that went into a little more depth on the expansion, I wanted to offer more thoughts on some of the major features.
The aspect I’m looking forward the most from the expansion is the idea of garrisons. The team described garrisons as being “player housing,” a highly requested feature that other MMORPGs support. The team said it would be like the farm x1000. Right now, the garrison looks to be on a character-by-character basis. It functions like a mini army base where you can create buildings, upgrade them, have followers and send them on missions. Also, you will have trophies and monuments that act as commemorations of your achievements and things you’ve accumulated on the battle field.
The buildings have a very Warcraft-like feeling with your inns, blacksmiths, etc. In short, the things you’d find in the RTS Warcraft can more or less be built. The location of where you put your buildings and the garrison is completely up to you. The garrison can be moved to any area in Draenor while your building’s locations themselves might serve some strategic purpose. Certain buildings will function as supporting a profession like blacksmithing at a lesser level.
Followers will go along the lines similar to how the Battle Pet system works. You’ll have quality and levels for followers. Also, you can give them items. The main aspect for followers is sending them on missions. These missions can be real time or done offline. While there aren’t any good details on what a mission might entail, the developers made some obscure references to raiding and quests. So I don’t know if this means that your followers can do your raids for you, but it’s a pretty interesting concept at a high level.
For me, I’m tremendously excited about this feature. It reminds me of AD&D where you could build a keep once you reach name-your-level (such as level 9 for a fighter or level 10 for a thief). In AD&D, after establishing a keep, you could hire retainers, henchmen and even an army. Considering that your toon will be at level 100 in this expansion, it makes sense that you are treated as a high ranking official capable of leading armies while having your own place to call home.
Two missing components at the moment from garrisons are PVP and guild style garrisons. PVP naturally came to mind when the idea of the garrison was introduced. I mean, what better way to use a garrison than send your army to some hated rival on the opposite faction? I think it would be cool in the future to have a mini warcraft style game pitting a few garrisons of opposite factions against each other, where players more or less manage resources and their armies in a chess-style turn based game (like an advanced version of pet battles).
The guild style garrison is something that I think needs to definitely be added in a future patch. It would be pretty cool seeing a guild with their own empire-like fortress. I think creating one’s own Wintergrasp-like PVP scenario using a guild’s garrison has some interesting future potential as an innovative manner for guilds to do more social activities.
The next aspect I want to discuss is the landscape. Draenor will consist of 7 “new” zones, which really are Outlands remodeled to a degree. The idea of the story is that the portal will be opened to the present time, but stepping through will cause the players to enter Draenor prior to it being the Outlands. In short, it’s a little funky in terms of the explanation (time travel never makes sense) but you’ll be playing in a primordial Outlands that looks mostly different with only a few familiar spots.
Most of the landscape and environment will be very lore and history focused. Two of the “new” areas will be familiar by name in Shadowmoon Valley and Nagrand but they will be different from what people know today. There will not be the Outlands version of Shattrath but players will have two faction cities, one of which will be the Black Temple prior to its downfall.
The two groups you will encounter during this period are the Orcs (Iron Horde) and Draenei. The Iron Horde are the “savage” (and this word will reiterate like a migraine), raw, blood thirsty versions that I believe pre-date the events of the original Warcraft. You will see all the classic figure heads from these clans come to light. The Draenei this time will have more development; you might describe the Draenei in this expansion as being in a Victorian Age where they are at the height of the civilization. Their positioning though will lead to their downfall as their society fades into decadence.
Another major feature are increasing the way items can be organized, stored and sorted. Probably, the biggest thing people are looking forward to is the account-wide Bind-on-Account heirloom items. To me, this feature will be monstrous as your BoA equipment will go into a permanent void-like interface that you can pull out on any toon on any realm. So if you want to suddenly switch factions and go Alliance (like in my case) but don’t want to spend money for a server transfer just to port your BoAs over, you can do this and utilize all your heirlooms.
On top of that, you will get to have a free level 90 toon. The idea is to get people ready for the new Draenor lands and have them dead center in the action. Since I have all 90s already, this feature at first feels a little useless to me. However, in retrospect, what I probably will do is convert one of my alliance alts into a 90 just to have someone around at that level and see content that I normally would not check out.
From there, I want to discuss the new raiding structure. Ironically, the day after I published my thoughts on making Flex inclusive at all levels, Blizzard the same day has more or less agreed with my decision. I don’t know if they read what I wrote or if it really was just the obvious move to make. But the new raiding structure looks fantastic. So the idea is that all raids from LFR, to normal to the “new” heroic mode (which used to be “normal”) will now have a Flex option. In short, it will provide the ability to scale monster’s health, your damage output and healing requirements based on your raid size. The only one that will not scale is what is being called “Mythic” level raiding. “Mythic” raiding will be of one size, 20 man and the other two group sizes will disappear. The idea is to tune the highest level of raiding towards a single group style. Also, they mentioned that making Mythic raiding flexible might allow for odd combinations that are far harder to test. So in that sense, Mythic raiding will end up being a high end competitive level that few can achieve.
Overall, I think this restructuring of raiding will be a huge boon to the raiding scene. I did read many 10-man heroic groups already bemoaning the death of 10 man guilds but it probably will be for the best. I think that Blizzard’s goal is to convert Mythic raiding into an esport style spectacle so that only really high end players and guilds will get to see the exclusive content. I’m fine with this like with what they did with the 4th phase for Garrosh on heroic mode. I think the rigid structures of raiding really made no sense at the end of the day whereas Mythic raiding really is about the high end teamwork and people. So this direction will be great for everyone. I figure that people in 10 man guilds might protest this move, but those who really want to go into high end raiding will adjust and manage on their own. The other nice thing is that the strategies ought to become more streamline for those groups; I mean, I’ve seen people struggle on 10 man heroic raids and feel that the extra people allow for a slightly bigger margin of error.
They also mentioned briefly about 5 man instances. One thing that they will do is create a normal mode and heroic mode on top of keeping the challenge modes around. The normal mode I think will be what the current level of Heroics are, but act as a training session at level 90 to allow you to get into the next level of difficulty. I really think this is a great idea, if they implement it along the lines of the 3 ICC instances (Pit of Sauron, Forge of Souls and Halls of Reflection) as well as Trial of the Champion. The idea is the normal mode version will provide some basic gear upgrades and get you familiar with the basic mechanics prior to moving you into a harder version. They kinda do that now but I don’t think it’s all that effective. You really just want a baseline that provides a forgiving mode to let people figure out the mechanics while learning their class en route to the more difficult ones. The way the current setup works is that you have a few level 89-90 instances, but people mostly use them for level grinding rather than a training ground. And for older instances, you’re still not at full power so you’re lacking something.
At any rate, I’m pretty excited. I personally wished that they had pulled the trigger on the Burning Legion. But one of the key revelations during the panel was how there are more expansions planned in the World of Warcraft series. Although I’m happy to hear of the ongoing future for World of Warcraft, my biggest concern is the time factor. These expansions take a year or two before being fully flushed out, released and experienced. If there are many more expansions in the future, then I think that they should put more effort into making the content faster to consume.
This may go against how hardcore MMORPGers feel, but the way the game is currently structured, you’re not really living in a world (unless you play/live in an RP-only server). I think that this coming expansion should’ve been it as far as the World of Warcraft system is concerned. Meaning the way the game is currently built and played. Although elements like the graphics and features have been updated, much of the core engine still is pretty old so it really needs an overhaul and rethinking for the franchise to be able to continue for more expansions.
I’m not saying that the lore nor the World of Warcraft universe should die, but the version 1.0 that we see needs to be put to rest and redesigned. I would love for more expansions to come out but the rate at which these expansions are produced and the expectations of slow consumption via the farming aspects make me feel that the core game cannot proceed in this fashion. The game absolutely must address the time consumption model like the horrible waiting on LFR, the dependency on groups for raids and the mindfart farming just need to be thrown out in favor of a better quality of life model. While some of the quality of life model of playing has made in roads (such as true account-wide BoAs), there needs to be far more features implemented to make this work.