Much to my annoyance, at an increasingly frequent rate, the "WoW needs a new engine! It's still based on Warcraft 3!" discussions show up again. First, I don't think that's actually what people want when they say that. Second, there's very little if anything from the Warcraft 3 days left.

Blizzard is unlikely to tackle this topic directly outside of the "we're constantly upgrading the game" quote they've used before. There's few people outside of Blizzard who are qualified to speak on this, and I'm not one of them, but given my experience, I feel like I can at least try.

Intro​

I've been over this on both this blog and on Twitter many times before. I'm a big fan of the Hearthstone Tavern model that Blizzard added back in 8.2.5. I even made thread in the community council about it. The model is great. It has an amazing atmosphere and is what I believe genuinely a work of art. However, it was never used.

More info on how the Tavern was supposed to be used in WoW can be found in an earlier blog post here.

I've been wanting to use it in some projects over the years, but I always run into the fact it has no exterior model. Granted, there is a good amount of mystery around the tavern (see the lore section later on) so it not having an exterior model isn't a huge surprise, but I wanted to take a stab at it anyways. This is largely going to be a learning project as I struggle my way through giving it an exterior. Come with me on with me on this journey and maybe we'll both learn something.

Huzzah! Blizzard released their first blog post talking about Player Housing! They explained the design pillars of player housing that they're keeping in mind while designing the system, as well as some other bits. I have a lot of thoughts, so I wanted to write up this blog post instead of making 40 posts on BlueSky. I was already going to make a player housing speculation blog post at some point, so I just collapsed that idea into this one and put all the fun future speculation bits at the end/in future posts.

I've been writing one of these posts every year, so why not keep the tradition going? Even if only for myself, reflecting is a good thing to do every now and then. A lot happened this year, but at the same time also not much. Time to look back, review and look forward to 2025.

Making a zone from the ground up is hard, especially if you're doing it on your own. Thankfully, throughout the years Blizzard has given us various peeks at their zone design process (sometimes intentional and sometimes not). I wanted to write up this post to document what (to me) appears to be their process in the hopes some of it could be useful for artists wanting to make stuff or learn/take inspiration based on how Blizzard does it. I'm a huge fan of world building (specifically in the more literal sense like this) and all the steps that go into it, so expect a long post.

Note that while these steps are described one by one for readability, in reality these likely overlap a lot with multiple of them starting at the same time or being revisited throughout the process. I will try to show/link to examples of the things I mention in each part for the visual learners (like myself).

As I've talked about before, I'm a sucker for passion. Recently through my efforts in trying to make WoW modding and specifically map making/world building more accessible, I've seen a lot of that. It's reaffirmed my beliefs of so many talented people being out there that simply haven't messed with it due to its lack of accessibility or it being so stuck in the past. It has also reinvigorated my spirit when it comes to the WoW modding community, as my previous experiences with it haven't been as positive as the ones I've been having recently.

The modern WoW modding Discord has been popping off a bit and is at almost 800 members, but with that it has also been bringing up some of my history with communities. This post with will largely be a rant about said history/sentiments with some minor plans/updates around WoW modding at the end and how I think it can be different compared to what came before it. Feel free to skip to the last 2 paragraphs for those plans/updates!

Late night contemplating and reflecting is how I operate. It's when the world and by extension my brain is the most calm and actually able to collect thoughts. I don't know if this is normal or if there's something wrong up there, but that's how it is and has been as long as I can remember.

Most if not all of my big project plans from the last decade stem from late night thinking sessions (often during sudoku or something else automatic). One thing that has always been hard and still is, is actually thinking about my life and my future. I don't think I really know how to do that. I can do it with projects and hobbies, just not life.

What if you could change anything about WoW and you didn't have to care about all the things Blizzard has to care about like dev resources, player reception, future content, backwards compatibility and all that. Just complete freedom with no consequences whatsoever.

It's a fun thought experiment that will yield very different results depending on who you ask. Hell, most of the things I list probably 99% of the playerbase won't care for, but in this context, we don't actually have to care! Many ideas here aren't necessarily mine either but stuff the community has talked about for ages. Either way, here goes.

There are many tools out there to support WoW modding, but as these posts will only be focusing on modern modding we'll focus on tools that can help with specifically that. First up: Noggit!

I love modding games. I love WoW. Following that logic, I've been dipping my toes in WoW modding for a bit now and wanted to do a bit of an intro post on it. Many people won't be familiar with it (for obvious reasons we'll get into), but I still think it is pretty neat and has the ability to be even neater in the future.