My wishlist for WoW

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.

Cut content

This one is an obvious category. It is worth mentioning that Blizz has been exploring this a little bit through WoW Classic where they'll be re-introducing places like the Karazhan Crypts. Maybe future "WoW Remix" events could also be a good fit for stuff like this?

Either way, here's a few things I wanted to highlight that I'd personally like to happen.

Hearthstone Tavern

Yes, this is the first thing I mention just to get out of the way. Those who know me or have followed me on Twitter for a while know about my undying love for this model. It is just the (finished!) interior of what the Hearthstone Tavern would look like in the WoW universe. It has its own separate map, but it is just an interior model with no exterior or place of reference where it exists within the world (if anywhere!).

Added back in 8.2.5 (video), it was meant to be part of a scenario called "Tradewind & Crow: Dreamgrove Detectives" where you would assist Arthur Tradewind and Thisalee Crow in finding a murderer in the Dreamgrove. It even had a few scenario steps laid out:

• Don't Wake Naralex - Play Don't Wake Naralex
• A Tragic Wail - Find the source of the cry.
• A Different Point of View - Let Arthur tell the story.
• Druidic Investigation - See if anybody has any information about the murderer.
• Nose to the Ground - Use your senses to search for clues.
• Following the Trail - Thisalee has a lead! Go see what she found.
• The Vicious Murderer - Track down the murderer and bring him to justice!

The only solid connection we have between the scenario and the tavern is these "safe locations" (generally just player spawn points and graveyards):

Hearthstone Tavern - Buddy Cop Scenario - Start Loc (JLW)
Hearthstone Tavern - Buddy Cop Scenario - Graveyard

However, the scenario was never finished for whatever reason even though I hear it was at least partially implemented. By extension, the Hearthstone Tavern interior has been sat unused (albeit sometimes 'touched') in the game files ever since, and I think that's a waste.

Garrison locations

Initially, garrisons were meant to have several locations that players could pick from. But like many things in WoD, it was cut short in the interest of time. The late but great Hayven Games made a bunch of excellent videos about this (#1, #2, #3, #4). Some of these look pretty damn awesome, I'd definitely love for these to see the light of day again.

Undermine

First seen in the initial WoW Alpha builds from long ago, this is one of the oldest known pieces of 'scrapped content'. Not much about it is known outside of what has been said about it in lore. This one might actually happen at some point given some references in 11.0, but we'll have to wait and see.

More

There's obviously more stuff I can mention here but I don't want this to be the only focus of this blog post. Here's a few things you can look up if you're not already familiar with that I think would also be cool to see appear some day:

• Azshara Crater battleground
• Defense of the Alehouse battleground
• Island of Doctor Lapidis/Gilijim's Isle
• Stormwind Vault raid
• Abyssal Maw raid
• N'zoth map
• The WotLK dance studio/flying combat
• Farahlon

Enough cut content, moving on to things that don't already exist!

Making a Living World

Don't just make the latest continent/content attractive to go and do, obviously recent content should be the priority for a healthy story flow, but also regularly freshen up old zones by doing Arathi-like reworks and adding world quests/other reasons to go back to old zones. Maybe add some community efforts with higher rewards/serverwide effects in there as well to allow for the rebuilding of certain places and maybe the destruction of others to keep that dynamic going forward. Hopefully things like these would breath some life back into the old/existing world.

As for not wanting to change things to much, terrain phasing could be used for people to go back to the older versions of zones similar to how it is used today in e.g. Silithus. Or alternatively, keep these zone as is in "Classic" versions of the game and only do stuff like this in Season of Discovery or Retail.

More customization

Dyes

Dyable (dyeable? whatever.) parts of models! Whether or not it be character customization (hair, eyes, tattoos, base clothing, etc) or item models (armor, weapons, etc) I think some sort of system where parts of models are dyable using color wheels would be cool. Some things could even have replacable primary and secondary colors or even some sort of gradient system.

This would have an added bonus of also cleaning up the game files a little as some recolored things (e.g. character eyes/hair) could be simplied with such a system as to not need a million texture variants, but far little textures with replacable color values that get set in shaders instead.

Voice customization

This was experimented with during Shadowlands with the introduction of the new character customization system, but this never came to fruition. Some bits still exist in the game files today.

Login screen picking

Easy win. All the login screens are still in the files to this day, it just needs some option to actually be able to pick which one loads. Make a menu like the cinematics menu where you juts pick a login screen or something and save it to Config.wtf so it is kept between sessions.

Warband scene picking

This one might be expanded on very soon as most of the tech is in place for the game supporting multiple Warband scenes, but I'd love to take this a step further to where you can design at least your basecamp yourself, including object placements, character/pet placement and more, effectively being a lite version of...

Player housing

Another obvious one that has been requested many times, but it's still a bit of a mystery how this would work/get tackled. The kind of level of customization that would be needed here very much gets us into the realm of modding/user generated content, so more on that later. In short, I imagine this would have similar possibilities to how Epsilon does object placing, combined with the in-game intuitiveness of stuff like Peterodox's Narcissus and Zee's SceneMachine.

"Making of" content

I really miss the insight we used to get into the "making of" of content through stuff like the special features on DVDs or from BlizzCon panels. The only thing we've really had for recent expansions is the "Building Azeroth" videos which are social-media short and by definition don't go in depth too much. Lifting the veil on how games (and yes, especially WoW) are made is something I personally love to see.

Another thing here is how Blizzard actively tries hiding development-related content. This is probably fair especially when it comes to future content with regards to spoilers and developer playgrounds with regards to letting devs do their thing without players looking at it, but at the same time seeing how things evolve is extremely interesting to me and I've spent hours exploring the various development maps we've seen over the years.

Making of/behind the scenes content activates that "man I could go and make some cool shit right now" part of my brain and I'm sure it does the same for others as well. Maybe it'll even convince some youngsters to get into making video games as well (even though the industry currently isn't in an amazing place).

User generated content

Blizzard used to be kings when it came to what is called "user generated content" (UGC) these days. Starcraft and Warcraft were known for their moddability and mods for those games gave birth to entire categories of games, most notably the MOBA category of games. WoW's UGC is very limited to add-ons only. Expanding this to proper 'modding' is obviously much harder to do for a multiplayer-based monolith such as WoW, but I do feel there's a massive unused content category and (as I've said before) by extension talent pool that they're missing out on.

Interoperability

Obviously one of the biggest efforts here would be tooling as well as working on ways to get the community to be able to integrate tools with WoW content as well so there is good interoperability between applications. A lot of this could be solved by public documentation on for example M2 and WMO model file formats. The community has both of these formats (WMO, M2) documented to an extent, but the devils usually are in the details and that's where this kind of community-sourced documentation tends to fail. With proper documentation and maybe even example implementations for software Blizzard uses (e.g. sources for a Maya M2/WMO importing/exporting plugin) the community could implement importers/exports for like Blender (one already actually exists for WotLK formats!) or other software themselves.

Another important thing for interoperability is the sanctioned access to certain data. WoW has had an arms war going with dataminers (something in which I might in part be partially responsible for) for many years now, causing the hiding/obfuscation/encryption of various types of data, most important of which are filenames. The lack of filenames makes it difficult for artists, addon authors and more to access files through things like wago.tools or wow.export. I've even gone as far as making a post about this in the community council forums about this. There would have to be some sort of sanctioned release scrubbed of any future content (and maybe bleeding edge current content) to prevent spoilers and such.

Official tools

In a truly "resources don't matter" scenario, internal tools like WoWEdit and their asset browser would be polished up for a public release similar to how Valve or other game companies handle public tooling for their engines. Decoupling these tools from internal workflows and tools like Perforce/Jira and all that is obviously a huge effort and is not something to be taken lightly.

UGC platform

This is probably one of the hardest things to tackle keeping in mind moderation, stability and scalability. But in the context of this post we don't give a crap, so yay.

For starters I think the game could borrow and expand on Epsilon's use of phasing for things that don't necessarily require additional content to be download. A step up from that would be something comparable to VRChat's phases/worlds or whatever they call them. For discoverability as well as even larger sets of custom content, a Steam Workshop-like system might have to be created that handles "subscribing to" and downloading custom content. This could also be used to host the addons we know and love today so we don't have to rely on third parties like Curseforge for automated updates and all that.

For very custom content or things that modify the official game, there will also have to be a way to differentiate between what Blizzard makes and what the community makes. Blizzard already appears to be moving towards having multiple different data sets (e.g. Classic Era, Season of Discovery, Mainline Retail) use the same client, so maybe that is something that could be leveraged there. This could also be expanded to where things like MoP Remix or Plunderstorm are "official" mods that have an exclusive connection to the main game.

Roleplaying

I have a long history in roleplaying in WoW, albeit not so much in recent years. Regardless, I see roleplaying as a form of UGC as well, but WoW's roleplaying-specific features are so limited/non-existent that it can't really be called that today. Big events like e.g. the Tournament of Ages are very cool community-ran initiatives that very much count as user generated content, but again isn't really something that Blizzard has specifically done something noteworthy for.

There's a lot of stuff in the other parts of this post that would be beneficial to roleplayers, especially the creation of one's own content, but here's a few more things that aren't new ideas either, but still would be cool to have access to.

Dungeon master/GM mode

A mode where you can manipulate the world to the extent where one could for example run a D&D campaign inside of WoW with the ability to spawn posses mobs/bosses, items, effects, cast spells and all that within the confines of a certain instance. This wouldn't affect anything outside of the instance and have certain resource budgets so you can't bring down the instance servers by spawning millions of mobs. The further the earlier mentioned UGC stuff goes, the more possibilities/freedom you would have here. A distinction between people roleplaying proper player characters and NPCs would be useful too in this mode.

Built-in Total RP

Make some of the things Total RP does built-in to the game. Blizzard has already floated around the idea of first names/last names in a survey a while back, but I'd also love to see an IC/OOC switch as well as some of the other features TRP has be integrated into the base game and some on specifically RP servers.

Better moderation

More humans, less automation. Additional written out rules one has to agree to on roleplaying servers that are actually actively enforced.

More

There's definitely more things I could mention (e.g. access to more emotes/animations), but I don't want to repeat too many of the things from this excellent thread and linked document that members of the RP community wrote up for the WoW Community Council as many of the things they mention in the Google doc under "New Features" are things I'd like to see as well, some of which I've already talked about earlier in the post as well.

Outro

Given more time than the 2 hours I wrote this in, I could probably go on and come up with more stuff, but there's an expansion release looming and I want to get some sleep before that (and I don't think this post would see the light of day if I delayed it to post-release).

I'm very curious to see what the wishlist of other people looks like if they had infinite freedom. Drop a comment below, let me know in the Twitter replies, or even link to a Google doc if you are as long-winded as I am.

If you got this far, thanks for reading!