by JR Cook - 9 years ago     show comments

Yesterday we talked about how an expansion centered on Azshara and her naga feels unlikely at best.

I feel it’s important to start off with an important caveat, which I suggested yesterday but bears repeating: if Blizzard wants to spin an entire continent’s worth of history, races, and narratives out of whole cloth, then that’s totally something they can do. That’s where Pandaria came from and (aside from the ill-managed faction war) I was pretty happy with everything in Pandaria. If Blizzard decides to do a naga-centered expansion, however they choose to do it, I’m probably still going to buy it and play it and I may end up being pleasantly surprised at how they manage to do it. Just because something is unlikely or has marks against it doesn’t mean Blizzard can’t make it work if they’ve got the will to make it happen.

The question of Blizzard’s willpower when it comes to certain ideas is probably a subject that deserves its own post, however.

So with all that out of the way, what’s on the chopping block today?

The South Seas

First, a bit of background: back around the time that Warcraft III came out (2000), Blizzard teamed up with White Wolf to publish the Warcraft RPG, a set of licensed sourcebooks to make Azeroth accessible as a tabletop RPG setting. You can tell how much of it was developed in conjunction with Blizzard, too: looking at Lands of Mystery, a book from 2005 that detailed areas in Kalimdor, Northrend, and the South Seas, the maps and zone descriptions for Northrend matched up closely with what we eventually got in Wrath of the Lich King, which wasn’t released until 2008. The information in that book about Kalimdor matched closely with what was visible in the pre-Cataclysm game at the time, while the information about the South Seas helped to flesh out hooks that were either left over from the RTS games (such as the Broken isles and the Tomb of Sargeras) or were referenced but not present in WoW (like the Zandalari trolls and Kezan, homeland of the goblins).

It’s important to drive home the point that before 2011, Blizzard had valiantly defended the RPG books as canon entries in the franchise. Details about Kezan and the introduction to hobgoblins made it into the starting area for goblin PCs in Cataclysm, for example, and while not all of the details in the books were adhered to completely (the descriptions of Northrend’s zone geography were changed substantially when the zones appeared in-game) there was an overwhelming sense in the community that if it was in the RPGs, it would eventually make it into the game. We’d be going to Zandalar and the Broken Isles and whatever’s left of Kezan eventually.

This is the core reason why a South Seas expansion always comes up whenever future expansions are the topic: Blizzard clearly did some of the groundwork already, so why not? The answer is a bit complex.

Okay, maybe it’s not that complex, but go with it.

During the second round of Ask CDev, Blizzard disavowed the RPGs, stating that they should not be considered canon and that while concepts from the books might show up in game, the books should no longer be treated as mirroring Blizzard’s own design bibles. The unspoken reason for this? Pandaria was barely ever touched upon while the RPG books were in development, and never appeared on any of the maps. When this round of Ask CDev took place, it was months before Mists of Pandaria was announced as the next expansion, but it was surely in development at the time. Blizzard didn’t want to be constrained by what they’d laid down in the RPG books years before, and so elected to decanonize the books to give themselves more freedom to shape the world as they saw fit, which included dropping a huge continent in the middle of the South Seas.

Hence, doing a South Seas expansion just because it showed up in the RPG books is essentially asking Blizzard to stick to an old design solely because that design existed. That’s not really an exciting reason to try and conjure up a narrative that ties all of the islands together, since the expansion needs to have a story that compels us to go to all of these places.

Assuming that a story could be written, of course, that caveat is still there: Blizzard could still introduce the South Seas if they wanted to. The Zandalari were even tied into the narrative of Pandaria, so it’s not like Blizzard decided to scrap what they’d done with them completely, and it’s a thread that, like the abandoned naga/Neptulon narrative, is just dangling free.

The other problem is that while the islands of the South Seas could all be made interesting and distinct as questing zones and/or locations for dungeons and raids, there’s one core problem: they’re all islands. As in literally separated from each other by large expanses of water. From an worldbuilding perspective, that means Blizzard has two options:

• Create a single instanced “continent” that has these islands separated by small channels of water (like the Zangar Sea separates Frostfire Ridge and Nagrand), which flies in the face of the idea that they’re separated by days if not weeks of sea travel.
• Create multiple instanced zones that appropriately separate the islands from each other. This creates a scenario similar to Cataclysm, where the five questing zones were nowhere near each other on the map. In the Cataclysm postmortem, Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street discussed how having the zones be so separate from one another wasn’t something they liked, because players felt like the expansion took on “a disjointed feeling, detracting from that feeling of exploration and discovery.”

It’s also important to point out that if Blizzard tried to find a happy medium of having the islands separated by large but traversable bodies of water, then what’s under that water becomes potential content. If Blizzard sticks with the current paradigm and doesn’t do that content, then it’s just a bunch of blank space eating up system resources. If they decide to do aquatic content, it’s still problematic for all the same reasons it’s problematic for an “Eye of Azshara” expansion. It’s a catch-22.

There are plenty of folks in the community who have said that the Shipyard hinted at a seafaring expansion, and it’s possible that the South Seas could provide some material for that. But from where I’m standing, there’s not enough content in the South Seas to carry an expansion without going underwater, and I don’t think an underwater expansion is in the cards. Hence, the South Seas feels unlikely as an expansion.

Coming up…

Time is running out, but the trail of expansion concepts that probably won’t ever happen continues on. So come on back tomorrow and we’ll take something apart together.

Really hungry for the game to take us someplace where fish tacos would make sense? Tell me why in the comments.