Blizzard has talked about how they want 8.2's new zone, Nazjatar, to feel like a place that is endlessly replayable. In WoW's long history, we've had a number of zones added in later patches that are meant to provide max-level content that isn't dungeons or raids or PvP.
While the curated experience of a dungeon or raid (and mechanically, the two are basically the same concept) is something WoW is famous for doing very, very well, its focus on the world itself has declined over time. Cataclysm and Warlords of Draenor were two expansions in which players felt that there was little reason to leave capital cities and garrisons, respectively, because the content that really mattered was all in instances.
We've seen experiments and developments in the past that led to more outdoor engagement. I think one of Legion's great strengths was the introduction of the World Quest system - an update to daily quests that felt less repetitive and gave players greater choice - you could simply do four world quests in a zone to get the emissary cache, and choose which among those four you were interested in, or you could knock out every quest in the zone for rewards and reputation if you were in the groove.
I still think world quests are a really good system, but they aren't perfect. For one thing, the limitation on them - that there are only so many world quests up at a time - ironically makes them feel more mandatory (I think there's a whole post to be written about how weekly or daily caps are meant to be maximums but often wind up feeling like minimums) and a lot of the time there's little sense of story progression or stakes to them - why, for example, is Storm's Wake just as happy that I heard a story about Loh the Tortollans were telling me when I could have been defending the town from marauding Horde who are going around murdering civilians?
The most successful unlimited world content I think they've done is the Timeless Isle. And aside from my ears perking up any time there's anything to do with time travel or time anomalies in World of Warcraft (Bronze Dragonflight is the best dragonflight) there actually wasn't a ton that made the Timeless Isle all that obviously good. There were practically no new art assets and very little story (even if we eventually discovered that the stuff we were getting for Kairozdormu turned out to cause way bigger problems in the long run) but it still wound up being fun.
Rare enemies came with some really interesting designs - the ghost ship, for example, was really cool. While there were daily and weekly quests that got you the biggest contributions to player power, there was a sense that you could just go around the island and keep playing and know that you were still contributing somewhat to your power.
One of WoW's tensions is between intrinsic and extrinsic rewards. The joy of pulling off your rotation perfectly and seeing big numbers flying at the screen, taking down a new raid boss, or wrecking someone in PvP are all joys you feel in the moment, as you are playing - what is called an intrinsic reward. Getting gear and reputation rewards, earning toys and mounts and titles for challenging feats or persistent grinding is a reward where it's less about joy in the moment than satisfaction once you've earned it, and that's called an extrinsic reward.
WoW has always been focused a lot on the latter, but when it is intrinsically enjoyable, players are going to be happiest. The thing is, because the extrinsic rewards are such a focus on the game, Blizzard has this problem where they can come up with fun game systems and modes, but players feel a weird sense that they are wasting their time by doing them if the rewards aren't right. Take island expeditions - while I do think some work could be done to make them a little more varied in terms of the things you're getting azerite from, I think their biggest problem is that the rewards are really not that interesting. Azerite as a resource is so obscured by other issues (like finding the piece of azerite gear with the correct traits) that just getting a chunk of azerite that you could easily earn through other game systems makes the Islands feel sort of inconsequential.
Warfronts I think do a better job here, because there are interesting transmog appearances and sets to earn, not to mention decent gear that is a lot easier to evaluate than "a big chunk of azerite."
Anyway, one important aspect to how unlimited content ought to work is that there needs to be a sense that a player is working toward something even if they're done with their daily quests or whatever the zone has.
But I also think that experimentation in the gameplay is important.
On the Timeless Isle, the most exciting rare mob was the ghost ship. Yes, Hu'lon had a cool mount that never dropped (for me at least,) but the ghost ship was A: unlike any other attackable object we've seen in the game and B: really changed the environment, giving players water-walking and providing a challenge that really required a raid's worth of players to attack it.
Dynamic events I think would contribute a great deal to making Nazjatar interesting. There should be big, zone-shaking creatures that change the feel of the zone while you're adventuring within it. Maybe some C'thraxx shows up and suddenly a wave of faceless ones start moving through the zone.
I'd love to see bases and points of interest that can be captured, and that as long as your faction (or maybe just the players versus the Naga) controls it, everyone gets a buff in the zone. But the Naga are fighting back with ferocity, and perhaps endless waves assault these locations, growing more and more powerful until it inevitably falls, requiring players to assault it again.
Giving rewards coming and going for this sort of dynamic event is also a good idea - if there's a currency for "relinquished" gear, you might get a big burst when you take one of these camps and then earn more each time you wipe out a wave - getting more and more of the currency as each wave gets more powerful, such that an organized raid that is capable of holding off raid-boss-like foes along with elite adds could be getting massive amounts of this currency until you get to the point where even a group of mythic raiders ultimately has to call a retreat.
One bit of world content that I thought was profoundly cool was the pre-Legion invasions in Westfall, Dun Morogh, Azshara, Hillsbrad Foothills, Tanaris, and Northern Barrens. I actually liked them more than the later Broken Isles invasions. Despite liking World Quests, I felt that the utterly free-form nature of the original Legion invasions worked really well to give a sense that we were dealing with an unexpected and unpredictable threat (I'm also always happy for them to use old zones to give that "close to home" feeling and raise the stakes.)
I loved that the nature of the invasion meant you could either join a big group wiping out massive demonic hordes or you could go to the more remote parts of the zone and find small clusters - there's a place in the western part of Westfall where a simple road runs next to a tree, and there were always a couple demons hiding behind the tree. Something about the aesthetics of this very normal little road - one you could imagine a kid walking back from school along - being threatened by little wyrmtongue demons really made all my protective paladin instinct kick in.
Now, dynamic environments are great to keep a zone feeling fresh. I will say that on the other hand, one of my favorite things in Legion was Suramar. To a large extent, the success of Suramar was that they took a max-level zone and treated it like other zones. Leveling zones tend to have full quest chains with a story that progresses over the course of its quests. Suramar was no different, except that you started it only at the level cap.
Another of WoW's issues has always been that the story is front-loaded - once you've leveled up, there's little left to do except go into the dungeons and raids and kill the bad guys.
That's something that's been getting a lot better, starting in Mists of Pandaria. But I think Suramar was the best example yet - before we went into Nighthold, we got two complex and interesting chapters to the story of the Dusk Lily Rebellion - literally starting the whole thing with just you and Thalyssra and eventually rallying most of the city to overthrow Elisande, which then led to a huge raid. (And the Nightborne abandoning us to go hang out with the Blood Elves, grumble grumble.)
I was, to be honest, pretty disappointed that the War Campaign in BFA was not as involved, complex, and frankly long as the Suramar stories. What we got was instead something more like the chapters that unfolded on Argus - interesting, but really just a couple of sporadic chapters rather than a rich and ongoing story.
Now, can the dynamic world and the rich ongoing story coexist? One advantage to being light on story is that you can have parts of the world change significantly for things like world quests without disrupting player's engagement. If you were on a quest to get keys off of naga soldiers to free an NPC from their prisons but then all the Naga there were dead and there was a big sea-monster in their place because of some world quest, it wouldn't feel great.
So I don't want to be asking conflicting things here.
Still, I think I'm going to be watching the development of Nazjatar with great interest. The idea of it - an island existing within a big rift in the ocean, with titanic walls of water surrounding the zone on all sides - is really cool.
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