With Shadowlands' final patch getting close to release, there's a lot of speculation on what might come next for WoW.
The game has seen a drop in subscribers and long delays, and after a decade and a half of seeing myriad other MMOs come about and touted as the "WoW-killer," we've actually seen Final Fantasy XIV finally overcome WoW in terms of subscribers. Internal issues at Blizzard might have something to do with this, but also a general sense of fatigue I think has set into the game. New ideas that didn't work out so well (ahem, Azerite Armor) and old systems that maybe don't feel as satisfying as they used to purely because players have been doing this for a long time.
2022 will see, after all, the 18th anniversary of WoW's launch, and if the typical expansion pattern holds, we'll be hitting 20 years of WoW at the end of the upcoming expansion. Blizzard has, wisely I think, chosen not to do a "WoW 2," but it does mean that a lot of old ideas are rattling around in the game.
The first few expansion introduced a kind of pattern of what I call "new character incentives." BC gave us two new races, and Wrath gave us a new class. Cataclysm brought an additional two races, and then Mists gave us both a new race and a new class. Warlords of Draenor then revamped the old Vanilla and BC races models, but didn't give us any new low-level content to play through. Legion gave us a new hero class that finished its starting experience fully caught up with existing characters, so players could jump in with a Demon Hunter main from the start (even getting to play them as soon as 7.0 dropped, without waiting for the expansion launch) unlike Death Knights, who still had to level up through Outland before joining up with the rest of the pack in Northrend. The end of Legion, mostly as a kind of early-access thing for BFA, introduced us to Allied Races, and we got an enormous infusion of playable races - ultimately by the end of BFA we had five new races per faction, though most of these were kind of "variants" on existing races, but with mechanical differences.
Shadowlands, like Warlords of Draenor, didn't give us any reason to start a new character.
And here I'm a bit mixed on my feelings. Early on in WoW's lifespan, I could never get enough of new races and new classes. But classes in particular require continual support for the rest of the game's lifespan. With Demon Hunters, I think the last of the really distinctive Azeroth-specific class archetypes got kind of covered (though I wouldn't mind finding a way to allow other races to be DHs).
In terms of races, I think it's not hard to add more to the game, but I do think you need to take some care to make these additions feel like they get a real stake in the world. You might really enjoy your Vulpera Rogue, but color me skeptical that we're going to get engaging Vulpera storylines moving forward in WoW.
The internal reshuffling of the WoW team and the exit of a lot of truly awful people has also led some to speculate that some of the, frankly, paternalistic attitude toward the game's design might also go with it. I'll always stand on my soapbox and wax nostalgic for the days in Wrath and Cataclysm when you could get seriously good gear by grinding out Emblems or Valor Points, and we might be seeing something like that in 9.2 with alternate methods of acquiring tier set pieces.
But my biggest hope for the game is to finally allow for cross-faction grouping. Given that shrunken population of the playerbase, it would help everyone to allow dungeons and raids to see players of each faction help one another out. I even think that it would be supported by the story - BFA was meant to be the "resolution" to the Alliance/Horde conflict, and I'd like to see that reflected. It doesn't mean all animosity has to be gone, but in an RPG, I'd like to have player characters get the option to opt out of the neverending cycle of hatred. Plenty of NPCs will set aside their differences to work with the other side in the story, so why must our characters be locked into deadly animosity?
Much as before the announcement of Shadowlands, the good money was on some kind of "death-themed" expansion, right now the speculation seems centered around finally going to the "Dragon Isles," which had originally been meant to be a part of Vanilla WoW as a kind of Old God-centric area, but would likely actually involve the dragons pretty significantly this go around.
One of the problems dragons have always had in the Warcraft universe as big scary monsters is actually that most of them are good guys. Dragons were uplifted by the Titans (in a vague way) to serve as guardians of the world, and so whenever we get bad dragons to fight, they sort of have to have this kind of exception to them. The Black Dragons were corrupted by the Old Gods, but the other four flights were basically good except for when, say, Malygos got overzealous in his policing of magic, or when Green Dragons were overcome with the Nightmare (so, corrupted by Old Gods) or the Infinite Dragonflight came back in time to undo what they had done when they were Bronze Dragons (once again, corrupted by Old Gods).
Now, we do have all those excuses, but I think dragon lore in Warcraft is an area that could really benefit from some fleshing out and expansion.
It's probably pretty likely we're going to get an announcement soon. In normal years, we'd already know as of last fall.
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