Blog Challenge #12: Design Your Own Zone

It’s another challenge from Z and Cinder, and this time they want you to design your own zone!

When thinking about this, I started mentally jotting down all of the various things I love seeing in the World of Warcraft, and wondering if I could somehow combine them in such a way that would be a compelling experience for players and maybe give an opportunity to add something new. Here’s what I came up with.

This place would be great without all the elves and demons sucking up the joint.

1. As much as questing in there annoys the hell out of me sometimes, I absolutely love the huge feeling of Suramar City. It feels like a truly proper city, something we haven’t had in WoW in….honestly I can’t think of when. It feels like people truly live there. I get that landmass in World of Warcraft has to be shrunk down for gameplay purposes, but it kills my sense of immersion to have cities that don’t feel populated and lacking places for them to live. Stormwind, Ironforge, and Silvermoon sort of go along that path, but they don’t feel “big” enough. Suramar City does, and I’d like to see another one.
2. I want this massive city to be a Draenei one, and that means it probably needs to exist on Argus, likely after we kick the Legion’s posteriors off of it. I love the Draenei, and I want to see what the absolute best of their architecture looks like, seeing as how we’ve been denied that multiple times. The Exodar is still busted up and broken, Shattrath City in Outland is largely a ruin, and Shattrath City in Alt-Draenor is either overrun with demon hordes or was never released as content for us to explore. It’s time we got to see the best of what they can do.
3. I know a big issue people have with bigger cities is the convenience factor of getting around to the things in the city you as a player need to get to quickly, and I have two solutions for that which I want to see in tandem. The first is flying mounts enabled right from the get go. I know people have said they don’t want flying mounts in cities because it makes it feel less populated, and I feel that having more NPCs present is the solution to that.
4. The second solution is one that I would borrow from Shal’aran, and thats to have portals to major locations within this Draenei city. But where would the hub for these portals be you ask?
5. This city needs to serve as the location for a new feature that Blizzard is long overdue for adding, and that’s guild and player housing. Players should be able to purchase their own home within this city, and have full customization control of it. Similarly, allow guilds to buy and set up guild halls with an equal level of customization within, right down to the floor plans. Players within the guild should be able to have their own rooms they can create and set up to their own liking.

   

   This is only tangentially related to my next point, I just think it looks awesome

6. I am predicting that the expansion after Legion will focus on battling the forces of the Void Lords, and I want the zone this city is in to feature that in a major way. I imagine that Argus, while probably not containing the World-Soul of a Titan, was nevertheless “hit” by an Old God, and part of this expansion will be dealing with it before tackling the remaining one(s) on Azeroth. In doing so, the players will eventually find a massive cave structure beneath this City’s zone. At first, the cave’s appearance will be innocuous, but eventually as they go deeper it will appear more and more alienlike, before we see telltale signs of the Old Gods, including their minions.
7. This entire adventure will culminate in players discovering that the Old God is no longer immobile, embedded in the very crust of the planet, but it has siphoned off enough power to evolve into a mobile form and break free. It will then escape its cavern and attack the city. This will take place inside a massive scenario where every player within, alongside a host of NPCs, will defend the city from this truly massive monster. This is inspired by the times in WoW when players would kite Lord Kazzak to Stormwind, and he would just lay waste to all the players in the city.
   I’m not sure how exactly this would work, but I would like to feature destructible environments that the mob could shatter, leading to a sort of race against time where players have to bring this thing down before it obliterates the city. I don’t want players to be unable to simply go about their business however, so all of this would be contained inside an instanced scenario that people can queue up for again after they complete the story quests and kill it themselves for a chance at more of the rewards. And I’d want plenty of options for how players go about fighting it, be it engaging the thing directly or getting some siege vehicles or helping activate the city defenses.

So that’s my grand idea for a new zone in World of Warcraft. Do you like it? Hate it? Think I’m a big moron for wanting more Draenei and Old God stuff? Tell me below!