Wow, no pun intended, I havent written here in a while. Time to fix that.
World of Warcrafts in-game timeline. I have been thinking about this little subject since Cataclysm was announced but a bit more ever since Mists of Pandaria came out. Blizzard has really made things very difficult for themselves and I can not understand how they did not see this coming.
Ok, to illustrate my point (Horde view). Previously you started off leveling up your character in vanilla WoW, everything was taking place before the opening of the dark portal. Then you hit level 58-60 and you could now enter the Burning Crusade expansion, with the story of how we tackled Dreanor and eventually defeated Illidan/Kil'Jaeden (not that you where very likely to actually see that particular content but still). Then you swiftly moved on to Wrath of the Lich King where Arthas kept hopping out from around the corners and the story unfolded much better than it had in the previous incarnations of the game, but then something happened...
When Cataclysm was released they fixed up the vanilla leveling experience, this was very needed since the game had improved much since 2004 but the initial leveling zones had not. However they did not simply make the existing content more interesting or more accessible, they actually remade the story of the entire vanilla leveling experience to match the story development of Cataclysm. This made leveling so much more intriguing and intuitive but it had a huge problem. The story of the first 58-60 levels now made no sense when you got to the other expansions. You where following the escapades of Warchief Garrosh Hellscream only to then get to Nagrand and find Warchief Thrall meeting Garrosh for the first time.
"Well this is not that huge of a problem" you might think, at least when you got to end game Cataclysm things made more sense. And yes this was very true, however what of the future? The leveling content of Cata-vanilla works really well as long as you intend to end up in Cataclysm. Luckily we got a new continent with Mists of Pandaria so the problems could be put on hold for the time being.
The big problems will really start when the next expansion comes out. Now you will have three Warchiefs running around telling you what to do, a timeline that starts in Cataclysm, goes in to the future locally when you are in main cities, goes back years in the Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King and then progressively moves you through a dead Deathwing threat, strange panda isles and a mad Garrosh that you probably won't see defeated in your leveling experience, only to end up with the now present Warchief and a very confused player.
Ok hopefully I conveyed the problem in a not too confusing a way, so what can be/should have been done then?
One solution that you might think of, I sure did, was that Blizzard should never have messed around with the story of the vanilla leveling experience in the first place. They should have made the experience much better and more accessible, like they did, but they should have kept the original story. This would have made the player start in classic WoW and they would have moved seamlessly through time up to the present expansion all the time traveling through the story in a, at least semi logical, fashion.
So why then did they change the story? Well I think a lot of the reasoning for this came from the introduction of the two new races. Both the Goblins and the Worgen had Deathwing and the cataclysm to thank for their existence as playable races. Their starting zones had this built in to the story and perhaps Blizzard thought it would be too strange to then come out and see the Greymane wall still standing and things like that. Another issue was that at this time the story of WoW was becoming a bit hard to keep track of as leveling character since you seldom finished an expansion off completely before going to the next one and Cataclysm introduced a big shift in main characters for the different sides, ok mainly for the Horde with Garrosh but that still affected the Alliance in a big way.
I believe they ceased the opportunity, since they where going to redo the vanilla leveling experience anyway, to bring the story back in the game. So that new players could build a relation to these characters and get a better understanding of what was going on in the world (of warcraft) thereby making players feel connected to the game to a greater extent. This was a great idea and something that was very badly needed, but it dated the content and introduced the above mentioned rather big problems.
So what should have been done then? What would be the way forward?
Blizzard has talked about "fixing up" the Burning Crusade leveling experience and bring it up to date. I feel like this solution would bring about a never ending updating of old content to suit the newest expansion, because where would that stop? Would they bring the Burning Crusade up to date so that it matched the Cata-vanilla content so the transition between them would work more smoothly? Or would they bring it up to a post-Mists date? And how would this affect future expansions? And what about Wrath of the Lich King? No I don't think that this solution would work unless you had a finished story to work towards and as long as there are expansions that story will not be finished.
So is it hopeless then? I don't think so. I think at this point the only solution that would make the story make sense and get everything to line up would be something that has never been in the game previously. An optional timeline.
Lets picture it like this. You log in to WoW for the first time. After you create a character you will see one big "start" button with a smaller "story" button next to it. The "story" button will say "classic", however if you click it you get the option to change it to "Cataclysm". If you do it warns you with some info and you can click "I've already played the game and know the main story" or something along those lines to select "Cataclysm". This would effectively split the level 1-60 experience in to two different phases. One would have the now present Cataclysm story in it while the other would have an "fixed up" and streamlined vanilla storyline.
Don't get me wrong I know this solution would take a great effort of Blizzards part. Sure some zones could stay largely intact with only some buildings having different models, but some zones (looking at you thousand needles) would be far more challenging. The upside would be that the stories are already there from original WoW along with the characters, but it would still take a ton of work and it would be work that is not directed at new content. It would however make the storyline sensible and it could also be an oportunity to reintroduce "classic" WoW to players.
In the end I don't know what would be best. If this was Starcraft 2 the fans would already be making this idea in to an optional mod but that does not really work with WoW, it is up to the developers. It is a bitter irony that the hard work Blizzard put in to integrate the player in to the story and make new players understand what the story of WoW is, might be the thing that ends up making players more confused than ever about what is actually going on.
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