World of Warcraft: Midnight, the incoming expansion for the two-decade-plus MMO, will be taking players back to Silvermoon—that's been known for some time, but it's also a bit of a continued experiment. See, WoW's a wizened beast with expansions in the double digits to its name, and if you keep slapping continents on the old girl, it's going to stop feeling like a World of Warcraft and more like a hodgepodge...er, of Warcraft.
Anyway, we know that we're going to get a redesigned Northrend again for the next next expansion, The Last Titan, but Blizzard's also considering taking a new lick of paint to some long-standing cities, too; beloved places that haven't seen an overhaul since Cataclysm which, not to make you feel old or nothin', came out 16 whole years ago.
"It was a little scary, honestly, to go back in to tackle that zone again," says Gonzalez regarding Silvermoon and the Ghostlands, given their nostalgia-drenched position within the Burning Crusade. "Are we going to make the right choices, visually? Are we going to change it too much? Are people going to feel like we’ve taken something away from them?"
As a matter of fact, Gonzalez admits that "most parts of the city, it was just smoke and mirrors. There were a lot of parts of that city that just were not there." That's not too strange to hear—when Cataclysm rebuilt much of the game's two base kingdoms for flying mounts, there were a ton of zones (previously only accessible via out-of-bounds glitches) that were flat, featureless planes.
Even without that motivation, though, Kubit states that this is a sign of greater things to come: "We’re really anxious to see how players respond," he says, "If it’s positive, I think it opens up a bunch more storytelling opportunities." He then tells Heather that reimaginings for the major cities of the Alliance and the Horde—Stormwind and Orgrimmar, respectively—are an example of something they'd like to tackle.
Honestly, I think it's smart. You can't just keep throwing continents at Azeroth and expect it to feel like a cohesive world, and besides—this experiment's already worked fine with Dalaran, which was the central hub for both the Wrath of the Lich King and the Legion expansions in different forms. Then they blew it up in The War Within, which is kind of a remodel if you think about it.
Either way, slowly remodelling the old world bit by bit—rather than all at once, as was done in Cataclysm—seems the better angle. Especially if Blizzard can work in these old-world locations to the present story in interesting ways. Silvermoon's not just being rehashed because of nostalgia, but because it makes sense for Xal'atath, void-obsessed goth, former sapient knife, and central antagonist, to attack the Sunwell, so why not give the place a second pass while we're there?
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