Everything Changes

The community blog topic over at WoW Insider this week is:

What do you think of persistent changes to Azeroth?

Now I have to admit I am in favour of the world constantly evolving and changing. Events like a giant bad tempered Dragon flying up from inside the earth should leave scars on the landscape as should tidal waves and conflict. You can’t have say deforestation taking place on a massive scale yet the number of trees in a particular zone staying the same, it doesn’t happen in the real world and wouldn’t happen on Azeroth either. As a story line progresses, the world in which it takes place needs to change along side it. I think phasing ( as annoying as it is from a world pvp perspective) works wonders for this, letting us see the result of our actions as we explore the environment around us. That said, I do wish Blizzard would stop taking a remodeling tool to my favourite zones.

However what I’d love to see is more use being made of the Caverns of Time. What if we could enter a zone in the Caverns of Time and be whisked away to a point in Azeroth’s past. You couldn’t necessarily go anywhere at once but that could easily be explained away by mist on the timeways or some such random deus ex machina. Maybe the destinations would change weekly or maybe it would be influenced by the patch but the idea would be that one week/patch cycle you could picnic in old Auberdine and the following week/patch you could revisit Desolace back when it was desolate.

This would also allow Blizzard to add old content without actually adding old content. A bit like the Timeless Isle, I wouldn’t make it obvious with big question marks everywhere but merely allow those who are interested to meander around finding things if they want to. You could put the old class quests back even if the rewards are purely cosmetic but personally I’d love to see Eris Havenfire yelling across the Plaguelands again. It would also allow people who are relatively new to the game to see the bits and pieces which everyone still talks about.

Major events like the Scourge invasions and the recent Barrens conflict could also turn up so that people who still want things from them could have a chance to revisit on alts. In fact which areas are due to swing by the Caverns could appear in the calendar a bit like the call to arms battleground so that you would know that next week, you could pay a visit to old Westfall or in three weeks time your chance to farm a bit of lumber for an old war effort. Loch Modan would still have a loch in it and Auberdine a proper pier but yet it wouldn’t detract from the current game.

We’d be able to pay our respects to NPCs long since dead and dance around Lady Prestor teasing her with future.

Azshara could be Goblin free once again even it was just for a limited period and we could just wander and explore to our heart’s content. Blizzard have recently started adding more and more vanity items and these portals into the past would be the perfect place to continue this trend as well allowing them to advance current story lines by trips into the shadows if they so chose.