For years in World of Warcraft our character has been referred to in voice dialogs as “The Champion”. I believe this more or less is just an easy way of addressing the character without actually having to care about whatever your character’s actual name is. Actually you are being called by your name in the text messages, but I want to focus on this concept of the Champion for a moment. Essentially this to me is the Warcraft version of the Warrior of Light. We play this character who is constantly put upon by the leaders of our faction or whatever other groups we find ourselves wrapped up in. While the game doesn’t necessarily call this out, we are clearly more pivotal of a character than just being another soldier in the army. Which has lead me down a series of ideas for a World of Warcraft expansion I would like to see.
After a decade of being pushed into making decisions we had no control over, our Champion effectively leaves the service of whatever faction we were part of. In doing so we move to an island with a Tuskarr fishing village and some ancient ruins, with the goal of effectively “retiring”. You would go through some initial set up phase of making yourself a home on the island and maybe doing a few quests to help the locals. After a short period of time Magni would show up telling you about some grave new threat that he needs your help with. You begrudgingly offer to help, but you tell him that you are going to do it your way or not at all.
This begins a sequence of events where you effectively build your own faction, that take up residence on the island. First you would need to go recruit someone who can create a portal network, and I am thinking you would maybe have a series of options based on your past experiences in the game. For example if you were exalted with Suramar you could go on a mission to recruit Chief Telemancer Oculeth to come help you set up the network. My thought being that these missions would work a lot like the recruitment missions in various RPGs like Mass Effect, where in order to convince them you have to go do some other things for them.
After getting the teleportation network set up, you could start drawing upon your past experiences… recruiting folks from your Garrison, your Order Hall, or even individuals that you encountered during the War Campaign. Each bond you created would strengthen your island and open up new options. I am thinking for a system as detailed like this that the Island probably needs to exist an account level, which I realize would piss off the roleplayers… but the level of detail I am visualizing would be a major pain in the ass when it comes to trying to level the island up for alts. Maybe you could have a point based system and that the points themselves are shared at an account level, allowing each character to make their own specific choices.
Ultimately the sequence would involve you negotiating with both the Horde and the Alliance and deciding whether or not to include them in your plans. Essentially you are throwing off the shackles of red versus blue and instead creating your own faction that gets to be created in the way you see fit. The other thing that I would love to see is quest to recruit grandmasters from various tradeskills. In order to start the quest you would need to have mastered that tradeskill on one of your characters, and probably have to craft some difficult to make items to prove your worth. However upon recruiting them they set up shop on your island and start offering that tradeskill to all of your alts. So if you want to craft some armor for a lowbie, you could just walk up to the vendor and access blacksmithing or alchemy or any number of other trades. My idea being that the island as a whole would have a shared crafting inventory that you could just dump your resources into and offer it up to any of your characters.
At this point you will realize that I have not talked at all about the bad guy we would be facing… because in truth that is irrelevant. This would be setting up a new structure for the game going forward and shifting us away from dictating a specific faction narrative to players, and instead allowing them to choose their own path. Sure it would be way more complicated to create content for… but it would also feel immensely better for those of us who throw some serious side eye each time one of our faction leaders makes horrible decisions for us and we have no real say in what is going on narratively. I don’t love the Night Elves… but I would have never willingly taken part in the burning of Teldrassil for example. I also would have told Genn to go fuck himself when he goes on an anti-horde rant as an Alliance player.
I realize I will never see content like this in World of Warcraft, but man it would be awesome if we did. The game needs to evolve past the simplistic us versus them story-line. The game feels best when we are all allied against something stronger than ourselves be that the Scourge, The Legion or the Old Gods. Shifting the story to be about the evolution of what started out as your vacation home, to turning into a fledgling island nation… would be an interesting story to experience. I also have some ideas about the mysterious ruins on the island serving as effectively a Diablo style endless dungeon where the progression of the island unlocks new areas of the dungeon to explore and with it more interesting loot available. The island could even have a shared Guild Hall available that would show up on the islands of everyone in a specific guild and zoning into it would take you to a shared instance for just your guildies. There are so many possibilities, but mostly I just want to walk away from the mistake that was Battle for Azeroth and forcing a specific PVP story down our throats.
