As World of Warcraft continues to age, much of the magic created by the game’s original questing zones is starting to dissipate—and players are beginning to notice. In a thread posted to Reddit earlier today, WoW players agreed that they’d be on board for changes to Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms in the near future.
The “old world,” as it’s colloquially referred to as by the player base, has not received any major updates since the launch of the Cataclysm expansion in December 2010. When that expansion launched, the original WoW zones that were massively overhauled were just six years old at that point.
As of today, it’s been over 12 years since Cataclysm went live, meaning players have spent double the amount of time in the revamped version of those zones than they did in the original. With that time frame in mind, the WoW community is well within its right to start wondering when a re-revamp could take place.
What obstacles could prevent Blizzard from updating old Azeroth?
The biggest challenge in a complete overhaul of WoW’s original zones would be making them as modern as zones that were added in recent expansions. Open-world content in Dragonflight zones is far more up-to-date than activities you’d find in Kalimdor or the Eastern Kingdoms.
Questing in the Waking Shores, for example, feels so much different than completing a quest or storyline in a zone like Winterspring or the Hinterlands. The average modern WoW questline is extremely story-focused and mechanically updated, whereas many of the quests that were implemented in Cataclysm rely on WoW’s simple, tried-and-true “kill and collect” quest formula that got the game off the ground in the first place.
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Plus, any modernization Blizzard implements would need to take place on a massive scale. While new expansions typically introduce about four to five new zones at a time, a sweeping update to Azeroth as we know it would require complete overhauls to over three dozen zones across two continents. There would need to be a story-based reason for all of those changes, too, which could throw the narrative and lore of WoW for a loop.
Can we expect any more old world updates in Dragonflight?
Blizzard has updated older zones in the past, adding new content and modernized assets to forgotten lands like Uldum, the Vale of Eternal Blossoms, and the Arathi Highlands, among others. Most recently, the Blue Dragonflight questline in Patch 10.1 (which quickly became a fan favorite) took players on a world tour of a select few zones where fresh content was added.
But those changes have come in short bursts in the middle of expansions, and none of the original content that came alongside the zones (such as questing hubs or storylines) was changed dramatically. If a new wave of changes were to reach WoW, most of the game’s content in the old world as we know it would have to go away forever—just as it did with Cataclysm.
In Patch 10.1.5, players will be able to bring the newly added element of Dragonriding back to the old world, when the Kalimdor Grand Prix comes to the live servers. With Dragonriding races coming to the world as a whole, you should expect the open world to be a lot more populated. Maybe in the future, players will have even more reason to head back to the world that they leveled their characters in all those years ago.
