Story Island – designing my own zone

Lovely ladies Z and Cinder are doing a blog challenge and anyone can join! This week’s topic is “Design your own zone”. You can find other people’s posts on their website.

For the purpose of this post, let’s pretend that copyright law is not a huge mess and Blizz can use any material related to WoW that’s ever been done (with a permission and a fair compensation for everyone involved in making it, of course). My zone will obviously never happen but I like to dream so let’s dream!

My zone is called “Story Island”.

There’s a lot of lore in game but also outside the game, in books, comics, videos and audio stories. And I would like to get all those into the game.

For every story, there is a NPC which starts a quest chain that will take you through summary of the story. You obviously can’t fit a whole book into quest text but you could fit the most important events.

I’m going to use the Warcraft movie to explain how it works. I know that the story in the movie is an alternative reality but don’t mind that, it’s also Warcraft. Spoiler alert.

You pick up a quest from an NPC called Duncan Jones which takes you to Hellfire Peninsula. When you get there, you watch a few minutes from the movie where orcs are building Dark Portal and Gul’dan is being all evil and talking about his plans. Quest text provides you with a context and more information and you go to Azeroth to see things from our end (us being the humans). In Black Morass, you participate in one-person scenario when the place is being turned into Blasted Lands, then you go to Stormwind to warn the King, meet up with Khadgar, travel to Karazhan for a chat with Medivh, …. Along the way, you watch short parts of the movie or in-game cinematics, read quest texts, listen to NPC talking to each other,…

For example books don’t have video materials on their own but there are a lot of people in community doing lore videos (I watch Nobbel87‘s stuff), machinimas, songs (Suramar from Sharm is my favourite right now), art (I ❤ Sirius and her work for Reins of Azeroth), podcasts, stories and other amazing content Blizz could use if they didn’t want to do all the work themselves.

Story Island works like mico-holidays. No achievements and no rewards other than lore knowledge and a good time. But it’s there all the time. It doesn’t come all at once, there’s a new quest chain every month so that you don’t need to rush and can take your time with every story and enjoy it. I’d like that.

 

Some more realistic ideas would be Pet Island (all the battle pets live there and can be captured) and Portal Island (with portals to all the zones), which would make my WoW life much easier.