An old but pretty good illustration of a Draenei Mage I used to play way way back when my screen name was Stillcrow.
I wish that TBC didn’t introduce the paradigm of outmoding the vanilla world and content, but it was one of my favorite settings not just in WoW but in fantasy as a whole!
The Draenei especially, with their bizarre physiognomy and strange crystals, I loved their concept art and musical theming. (They’re also very pretty)
If there’s one thing I’d love to see well-implemented in turtle-wow, it’s a horizontal, and creatively novel interpretation of the mystifying features and settings in TBC.
Class quests. I miss a lot of the vanilla ones - it was really fun having a story unique to your class that spanned from level one all the way to max. They were all so full of great class fantasy, story, and flavor.
The World of Warcraft will never be as magical as it was before the internet invented “solving” games and content creators optimized the life out of creative choices that developers make-
However.
I honest to god believe that the move to make it less of a marionette show is to go back to vanilla (you can update the graphics if you want but idc), and develop new content horizontally instead of incrementally. I think that game design would also make the writing less… weird and character/escalation focused- and instead more sandbox, ‘human’ scale, and immersion driven.
We could still go to a lvl 60 Outland, or North Rend, or what have you. We could still meet the Draenei, and recruit the Arakockra (idr how to spell it, the bird people that all the horde people wished they could have instead of Blood Elves. You mightn’t remember but they were PISSED about the blood elves haha), and get all that awesome landscapes and environment design.
We could still fight awesome raid bosses and encounter new and weird mechanics, both in and outside the instance. GW2 has showed us that there’s a lot you can do with horizontal progression/expansion in an MMO (I LOVED playing GW2 even though the story made me roll my eyes haha).
I would play retail WoW if that happened, and also Blizzard stopped sexually assaulting, bad mouthing, bullying, financially abusing, and lying to, its employees. If it clearly and plainly apologized to Chung Ng Wai, and compensated him, and the other contestants involved, for trying to silence their message of solidarity. If they stopped abusing the finances of their customers, and stopped betraying the integrity of their creative product to squeeze out higher profits- instead choosing to generate more income through creative excellence.
If Blizzard did ALL of that, I would play WoW again.
But hey! Turtle-WoW exists! It’s free! And it’s going on the right direction!