On Azeroth's Cataclysm (Or: Truly Evolving MMO Worlds)

This post is not what you might call "topical"... I quit playing WoW shortly after the release of Cataclysm, mostly due to an unfortunate job that had begun consuming all of my free time.

At the time, I remember really being struck by how interesting an experience it was to explore a world I knew so intimately (having played WoW off and on since Beta) and seeing it so completely changed, yet still recognizable. It was so much fun to briefly feel like the world was truly changeable and, well, real. Naturally that wore off the longer I played, and having recently returned to dabble in Azeroth, (I mean, hey, Pandas? I'm so in) the fact that the game world still looks like it did the day after the Cataclysm is really immersion-breaking.

I really hope that in the future, MMOs will explore the idea of a truly evolving world. I remember thinking about all the possibilities when WoW first introduced the phasing system with the release of WotLK, and am still surprised at how sparingly they have used it. I kept expecting a quest where I would help build up a settlement through a long progression of quests. I especially think it would be cool as a nod to Warcraft's origins as an RTS game where you basically build up a settlement from scratch for every single level.

I feel like Blizzard really missed a golden opportunity to showcase their phasing tech; if they had included some quests throughout Cataclysm to help the various areas of the world rebuild, then it would have given players a greater feeling of immersion and investment. In the long run, I think the idea of a truly interactive world environment where things can fall apart and be rebuilt directly through player actions will be the rule, rather than the exception. Such a world would naturally engender a feeling of investment and ownership by the player-base, which in turn would mean sustainable long term profits. Of course, it'll have to be carefully done...

I seem to recall an MMO from many years back that experimented with a truly interactive ecology, where the players' actions could have dire consequences; if you chopped down every single tree then the forest wouldn't regrow, and if you over-hunted a population of NPCs then they could die out. As I recall, every server ended up being a dead world.

Then again, I cannot find any evidence of this by Google sleuthing, so perhaps this was all part of a theoretical discussion or a product of the fevered dreams of an old MMO veteran... In any case, I do think it would be an interesting experiment, so long as it was hard to grief such a setup and the player-base had a means for punishing griefers. (It is a shame that griefing is such a thing, but that's a discussion for another post.)

Regardless, I think WoW is onto something with their phasing system. Here's hoping they expand its use to help further immerse the players in the illusion of a truly living, evolving Azeroth, or at the very least serve as an inspiration to more revolutionary MMOs just over the horizon.