by JR Cook - 9 years ago     show comments

Azshara and the naga, as well as the locales of the South Seas, are pretty much out as expansion concepts, chiefly because Blizzard still seems shy about doing aquatic content since the mixed reactions to Vashj’ir during Cataclysm. There are plenty of ideas that don’t have that constraint though, and one of them has long been rumored to be in the pipeline for the game, but has never materialized.

The Emerald Dream

The Dream has been characterized somewhat inconsistently throughout the franchise, but the core elements go like this: the Dream is a backup copy of Azeroth, created by the Titans after they had shaped Azeroth but before they’d introduced sentient life into the affair. As such, the Dream is pristine: there are no cities, no civilizations, nothing but an entire world filled with nature and nature alone.

At the same time, the Dream is also connected with all living things, and the dreams of those living things can impact the Dream itself, which can in turn impact other dreamers. As such, the Green Dragonflight, as well as the druids trained by the Ancient Cenarius, maintain order in the Dream and prevent anything from corrupting it.

Throughout pre-expansion WoW, there was a growing plot that something was wrong in the Emerald Dream. Druids who were supposed to wake up weren’t waking up, and the dragons of the Green Flight who were closest to the Dream appeared to be acting outwardly hostile, even for dragons. However, despite adding several world bosses and a critical event during the Scepter of the Shifting Sands questchain that fed this narrative, there didn’t seem to be any end to the corruption before we headed off to Outland in Burning Crusade. Years later, the novel Stormrage addressed the corruption narrative, setting the stage for Malfurion to awaken in time to become a central figure in Cataclysm, but left some hooks there that suggested gameplay could still happen.

Commentary from the devs before WoW’s release suggested that the Emerald Dream was going to be endgame content, but then it never emerged. Folks who knew how to glitch instances and/or manipulate private servers uncovered some unique but incomplete assets in the game files labeled appropriately for Emerald Dream-related content (see the video below), but they were never made accessible to players. When people eventually started asking what happened, Blizzard’s response was that an endless pristine forest wasn’t really well-suited to being an entire expansion.

The retort from the community has typically been to bring up the Northrend example: WC3 characterized that place as being an endless frozen wasteland, and yet between the RPG supplements and Blizzard’s zone design in Wrath of the Lich King, they were able to spin the place into an ecologically-diverse and beautiful set of locales. Why couldn’t they do that with the Emerald Dream?

Part of it may go back to a question of willpower. Setting that aside, there’s the question of how we’d do an expansion where there’s no local denizens for us to interact with. If we’re consistent with what we’ve been told is the purpose of the Dream of Creation, there’s no civilization there, no locals with problems for us to manage, nothing along those lines. There are the Cenarion Circle druids, sure, and the Green Dragonflight, but more than one zone working with the same crew of NPCs, regardless of what they want us doing, is going to get stale after awhile.

There’s also a reasonable question to ask about the impact of everyone going into the Dream. At the very least, it corrupts the backup copy of Azeroth that the dragons have been protecting since forever. Granted, we destroyed the re-origination device in Uldum that would have wiped Azeroth clean and loaded that backup copy, but that’s beside the point; the more we destroy or corrupt the works of the Titans, the more we start looking like the same kind of malevolent force as the Burning Legion or the Old Gods, both forces that the Titans have been aligned against since the beginning of time.

Artist’s interpretation, of course.

There’s also a logistical problem to consider: we know that pre-Sundering Azeroth was a single landmass with the Well of Eternity in the center and everything else situated around it. To be consistent, the backup copy of Azeroth would have to have this layout, meaning that we’re talking about a single continent that’s the size of present-day Kalimdor, Northrend, the Eastern Kingdoms, and Pandaria all smacked together, with some additional space taken up by all the miscellaneous islands and sub-continents in the South Seas.

Blizzard could work around this constraint, of course, and folks with their hearts set on the Dream expansion have aired all kinds of possibilities: phasing, focusing on the area specifically around the site of the Well of Eternity (which in the present is underwater), or even just ignoring the constraint and demanding that Blizzard build a single continent instance that dwarfs all of their other instances combined. And of course, Blizzard could always just retcon what the Dream is supposed to consist of in order to fit the gameplay they aim to provide, since that’s largely what they did with Draenor during WoD.

The Dream is Dead

The Emerald Dream is both too free-form a concept and too concrete to really deliver on, when it comes down it. The ephemeral nature of dreams is something that’s difficult to communicate if the game is centered around reliably being able to go to a discrete place and complete your quest objectives there. And the other fixed elements about the dream (no civilization, no cities, Kalimdor as a single giant forest continent) beg a bunch of questions about how Blizzard would approach building the expansion.

As it stands, the best implementation for the Dream is what we’ve already seen Blizzard do with it: very occasional instances where we enter the dream (mechanically accomplished via phasing) to complete a short list of objectives and then wake up back in the real world. Anything else requires either a far greater scope than Blizzard seems willing to take on, or delivering something that bears little to no resemblance to the location that the franchise has established up to this point. Neither of these options are feasible or desirable.

Coming up…

Back in 2013, before BlizzCon, if you’d told me that we were going to go back to a past version of Draenor for the entirety of an expansion, I’d have laughed incredulously. And yet here we are, two years later, about to leave that expansion behind us. Does that open the door for other expansions set in other obscure points in time? You bet! Come back tomorrow so I can put an axe in those concepts as well.

Are you certain that the Dream is coming? Tell me why in the comments.