I recently read a post at Tobold’s about the nature of Bliz­zard expan­sions, and it got me thinking.

I keep ref­er­enc­ing World of War­craft 2 in my posts (“Maybe Bliz­zard will change this in WoW2”). But it dawned on me that there’s really no real dif­fer­ence between sequel and expan­sion with MMOs. We’re already play­ing World of War­craft 2. Bliz­zard is about to release World of War­craft 3.

WoW3 is a 10-level long game, com­plete with its own endgame. The mechan­ics are dif­fer­ent, but they are back­ward com­pat­i­ble with WoW and WoW2. In fact, all that old con­tent is being updated to use the new mechan­ics. For some classes, the spells and tal­ents are dif­fer­ent. Item­iza­tion has greatly changed. Tank design, one of the fun­da­men­tal parts of the stan­dard group game, has greatly changed in design.

As Bliz­zard learns more about MMO design, classes take on new wrin­kles and learn to work together bet­ter. The over­all play expe­ri­ence at each point is bet­ter than the pre­vi­ous version.

Sounds a lot like a sequel to me.

Still, let’s look at it another way. Here are the most obvi­ous changes you would notice if you were to be dropped back from now (late TBC) all the way back to Week 1 of WoW. I’m skip­ping the obvi­ous stuff like (no dark por­tal, no out­land, no draenai/blood elves).

(Let me hear it, old school WoW peo­ple! Rem­i­nisce with me a little.)

• Mounts are pur­chased at L40.
• There is no lev­el­ing boost between L20 and L60.
• A fair amount of the uncom­mon loot you get is not use­ful to any class or build in the game (two handed swords with Spirit, cloth armor with Strength, etc).
• PvP is unstruc­tured and open and gives no reward other than the fun of it. There is no bat­tle­ground or arena sys­tem, how­ever there are raids on oppos­ing cities and con­stant skir­mish­ing between Southshore and Tar­ren Mill (as a result, quest­ing in Hills­brad is a nightmare).
• Pal­adins, Druids, Shamans, and Priests have one mean­ing­ful build each: healing.
• Heal­ing gear didn’t make heal­ers spells more effective.
• Pal­adins are Alliance only and Shamans are Horde only. Each fac­tion thinks that the other’s exclu­sive class is overpowered.
• The only tanks are War­riors. Their only but­ton to gen­er­ate threat is Sun­der Armor, and boss tank­ing is mash­ing that button.
• You zerg (15-man) the 5-man con­tent, and in fact this was how the max level instances (both of them) are run. “LF6M for Strat, any class.” This expe­ri­ence is largely free of tac­tics or strategy.
• There is no mean­ing­ful Silithus zone.
• There is no Mau­radon or Dire Maul.
• There is no Stran­glethorn fish­ing event or Gurubashi arena mas­ter event.
• There is one raid zone, Molten Core. To get there, you have to clear through the longest instance in the game, every sin­gle time you want to raid there. The short­cut to avoid this long clear is to swim up a long river of molten lava, and roughly 20% of your raid dies while doing so. It’s still worth it.
• Molten Core had all of Tier 1 and Tier 2, and both looked terrible.
• There are no badges or tokens that are shared by classes. In your raid­ing career, you can go months before see­ing an upgrade; when your piece finally does drop, your fel­low class mem­bers want it just as badly as you do. In fact, most instance runs, you expect to get no loot at all, so DKP and other guild cur­rency sys­tems are ported from other games.
• The most reli­able way to get zomgepics is raid­ing. Peo­ple who oth­er­wise have no inter­est in raid­ing do so solely to get zomgepics (much like bat­tle­grounds now). In related news, raids are 40-man affairs where afk’ing is ram­pant (again, much like bat­tle­grounds now). You silently loathe 10–30% of your raid mem­bers for this rea­son alone (yes, much like bat­tle­grounds now. Bliz­zard threw bat­tle­grounds under the bus to improve raiding.)
• Raid­ing requires resis­tance gear for every­one; the only way to cre­ate that gear is to raid and wipe and get the ran­dom craft­ing mate­ri­als to drop from the trash mobs in the very instance you’re craft­ing the gear to be suc­cess­ful in.
• There is no heroic mode of anything.
• There are no fly­ing mounts.
• There is no guild bank.
• There are no realm trans­fers. There is no char­ac­ter renaming.
• There is no way to report gold spam. There is a lot of gold spam.
• There is no online armory. Peo­ple lie about their build all the time.
• There is no way to mark tar­gets. Hilar­ity ensues on more than half of all fights.
• Some class’s entire raid­ing expe­ri­ence is hit­ting one but­ton to decurse the raid.
• Quest tar­gets are farmed for use­ful drops.
• Travel is com­pletely dif­fer­ent. There are no sum­mon­ing stones. There are far fewer flight paths, and you can’t make a multi-point flight, you have to travel to one, then the next.
• You either have a war­lock, or you com­mute. Most max level char­ac­ters don’t have epic ground mounts. Com­mut­ing is not triv­ial, and zone chat and hearth­stones are much more mean­ing­ful because of this. You actu­ally hang out in the same zone as an instance that you want to go to, in the hopes that some­one else shows up. Instances are much slower to get rolling.
• There are no daily quests. You grind mobs for money, and you like it and say thank you.
• Escort quests are both pro­lific and mad­den­ing because of fre­quent bugs. (robot chick­ens, anyone?)
• Some dun­geon set pieces are tied to trash mobs that are incon­ve­nient to get to. Also, the drop rate on these trash mobs are lower than sim­i­lar pieces tied to instance bosses. (I’ll never for­give you, Devout Gloves! Don’t believe that tooltip, they weren’t BoE originally!)
• The inter­face sucks is sim­ple and clean. (kid­ding, PvD)
• Most high-level craft­ing pat­terns are world/realm drops (aka very very very rare ran­dom drops), which are either sold for ridicu­lous amounts of gold or are learned by someone’s alt, never to be seen in gen­eral pop­u­la­tion on that realm.
• The Auc­tion House is in only one city per fac­tion, and that city is crowded.
• No handy min­imap icons like ! or ? let­ting you know where you can get or turn in a quest.
• War­lock and Hunter pets don’t despawn when you were mounted. Those classes have a larger aggro radius by default as they ride.
• Pal­adins only have one dura­tion of buff: five min­utes. Keep­ing pal­adin buffs going dur­ing a raid is comical.
• War­locks don’t have soul shard bags. Inven­tory is con­stantly a mess for them.
• No mage tables or war­lock soul­wells. Con­jur­ing food/water/healthstones takes for­ever.
• Pal­adins can nuke Horde PC Undead toons with Exorcism.
• Tau­ren don’t have Kodo mounts, they instead get a buff to run at mount speed (plain­srun­ning)… but it’s not under player con­trol when this abil­ity turns on. Hilar­ity ensues.

You see what I’m get­ting at. We’re cur­rently play­ing a game that has the name World of War­craft, but when you com­pare it with the orig­i­nal World of War­craft, you could eas­ily call what we’re play­ing a sequel instead of an expansion.

WoW3 will be back­ward com­pat­i­ble with WoW2 and WoW1. Soon, you will be able to load your WoW3 toon and play all that con­tent with all the improve­ments. The graph­ics in WoW3 will be slight upgrade from WoW2, just like WoW2 was to WoW1.

The whole expansion/sequel dis­tinc­tion is over­rated when it comes to talk­ing about MMOs. These games are con­tin­u­ous. They evolve.

(Also, going back and read­ing the patch notes and see­ing “Patch 1.2 Major Changes 2004–12-18″ and remem­ber­ing read­ing them makes me feel really old.)

revised 2008-08-25 with addi­tions and cor­rec­tions from the com­menters: Ianedes, Pete, P, Rudo, BookhouseBOy, Hellscreamy, Kyladar, Din, Hiryu. Thank you all!