It’s the chain I beat you with until you
recognize my command!”
The best way to show Orr being cleansed and still maintain the pre-death of Zhaitan Orr would be to make it into LS instances. So if the LS takes us back to Orr, those instances will show some restoration, while those who haven’t done the PS won’t find it odd, and they wouldn’t have to change the entire map and events to a post Zhaitan state.
Nature abhors a vacuum. With Orr cleansed so that the undead become fewer and fewer, but the pact races are focusing most of their attention elsewhere, I could imagine an aggressive race like the Krait taking advantage of the power vacuun to expand their domain into Orr.
Keep the original Orr as it is but add instanced missions set in a recovering Orr where heroes are called upon to defend the brave (or foolhardy) settlers and frontiersfolk from the depredations of the Krait and even those remnants of the undead horde powerful enough to have survived the cleansing.
Ultimately a cleansed, safe, and peaceful Orr is a bad idea in a game centered around adventure and fighting evil. The existing Orr is large, detailed, and intricate in its options for adventure. Throwing it away, or hiding it in the LS would be wasteful. Adding to the game, in the form of vignettes that tell of the ongoing struggle for life and civilization in the aftermath of the cleansing, gives the sense of progression of story needed for a living world without wasting resources by discarding existing content or rebuilding a variant of an entire existing zone to show that plants can grow there again.
If they do remake parts of Orr to show cleansed areas, that doesn’t mean they will put in red mobs that can drop heavy bags to replace the risen. Cleansed sections could very well have yellow mobs that drop red meat and hooves or eggs and talons.
Be careful what you ask for. You might not like the improved version.
I wouldn’t mind them changing/replacing events in Orr to reflect the healing that should be going on. Especially since so many of the current events break so often. Maybe the new ones would run better.
I think the best solution would be to create new maps set in the as-yet-unexplored areas of Orr. Keep the three existing maps as they are, but have the ones further inland be less dead.
The Personal Story would have to be changed though. It revolved around Orr towards the end.
I killed Shiro in Factions. Why are there still Afflicted in Kaineng City? Because MMO (or quasi-MMO).
There’s aren’t afflicted if you change to WoC mode.
I once had a dream like OP. I made a song about it.
https://soundcloud.com/tim_six/shadows-of-the-past
A little bit more context: this was written back when we didn’t have Megaservers and guesting was almost mandatory for temple events. Orr maps on just about every server were empty, save for the few players who were mapping or wandered in out of curiosity or by accident. Those 3 maps, as empty and broken as they were, are still my favourite 3 in the game. Exploring them multiple times, I would always fantasize about what Orr was like before Zhaitan. I always hoped to one day see what was shown in the wallpapers that featured Orr: the mass exodus of denizens leaving their crumbling ivory towers, the Risen attacking and ravaging the land of its innocence and beauty, and ultimately, the fall of an empire…
tl;dr: there should be an instance of Orr when it was all nice-looking.
The Personal Story would have to be changed though. It revolved around Orr towards the end.
If only new maps (in areas that aren’t currently available) are revitalized, then the Personal Story would be completely unaffected.
Orr needs to stay a rotten wasteland as it’s always been. However I would like them to remake most of the events and add more interesting enemies. Orr was really a prototype of what Dry Top and Silverwastes became. They need to go back and apply that design to Orr.
Zhaitan isn’t dead, plot twist. Tossing large amounts of arts & crafts glitter wasn’t enough.
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