Breakfast Topic: What should WoW's grand finale event be like?
by Brandon Cox 
Aug 12th 2011 at 8:00AM
As much as it may hurt to consider, WoW will one day end. It's unfortunate, but all good things must come to an end. There will be a point when Blizzard realizes that it is no longer economical to keep the WoW servers running. It will flip the big, imposing, red switch, sending all the servers offline for the final time. But knowing Blizzard as we do, such a monumental event would not take the form of an unceremonious shutdown. There would be spectacle, and lots of it.
Given that Blizzard would be shutting down the servers because they yield no economic benefit, putting development time into a great sendoff would be highly unlikely. As such, we would be stuck with preexisting world events. That still leaves a lot of room for shenanigans, however. Would Blizzard bring the zombie invasion back? Perhaps The Burning Crusade launch event? Raid bosses all over major cities? Or (my personal favorite) perhaps a conglomerate of them all: zombies aflame with fel fire disrupting major cities, creating rifts that require an entire server's effort to close? With the Lich King in the center of it all just for grins? Sign me up.
There are so many ways to give WoW the send-off it deserves. How would you do it?
Filed under: Breakfast Topics, Guest Posts
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 7)
Hansworst Aug 12th 2011 8:06AM
Boss fight against Sargeras, down to 1%, you suffer killing blow by Sargeras. You lose
Tfish92 Aug 12th 2011 8:48AM
That would be like how they ended the matrix mmo.
Everyone got gm powers while the sky and everything went crazy for a few hours. Then at the end everyone's avatar was crushed into a little ball and the machines had purged all the humans from the system.
Naraxis Aug 12th 2011 9:07AM
How lame, its far more likely to be something like this...
First, WoW will never die. It's far more likely that when the level cap reaches 100 and the final boss of that expansion has been defeated blizzard will have an end of the world event. However, the servers will still remain up for anyone who still wants to play... But then soon after blizzard will release WoW2. Getting more to what I would like the end event to be, some sort of massive army of hellish creatures would need to attack the various capital cities kind of like the elemental invasion. Except that all pvp will be turned off so alliance and horde can work together to defend the cities.
In each capital city will be a sort of farseer who can predict what city will be attacked next and be able to teleport you outside of it. When the attack commences all the players defend the cities with all of their might. There would be several waves of creatures to fight ending with a raid boss. When players get to the raid boss releasing spirit becomes locked out. The raid boss will be far too strong for players to defeat and the city will be destroyed, im talking literal, physical, destruction. Players participating will receive a satchel with items of increasing rarity and power depending on what wave they were able to get to. This will continue until all capital cities have been destroyed and then a final cinematic will play showing, whatever the first boss of WoW2 will be, laughing as he walks his new domain.
After this cinematic players can continue to play the game and visit the destroyed cities and can run the endgame raids and dungeons to their heart's content... untill WoW2 is released. Then it's likely that Blizz will shut down the WoW1 servers and any players who have played WoW1 for more than a couple years will likely get a discount on WoW2 and will have any payed for play time carried over.
Whew, wall of text. anyway that is what I would like to see happen.
ivan Aug 12th 2011 10:21AM
@Naraxis
Aww how cute, you think wow will never die? There is only so much the game can offer. I've been playing since 2007 and I love it, but all good things must come to an end eventually. It will be a sad day.
noel mcleod Aug 12th 2011 10:29AM
It all depends on how stupid Activision/Blizzard behaves when the time comes. Wow is unlikely to die soon, and there is enough content that WITHOUT ANY DEVELOPMENT you could support a meaningful player base for at least five years. The revenue would drop, but Wow is what the business community calls a "cash cow", it can be used to generate a lot of cash without requiring significant input for a very long time PROVIDED no one gets stupid about how much it should cost. A $10 month subscription for a million people ($10 M/ month, $120 M per year) would run about a 50% profit margin in maintenance mode; I can see this running for at least a decade until the current level of PC hardware that is used to play the game just stops working. And keep in mind that this is a scenario without significant development, I just can't see the investors letting this go.
When it does go, it will most likely be more with a whimper than a bang because (again if the management team is smart) they will have transitioned the playerbase to "Wow 2".
WoW 2 will have players able to rule their own nations, controls hundreds of NPCs etc like the best of the "resource" games while still maintaining the core experience of Wow (tinfoil hat there, but not that much of a stretch).
adyuaa Aug 12th 2011 12:50PM
With the talk of 5 levels having been too little this expansion, I suspect we might never see 100 as max level. In this hypothesis, it'll go 95 to 105 to 115. This might be a good thing. There's a lot of emotional finality in numbers that are a 1 followed by some zeros (or even any other number followed by zeros - remember the whole year 2000 manufactroversy?) I can't even imagine what people will do when they reach level 100, but whatever it is, it'll be lessened if there's already 5 more levels available to get.
Or the other hand, that sort of thing can be a lot of fun.
Meritus Aug 12th 2011 3:43PM
I think a PvE based ending where the "E" wins would ruin it for too many people who consider their Toon the "Hero." I think a more interesting solution would be something like suddenly making the whole world a giant arena. Remove all spirit healers and rezzes from the game and allow spectator ghosts to roam anywhere and everywhere to watch. Suddenly death becomes much more permanent. They then instigate events that would force players into a kill or be killed survival mode, Ally vs Horde of course. Last faction standing wins, Launch Fireworks, Roll Credits and Server Off.
Joyous_Oblivion Aug 12th 2011 11:42PM
@Meritus: That idea would piss off more people than a PVE ending. You basically are saying the game will be decided by the PVPers, and lets face it, WoW is a PVE game, with PvP thrown in as an afterthought to attract some of the old-school counterstrike/FPS types.
The ending, if there ever is one, will be a grand PVE event, and the small minority that are PVPers will have a part in it too.
Brock Hamill Aug 12th 2011 8:08AM
I want, Us all to die, we have been playing for 6 years to save the world that can really not be saved, and one night we are in the capital cities trading, trolling, sexing up the nearest bloodelf, and out of nowhere fog rolls in the sky changes color and you hear screams (if your sound is up) then as the fog rolls away. you notice that your lying on the floor dead and you didn't even know because the fog was so thick and covered your PC Monitor fully you didn't see your self fall, and then you get "you've been disconnected from server"
THE END!
Braemin Aug 12th 2011 9:20AM
"Not like this..."
Noyou Aug 12th 2011 10:16AM
Too soon!
Nina Katarina Aug 12th 2011 8:08AM
Hogger and Gamon; The Final Revenge.
Noyou Aug 12th 2011 10:17AM
Oh, monsters can spew forth from stocks and ragefire and every other dungeon to over run the world! *cackle*
Stormwalker Aug 12th 2011 8:11AM
As Prophet Velen once foretold, there will be *some* magnanimous event taking place that will pit Darkness against Light in the most grand of battles.
What, exactly, that'll be, I'm not sure. But Sargeras will definitely have something to do with it.
Thayer Aug 12th 2011 9:32AM
Are you sure magnanimous means what you think it means?
1. Courageously noble in mind and heart.
2. Generous in forgiving; eschewing resentment or revenge; unselfish.
Or did you post from a phone or something that auto-corrected monumental or some such word.
Andy Aug 12th 2011 8:12AM
If they do a final expansion, i would assume we would take the fight to the Burning Legion. Possibly to Argus, if it's not destroyed. With Sargeras being the big bad of course.
Daedalus Aug 12th 2011 8:33AM
While there technically will be a final expansion some day, it almost certainly won't be planned to be the last.
No, the "final expansion" will be whatever one came out last after Blizzard comes to the decision that it can't justify investing more in the game. If they've come to that decision, there's no sense in paying developers to create a whole expansion to capture that.
Besides, how good an expansion could that be? "Hey guys, here's the plan: we want you to work as hard as you can, put in lots of overtime, and make this the best expansion ever, because we're planning to fire most of you when it's done. Wait, where are you going?"
I mean, technically, Cataclysm could have been the last expansion. If subscriptions somehow fell by 10 million or so and just never recovered, then it would have been the last, and all those plot lines would forever remain dangling.
As the author said, if WoW does get a final send off event, it's going to have to involve stuff that's already been made.
MusedMoose Aug 12th 2011 8:17AM
Two words: hardcore mode.
Naturally, knowing it's time to close WoW's doors is something that Blizzard will know in advance. So I think it'd be awesome if they set up some kind of event like the column described, massive invasions and all that, a real "it's the end of the world" scenario. But there's one new twist: once it starts, if you die, that character is dead permanently. Naturally, creation of new characters would be locked as well.
Turn off PvP and make it so everyone, Horde and Alliance, can join up to fight against the end. Make it so that whatever's attacking won't go into buildings, and their attacks won't affect whoever's inside, so that people can choose to fight or hide. Those who choose to fight can gain some incredibly powerful items if they succeed... but those items have a duration, so if you want to fight and survive, you have to keep fighting or lose the benefits.
In the end, on the last day, Sargeras shows up and pretty much is able to simultaneously attack every zone at once. There are no safe places this time. Those who survive until the end, or nearly so, will be given "Hall of Fame" status on the WoW site afterward, with notes on how they died and how long they survived the final day.
I have no idea if anything that I've said could be implemented. But I think it would be pretty epic.
Aigarius Aug 12th 2011 8:26AM
And people that are dead, can fly around and witness the action :D
Trippy Aug 15th 2011 2:45AM
Garrosh vs Varian.. Gorehowl cleaves Varian in two. Horde wins. The end.