World of Solocraft
I want to make World of Warcraft a single-player experience.
Massively Multiplayer Online RPGs — or MMOs for short — are best played with as many people as possible. It’s sort of in the name, isn’t it? They’re great for gaming in a social environment where groups of people solve complex but fun, flashy problems! Look at this video from Final Fantasy 14, for example. It’s an end-game instance that’s actually really hard to do":
(God I love this game. The music. The graphics. The world. The story. It’s pure art.)
Completing that end-game content is hard. It requires good communications, trust, and team work. It’s a fun feeling when you complete it and the rewards are shiny weapons everyone in the game knows you’ve worked hard for. Skip to the 19 minute mark to hear the excitement of the players after they complete the content. That’s the MMO in a nutshell and it can be awesome.
But there are problems with MMOs. In my opinion they’re not big problems, but they can be for some people.
A brief opinion piece
Firstly, MMOs can be incredibly time consuming and they can make you feel as though you must keep up with the grind to maintain your status within the game. Not all of them do this, but in my opinion retail World of Warcraft (as of January 2025 with The War Within) currently does with its dailies, weeklies, and the end-game currency system — these things are “seasonal” too, which adds to the pressure.
Second, MMOs can, for the most part, force you to play with other people and people, well people are people, and sometimes people suck. I think we’d all agree that anyone who’s played games online for even a short period of time will have come across grievers, trolls, and just generally obnoxious, terrible people. The problem here of course is content is locked out and made unavailable to people who suffer from social anxiety and cannot work with other people to meet end-game objectives. That excludes them from the rewards offered by that content.
Third, going online to play an MMO often requires a monthly subscription or some other financial pressure. Let’s be honest here: charging people money to play a game is absolutely fine. Charging people a recurring monthly fee to play a game is also absolutely fine. Of course it is. Any arguments to the contrary would be hard to standby. Not everyone can afford to offload $20/month onto a game, however. That’s a lot of money for some people. So what are they to do? In the case of keeping up with the modern day MMO, it’s sacrifice something else in their lives to pay the subscription or find away to cover the cost — that last part actually terrifies me as the thought of someone doing whatever they needed to so they could play a game is… worrisome.
Fourth, an MMO is constantly updating and changing. Sometimes those changes are good and sometimes they’re bad. WoW’s past expansions are a shiny example of this. When they’re bad you’re out of luck: that’s now the new standard for your favourite MMO. That’s now the game you’re paying for and if you’re not happy about it then you can either suck it up or stop paying for the game. That kind of blows.
Fifth, if an MMO does change or update into something you’re not happy with or, even worse, shuts down entirely, then you’ve lost the artwork you were previously enjoying. Imagine we changed the Mona Lisa today, without creating a new copy to work with or at least backing up the old one?
Let’s be honest, it’s unimaginable that such a piece of art as the Mona Lisa would ever change, and that’s because it never will. The same cannot be said for your favourite MMO and that leads us to the concept of art preservation or, more specific to our discussion here: game preservation, which is actually a thing.
Video game preservation is a form of preservation applied to the video game industry that includes, but is not limited to, digital preservation. Such preservation efforts include archiving development source code and art assets, digital copies of video games, emulation of video game hardware, maintenance and preservation of specialized video game hardware such as arcade games and video game consoles, and digitization of print video game magazines and books prior to the Digital Revolution. - Wikipedia
And finally, sometimes people just don’t want to go online to play a game. Sometimes they just want to shut out the world by going into a fictional one to melt away whatever problems they’re having, or stress they’ve got sitting on their shoulders, which more often than not involves shooting zombies in the face with a shotgun. Those zombies may or may not by abstract representations of the people you have to deal with on a daily basis… just sayin’.
But…
… what if an MMO — specifically World of Warcraft — could be played on your local computer as a single player experience? Does that solve a lot of the problems with listed above? Yes I believe it would. However, I wonder if that’s even possible and I wonder what that might even look like?
Let’s find out.
If you want to contact me about this content and discuss ideas, then you can join my Discord server.
Some initial thoughts
When I first played on a private server (I don’t recall which one), one of the first things I noticed was how big the world felt when there was barely anyone in it. It’s a big world which Blizzard has created a lot of content within. There are quests, instances, Easter eggs, flight paths, open-world content, PvP and more. It’s also quite an empty world too, however. There’s LOADS of landmass completely unused. Even some of the first zones you hit like Elwynn Forest, which seem “filled in” have quite a bit of spare room for additional quests and activities. So despite the fact that there’s plenty to do, it’s also a world waiting to be filled with even more quests and activities, and I’d like you to keep this in mind as we’ll revisit this idea later.
Another thing I observed on these private servers was how the maintainers were able to make some interesting changes to the world. They could change the rate at which experience was given to a player (2x, 3x, 100x, etc.) so that levelling was faster or even slower (which I’ve never seen implemented.) They could add NPCs with custom dialogues, custom quests, and even custom AI that drove some interesting behaviour. They could even just give you experience, items, mounts, and even “teach” your character were every flight path was and unveil every map for you.
These two things combined made me sit back and ask: how?
Server emulation, that’s how
World of Warcraft (WoW) is an old game at this point. It has just celebrated it’s 20th anniversary, making me feel like a right old plonker… thanks Blizzard.
Just like any other online game, WoW works by operating in a client-server model, which means the game running on your local system (the client) constantly talks to and updates a remote system (the server) with the actions you’re taking. The remote system, among many other things, validates what you’re trying to do whilst also telling other (relevant) clients what it is you’ve done so they can update their local client and literally render your actions on the screen. There’s nothing new or unusual here, but throughout that 20 years of history, very smart people have reverse engineered the World of Warcraft client and developed an understanding of how it speaks to the remote servers.
This means they can replicate the remote servers and therefore write and setup their own WoW private servers, which act separately from Blizzard’s. This is called server emulation and we have a few open-source options available to us today.
AzerothCore is my choice of emulation. It’s one of the first ones I tried and it’s been very good me to, both as a software solution and a community. There are other emulators of course, such as TrinityCore and MaNGOS, but I’ve been extremely happy with AzerothCore (AC), especially when it’s combined with Eluna and a few other modules (because yes, it’s modular and you can write custom changes to the engine and therefore the world.)
At the most basic level, AC has enabled me to relive the same experience that those private servers gave me all those years back, except this time I’m the Game Master (GM) and it’s all happening on my local computer. This affords me an extremely stable and feature complete 3.3.5a experience, which is the final Blizzard patch to “World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King” (WOTLK). I can modify this experience too, because I can change AzerothCore’s code and I can manipulate the database in the back end, let’s me do several things:
I can modify a lot of the existing game world;
I can change how the player’s characters level and how fast they can level;
I can add NPCs where ever we want and make them do all kinds of things;
I can create custom quests;
I can…
… do a lot of things. Almost unlimited things actually, and that’s exciting.
If you’re armed with the 3.3.5a WoW client and an active, running AzerothCore instance, then you’re armed with an entire world and ecosystem of tools that allow you to create your own content inside of “World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King” and the world of Azeroth itself.
Bringing it all together
If we bring everything we’ve discussed, considered, and found all together:
We have the MMO genre and its awesome massive open-worlds and content;
We have some problems with the genre;
We have a way of at least playing WOTLK in a way that solves some of those problems using AzerothCore;
We can change WOTLK in a way that solves more of the issues with MMOs;
And we can digitally preserve WOTLK at the same time.
These all sounds like great benefits to me!
Now it’s time to discuss what my ideas are, at least at a high level, to help use with the issues we’ve uncovered with the MMO genre.
My ideas
Right now we’ve got AzerothCore and the WOTLK client; a desire to create a single player experience that’s offline; whilst also making all of WOTLK’s content available and accessible to a single player who cannot solo dungeons or raids.
I have ideas about how these things might be achievable. It’s not going to be easy and it’s going to take a lot of time, but that’s OK. It’ll be fun to do, write about, make videos on, and share with you, dear reader.
Whilst we’re talking about writing and videos and sharing, let me just be up front and clear about how I intend to publish my work. I want to write a lot about this journey and go into a lot of detail about it, especially the technical side of it. My objective is to not only complete the technical work itself, but also write about how I solved the problem and then produce a YouTube video to showcase the solution. It’s my intention to place the written works and a private section of my Discord server behind a $5/month paywall. I believe there’s value in paying for such AI-free, human curated knowledge and conversation.
Let’s being with a high level overview of my ideas thus far:
Better Starting Zones
1-60, then 60-80 within a few days, without increasing experience rates or “cheating”;
Better Professions
Making professions really relevant to the Player vs Environment (PvE) world by having NPC demand for (single) player made products;
This will also involve allow a single character to learn all professions;
Open World Endgame
Bringing the (mini) bosses outside of instanced content, where possible, and placing them into the open-world;
Open World Content
More open world content like Elite hunting: Elites from dungeons that spawn at random and quests to hunt and kill them, offering big rewards;
More open world content that rewards end-game tokens so players can buy BIS gear without stepping foot inside of an instance;
Dynamic World
Have the population of the world expand and shrink, proposer and suffer as a result of the player’s actions;
Have special friendly NPCs available based on a population boom and proposer environment;
And I’m sure I’ll have more ideas as time passes and, hopefully, as people read my work and make suggestions.
I’ll go into a bit more detail on these ideas below. They’ll naturally flesh themselves out over time.
Better Starting Zones
This is the first idea I’ll be working on. It focuses on the idea that the player should be able to “short cut” the levelling process — if they choose — by going from 1-60 within only the first 3-4 zones around their race’s starting point. For example, in Elywnn Forest you start off in Northshire (Abbey), a small area for humans to start their journey. Once you graduate from this area you’re only roughly level 5 or 6. The grind from there, towards 60, is quite a lengthy one… and that’s OK. People like that. I like that. Take the long road if you like: it’s your time and your game.
But here’s my idea: what if you could do a quest chain that started in Northshire Abbey (for example) and then progressed through Elwynn Forest, Westfall, Redridge Mountains, and Duskwood, eventually levelling the player to 60? I think that’s a good first project to kick off WoS.
More to come on this one in a separate blog post.
Better Professions
I’ve actually somewhat already started this project as it was one of my first.
The idea is to make professions relevant on three fronts: accessibility, demand and making gold. The demand for your professions on a single player instance is going to be zero — there are no other players, after all. That’s sort of the point. Therefore, NPCs would have daily and weekly quests for your crafted items, which they’d pay quite well for. That by proxy solves the “making gold” issue, as players can now use professions to make the gold they need to buy spells and possibly gear.
As for accessibility, AzerothCore makes it easy to allow a character to learn 1, 2, 7, or every profession in the game. The current Blizzard-default is 2. I would set this to all. That way one character can be a jack-of-all-trades and really have fun with them.
About Mining and Herbalism
Just a quick note here. I already have some SQL code stashed away that can vastly increase the number of mining and herb nodes that spawn across Azeroth. This is an important thing to add into “Better Professions” to allow for a slightly faster gathering process.
Open World Endgame
One of the cool things about AzerothCore is the ability to load modules. These modules, which are written in C++ (unless you use Eluna, which we’ll cover), can do basically anything you like. That’s a handy thing for us to have, and at this point in time the module catalogue for AC is pretty good, with some solid, powerful modules available to us.
A few key modules that we could consider using in WoS include:
AutoBalance - this allows people to enter dungeons and raids, even alone, and everything is balanced to make it playable;
The problem of mechanics that might need multiple players isn’t solved, though;
Solo LFG - allows players to use the LFG feature to find and enter a dungeon alone, without even needing to form a group;
There are some SQL based “modules” too, but I’ll look at those in another post.
The above two are great for making end-game content accessible, like dungeons and raids… but…
What if we just brought the content out of the dungeon (where possible) and into the open world, with changes and scaling? Instead of having to go into an instance at all, what if an open-world zone, or an area in a zone, was used and populated with the elite NPCs, bosses, etc.?
I have no personal issue with instances — they can just stay there — but extracting the content and making it solo-able means the drops and items from those NPCs becomes way more accessible.
This is a big job, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on it before I commit too much time.
Open World Content
This is similar to the above concept, but it’s about introducing new content to the open world: NPCs, quests, dailies, weeklies, challenges, etc. There is a huge range of things I’ve got in mind:
Daily Hunting Log: each zone has a range of elite NPCs that spawn and wonder around, and the player has to find and hunt them down;
Weekly Hunting Log: Complete multiple Daily Hunts and get end-game (Valor?) tokens to exchange for end-game gear.;
Daily and Weekly Profession Quests: NPC requesting special items for big rewards;
And other things along those lines. However, a really big idea I had that falls into this same open world category, but deserves on of its own, the concept of a world that dynamically updates based on open world actions.
Dynamic World
What if the player completed your classic hand-in quests and instead of just getting a thank you and some copper, new NPCs spawned and maybe even structures? What if raiding parties spawned at random and hit towns like Goldshire if the player didn’t maintain the supply of food and weapons to the guards?
If the special NPCs and structures that came to Goldshire only came if it was safe, which only occurred when the player had handed in enough items to spawn enough guards, and those NPCs sold very rare end-game gear, mounts, etc., then there would be an incentive to complete this dynamic, open world content.
As you can probably tell, the ideas get a bit more vague and abstract as we go, because a lot of thought, design work, and code will have to go into all of this. Patience will be required, as will time and more of an understanding of AzerothCore.
What’s Next?
I think that’s enough talking for now. It’s time for some action. Following this post will come a YouTube talking about the ideas here. I’ve already started work on designing the quest chain (for the first one, for Elwynn Forest) for Better Starting Zones. I also want to focus on Better Professions, too, as I think that’s a solid game changer and makes it easy for a casual player to focus on all professions from level 1 onwards.
Let me know in the comments of this post, the forthcoming YouTube video, or on my Discord server if you have ideas or thoughts.
Have fun!