Hello board,
Over the years I have grown frustrated with Warcraft lore and systems. Shadowlands made me soft-quit the game and I decided to make my very own fan-fiction mod.
I have very little experience - during TBC times I tried making my own offline private server using the guides. I swapped faction ID for quest givers to Argent Down so I could do every quest regardless of faction XD As this was ages ago, I remember nothing of it and I am guessing the tools used are completely different now.
I also did some abysmal maps in Warcraft III
I already found some tutorials on this site, but I am hesitant to just... start. The project I have in mind is very ambitious and will take me ages to create. I have little time due to work and personal issues and I am frankly scared to dedicate time and energy to a potential dead end. So far, I have been focused on making notes about system changes and rewriting the lore, but I think it won't lead anywhere unless I start modding and see some tangible progress.
I feel like I should first decide what client to work on?
What I would like to have in core gameplay:
Weapon Skills, Class Trainers, Talent trees, Old Stats
This points me in the direction of WotLK - it is also the last expansion that had the world intact and I feel like it had the least damage done.
But then there are things I enjoy from later expansions:
To name a few bigger ones - Collections, Garrison (I want to heavily rework it) and obviously graphical improvements.
I have seen that porting models to WotLK is possible, but that there is limit to amount of polygons the client could handle.
I can't decide between
- porting models, maps and a couple of systems I like from higher clients to WotLK and then creating new zones using that, or
-picking the highest client possible, somehow bringing back old systems and then heavily modding the existing maps, how characters function and disabling stuff I don't like.
I also would like to create new UI - for example making the reputation UI separate and account wide, having lore UI in adventure guide probably, etc.
Since I am heavily rewriting the lore (to clean up the mess done with all the retcons), it almost feels like I should just take a blank slate and work from scratch. Is that possible? I mean aside from developing a new game XD (I feel like some modding I can do, but programming is beyond me). I guess I could take the latest client, yeet all the maps with npc's related to systems I don't like and start making my own, but that feels messy and I will probably end up with a bunch of unused data and pointlessly fat client.
Anyway - can anyone give me any pointers? How would you guys approach this?
