Would you accept a complete departure in WoW?

Warlords of Draenor had several problems — a lack of endgame content, a truncated storyline and a dearth of development where more than a year passed between the Hellfire raid and the next patch. This all left players feeling bored and unhappy. There was also a severe feeling of U-Turn with the Iron Horde suddenly becoming the Fel Horde, and many of the titular Warlords dying very quickly and in unsatisfying ways. And the whole flying snafu didn’t help, either.

But one thing you can say about the expansion is that it was a pretty big departure for WoW. There had never been an expansion based around the idea of going to an alternate dimension before. We’d never seen events from a different historical perspective, equal parts Sliders and The Man in the High Castle with Orcs.

The fact that the expansion has a poor perception among players — and I’ll include myself in this — doesn’t change the fact that it was a fairly daring attempt on Blizzard’s part. And its poor reception makes me wonder if we’ll ever see them get that daring again. For example, it’s expected that we’ll either fight the Burning Legion or the Void in the next expansion. But what if we didn’t?

What if we switched gears and instead went to an entirely new place we’d never seen or heard of in Warcraft before? What if we faced monsters and threats we had no particular understanding of beforehand? A potential entire expansion set in uncharted territory, drawing upon magic we didn’t understand and places we’d never so much as heard of, populated by beings entirely unlike what we knew? It kind of sounds like I’m describing Mists of Pandaria but we’d at least heard of the Pandaren before. Would World of Warcraft players accept another journey to an unknown world? Would you?