Taking a bit of my time off this week to dig a bit deeper into one of my favorite places, Blackrock Mountain. For the longest time, I’ve wanted a revamp so we can see it fully fleshed out, with all the dungeons connected - but (spoiler) none of the dungeons actually fit inside.
So, I figured it was worth a bit of effort to slap together the maps, spruce it up using Inkarnate, and see just how large the mountain would need be for the dungeons to fit.
This is the first of (what will be) three or four maps showing each level of the mountain’s interior: the Core (bottom), the Lower Spire and Shadowforge City (second from the bottom), the Upper Spire (third from the bottom), and then Blackwing Lair & Blackwing Descent (the top).
Obviously, I’m taking some liberties here and there for the sake of making it work, but the scale should be on the nose at the very least.
Some things I’m noticing while looking at the maps in their raw format is that the Dark Iron Highway in BRD could very well emerge out near the Altar of Storms, and also that the mountain would need to expand far to the east and south if BWL, UBRS/LBRS, and BWD are to fit.
This is what the complete set of maps look like stacked in place:
When it comes to blackwing decent. If you look out from the 2nd bosses room, you can see the center of the main area inside the mountain. It also seems it is on the side to the left, coming from the burning steps entrance. Since you can cross reference the placement of the statues and other landmarks from that area from the perspective of the instance and outside of it.
The first screenshot is taken from inside the raid. The second one is from outside the raid. The angle of the second screenshot is not in the exact angle position of the first.
The dwarf statues holding the chains are in the same poses and the chain down to Blackrock Depths is in the same space. There are a few differences, the biggest one is the left path from Burning Steppes to Searing Gorge is missing from the instance version, but the position seems to be mostly the same.
Even the map for Blackwing Decent places the defense system around the stop where I claim it is. Which is odd, because it means the entrance to BWD does not line up with the entrance to BWL, unless you go through a really long corridor that goes around the mountain.
Given how deep BRD is in the mountain. My guess the highway is that it runs underneath the alter of storms, not on the same level of elevation.
That was one of the liberties I took; I also was lining up screenshots from in-game, but it’s just weird to have a singular tunnel wrapping around that central core area. The way I can see it making the most sense is closer to the way I have it on the maps, where the raid is inverted so that, at the very least, the Defense System area is connected to the entrance of the mountain.
I need to scoot the BWD map just a bit further south, but it’ll have to do for now.
It’s a possibility, for sure. As of this point, there’s nothing built further west of the Altar, so unless the Dark Irons were building the highway out to the sea, I think having a path leading out into the Burning Steppes from their city makes the most sense.
The other thing that boggles my mind is that Atremedes’ room depicts a massive hallway that goes on and on, filled with huge tomes - except, no matter how you place the maps - it would just be jutting out into the open air.
Looks cool as hell but yeah remember open world doesn’t always correspond to instance sizes
Scholomance being the most obvious example, Karazhan too.
On a related note I did the same for Shrine of storms and crucible of storms and the Nzoth room is directly below the Tide Council boss on the platform that looks like a moon.
Oh of course - this hasn’t ever been an actual issue; it’s all just a fun side project.
Karazhan is especially funky; half the rooms are just floating outside the instance, and the devs used invisible walls to block them out. Scarlet Monastery too; would have been wonderful to see the whole of that place implemented in the overworld.
Yeah it is annoying when blizzard has the entrance of a raid being nowhere near the location of where you start. BWD is a prime example. Personally I would still place it where it should be canonically, even if it does not make sense practically. Blizzard clearly intended for BWD to be placed in that location, otherwise they wouldn’t have used the main hub area and made edits to it. Such as removing half the walkway, putting a dwarf face on the center rock and removing the large chain that would’ve blocked the view (which you can see in the outdoor SS).
Part of me hoped that blizzard would’ve added in the defense systems room to the un-instanced version of the mountain when they added in Zaela’s platform in WoD.
The most obvious example is WotLK Naxx. Sapphiron or Thaddiuses boss rooms are by themselves the same size as the entire necropolis is in-game.
With Scholomance I at least get the impression that a lot of it is underground, and with Karazhan it gets a pass because it’s supposed to not make any physical sense thanks to magic.
This goes back to Vanilla too, though; Naxx has always been massive.
Maraudon too; if we had the actual dungeon in the overworld, it would stretch out into the sea.
It’s a big shame, but just what we’re stuck with. They’ve made some progress in recent years, though. The Mac’aree instance in Legion, the Suramar dungeons/raid (which are 110% amazing), High Maul.
I think we need more of that, so it’s all seamless.
Edit:
Also - haha, I went back to look: focus on the entrance to Stratholme just below it. Naxx is stupidly massive.
I know why it isn’t, it’s because you can fly around in WotLK whereas in vanilla you were confined to the ground, giving Blizzard the ability to use all sorts of optical illusions like forced perspective to make things look bigger than they really were.
Since you could only visually see Naxxramas when you could also see Stratholme, Naxxramas looked like it was the size of a city, thanks to Stratholme itself using a lot of tricks to make itself seem larger than it actually was. So the interior of Naxxramas seemed to track its external size better. IIRC if you untethered and looked around Stratholme from above, the necropolis itself isn’t actually that much bigger than it is in WotLK, it just looks like it is because you were never intended to be able to get that close to its exterior.
I guess what I’m saying is that flying mounts were a mistake.
Even Ulduar has the same problem where the section to FL and beyond isn’t even in the game. If you fly around behind the entrance you just get a cliff face. I guess it is just because it would’ve been hard on the game and the servers to make things like instance maps in the open world at that point. Hence why they are instanced. Blizzard has gotten better at it for sure, having sections of dungeons and raids out in the world (but generally on a smaller scale). Even in vanilla you had instances like ZF and ZG show their outdoor versions when you fly over them on a taxi mount. But those areas are smaller and usually have different assets used. ZG being the big example as Hakkars temple is different when you compare the outdoor and instanced versions. Even with the Cata update to Strangethorn Vale the temple is still different.
Maybe the Dark Iron Highway leads into this hallway? If you place BWD where it should be (on the left side of the main hub area, with the defense room being the anchor), the two areas almost line up in theory. We don’t know what exactly is behind that giant door.
That’s the unfortunate situation with most stuff in WoW; things are there with no explanation, and honestly we shouldn’t really need one because it isn’t relevant to the main storyline’s progression - and I get that.
It’s a shame though because, personally, I love digging into the super acute details and tidbits; exploring in open world games is what I spend far too much time doing.
The interior is, the outside - definitely not, yeah. But that’s largely because those raids were intended for 40 man groups, and they needed the physical space to actually spread people out. So it does make sense from a development stand point.
Given that the entrance has a lot of guards, including a molten giant (the only other one in BRD is right before the Emperor himself), it has to be something extremely important. So a room full of books and ancient knowledge might be it. Given that the defense system room is on the same level of elevation as the chained rock in the main hub area, the blind dragons room may be closer to the highways elevation. Given that you do go down an elevator to reach the main area of BWD.
The Dark Irons really turned their city within Blackrock mountain into something amazing when you include all the other areas that were taken over by the Blackrock orcs (Blackrock spire), black dragonflight (blacking lair and blacking decent) and later the twilights hammer (blackrock caverns) along with Shadowforge city.
And they did all that in what, 300 years or so. That is extremely impressive.
Hell, some of the areas in SoD feel tight to have 30 players be evenly spread out, even for mechanics that have a 5 yard radius. Damn it blizz and designing those areas for 20 people… The four platforms in Sylvanas phase 3 are really hard to have 30 people all spread out for mechanics like the scream and veil of darkness. No wonder Sylvanas gets easier the less people you have.
Which, I believe, is the point Ainhin was making. Back in Vanilla>BC they did a lot of work with forced perspective to cut back on the extra work load of 3d modeling everything.
