Why do we have 4 zones in 2024 with 830% flying mounts?
Takes less then 3 min to fly though the whole map, at this point just remove “world”, from world of warcraft.
Classic launched with 40 zones, without flying
If you want to keep 830% mounts, at least give us 20+ zones. New zones looks great but are overdesigned and bloated with tons of different subzones and skyboxes. No one complains that Tanaris is just a desert—it’s supposed to be
If you want, you can just use ground mounts to maintain your immersion.
This is a 1000 times better than shadowlands with ultra-cramped zones, quest hubs 7 feet apart, and every single mob in the game would instantly daze and dismount you the second they saw you out of the corner of their eye. Also, “oh my quest marker is 20 feet west, sweet! oh…I need to go on a circuitous around the entire zone to get to it, yay…”
yeah i dont want to spend like 20 minutes hoofing it across a zone. 3 minutes to flyover is fine for me
No body tell them that the maps in DF and presumably TWW are huge to accommodate dynamic fight.
Think of the biggest map you know in WoW. It’ll fit comfortably in Azurespan with room to spare.
TWW zones are 98% ground mount friendly and the last 2% forces one to use skyriding.
Classic also took like… 8 years to make.
It took 4 or so, however you can also really tell. The human starting zones took like a year of that and then the rest of the zones – all like 37 of them – were developed in the remaining time. They are often extremely barren and devoid of anything to do.
Like sure, there were 40 zones, but some of those zones were Azshara, Silithus, Desolace, Tanaris, the Shimmering Flats, Hyjal, the entire western side of Ashenvale, etc. lol
Some of these zones were eventually fleshed out, but many of them were left empty.
I don’t think that resolves the issue.
Drawing an inference, I’d venture that they’re referring to overshooting mobs, NPC’s, nodes, etc. on an 830% mount due to their proximity being compressed as a result of the zones being smaller and containing less space (or at the very least the perception thereof).
It has nothing to do with immersion.
I like more games than WoW and prioritize them based on file size, generally.
So no thanks, I’ll take a pass on 20 zones sized like the last two expansions.
Because people got upset when flying was removed, so the compromise was to create absolutely MASSIVE zones and make a flying system that’s far healthier for the game.
This isn’t the only thing that creates a “world”-feeling, not to mention the world is more alive now than it has been at any point in WoW’s history. The only possible exception is maybe BFA due to the two capitals being living buzzing cities, and after that you have Dragonflight that managed to make empty skies part of the world building (in large parts due to the updated flying).
So you are just categorically wrong here.
By looking at how people played the game back then… we also know that we spent roughly 80%+ of the time travelling, and not playing the game. This wasn’t travel as part of gameplay, this was travel to get to gameplay.
This is a very strong argument against ever treating WoW like that ever again.
No.
Again… no.
And most people in Tanaris are there for questing and then never goes back to different areas of the zone. Or they hang out in Gadgetzan/The Caverns of Time. So Tanaris effectively doesn’t exist outside of questing, only Gadgetzan and the Bronze Dragonflight.
You are the first person I have seen in a while who is asking for the world to get smaller and have less relevant content. It is certainly a bizarre take.
And those zones are tiny in comparison to the ones we got in Dragonflight and The War Within.
Dustwallow Marsh got a new questline for Alliance in TBC (patch 2.3). A lot of zones were unfinished in vanilla.
I do this 80% of the time. It’s good to have options depending on my mood.
Steady Flight.
The worst part about SL was all the forced visits you had to make to your covenant. The worst was to pick up your callings (in BFA/Legion, emissary quests didn’t have to be picked up).
Plus, yo uhad to take flight paths between zones and go via Horibos.
Welcome to Revendreth pre-flying.
This isn’t how I remember it. For some reason, Blizzard went through a phase of wanting to create massive zones for their own sake. I never understood why. I actually thought it was a negative that the DF zones were so large.
Why? Oh you want to do the Dreamsurge? Well, you need to kill rares. One just popped… 4500 away. Good luck getting there before it dies.
Plus the designers have been overcompensating for the addition of the third dimension by using it everywhere they can, even when it’s just annoying. Remember the parking garage near the Catalyst in Theldrassus where finding the right level was always a challenge? Sure, quest markers eventually got an elevation arrow but it can be less than clear how to actually get to that elevation.
This is a deep topic. What we have is a series of bad design decisions followed by decisions to “fix” the issues created by the design decisions.
The first mistake was how expansions were structured. New zones. Old ones became ghost towns. Old content became completely irrelevant. Also, TBC started the trend that you have to have action all the time. There is no downtime, no time to experience the world. People involved in WoW at that time have spoken about this.
Then there’s the whole flying debate. Whehter or not you think this was a mistake, it definitely made the world smaller.
So we had expansion after expansion, adding new lands and emptying the old. By BFA, levelling was a strange and disjointed experience of going between expansions. SL mae all these zones scale with level. This kinda solved the levelling problem but created another: it robbed players of any sense of progression. No longer did you have to get high enough level to go to Searing Gorge. you could also control your difficulty by going to a zone early or late.
Plus power has to keep going up because the expansions are stacked on top of each other. New level cap. Really they should be parallel and largely optional, pretty much for cosmetics. This increasing power problem creates new problems ever expansions. You get nerfed on old content (as happened with BFA/SL raids with the TWW prepatch) and all of the borrowed power systems (up until and including SL).
Chromie Time is a net good but it’s also a response to the effects of bad decisions and it’s still disjointed. Like it doesn’t confine you to the chosen expansion.
Still, you do a tiny fraction of the content nowadays. I levelled one toon in DF from 10 to 58 just doing the Icecrown quests. I combined doing Loremaster with levelling new toons. I don’t know how many toons I levelled this way but it was a lot.
One of the good things about Remix was that it confined you to Pandaria. That’s actually what a new player experience should look like. It also avoids all the weirdness of phasing that causes nothing but problems (technically there was still phasing in Remix but it was minimal).
Another consequence of level scaling in zones is Blizzard’s intentional design decision to make you weaker as you level. This goes against everything MMOs are about. It was on full display in Remix but it’s a real problem in TWW still. Reportedly TWW uses ilvl scaling at 80 too. People still complain that it takes too long to kill OW trash at ilvl 590 than it does at ilvl 530. I haven’t really tested this myself.
…don’t you mean bigger zones? 
but then it is your issue, not mine.
This is stupid. The last thing this game really needs is “new zones” we got an entire world that needs to be fixed and filled properly. Made relevant again. World of Island craft is getting old.
Why do you want all these massive zones empty with nothing to do in them? When the ones we already got are empty with almost nothing to do in them.
I’d love to get to the other side of Azeroth or whatever or wherever Arathi is and have like a whole new EK/Kalimdor sized region to explore.
It will never, ever happen!