So I was looking at the map the other day and notice above Eastern Plague lands to the northwest is a piece of the map that your not able to get to. Its called by a few Northern Lordaeron, did they just forget to do this part of the map?
I just always assumed it was Strath, considering it is a major city/nation and stuff in game isn’t always to scale.
it is definitely stratholme, yes.
it was more then just a city?
It’s interesting because it’s the only part of the world map that was never fixed. The case for Northern Plaguelands/Northern Lordaeron has yet to be resolved. Who lives there? What lives there?
Are these the troubled “north lands” that King Terenas mentioned in the Warcraft III opening cinematic?
Back in old Classic you can swim around and there’s a Night Elf/High Elf tower there. In Retail, an invisible wall prevents you from exploring, as does Stratholme outside of the instance.
There is a lot of the map that has been changed over time.
Those retcons can be a bear sometimes…
=0 My queen, you’ve changed your mog!
wonder why they stop it
It had a zoo
Also opens the possibility of Blizz using those unused locations to add things to the game in the future, like they did beneath Karazhan. They might want to revamp the old zones again…one day.
It was supposed to be dragon isles but it was cut off. You can check info about that viewing dragon isles map link in wowpedia (can’t post it here, sorry)
As others have said, the unmarked “zone” on the part of the EK map is occupied by uninstanced Stratholme. Well, partially anyway — you see all that “smoke” above Strat in Eastern Plaguelands? That’s masking two things: a part of a Naxxramas prototype that never got removed from the Stratholme model and a gigantic empty, flat void behind it. It wasn’t uncommon for these kinds of voids to exist back before flying was added to Azeroth, but most of those were fixed in Cataclysm. Only outdoor Stratholme was left unfixed.
Why did they leave it unfixed? Well, as you might know, the Blood Elf areas (Eversong and Ghostlands) that were added to Eastern Kingdoms in The Burning Crusade aren’t actually part of the Eastern Kingdoms map. Instead, they’re part of the Outland map, presumably to prevent people who hadn’t bought TBC from accessing it.
When the Ghostlands was being made, the map artists designed as they pleased without regard to space constraints. This worked because the map was separate, but it means that the southwestern part of the Ghostlands (known as Deatholme) technically occupies the same space as Stratholme! Because of this, merging Eversong + Ghostlands into Eastern Kingdoms proper was greatly complicated (at minimum, they’d have to move the entirety of either Stratholme or Deatholme), and Cataclysm’s development already had the dev team stretched thin, so they elected to put up and invisible wall and cover the Stratholme void-area up with smoke.
If you find this interesting, can read more about this and see screenshots demonstrating the overlap between the two maps here.
You can post links by using the “code” tag, just for future reference.
This is why I went druid