Every expansion, but Shadowlands especially by several orders of magnitude, is way, waaay too small. This is supposed to be the afterworld for hundreds if not thousands to millions of worlds, whose denizens spend thousands of years there if not forever, and it’s practically smaller than Zandalar and Kul’Tiras… a couple of islands on one planet
They big time missed the mark on their world creation when they made Shadowlands. Obviously they couldn’t possibly have made it realistically large, but it should have been the expansion with the largest landmass in the history of the game
Then it might make sense to see as many Azerothians as we are seeing, which actually isn’t even enough considering how many there really should be. And then they could let us START the expansion with flying as well, because there would be so much space to cover, as there should be.
It could then also have more than 4.5 biomes (.5 because the maw is basically just a single-colored span of dirt). One example might be De Other Side: This could have been an entire separate biome of Ardenweald, instead of some afterthought that got shoved onto Ardenweald like an unwanted step child. I guess the loa are just that insignificant compared to generic nature-spirit squirrels
The game should be called Sandbox of Warcraft instead.
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Calling it “sandbox” would be an insult to the good sandbox games of yore.
It’s now “theme park of Warcraft”, more than ever. All of those 
y little paths where if you dared to deviate, you’d get stuck, or trained to death by mobs, or drown in water, or blocked by mountains. So many mountains. Every zone this time around except Maldraxxus, somewhat, was a tiny little ratmaze before we got flying.
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raid: shadowlands
outland is def way bigger than shadowlands
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I understand the concept of not wanting the individual planes of death not being connected but it makes it stupid to travel around. I love that the main city is just an airport. Really nailing that fantasy vibe.
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I mean in lore it technically is an airport for souls.
I love how small it is,nothing better than running away from 1 mob and pulling 15 others because they are jam packed together
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Which makes for a bad major city in a fantasy game.
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I mean im not disagreeing its a terrible city.
Aren’t all the cities terrible? the only one that even remotely feels like a city is silvermoon, and they did it in a way to make that be the reason it sucks …in addition to not being able to fly there.
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Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I like how small it is. It’s nice getting from one place to another fairly quickly. I would only want bigger zones in this game if there were fast travel.
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You mean like flight paths? 
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No, instant teleports like in Skyrim. I think they have something like that in FF14 too.
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Yeah they’re in WoW too. There’s an entire room or two in each of the factions’ major cities devoted to them.
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I agree that it’s small and definitely more noticeable with flying. But for the first part of this expansion if each zone was the size of hellfire peninsula with the terrain they have it would have sucked.
Shadowlands problem is all the zone are in their own bubble. This makes it look smaller imo.
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That’s definitely not the only problem. Yeah Oribos basically being an airport is silly, and the zones being in their own bubbles is silly, but they’re still just tiny. Is Bastion even bigger than say Tiragarde Sound?
It’s compounded by having to take a flight between the 4 zones.
I guess conceptually from a story stand point whatever but from a practical how does it feel point of view it just seems tiny and disjointed to me.
Yeah Shadowlands does have that Cata feel where every zone* is separated from each other. The only thing that connects them is a travel network in the major cities (SW and Org). I remember reading from Ghostcrawler how he hated that portals was the main way we travelled to and from these zones (hell, Uldum doesn’t even have a back portal and Hyjal didn’t have one until Firelands came out iirc). So that criticism could’ve bled its way into Shadowlands many expansions later, and well after GC left Blizzard. So that could be why we have a flight path network centered around Oribos in Shadowlands.
*By Cata zones I only mean Hyjal, Vashj’ir, Uldum, Deepholm, Twilight Highlands and Tol Barad.