Shaowlands attempted to break from the cycle of always a brand new continent per expansion. Let’s see the previous:
Outland, Northrend, Pandaria, Broken Isles, Draenor, Kul Tiras, Zandalar…all a single landmasses with connected areas. I believe one of the downsides of the Shadowlands is that the zones are literally…disconnected. The previous examples are extremelly immersive. Oribos is fancy, but has no soul (just like the brokers/etherals) compared to places like Shattrath City, the Vale of Eternal Blossoms hubs, Dalaran, Boralus and Zuldazar.
Imagine if Maldraxxus, Revendreth, Ardenweald and Bastion were all connected and the Maw was simply one level below, the literal Hell, accessible from any point/gateway whatever. I believe the decision to go with separated areas was due to the lore exclusively. Take Bastion and Revendreth, they are extreme opposites, you have one victorian/dracula/vampire-like region versus an angelic afterlife with wheat fields.
BFA had 2 new separated big areas separated by the Sea which make total sense due to the story, specially due to Kul Tiran and Zandalar naval warfare.
Do you think they will go back to the traditional single continent on 10.0? I hope yes, it’s the safe bet and honestly much more immersive!
I would appreciate it if the lands would appear less “murky” – outlines of things are so confusing I am constantly bumping into things and running the wrong way.
I think it would have been really cool if it was all one really big land mass with an Oribos-styled wall separating all 4, with Oribos in the center still as the crossing point between them.
Would still serve the purpose of keeping them “separate”, but then when flying was introduced, it would be cool that we could fly between them.
The land masses, you’ll notice, have gotten progressively smaller. This iteration of four zones with basically a 3 color palette as not been it’s finest - imo.
Going into the future I’m hoping against hope that we will be using much of the abandoned and beautiful areas of Azeroth. To go through some of the most entrancing, magical area’s is a dream.
I miss taking the ships from Stormwind to Northend, and from Booty Bay to Ratchet. Or Menthil harbor to Theramore.
Then there’s all the places we love. Using a storyline to do this would be great, but as they slowly adapted us from flying for ourselves to “it’s useless” unless used for alts they’ve been adapting us to portals.
It’s a pattern for them - as is new continent’s popping up out of nowhere.
I thought I read somewhere that the reason for isolating behind pseudo loading screens was a technical issue - that as graphics have become more detailed, the sheer memory requirements of pre-loading and holding ready all the graphics for zone transitions was starting to become a burden … but it might have just been someone’s speculation?
Because nothing is being done in that time. When I get on travel points (flight paths, boats, zep, tram, etc) I just alt tab and go do something else until I arrive
I prefer the large landmasses, but I’m starting to feel like we need to utilize the ones we have rather than add new lands that will be forgotten after the current content.
Id very much like to see them go back to larger landmasses rather than scattered bits and pieces. ESO has one large landmass with some separate smaller islands, and it opens up new areas with expansions. Until then you cant get into those areas as they are locked - similar to how that weird unused zone up top of Eastern is blocked.
Me too on the adventure part. The nuisance, I think, came when we started using portals as the norm, a long travel through a wormhole, and also with the lack of flight paths we lost visibility.
Soon has they changed the portal availability it was going to be the new normal. Some of it was helpful and necessary with all the new lands, yet still we have trouble getting “back” to old area’s for achievements. And despite their talk of wanting to make the world feel bigger they shrunk it and handicapped our travel fun.
Lets assume they are happy to retcon (and they do seem happy to do that now and then) - there could always be the other side of Azeroth, which would be big enough for a lot of larger landmasses. Plus we travelled to one alternate Azeroth, presumably it could be done again as often as they wanted to.
I figure that’s where we’re going next anyhow. There going to use the Cosmology map & this expansion to flip Azeroth on it’s other side: the ‘B’ side. Lol
