Stop Making Archipelago Zones

Community General Discussion
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(WARNING: This Post Discusses Flying and Pathfinder)

I understand the reasons why Pathfinder is a thing. Make people do the slog and experience everything first, and then reward them with the ability to fly once everything is done. Cool.

But a side effect of this has been… the archipelagoizing of the zones.

Pandaria was a whole continent, and felt great to explore. We were able to fly right at max level, able to experience everything this great open WORLD had to offer.

Draenor was a little smaller, but still had vast, picturesque landscapes in some places. Getting around was a little annoying at first, but after Pathfinder it was mostly made better.

And then Blizzard realized “Hey, if people can’t get around fast, why are we bothering making big open worlds?”

The Broken Isles then, were even smaller than Draenor. A ton of verticality in the zones, while usually not a problem, meant that they felt artificially lengthened as people tried to find ways to get around without flying.

And now in Kul Tiras and Zandalar, we literally have zoned-off archipelagos to walk around as the zones continue to shrink, lose content, and become more mazelike.

And it gets worse in Shadowlands as literally every single zone is a separate instance. What’s the point of being able to fly if there’s nothing to fly to?

The gating of flying has had a pretty noticable side effect: The worlds and the zones within them are getting smaller and smaller, since there’s no reason to make large ones if people can’t get around them. And I know I can’t be the only one who prefers having large, spawling open worlds that actually feel like worlds instead of isolated sandboxes.

As I write this, I start to understand more why Blizzard gated off flying in the first place: To save resources on making those big open worlds. But I signed up way back when to play a game called World of Warcraft, not Instances of Warcraft. And yet, as the zones get smaller and smaller, so too does the player’s perception of the game get worse and worse, for varying reasons.

Sigh…

I just want a big, open world to explore again… Is that so much to ask?

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PF has no doubt had an impact on zone design philosophy, but also keep in mind that they’re running out of unimplemented areas that could plausibly be continent-sized. To make things worse, they painted themselves into a corner by showing Azeroth from orbit in Legion (which makes retconning “the other side of the globe” more difficult).

I think that unless we go to a new planet for 10.0, they’re probably going to be forced to return to EK+Kalimdor and make use of those somehow… likely via a revamp or phases or something.

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I would love a revamp of EK and Kalimdor, but you’re probably right. I theorized where the game could go from this point in a different thread, and that kinda cements my thinking.

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You… fly in that zone to a shrine. You take that shrine and teleport to the next zone and mount up again.

You just land for 3 seconds. Also, common misconception you seem to have in bold. Thats false. Every zone is on the same map file. Just far away from each other. Shrines will likely function similarly to the Emerald Nightmare portals.

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+100 internetz on the new word! lol I’m gonna use it.

No, you are not. One of the reasons TBC is so awesome is because Outland feels like another ENTIRE planet. Rather than a zone.

Same with Northrend, same with Pandaria.

From this team? Sadly yes.

I have yet to see a SINGLE thing players have asked for since WoD that hasn’t been either denied or delivered in such a convoluted and different way that is isn’t at all what players asked for.

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In practice is the same as if they were on separate instances is what he is trying to say. Unless you can physically fly through fatigue into the next area, then yeah they ARE in different “instances” when you have to use a teleport however brief a moment, to get to the other place.

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And that’s any better… how?

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Well, the Titan globes in Ulduar are missing a lot of land masses that have been added since then.

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I agree, they are getting annoying, but this also simply due to Blizzard running out of established lands to explore and having to use their islands.

The only thing they have now are lands they completely makeup. We’ve pretty much exhausted the old world and its villains.

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What’s the problem? The zones are all still there. You still fly around to them. You just can land to have a free teleport to where you need to go in the zones. It’s more convenient and helpful if anything.

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Everything is not about pathfinder/flying. The original open world is still the largest open world and there was no flying when it launched. And there were only four questing zone in Cataclysm and it was specifically designed for flying.

Personally, I have to admit my first reaction when I saw the geographical set-up for Shadowland I was disappointed but the reality is leveling is going to be 70% faster, in order to accommodate the raiders and mythic+ players race to end game content, so the game doesn’t need much open world content anymore, so it doesn’t need much open world anymore.

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The game doesn’t need a lot of things. It doesn’t need M+. It doesn’t need a coherent story. It doesn’t need to have balanced classes, or gear, or whatever. But that doesn’t mean those things dont make the game better.

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Yeah if it’s far enough to trigger a load screen (which from personal experience is as little as 100 yards) it’s practically the same as each zone being a different instance. The lack of seamlessness is frustrating.

One thing that they could do to patch things up a little would be to make it possible to fly between zones in the Shadowlands, much as you can fly across vast stretches of nether in Outland (e.g. between Hellfire Peninsula and Netherstorm). Even if few people actually take advantage of that, it’d at least help shake the feeling that you’re being boxed into a tiny dungeon-style zone.

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That has nothing to do with flying. Its load times. Loading dal+broken isles takes way too long (if you dont have an SSD), so blizz tried to fix this by spliting bfa into 2 loading zones. Now shadowlands will be cut up into more zones in an attempt to fix load times

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If I remember right, blizzard has poked fun at themselves for the whole “previously undiscovered island” bit so even they are aware that it is getting a bit stale. I guess the question is, do we then start realm hopping? Shadowlands is supposed to be a different plane of existence or a different dimension or something. Is our future hopping across the cosmology chart? Maybe we abandon azeroth after the titan inside wakes up and have to find a new planet to live on. Would players be on board for that kinda stuff or would it be too out there? Either way, I agree that they can’t just keep plopping down islands forever.

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If you look at the utterly massive advances in map quality between Vanilla and BfA or even Cataclysm and BfA, I think a lot could be done with some kind of event that justifies re-sculpting EK/Kalimdor’s surface. Just imagine Azeroth proper with the same sort of “real” mountains like we have in Kul Tiras instead the towering dirt lumps and zone walls that those maps currently have.

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Op,i get what you are saying, I too would love to see a place on Azeroth as vast Outland’s nagrand maybe some day. Imagine an area like meteor crater that stretches for miles.

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I figured they had it licked w/ the Legion World portals expanding the universe infinitely but here we are. Back on an island.

That said though there are places in the old world that are totally unused, just bare landscape. Not sure what percentage of the map they take up. Maybe smaller than they feel in flight.

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I feel like they still have so many ideas at their disposal though that could be continent based. Here’s a few:

  1. Dragon Isles: Personally, I’m working on a Dragon Isles fan project out of boredom during the quarantine, and I’m making it a huge continent of floating islands.
  2. K’aresh: K’aresh is an entire planet that we have yet to explore, and it’s probably coming down the line. They can make that huge for sure.
  3. Other Side of Azeroth: They can do whatever they want with the other side of Azeroth, including make a continent. People can whine about Pandaland, but I think it got really good after 5.2 and had some really nice zone design.
  4. World Revamp: It’d be a nice change. If they found a way to work every zone into a new story for all players to follow, it’d work out.

They’re gonna keep making up certain things, too. They have the freedom to expand the lore and create uncharted areas that we go to. As long as they keep making money off of this, they’re gonna be making new places for us to explore!

I just really hope they go back to the continent-style philosophy with 7-8 zones at the beginning of an expansion.

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All those “glue areas” between zones in EK/Kalimdor could contribute to the size of their surrounding zones quite a lot if they were properly sculpted. I’d estimate that it’d increase usable landmass on both continents by at least 30-40%.

EK is particularly bad about this, I suspect because it was the first continent and was developed before the WoW mapmaking process had been even remotely standardized/streamlined. The borders between Duskwood/STV/Deadwind/Blasted Lands/Swamp of Sorrows are a bloody mess.