Good point. Blizzard, get rid of flying!
I agree⌠I am 100% NOT excited about all the zones in Shadowlands being separate instances.
Not sure why they couldnât have done something like Outland.
Zones could be disconnected yet still âconnectedâ by an expanse of void zone between them you could traverse with flying late run the expansion
I donât know if they intentionally did this or not but that is just about the only way they could have made us waste more time on travel this expansion without actually taking away the flight paths.
And isnât it funny one of the reasons for removing flying was it made the world seem too small.
Actually your post is one of the most original and insightful I have seen on this forum ever. Kudos.
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Yeah agreed. I really like that they are starting to capitalize on old zones in patches.
Arathi Highlands, Uldum, Valley of Whatever in Pandaria
Phasing the old world into the present isnât the worst idea either. I donât know why Auberdine has always been a special place to me, must be the noobish repeated murder by moonkins as a new player way back
The playerbase has moved on from Cataclysm but the world hasnât.
Those 2 things combined create an amazing opportunity for a refresh.
Same, although I wish they could get out of the habit of there needing to be crazy destruction in order for zones to get updates. Arathi and Uldum/Vale were spared this thankfully, but Darkshore and Tirisfal werenât so lucky.
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Remember this whole time jump clue from that dev interview? If time moves differently in SL and we come out of it somewhere in the future the whole game and landscape could change⌠Cataclysm 2.0 but on a grander scale.
Iâd be down for thisâŚ
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The âother sideâ that we havenât been to was completely obscured behind clouds and shadows. We couldnât see anything to be retconned at this point except that the relative size of what we currently know only being one half of the globe, which itself is a retcon.
And even then, the Titan planetary displays in Ulduar and such are already inaccurate and retconned, which logically would make no sense. Nothing like a Titan/Watcher missing entire land masses, or continents. No reason that the view from Argus or the Vindicar wouldnât be treated the same if they felt like it. (Not that itâs logical.)
More on topic: I get lore-wise why Shadowlands wouldnât just be a singular land mass. This is an entirely different dimension, with various equivalents to heaven, hell, purgatory, and some unique concepts that reflect Azeroth and itâs peoples. It wouldnât really make sense if all of these different concepts were butting up against each other. Would the Necrolords in Maldraxxus be satisfied by having the Kyrians as neighbors without waging war on them as well? Why would the purgatory-eske zone of Revendreth be right next to⌠anything? Isolation makes quite a bit of sense for their concept of punishment. Ardenweald being itâs own pocket of flourishing nature seems to be the most sensible idea as well.
In the same way I wouldnât expect heaven and hell to be literal neighbors (separated by purgatory, or not), I also wouldnât expect these areas to have such close proximity. They are essentially each their own afterlives, without needing contact with the others. Not that conflict canât, or shouldnât still exist between the respective factions, but in an afterlife setting where these placements are meant to be defining decisions, it makes the most sense that they are distant and separate, both physically and conceptually.
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I was just thinking about this the other day. What happened to the World in World of Warcraft.
When I did the cloak quest on another alt recently, I think I spent almost as much time looking at load screens as I did actually playing.
Portals and âBoatsâ(actually just portals with extra steps) to get everywhere, spend 5min somewhere, then into the next portal.
I remember going into a portal or taking a boat/zeppelin felt like a big deal back in the day.
Now itâs the only option to navigate, especially with them reusing old assets for 8.3.
Older continents feels massive compared to the Broken Isles or Zuldazar and Kulâtiras.
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once space ships entered the picture, azeroth shrunk. that and the globes. so now we need a time skip to fix it all. blizz dun it again
I did try FF14 last year and didnât like it mainly because every zone there was instanced. WOWâs greatness comes from the open world concept. Instanced zones, while it helps regulate lag and reduce server crash, is not a good nothing. Open World Concept is the way to go.
@Blizzard, get quantum computer instead and you will solve all your lag problems and server crash problems. No need for CRZ or Sharding either, and you can put us all in the same area and there wonât be any problem at all.
Go for Quantum Supremacy Blizzard!
That would have required thinking long term, longer than just the expansion after the next. They simply boxed themselves in with the way they mapped out Azeroth in the first place. Having âHere be Dragons!â or âTerra Incognitoâ, as on some old maps, could have solved a lot of problems.
Of course, that would also have required them not having the Titans remodel Azeroth into one supercontinent (which subsequently shatters).
B-but⌠i like water. It has fish in it.
But in all seriousness, bigger, denser, layed worlds are better.
Iâve been screaming internally to see this gameâs world become more dense with a lot more layers, kinda like how the world in a Fromsoftware game is created; dense, very populated with a lot of caves, crypts, wells, labyrinths⌠pretty much anything to fill in the worldâs space.
A mmorpg world canât just be large, the space in the world needs to be used to its fullest.
- If a area has a wide open space of land to place content; but there is like⌠10 to 20 feet of layed nothingness underneath-- THATâS WASTED SPACE; put a cave system there with some content.
- Look at all those mountains you see off in the distance; can players get to those mountains? yes? THATâS WASTED SPACE; put another cave system inside with more content.
- Wow, check out that sky⌠it sure looks EMPTY; put some floating islands or castles up there.
My biggest gripe with video game worlds these days is that so much space is wasted in a gameâs world, and itâs just a complete⌠er, i donât want to overuse the word waste.
Iâve seen mmorpg game worlds with HUGE amounts of land and well, pretty much what the OP is really asking for, but all it is land, with nothing in it; itâs a lot of land, but itâs barren- no NPCâs, no monsters, no content- just nothing.
So yeah, i want the same thing, but i also want the space in said openness to be used and not just neglected with only art assets like trees and shrubbery to keep it company. 
Well, yeah. Of course having a big area with nothing in it is kinda stinky. Thankfully, though, we know itâs possible for Blizzard to make big open worlds that have stuff in them and arenât kinda stinky.
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The point of this is all to slow down content consumption, both prior to and, importantly and mostly, at max level pre-Pathfinder. By both making flight come later in an expacâs cycle and by designing the land in the most convoluted way possible, while still being technically compact, the pace of content consumption is slowed, while the cost of content production is lessened. Itâs this kind of creative âfreedomâ to design this way that underlies the philosophy of âno flyingâ to begin with, which eventually led to Pathfinder.
Making the zones discrete instances also helps the technical side of the game significantly, I am fairly certain, in terms of managing player load and layering/phasing. It disrupts the kind of experience you are talking about here of flying across all of Pandaria, for example, but Blizzard wanted the freedom to decide to design things this way, and not be forced to design them that way, so this is what we now have.
To be fair, even EK and Kalimdor are just a bunch of walled off zones connected to a larger continent. Nearly every zone is separated by large mountains. Even back in Vanilla I found that very strange. Although itâs one land mass, it felt very instanced.
Outland is the same way. Itâs one large world but the zones are all connected via one-way paths in and out.
Northrend was the same way. Large zones separated by mountains with the exception being Borean to Dragonblight.
I know what you mean, though. It feels like they doubled down on the âinstancedâ zones.
Is this about islands or flight, cause it sounds like itâs about flight as everything is measured in how easy it is to get around.
Yep. Bingo. Modern zone design is awful. They may look pretty, they may be very artistically themed, but they are NOT zones that you should put into an open world video game. They are simply way too cramped, vertical, and disorienting. Iâm not sure it will ever change because in almost every aspect of the game, 2020 Blizzard thinks bloated = better.
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Yeah, the zone design being absolute trash is probably one of the reasons Pathfinder is so hated. Look at Argus and Nazjatar. Not only are they weirdly tiny, cramped mazes, but they are loaded with mobs. 10,000 mobs per square foot. On top of being a blatant time-waster, it just feels so inorganic (how do all these mobs manage to find food and survive clustered together like that?). Then couple that with their growing portal fetish and load times that rival ESOâs and it just kills any urge to explore.
An open world with no loading times between zones was literally WoWâs big gimmick in 2004, when such a thing was unheard of. The devs are tearing modern WoW apart down to itâs very core.
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The other side of Azeroth as seen during Legion is obscured by clouds. They left that wide open as a possibility.
Anyone who says pathfinder is anything but a method to combat botting is just fooling themselves.
Players as a majority absolutely despise pathfinder. So whyâs it in? To make it harder for botters to suicide bot, it makes it more expensive for them to mar farm (thus they end up suicide botting in like instances or farming simple mats like shaldorei silk.
That is the only reason for this convoluted garbage pathfinder crap, outside of as you said, making smaller and smaller zones
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