Stop Making Archipelago Zones

Community General Discussion
42

well duh.
I said last year that their goal is to make flight such a pointless pain that we just give it up entirely so they dont have to think about making well thought out content anymore at all that takes their game mechanics into account.
Theyre counting the seconds till they can just remove flight, as theyve wanted to since WoD.
Making it nigh on pointless was a good move in that general direction.

1 Like
43

It serves little purpose.
Those who were going to run all the content were going to do that anyway.
Those who werent are unlikely to do it for flight. They’ll just run A to B, get the content done and unsub until the next patch or expansion.
I like the ‘once for all’ PF provides for those who like that sort of maze running game play, but they could have easily ADDED it to the existing method of getting flight then instead of replacing it.

44

All I want is an expansion with Tel’abim in it, where in the name of the loa of kings are all these bananas coming from.

2 Likes
45

That’s false. All the zones are on the same map file. It’s similar to the Emerald Nightmare, in which you’ll just take a quick portal and teleport. Heck, there may not even be a loading screen

46

Oh no, there will definitely be loading screens. I can’t hearth from one side of the Tradewinds Market to the other without getting a loading screen, and you think they can do it for gaps as large as the ones in SL?

47

The zones have been getting smaller and smaller. Even more so when you really look at them and see for many that half the zone is unused mountains LOL.

48

Even if there’s a load screen it’ll take like 3 seconds.

This is really a non-issue.

49

In any case, you’re kinda missing the whole point of the thread. Where’s my big open world? Why do we keep getting crammed into mazes?

50

I have to agree.

And on top of that I want it to feel like a more natural world again. In vanilla you had big zones that were filled with wild animals, forests, mountains and plains grasses.

Now you have a zone with every square inch filled by some faction trying to kill you like an fps shooter.

1 Like
51

Yes and no, you have to account for how much more phasing there is now

52

Not really, the zones were actually pretty bland in comparison. Everything was just copy/pasted throughout the zone. The assets looked nice, but the actualy layouts of the zones were super uninspired.

The zones were intentionally large and annoying to navigate to artificially extend content. Much like how it was in vanilla and bc/wrath before you got flying.

Some the best looking zones in the game. They had a ton of variety and were enjoyable.

You mean big empty copy/pasted terrains that are uninspired? Go ride around zones like tanaris, desolace, badlands, blasted lands, etc etc and tell me bigger is better. Pre cata barrens and tanaris take the cake for more sprawled out and repetitive looking landscape though.

I’d much rather have smaller and more detailed zones. I prefer every square meter(not literally, but the majority of the zone) looking like it’s had the touch of human hands vs hey, let’s make this big huge area for the sake of making it and place 30 trees in the whole zone. Oh let’s throw the big terraced mountain thing in the middle that will make it even more annoying to get around for questing (talking about old barrens).

Moral of the story is that bigger is not better. If you want a big world, go play Daggerfall or No Man’s Sky…

53

If you look closely at the “actual world as seen from Argus” you’ll notice that it already isn’t lore-friendly. The northern end of the Eastern Kingdoms stops where the vanilla map does, with Quel’thalas being a tiny blob of land instead of the Ghostlands, Eversong Woods, and Quel’danas.

EDIT: Here’s the texture if anyone’s curious:

54

True, Eversong/Ghostlands is on a different map file (if you haven’t already, try swimming around to where Quel’thelas is supposed to be) and they probably didn’t think stitching it in made a big enough difference for most to notice.

55

The funny thing is, you can just barely see Azuremyst and Bloodmyst peeking out of some clouds near Kalimdor, so someone didn’t entirely forget the BC areas. Teldrassil is almost completely obscured as well.

56

I bet the time skip post shadowlands will revamp the old world changing nation borders etc … Showing new groups controlling different areas and maybe a new human lordaeorn and worgen player hub city and then just use the NPC like in lordaeorn now to go back to the old world it’s my best guess

57

That is funky. Maybe Azuremyst/Bloodmyst made they cut because they’re out in the ocean, so no extra work was needed to blend them in properly. The Ghostlands map has a significant spatial conflict with the Eastern Kingdoms map, so photoshopping it in might’ve looked funny… though they could’ve just painted clouds over that area, so who knows.

58

Looking closely at EK again, I’m noticing that Gilneas seems to be MIA as well. It seems that whoever made the globe simply used a pre-cata version of EK. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

1 Like
59

You have it. You just have to take a shrine to the next part of it. It’s still open.

Take a look at Final Fantasy 15 for instance. The game is open, but each region is cut off. Or Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. It’s open world, but is divided by the ocean.

You’re not really getting mazes here though. Bastion is twice the size of Nazjatar in length and it’s literally just a bunch of rolling hills. Maldraxxus is just a bunch of wide open fields with death stuff all around. Revendreth though is more of a maze, as that’s part of its theme. It’s a giant castle. Finally you have Ardenweald. Which is a giant forest.

60

I demand more taiga biomes.