Why is this entire zone instanced? And why can’t we fly in it?
Good question. There’s no reason that the Draeni and Belf lands should be instanced. Cata was able to add uninstanced zones to the Vanilla continents. So i say its high time they do the same to the BC race’s starter zones
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The reason Ghostlands is in an instance along with the other zone that has Silvermoon City is because they were added in The Burning Crusade Expansion.
As a result of this, Those zones were only available to those who owned Burning Crusade and not to those that did not own the expansion.
As to why flying is not implemented to those areas, Blizzard just never got to it for reasons being. One reason is because Silvermoon was never designed for flying above the city itself.
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The blood elf and draenei areas are actually in Outland servers. That’s where they were placed with the rest of BC content for technical reasons. They have a loading screen because they aren’t on Azeroth or connected to the mainland.
As for flying, those zones were never designed with flight in mind. It’s all smoke and mirrors. If you flew above them you’d see just broken landscapes and empty gaps in the land that aren’t visible from the ground. To add flying they’d have to rebuild a lot of it.
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They wanted the name to be very “apt.”
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I suspect the whole smoke and mirrors and incomplete landscape is more of a issue in Silvermoon city and surrounding area than the Draenei area. It would also take a lot work to fix these are as they pretty much would need to start form scratch almost and the other issue would be then integrating them to the Azerthoth map rather than the outland map. As much as I would love to fly in Silvermoon I think it just an impossible task.
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Not an impossible task, just one that would take more work than it’s worth. Both of the BE and Draenei cities and starter zones are far enough out of the way and enough of a pain to get to that even when they were new the only people who really used them are new characters leveling through them, who can’t fly anyhow.
Like you said, it would take a lot of work to make them flyable, that takes money. And if they were to do it, it really wouldn’t increase their use much if at all, so all that money would have been a waste.
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Exodar doesn’t have the same problem than Silvermoon due to the way it’s constructed; it’s more of a dome lodged inside a mountain, so they didn’t need to leave empty spots like they did with Silvermoon.
I’m guessing that they just keep both areas flight free because having one with flying and one without wouldn’t be fair.
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Sounds like it’s just due to being a relic of the old days and there’s no financial incentive to update it. Which is a pity. Thats the big problem with wow. Consistency. There is none. It’s basically just a bunch of different games slapped together rather than one big one.
I would honestly prefer they cancel 9.0 and instead use the Devs to fix up and update everything from vanilla to WotLK expacs but I know they’d never do it. Too much content. Updating all the old armor and weapon mogs would be gargantuan task. Sigh. Wish they’d make at least some effort though. Maybe just update all the old mounts.
At this point it would prolly make more sense to start from the ground up with WoW 2.
Cataclysm was the perfect time for them to add them to the Eastern Kingdoms/Kalimdor maps. But they didn’t.
Next time we get a world update (hopefully soon) these two zones better be on the list. Really, I don’t care if they remove the Draenei area and give kalimdore to the horde, but then allow flying and update ghostlands and eversong
I think I saw a video where all of Quel’thalas and the Draenei islands was either really high above outland or really low below it.
Here’s something else unrelated but might be interesting, on a ride to netherstorm with the new view distance I saw some construction on the edge of the bottom of Netherstorm’s side. I don’t know what it is, it was looking similar to the wall or something covering the entrance to original Hyjal.
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Check out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0Mga_U3Jsw “10 Hidden Things in WoW” video by Hirumaredx. Number 2 shows that the Blood Elves and Draenai starter zones are actually on the Burning Crusade map and not on Azeroth. Pretty interesting! Since they are not on the Azeroth map, you cannot fly directly to them. It is basically like going through the BC Dark Portal to get to them.
Edit: Also look at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rFE8HzIijY “Why You Can’t Fly in Exodar and Silvermoon” by Hayven Games for a more in depth discussion.
Just a random .02 cents worth here- Blood Elves and Dranaei have been player races since forever. (Not since pure vanilla, but still- a long long time.) ALL other player races can return to their homes and enjoy flying, once they’ve done the leveling. Even Kul Tirans and Zandalari, at this point. I often see responses cite the lack of need, since hey, you’ve already leveled, so flying shouldn’t matter, but this presumes the only point to flying is convenience. Some (I dare say, many!) of us actually enjoy flying. You know… for flying’s sake. Because it’s fabulous. If there any reason other than “we can’t be arsed to fix it,” I would totally understand, but honestly- they knew when they added those races and those areas as starting areas, that they would be a permanent fixture in the game, so really, building them so they couldn’t be updated along with everything else was just incredibly poor planning and judgement on Blizz’s part. It took them years to fix Stormwind… but they did fix it. There is no reason to just shrug it off and say “they’re never going to”, because they absolutely should. The players of Belfs and goatfolks deserve that much consideration.
If they actually gave us a reason to go back to these old locations…
By the way, please do that Blizzard.
…it’d be worth the effort. It’d only happen though with a world revamp (as in one to update the graphics for consistency, and also to undo the damage done in Cataclysm by removing all references to that time frame).
Because they never updated it with cataclysm so eversong and ghostlands are basically all smoke and mirrors from an aerial perspective. Silvermoon from above is scary.
This is why you can’t fly there -
https://youtu.be/9rFE8HzIijY?t=332
it was never finished. get ready to have your immersion ruined.