Regardless of how it would actually look, I wish it’d have a return to form. Use the design of the Warfront & Garrison buildings instead of the oppressive “Mightstone” (remember that stuff?) and metal buildings everywhere for most of it, but drizzle some of the style of other races over sections.
And maybe find a way to make the Drag properly dark again.
The Mightstone is entirely because of Garrosh. I feel like the city, or at least parts of it, also wouldn’t be smoky and gloomy as hell anymore. Still a different sort of severe and oppressive compared to the Alliance, but with, y’know, a nice residential area of some sort where it doesn’t look miserable to live there. Show that orcs don’t have to necessarily live in squalor. Show how the elves clean a part up to use.
Another thing they should do when they get around to Rebuild expansion, Revamping Orgrimmar and Stormwind (Stormwind in particular with it’s crusty textures). And fill them out as fully fleshed out cities as we see in Suramar, etc, and hopefully the same with all the other capitals. Give us a reason to go to these places and based it essentially more on preference of where you want to be than just “everything function wise is in one city”.
I think it’s fair enough given newer cities like Legion’s Dalaran, Boralus, and Dazar’alor all have living city feeling to them.
While this is true for most cities, there are plenty of examples of large states creating new capitals on a whim, both in the ancient and modern world. It’s actually not that unusual for a state to outgrow its original, “natural” capital and decide to just make a new one somewhere.
as a handy reference:
h**ps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_purpose-built_national_capitals
The most easily referenced ancient example is Constantinople(Istanbul). The old city of Byzantium was technically already there, but the new capital basically bulldozed it because they wanted the strategic location. There was nothing natural about it, it didn’t evolve. It was built because the Emperor commanded it to be built.
I was always surprised that after the Siege of Orgrimmar that they didn’t add walls that connected the city to the port - similar to Ancient Rome and Ostia.
Eh, that port sucks anyway. It’s an embarrassment compared to the Stormwind one.
They need to either A. Blow out the cliff and make a REAL Zandalari style port. or at least have some tunnels that go through the cliff to it. Or B. Build a huge impressive Zepplin skyport.
If I remember correctly didn’t the latest novel mention Orgrimmar is in a building boom right now and the richer members of society are building larger and more elaborate houses. Considering Kalimdor is mostly stuck in game around cata when the goblin just joined the horde. I can easily imagine now that they have succeeded in turning the entire zone of Azshara into a suburb of Orgrimmar.
I wouldn’t mind seeing that pier transformed into a full blown port city of its own. Strategically, it’s smart to not have all your infrastructure in one location and it would give something to differentiate itself from just mirroring Stormwind.
Biggest issues are the close proximity to Orgrimmar that leaves little room(which could be alleviated by moving it more south) and the gameplay aspect. Making the player have to travel further to reach the ships is a drag as we’ve seen with Dazar’alor.
They could always take after the Dread Grotto in Blackrock Foundry and make the dock underground. Make it part of Underhold, but have it emerge from the eastern cliffs.
Just place warp pipes throughout the city leading to the Underhold. Make it into the Goblin/Forsaken districts.
Warp pipes were already a technology used in SoO, and it wouldn’t be too hard to set up them up, code wise. Just an object and an invisible portal.