So, it’s Christmas time. I’ve got my place decorated, the cats are as full as can be on fake tree needles, and I’ll be listening to Bing Crosby until my ears fall off. I was talking to a friend, and she mentioned something for which I now have a mighty need.
Where’s the winter in Ardenweald? Wasn’t it supposed to be the winter/fall to the Emerald Dream’s summer/spring? Ardenweald is impossibly beautiful, definitely my new favorite zone because I’m a night-elf, druid main and also basic as all hell. However… Winter Wonderland Ardenweald. Snowy magic fae forest, or at least some small, subzone that’s wintery. It’s too late now, but since the seed’s been planted in my mind…
https://media1.tenor.com/images/fbc94ecdea8312079311389a7ad4423c/tenor.gif
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Ardenweald is the nature zone, and if WoW has taught me anything its that nature is a synonym for lush green forest and there’s simply no other form of natural ecosystem. If you ever see an ecosystem that is not a lush green forest, like some sort of disgusting savannah or plains, or god forbid even a desert please contact your local druid at once, so they can arrive and return nature to it, by which I of course mean, create a lush green forest.
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Heart of the forest should be decorated in winter veil lights, with ornaments and everything. Lady Moonberry should be dressed as an elf. These are indisputable facts.
Blizzard is clearly anti-fact.
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I mean, it’s winter where I live, and it’s still greenish, with a high of 63° tomorrow. Besides the blue color scheme, Ardenweald isn’t that far off from most of my Christmases, so I don’t see the issue.
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Having lived in the south my whole life, this is my favorite animated, Christmas movie, if only because I never related to a character as much as Heat Miser. Like, a “white Christmas” just seems like some fantasy that can’t actually exist.
I moved out of the south to northern Ohio for a few years. Lake Effect snow, a wind chill of -40°, and trying to get to work while my whole car is encased in ice convinced me that white Christmases aren’t worth the cost.
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I’ve migrated slightly more north, and now see snow like… Eh… Once a year?
I hate snow. More specifically, I love looking at snow, but hate everything else about it. So, snow is great so long as I’m not planning on going anywhere that day. However, snow/ice quickly becomes insufferable once I’m actually having to deal with it.
I basically like cold during the month of December only. A cold Christmas/New Years, with a chilly Thanksgiving/Halloween. Once like… January 3rd/4th rolls around, winter can stop in-so-far as I’m concerned.
I cannot help but feel like Ardenweald should have had more of a winter theme a la Winterspring. As it is it’s just another Night Elf Druid zone indistinguishable from any other Night Elf themed zone except for the lack of marble statues. It’s just so overdone…not very creative on Blizzard’s part which is surprising because if you contrast it with the other 3 zones they are all extremely creative and unique. Not sure why they chose to play it so vanilla in Ardenweald.
Also the Winter Queen is 100% evil and I’m on to her shenanigans. 
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It’s meant to be an idyllic afterlife, which slogging through snow is not.
However, it’s also representative of nature as a whole, so one would wager there’s sections of Ardenweald that house different climes.
There is a pretty simple reason for why Ardenweald looks as it does, really. The art team fell in love with swirly space trees. The entire zone was built from the basis of some art they did for space trees meant to be in bastion originally.
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Makes sense. Val’sharah + swirley space trees = Ardenweald.
I think maybe the “Winter” has more to do with the sleeping dead souls in pods.
Winter easily functions as a metaphor for death, the Winter Queen rules over a realm of death and awakens souls for their Spring.
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Yea, if you look off the side of the zone you can see it seems to go on and on to the horizon, as just this foggy forest. Who knows what the full extent of Ardenweald looks like.
But then it wouldn’t appeal to night elves as broadly, Kaleaon!
To be fair the notion that Snow = Winter is really only common to certain latitudes of the earth and the countries therein and certain altitudes eg mountain cities.
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Yeah. Winter here is freezing days, rain and wind. No snow because we’re coastal and the altitude is too low.
Here Winter is dry and while cold for us, is nothing for people in the USA I think.
Though Ardenweald feels very cold, is entirely built on cold colors after all.
This also bugs me. She may as well be called the Spring Queen, there’s nothing winter about her or the zone in any way. It should have looked like an HD Winterspring.
Even just for zone variety: we get forests all the time, when was the last time we got a snow zone (not a zone with some snow in it here and there, but a zone where snow is the central art direction)?
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Yeah, but where I’m at the “winter” aesthetic is “all the trees are dead, and I have to chip ice off my windshield in the morning”, which is hardly inspiring for a fantasy game. Call me bias, but I want snow in my winter zones.