… fair point. LOL
Unless the world goes through another Cata style revamp, I doubt it. Silvermoon and the Exodar are forever frozen in time, and will always be on the Outland world server. It would require an expansion-based reason / feature to do away with this, and actually attach Silvermoon and the Exodar onto the EK / Kalimdor world servers.
As for the Ghostlands as a whole on the Eastern Kingdoms (ignoring Silvermoon for a moment), I don’t see why they can’t just change the map graphic and elongate the northern tip of the continent to fit it in. That’s just a cosmetic change. The geometry itself could still be parked north of Strathholme rather than worrying about trying to overlay 2 zones on top of each other.
I mean… it couldn’t be too time-consuming to plop objects and make roof areas what with blizzard’s creation kit, which, I assume they have. They seem to be able to whip up small settlements lickity split, and if it’s anything like bethesda’s creation kit any ol random person could do it.
I’ll take all I can eat dominos as a payment.
That is, unless they have wonky lods in the original objects, which… I mean it’s possible but most of those assets are used all over outland.
They’d need to at least lengthen the path between EPL and Ghostlands to match the new more-north position of Quel’Thelas, but yeah that’s def an option.
I’m against it because I’d rather they focus resources elsewhere rather than rebuild SMC to accommodate flying for the 10 minutes per year anyone spends there.
Now if they revitalized SMC as a major part of the story and content, I’d be okay with that. But so long as it remains forgotten by any one except blood elves sub level 20, then let it stay.
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I mean, sure, but they focused some of their assets on nerfing the vendor price of BFA greens this patch, and flying in silvermoon/exodar would have been a much better use of time.
Oh that I understand. This is the true counter argument to making flying in the Ghostlands TBH. The ROI. So I get it. But I still don’t like it.
Although I still maintain they could at least switch on flying for Azuremyst Isle and call it a day since it doesn’t suffer from the same issues as Ghostlands does. But I guess Alliance bias? 
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Cities have always been constructed kinda weirdly in WoW. The original Vanilla cities (as now seen in Classic) as well as those of TBC and WotLK were giant, monolithic “world objects” built in 3D software rather than a map editor. They’re built more like dungeons than proper world areas because traditionally, cities have been the responsibility of the dungeon team.
That’s improved somewhat with modern cities like Suramar and Boralus, which are much more maplike, but original Silvermoon is still very much the old monolithic style, so they can’t just “patch it up” so to speak - they’d need to rebuild it entirely to modern standards.
Would it be possible, then to reskin suramar structures and make them fit with the silvermoon theme thus reducing the overall amount of work? I mean, some of the suramar structures could be used by any race of elf city with enough minor tweaks since lore n stuff.
The subject of Silvermoon/Ghostlands and Bloodmyst/Azuremyst having flight seems to come up every so often. You touched upon all the issues with this pretty well.
Back in the day, they were placed on the Burning Crusade world server with the portals or ships leading to them serving as the barrier to entry. There used to be an error message if you attempted to use the portals to enter those areas without a BC key on your account.
To add them in, both Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms are going to need another revamp, and all the coding for dealing with those areas in various ways is going to need to point to their new locations rather than the current locations on the BC world server. That also means work on the surrounding areas will need to be done as well. You currently cannot fly anywhere near Teldrassil if you’re phased into BfA’s timeline. The Ghostlands would need to be shifted to account for being able to fly over Stratholme (on another note, how the hell is it still on fire and not complete ash?)
It’s honestly a ton of work, and frankly I think the EK/Kal could use another revamp about now. Honestly, I’m hoping the next expansion addresses the state of the world, especially with so much phasing happening in some of the older zones now.
Hell, if you had to rebuild the two areas again, I say just make new EK/Kal world servers to account for the fact that such a big revamp would also be screwing over Cataclysm content, as well as any content from later expansions that used those maps for whatever reason (several Legion quests for Artifacts go into those areas, BfA phasing alters several existing zones, ect)
Honestly, the world could use a revamp to bring the look of the zones in line with later expansions and finally unlock flight across all of Azeroth, but at the same time it shouldn’t come at the expense of tearing apart so much old content again, especially with Chromie Time having just been introduced with this expansion.
Retexturing Suramar stuff is way easier for sure but I doubt that’d go over well with the numerous belf superfans lol.
The way I think I’d approach it is to heavily lean on terrain phasing. This would allow modern players the choice to level in classic Azeroth, Cata Azeroth, or Azeroth 2.0 instead of being stuck with the newest revision only.
Strongly agree that both the original continents need love, though. Even if they only went through and replaced all of the sheer cliffs with nice climbable Kul Tiras style mountains it’d make a world of difference.
Oh, custom objects would need to be created for important or highly visible structures, sure but clip some of the woven stone stuff out of towers or roads or whatever and it would work well enough. So like, the sunwell model in Shatrath, that’s literally just a scaled down model of the sunwell?
But so was Stormwind, Orgrimmar and practically every other city. Although both Exodar and Silvermoon are part of Outlands mapping. Either way, odd thing for them to have gone back and fixed it. Truly an amazing city.
#JustThoseIndieCompanyThings
Personally I wish they would of spent the time in Cataclysm adding Quel’thalas and Azuremyst to the main map rather than doing zany stuff like creating a volcano in Ashenvale or filling 1k Needles with water.
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Yeah for sure. So much energy burned on changes that at the end of the day weren’t much of an improvement in terms of the leveling experience (in fact in some ways it got worse, like with the nightmare of navigating Darkshore as a lowbie without flying post-cata).
Like ok yeah the boar liver quests got fixed but they could’ve done that without all the other junk. They kinda tossed out the baby with the bathwater.
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you sound exactly like the people who win the lottery and go bankrupt.
‘here’s some money’ leading to spending 10 times more than you have and then realizing math happened.
if every pointless request like this one was honored, the development would have no direction, no focus, no timeline and ultimately lead to the game’s closure and company bankruptcy after a failed F2P transition and launch on Steam.
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except the problem is as stated the fact that it is on the outlands map. in order to do this it needs to be physically RELOCATED to the azeroth world map. this is no small order and would require significant resources. thats not even talking about the work needed to enable flying and fixing up the undone textures and making it 3-d. all 5 maps would have to have this done.
This is a very good response and why it is unlikely that flight will ever be enable for the zones of the Blood Elf starting areas. You actually have to travel through what is effectively a server portal (similar to going through the Dark Portal from Eastern to Outland). So those zones look on the map like they are in Eastern but they are actually in Outland. I guess there was a programming need to do that back in TBC.
I can’t see they will ever spend the resources necessary to entirely shift part of the game from one expansion to another. There is also the fact that much of Silvermoon is purely graphics images. Even with the cleverest hacks going (such as DH leaps and other flight toys) you can’t enter the destroyed half of the city because it doesn’t really exist.
While they could theoretically introduce flight within certain parts of the zones, you couldn’t fly in or out of them due to their unique disposition and you couldn’t fly above Silvermoon because half of it doesn’t exist and you’d slam into this invisible wall.
PS: I’ve always believed that the locked zone on the map in Eastern near Ghostlands was originally intended to be either a raid or an extra zone and it was never implemented. I understand there was a method of entering it but I won’t detail that as it will certainly be considered an exploit, if it even still exists.
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