How is it that Blizzard could launch wow with 40 zones at the start in 2004, Blizzard had
Way smaller team and budget
Inferior computing power
Less optimized world building tools
Seams like It would be absurd to ask for 40 zones in a new expansion, however
according to Ian we are getting 4 new zones in each o the world stone saga expansions.
Can’t help to feel that the newer zones feel small, bloated and overdesigned
There are several subzones within zone, The Azure Span has a fire area, snowy area, ice area, fall area, summer area and so on…
Heck sometimes the skybox/color scheme can change 5 times while dragonriding though the zone
Can we just keep it simple with a static theme or do we want redridge, duskwood, elwyn forest and westfall together in 1 zone?
Subzones should be expanded and given space to breathe, allowing developers to create more zones.
I don’t know, maybe I’m just being salty because Emerald Dream did not live up to my expectations, just would be great if we got the World in the World of Warcraft back.
The zones were overal much simpler with often large parts not even decorated because you couldn’t fly and reach them normally anyway. They also worked on WoW for quite a few years.
Zones nowadays are just way more intricate with lots more details and fully detailed all over to account for flying and such.
So I definitely prefer today’s zones overal. But… I do see your point: There’s no need to put lots of different biomes in every zone. Just focussing on one or two themes and making those great would be fine.
Maybe then they could make more than 4 zones, because that does feel a bit low.
I’d prefer 6-8 zones per expansion.
Do you understand that there are much more dev resources involved in developing entire game than expac?
Especially considering that yeah, high amount of vanilla zones are basically fields with trees and npcs planted on them.
Also it took them almost 5 years to develop the whole game, it’s a very long dev process for early 2000s
If you look at the level of detail I think you could find your answer. I’m playing through old zones with a 58 locked character and everywhere I go it looks like a map designed within a week, that you could also have created in Age of Mythology editor (you could probably have created it better, to be fair). I mean, you can even spot the texture tiles in most places!
In the meanwhile new zones are - way - more detailed. Some serious effort has gone into them, and it gives. Also, in older zones you usually have 4 chapters of quests each, and those are also shorter than average. I get this feeling of the same quantity of content, diluted in more zones.
But yea I’d go with a couple more zones too rather than the usual 4, just to make the trip a bit longer.
years of development , copy paste assets, no flying adjustments so basically some parts of it were just empty and they didn’t have anything else to focus on.
the vanilla zones are some of the best zones in the game
i could name a few,
Elywnn forests,
tanaris,
ferelas,
thousand needles,
winterspring,
felwood,
stranglethorn vale
the game doesnt need to have new zones, the devs need to go back to vanila zones and make them better detailed with scaled quests
( seeing a max level in Goldshire as a new player , MOTIVATES you to level )
all these little " player crossings" where a max level crosses path with a new player, adds magic to the game,
it speak volume to a new player to see a populated zone at the beginning
When flying came to the Wold World, they had to rework the old zones as well to enable skyboxes. If expansions gets faster I dread to see the quality of the new zones if they were to force expand it by much.
They are best for you, because you have nostalgia tied to them. Ok Elwynn Forest and Stranglethorn Vale were really beautiful and all, but the rest you mentioned were absolute crap design wise. Like how could you find Feralas, Tanaris, Winterspring and Felwood appealing? It was pretty much the same thing in all 4, without any diversion. Ok Thousand Needles were unique, but still insanely repetative overall.
I see your point with adding only 4 zones, 3 raids and 8 dungeons to an expansion, but on the other hand, it’s unfair comparing the new zones to old ones, because it’s like comparing 1950 cars to 2020 cars. Sure it’s subjective that some find 1950 cars better looking, but you can’t argue that they are better.
Vanilla took as long as 3 expansions to develop, so it’s not unreasonable that there was more content.
How many games do you know where expansions (basically the OG DLC) are bigger than the original game? Closest I can think of is Half-life: Opposing Force which was almost a full game on it’s own, but also took many years to write, and still doesn’t have 1/10th of the content of any WoW expansion
I would. It makes no real difference (unless we go with the whole mountains all around design, but we don’t have to do that as shown by Northrend) except for the fact that you can actually see everything on the map.
I wonder if there’s a map addon that makes it easier to zoom around and all that. WoW’s default map is becoming increasingly hard to use because the zones keep getting bigger.
EDIT: Yeah, Leatrix does it.
Once again, more addons to solve simple problems. Sigh…
I don’t think this is an accurate description of Vanilla WoW. We had Un’goro Crater, Winterspring, Thousand Needles, Dustwallow March, Stonetalon Mountain and that’s just Kalimdor. Sure the Barrens were pretty, er…barren and Mulgore was plain.
I think the idea that Vanilla was just a flat landscape with some trees is overdone.
I would much prefer 8 simpler zones (like we got in Wrath or MOP) than 4 intricate little zones we get these days. BFA did a better job with zones in the recent expansions and this could have been because they had to do 6 zones (3 per expansion) so didn’t have the time to do such fiddly maze like zones.
I have turned Ground Clutter and Environment Detail way down in my Graphic settings, partly as my pc is 10 years old but partly as I prefer simpler landscapes. This doesn’t change the game that much, it’s mostly just fewer trees and rocks.
I meant that many vanilla zones were like it, not all of them.
We won’t get them because zones now accumulate not only ground travelling but new flight system too, they need to also design empty space above the ground, for races for example
Please don’t tell me you were dancing on mailboxes again…
On topic, the advance in technology over the last 20 years (appertaining to WoW only) means Blizzard can go bigger and better with every new expansion. However i will concede that there is a certain charm with the older zones - i still go through a few of them occasionally for the nostalgia hit.
How does it do that? It doesn’t do anything. Who cares if I move through 3 zones instead of 1 as I fly the same distance over the same terrain?
Zones are simply groups of subareas - grouped in a way to make viewing them on the map convenient. If we didn’t have discrete maps there would be no reason to have zones at all. Their boundaries are arbitrary in terms of world space, and fundamentally designed so the map fits neatly full-screen on a 640x480 display.
That’s pretty much the long and short of it.
And now the maps are so large that I can’t see the roads that easily. They’re like 2px wide even when zoomed all the way in.
It was a big selling point, to make you feel like you are traversing a vast area. Azure span in particular, was mean to feel vast.
They can’t please everyone, if zones are too small there are complaints. We saw it with Korthia and again we see some complaining Emerald Dream should have been bigger.
I don’t think this is entirely accurate. Even now, while the boundaries aren’t quite as clear-cut as mountains all around, ‘zone’ boundaries are still defined by geographical features. Waking Shores is separated from Oh’naran plains by a cliff and from Thaldraszus. Oh’naran Plains and Azure Span are surrounded by mountains, with a road connecting the two, while Azure Span is connected to Thaldraszus by a broken bridge.
Of course, this becomes slightly less obvious once you’re soaring far above the height of those mountains, but while questing or gathering or something, you’re generally not going to be quite that high since you will be landing frequently, so these boundaries are still important.
Even in Wrath, you still have mountain ranges, rivers, or walls in case of Zul’drak separating the different zones.
The problem with Korthia isn’t that it’s a small zone. The problem with Korthia is that it’s small and besides the raid it was the only thing we got. That and a slew of things nobody wanted.
But you also had these walls internally within the zone, splitting its tiers apart.
