Have you all noticed how every expac the new continent becomes smaller and smaller . calling it a continent hasn’t really been appropriate anymore since wod. so can any beta slave confirm or lie? in sl the tiny zones were hell to traverse to keep you running around longer. I wonder of they inventef something new. betas?
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from what I hear the zones are vast and at least fun to glide trough.
Think Dragonriding would be allot less fun if they end up having tiny contentless zones to glide trough. /shrug
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Its true that the continents becama smaller and smaller, but Blizzard said that the Dragon Isles have the similar size like Northrend. There are only 4 zones for now (plus Evoker starting zone), but the zones are really big. One of them is the largest zone in the whole game.
Since we will be able to have some kind of flying from the start traversing those zones shouldn’t feel that slow. But at the same time the continent should feel big.
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this would be awesome if true, sound promising., I’d like it to feel like we’re in a big world again rather than a small pocket dimension.
edit: actually 4 zones is lame again.imagine tbc with 4 zones, just hellfire terrokar, smv and netherstorm or wotlk with only howling fjord boring tundra, icecrown and stormheim. I’m convinced blizz is lowering what they spend on these expacs every time while keeping price and sub the same. until they start releasing old content for full price. all they 'eed is a gimmick that sound good but is badly executed to lure ppl back. not sure they even have to though.
From playing beta i can tell you that dragon isle is pretty big 
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finally. tiny zones were a pain.
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Well… no, actually. Or… kindda.
BfA is the largest expansion by landmass ever released except vanilla and maybe WotLK depending on how you measure it. Yes, the two continents were small, but when you added them and added Naz’jatar it was a different story altogether. With patches it’s quite a bit larger. It’s important to keep in mind that other than a tiny island WotLK never received any landmass in any of its patches!
Dragon Isles is pretty big - about the size of Northrend. Shadowlands and Legion are very small, MoP is also quite small. Cata is small but it overhauls the whole game world so in that sense it’s the biggest by far.
But yes, Shadowlands is quite small.
TBC had 7 zones and quel’ danas though. Also Belf starting zones and draenei if those count (they don’t) I feel wotlk was huge without any added zones, it had 8 zones. I’d say BFA was the size of WoD until nazj/mechagon(which were both TINY)
I just hope SL was indeed so small because of covid and such (actual legit reasons) instead of what I’m thinking (see edited post above) and we get another actual CONTINENT worthy of the name.
Dragon ‘Isles’ sounds bad → broken isles
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I share this one with you. Honestly its too much of a coincidence to not be a thing almost.
Blizzard wouldn’t intentionally want to make you feel like the game was worse than it could of been. Unless we’re talking some cartoon villain at the reins here.
I believie Covid hit Blizzard at a particular bad timing… So much so they had to cut Shadowlands and their intentions short of it, And fast track onto the next expansion.
I just hope they don’t rush Dragonflight. It looks promising and im hyped for it!
Whatever happend during Covid I hope Dragonflight gets the time and the catch up to make up for it!
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But there is a big difference that the old zones all had the same nature in the whole zone with maybe just small patches of something extra. And also new zones are much more packed with things, a lot of more questing hubs in one zone etc. Old zones had a lot of empty space. There is a big difference what was considered a zone in the early days of wow and what one zone consists of now.
So even though we arent getting a lot of zones, now this zones are bigger than they have ever been. So basicly not only are we getting a continent thats the size of the older continents, but this continents has a really detailed zones. On average one zone should be as big as 2 zones in Northrend, but each zone will be much more detailed than the zones in the Northrend were.
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Quit counting the number of zones. Modern zones consist of far more unique and varied environments than what you find in older versions. It’s simply not a fair comparison.
Show us numbers.
I only think that how it feels, i think they are about the same size. If you look at the map at previous expansions, they are not that big. Northrend is one of the biggest, but the zones are put together rather than seperate like we have seen recently.
Given their size will be in balance of 940% flight speed i imagine they will be larger then SL
It’s not just the size of the zones. It’s how they’ve been designed to be mazes with only one path to navigate through. On top of that the mob density is set to “Pub on New Year’s Eve” level. You can’t sneak aroiund mobs as there is only one path.
I’m hoping that DF will be moving away from this philosophy of zone design. I’m not really looking forward to Dragon riding so will likely be spending quite a bit of time on the ground and hope that this won’t be a maze of daze.
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Honestly, one of my biggest hopes for 10.1 is that they don’t deprecate the original Dragon Isles as we see them in 10.0. I want to have reasons to go back there, other than just running to dungeon entrances.
Content patches should increase the physical size of the world we operate in (for that expansion), but they’ve been consistently shrinking it for the last few years. We don’t really get time to learn to consider a zone as “home” before it’s relegated to somewhere we only go when we need herbs.
(On that note; any new herbs should be available in all zones from that expansion, not just the x.2 zone! Let us hope they learn from Nazjatar…)
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Thats so true. The main point of the world scaling is so that we can enjoy the whole continent and not just the last zone. But with every content patch we get one new zone that like the new main hub and everything else is forgotten.
Maybe smaller in end to end land mass, but the elevation has changed much over the years.
A lot of this is increasing the density of world doodads and the polycount of assets. It really kicked in with WoD, which is still WoW’s best looking expansion, but it got really bad with Legion.
Another aspect is Blizzard’s misguided desire to reduce travel time between dungeons and world quests. They’ve said so themselves.
There were other changes in art direction, like making sure things are appropriately sized. The entrance to the barracks shouldn’t be 20 meters tall anymore.
Legion, BFA and Shadowlands maps feel like they were shrunk and should be scaled up to be at least double in size. Shadowlands is particularly bad, because all maps are split. In BFA at least you had the 2 islands which were decently sized and the Broken Shore was one decently sized map.
I hope Dragonflight is a return to massive zones, huge sprawling areas like Wrath had.