Returned to game after 6 months break, unlocked tge Emerald Dream, and I can’t explain how disappointed I am. It’s this mysterious, ethereal, nature place that we wanted to go to ever since Warcraft 3…
And what we got? Another random Druid/Night Elf zone. Something like Val’sharah, but not looking as good… like a downgrade version of Val’sharah… souless, plastic, boaring, empty, with the same stuff we’ve seen many times before.
Then I remembered Zereth Mortis, also a zone that was meant to be this etherial, other worldly, nature realm of life… and how it actually was that. Everything about it was just stunning, the art, the scenary, the music, denizens, everything. Literally every corner had some interesting secret to explore, or just for you to fly and admire the scenery…
Gameplay was also exceptionally fun too, with hundreds of stuff to do, fun progression system, great encounters and wb.
You can really feel how passionate the artists and content creators were when making Zereth Mortis, and how they didn’t want to come to work when making the Emerald Dream.
The only thing in common for the two zones is the story being equally bad.
At the start when you couldnt fly if you weren’t within range of a boss when it spawned you’d never get there before it died. I once spent 20 min running backwards and forwards after the skulls on the map never tagging one.
And no I’m not going to realm hop or install timers for world content. Absolute garbage implantation.
The grinds it had were also busy work for people that have to get all the pokemons.
Frankly, what we got was all Blizz ever claimed the Emerald dream was: Azeroth without interference from mortals, so yeah, a big forest.
It could have done with a bit more mystical stuff (Borrow some ideas from Ardenweald), but it’s a serviceable world quest zone, not much more than that, though.
Touting ZM as some amazing masterpiece of zone design is a bit silly though, it was the same stuff as the Emerald dream, with as diversion a lot of chasing rares before they died, which (Especially before we got flying) definitely wasn’t as fun as it sounds…
Don’t really agree, I think Zereth Mortis was pretty bland given what it was. It also had a lot of visual glitches and other strangeness that didn’t have to be there.
But you’re right in the sense that the Emerald Dream was somehow even more disappointing. The Emerald Dream really needed some more effects, it needed to be bigger (literally stretched out would’ve done it), and above all else it needed to respect its lore. Like I’m sorry, you don’t disembody by sleeping in the dream - you enter the dream by dreaming, therefore effectively disembodying.
I feel you about Emerald Dream. That was the biggest disappointment of a zone in WoW. It wasn’t the worst, by a long shot, but for the Emerald Dream - the actual Emerald Dream that has been built up so much over the decades - to be such a waste of space was criminal.
However, not so keen on Zereth Mortis. The original Timeless Isle was amazing (if you weren’t on the wrong end of a PvP realm at the time) but all of these attempts to recreate it just remind me of how far they fall from what can be done.
ZM was very forgettable, now Mechagon & Nazjatar were perfect patch zones, dungeon, raid, meta achievements, minigames, rares to farm, questing, profession stuff, dailies, just all around wonderful zones.
All SL zones are thematically epic and very pretty, and i wouldn’t mind more afterlife explorations. Annoying and unnecessary mechanical components of the expansion have prevented SL to be all time great.
can’t really see the difference between mechagon endless farm and ZM… just cause you liked one more than the other doesn’t mean one is better designed or different… it’s just personal taste
agree, ppl reflect their dislike for SL mechanics and stuff (which to me never been a problem but again personal taste) to zones and landscapes which were actually cool and always are, now emeral dream was disappointing…
while I agree on the emerald dream I like to think (and so should be) it was just a fraction of the emerald dream, the one we needed to protect holding the new world tree and bùmaybe because of that so similar to other druid zones (which by definition they are similar each other!) since it extends parallel over the whole normal azeroth. I know npc and other lore said that zone, raid, and other point of interests, were the center of the emeral dream but I still hope…