[00:00] All right, Crandor, what's happening? Actually, before that, we got a $13 donation and a $25 donation from Flood. Thank you to Flood. Sorry, I missed those donations, man. He says, are you going to play leagues before Classic Plus releases?
[00:15] I guess it depends when Classic Plus releases. If Classic Plus releases Shadow Drop right after Blutron, then no, I will be playing Classic Plus as priority right away. If Classic Plus comes out sometime next year after Wrath or a year and a half-ish after Wrath,
[00:33] yes, I will play more League before Classic Plus. So, Crendor on why Azeroth feels so disconnected now. Let's have it. Today I want to talk about why connected zones feel so much better than disconnected zones.
[00:46] And this is something that I think we're experiencing right now in midnight, and it just made me want to make this little rant video about it, because I've had these feelings for quite some time prior to midnight, because if we go all the way back to Cataclysm,
[00:58] that's when this first kind of started, where it was essentially World of Portalcraft. I remember even back in... Even TBC is where it first started. Like Classic, why you have Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms
[01:11] and everything is in there. And when TBC comes out, you have Outlands, which is massive. And you go through a portal and you have this whole other world. And TBC is not a super massive problem because you do come back for Mount Hydral, for Karazhan,
[01:23] and the auction house is in Stormwind or Ironforge, if you play Alliance at least. If you're playing Horde, then we have bigger problems to address. But that's not the point. The point is, the problem is I got slow trickle and started in my TBC.
[01:39] Cladicalism? Cataclysm, playing the game and people were like, it's World of Portalcraft, you just portal all over the place. There's no, you know, it's not like Outland or Northrend where you go there and you're just in a new continent. You're in this new area and experiencing everything
[01:52] for what it is. It's all together and it kind of has a theme behind it. So I thought we would go over a lot of the reasons I've at least come up with that it feels much better and much more immersive to
[02:04] have one big continent filled with zones. So I recently made a video. This is such a good topic. So like, it's hard to expand a game forever without needing
[02:16] more portals or forms of mobility. So, like, take RuneScape, for example. You have a world, old school, that's continuing to grow, and there's new zones, like Bar L'Amour update or something like that, and you can go there and there's a bunch of new things to do, but there's still reasons to go back to the same fundamental cities that you were at when you started the game in the first place, right?
[02:44] You see high levels traversing through the same places as the low levels. That's a good thing, right? Versus high levels are in one city, all the low levels are separate, and then there's a disconnect.
[02:56] So, like, my hope would be for Classic Plus is there wouldn't just be a new city that takes over Stormwind or Ironforge or something and have Stormwind dead,
[03:09] and this new city is where we all hang out. I would want there to be new places to explore of course, but for the same cities to have reasons for players to go there. So in TBC, it actually is kind of decent, because you need to go to the auction house.
[03:23] So you go to Storm and City still, it kind of works. But a lot of people hang out in Shat anyway, and there's portals, so it could maybe even be better. A video called, Why WoW Doesn't Feel As Immersive Anymore, and this egg was already a play
[03:39] into that, and I didn't really mention it in that video, because I didn't really think a bit, to be honest, but if we take a look at some of these older expansions, or really just all the expansions, in classic World of Warcraft, we had Talimdor and we had the
[03:52] Eastern Kingdoms, right? And I think one of the coolest parts about having those continents was there was no loading zones. The only time you would ever load would be if you took a boat or a zeppelin or something to go to the other continent, right? Or if you went into
[04:07] a dungeon or a raid or whatever, but you could go seamlessly from the Barrens to Thousand Needles, to Tanaris, right? And there's no loading. And I remember back in the day, that was actually a big thing. Really cool thing, yeah. EverQuest and some of the
[04:20] other games being like, dude, that's actually pretty crazy. And now, it's funny because we've gone backwards. Now we're porting all over the place. True. I mean, there's certain zones that you don't do
[04:32] that, but let's kind of go through here and piece together what feels so good about some of these continents or zones. So if we go to Outland, for example, you obviously had to port to Outland.
[04:45] You went through the Dark Portal, literal portal, and you're in Outland. But the thing is, all the zones were connected, and they had a theme that made sense. And that theme, for me, was just like weird, destroyed alien world.
[04:58] And so whether you went to Danger Marsh or Nagrand or Netherstorm or Terokkar Forest, it all felt like a weird, destroyed alien world in some aspect. Now, they each had their own different kind of take on it, right?
[05:12] Like, Nagrand had the open plains, but it still had, like, these floating islands with waterfalls. And then, you know, you would go to Terakar, and it was still a forest, but it had, like, weird lighting with, like, these crystals lighting up everything
[05:26] and the bird arocoa people walking around. And there was always this overarching sense of, I'm in a weird alien world right now. And then you go to somewhere like Northrend, right? We go up here. and you know whether you're in Howling Fjord or Grizzly Hills or Storm Peaks you always get the
[05:43] sense of like I am in the frozen north right now and you're in different parts of the frozen north right like every zone you go to feels different but it has that overarching theme of I'm in the frozen northern part of this world of Warcraft so you can go through and kind of do this for like
[05:59] most expansions right if we go to if we go to Pandaria we're in like East Asia or China right If we go to Legion, it's like an ancient, you know, broken, mysterious type of place, right?
[06:12] That type of vibe. Although there's some places that don't feel as much like that, but that's at least what I thought. And then we go to, like, Dragon Isles, right? Like, I think the Dragon Isles actually did this. I think they did it really well, where it felt like a whimsical fantasy land.
[06:28] That's the kind of vibe I got from the Dragon Isles. Yeah, very whimsical. It was very vibrant. It was very colorful. You know, you had the open plains with the crazy sky, and then you would go to, like, the azure span, and everything's very big, and there's so many different biomes, and things climb off each other in these mountains.
[06:46] It felt like a whimsical fantasy world Yeah We get to the disconnected zones where we have things like Cataclysm where nothing really kind of blended for that expansion
[07:00] Now, I will say, that expansion was also about revamping Eastern Kingdoms and Talimdor, right? And so when you have something like Twilight Highlands, it does kind of fit where it's supposed to fit, right? It just doesn't
[07:12] make sense from like a, you know, Northrend or Outland perspective, because these are just zones that they're adding into the world. So you kind of needed the portals, but you still had the option to fly to those zones.
[07:25] So it wasn't, like, as bad, I would say. When you get two Shadowlands, I think that has to be one of the worst zone connectivity things. Like, for me, I think the issue comes way sooner.
[07:39] Like, I get what Krendor's saying. Like, I think it gets worse later on. but like I think the issue is an issue like really early on like what I love to see in
[07:51] Classic WoW is someone that wants to go to AQ has to like fly over take the boat take a flight pass and run down if they want to do NAC they have to fly up to EPL and like run across like
[08:06] I love that you see players running across the world the problem is and don't get me wrong like I love Wrath, but the problem even with Northrend is you have a new neutral city with Horde and
[08:18] Alliance, and players are just permanently kind of out here. I believe in Wrath 2 there's Auction House, there's even worse than TBC, and they just kind of live in Northrend at max level, and you don't see the high-level players
[08:30] go back to the old zones. TBC did a little better with Karazhan, with Mount Hyjal, and Black Morath and stuff, and the necessity to go back to the Ashinoth.
[08:44] But even as early as QVC and Wrath, you have these giant landmasses. So what's the alternative? The alternative, I think, for something like Classic Plot right away
[08:56] is you literally just keep it, Kalimdor Eastern Kingdoms, and you build out all the things that have landmasses already there, so you need to run there. For example, like, Easter Wetlands, like, right here.
[09:11] I mean, there's tons of them, right? You have Oldum right here to build out into a raid. You have Mount Hyjal that is, you know, clearly, like, on top. Like, you can just build Mount Hyjal out.
[09:24] Ishara, you can do a lot more than Ishara, I think. Like, there's so much here that you start here. But then eventually, like, you do run... You can do Ghostlands. You can do Eversprong Woods in Classic Plus, because it's already here, right?
[09:36] Eventually you do run out of landmass, but then my preferred solution would be to do something like an Isle of Dread, where you still run there and then take a boat, and then you have new content on an island,
[09:48] but it's still like you could still technically swim there. There's no loading screen, and it's not a city, but it's a new area to explore. That's fine. But once it becomes like this, Outland,
[10:00] and the high-level players are here for the majority of the time, or Northrend, I think the problem persists really early on. like, TVC and Rav, even. Kata, I think, actually did better in the sense that Kata brought the world back
[10:12] to Azeroth, in a sense, right? With, like, Mount Hyjal, and, like, some of these zones were, like, actually just integrated in. Bashir was, like, in the middle, which kind of worked,
[10:24] but then it got worse again after Kata. But my point is, for classic quests, you should just stay here for a long, long, long, long time, and then as you need to, you can start to do, like, island stuff, but make it so it's not just, like, a portal to an island that you now never leave.
[10:38] It's more a portal that you would go to to an island or a boat that you would take to an island that you would temporarily visit to do some type of collecting, questing, gathering, empowerment, but not like, I'm just going to now live here like I do in Shattrath
[10:52] or in like Galarin, for example. You had the four Shadowland zones, right? We had like the Maw, but I... whatever. and you would have to go to the Oribos airport.
[11:06] You would have to go to the airport of Oribos, the city, and then take a flight that led to that zone. And the worst part would be like, dude, oh, I went to the wrong zone. How do I get back? You got to take a flight back to Oribos and get another airport, you know,
[11:20] another flight to a different zone, unless you have like engineering or something like that, right, or whatever. And it just, it gives you that sense of being disconnected. and that little bit of disconnection, I think, can shatter immersion
[11:33] because all of a sudden you're just like, like, why am I doing this? This is so annoying, right? And it pulls you out of the feeling of being in the game, being in this living world and being a part of this world
[11:45] and I think it really matters more than I think a lot of people think it does. Totally. Then we get to... I think, like, with all of this in mind, world building has to be done at a much smaller scale. like if you want to add in a new zone you can but it's not like as big as northland or outlands
[12:02] it's like a new zone like we talked about that already persists like a mount highland or like the like the coast down here the coast here or like a ghost lens it's like or like an ever song
[12:14] like it's big but not nearly as big as like this right because if you do this the problem is you do it again and again and again and now you're in the same position as retail where the world is just
[12:26] too darn big, and you're not traversing all the old areas, you're traversing, like, only new ones. Right. Midnight. And there's some other ones I'm going to cover in a bit. But we get to midnight, and midnight just steals all over the place.
[12:41] Like, we have Eversong Woods, and we have Zul'Aman, and those are kind of, like, the two big zones, and it's like, okay, so we have, like, revamped Eversong, and we have Zul'Aman, and then
[12:54] we have, like, the Harondar, which, bro, I'll say it, like, maybe this is a terrible take, but I'll say it. I am completely fine with having Stormwind
[13:06] City, Ironforge, and Darnassus as, like, my forever homes. You keep the auction house, and the mailbox is there, or I guess mailboxes can be more, but, like, you keep the auction house there, you always have to get back to Stormwind
[13:18] at some point at some time. I'm fine with that. I'm actually completely fine with that. I'm okay with never living in a new city as a capital city ever again. Like the retail model currently
[13:31] is every two years you get a new capital city. And then you never go back to the old one. You never go back to the old, think about that. Every expansion there a new capital city that you hang out for for two years and you never go back to it again is that crazy but that just normal that what they been doing for a decade or more
[13:53] two decades by almost that's just the model your idea is boring and you know it is a little boring but I don't know, I'm okay with that I guess I agree with my own idea
[14:05] I think about it in terms of room scapes Like, you have these cities that the high-level players have been going back to for years, and it's comfortable and familiar, but also there's something that's epic.
[14:17] It's home. You don't want to just relocate every big patch to a new capital. Yeah, no thanks. Was supposed to be for War Within, and it actually kind of fits in War Within, to be honest.
[14:31] I wish they put it in War Within, because I think Harandar is, like, a pretty cool zone. I like a lot of the aesthetic there, and there's, like, the roots and everything. Like, it's cool, but it almost feels like it's void of just stuff.
[14:46] Like, there's cool stuff going on, like the mushroom gladiators and things, but there's no real... I never really get a sense of, like, the theme behind it. At least if it was in Kazilgar, it's like, okay, we're underground.
[14:58] Bolton in the chat says, this is the problem. That's boring. That's too much. That's not enough. That's too much. This is going to be so sad.
[15:11] Bolt, I completely agree with you. I completely agree with you. It is going to be sad.
[15:23] Bolt, that is the truth. Yep. Because no matter what, people want different stuff. And it's going to, like, no matter what, no matter what, people will be saying that. Not enough or too much.
[15:35] You're right. You're right, man. You're absolutely right. And then, like, the roots are here. You know, it would make sense from that perspective, which is why, you know, it was probably cut from that, which I believe was proven. But it just feels like it's kind of thrown in here.
[15:49] So it doesn't really fit the theme, which I don't really know the theme of Midnight. It's like void invasion. And I think that's part of the problem. Then we get to the void storm zone, which I didn't even cover in the beta
[16:01] because I was like, this zone is just so boring. It feels like they just took old Void assets from that one, whatever the zone was they did in The War Within and slapped it together. Like, here's a Void zone.
[16:13] You're like, cool. And so it boils down to a point where it's like, well, the only zones I want to go to are Eversong and Zul'Aman. And most of the story is just in Zul'Aman. And so it feels like this expansion was like Zul'Aman and Eversong is there to be a place for Silver Moon.
[16:33] And there's like some stuff to do around there. And I think that's why it feels so small. Bro, I like Krendor. He's just like a... He's a WoW player.
[16:48] You know what I mean? He's a WoW player. He's just giving his unfiltered thoughts of World of Warcraft as a WoW player. You know what I mean? He's an OG.
[17:00] he's just saying it as it comes to his mind this is what I think after playing it he has a bunch of series one of them is called Pointless Pop 10 and I've watched a bunch of them and he just talks
[17:12] about a bunch of random Pointless Pop 10 lists, like it's great I love this guy's content and on top of all that the fact that there's only like one and a half two zones essentially
[17:25] there's really no theme that blends them all together and I think that really can just take you out of the game and feel like, like, what's going on? So getting to some of the other ones I was mentioning, Tazilgar was interesting because instead of,
[17:39] you know, being spread out in a classic zone fashion, it was all verticals. We were going down into the earth. And I thought that was cool. I didn't think, I didn't like it as much as just like normal places like Northrend or Outland or whatever, but I didn't mind
[17:55] it. Like, I think it was cool having that, and I kind of thought that some of the zones there didn't really blend together as well as, say, something like Northrend, but I didn't mind it that much. I thought it was cool. They were trying something different, and
[18:10] I still like it. I don't think it's bad. And then there was BFA, where it was an interesting blend, because it was almost like they were trying to do Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms again, where you had, like, the Horde continent and the Alliance continent, right? It kind
[18:26] of felt that way, and I didn't mind that, because the only annoying part of that was trying to get to the other one, you know, like, making an altar, doing something. There's plenty of times even now where I'm like, I have to go film something over here on my
[18:40] Horde character. I'm like, how do I even get there? Do I have to, like, go to Mechagon? Do I gotta do something? You know, it's just, it can be kind of annoying from that aspect, but I still thought the two little mini continents with three zones each was pretty cool.
[18:53] I guess the only other downside was it felt very dense. You know, it's like at one moment you're in a jungle, then you're in a swamp, then you're in a desert, right? It's all jam-packed in there. The Alliance one, I think, was a bit more somatic in terms of, like, geography,
[19:08] where you actually had, like, the mountains and, like, a zone with, like, a harbor and water and seaside, coastal stuff, and then you had more of a northern coastal thing, but not like super north or anything,
[19:21] and then like the autumnal forest area. I think that one fit more, but I still didn't mind BSA. I thought that worked out well, but I think the disconnected zones really do tear you away from the immersion of the game.
[19:36] Now, I will say, I don't think disconnected zones are always bad. I think it depends on how they're implemented. So I think as a core concept of having a continent where zones are all together
[19:50] should be every WoW expansion from the get-go. Like I think every time a new WoW expansion is released, they should have a continent with numerous zones on it that you can reach from each zone.
[20:02] You don't have to port anywhere. So he's talking about the formula that Blizzard uses moving forward for retail expansions, and that's a completely fine and fair conversation.
[20:16] For me, I'm more of a classic guy, of course. I think Crandall Place on my retail. For me, I am looking at it through the lens of Classic Plus, and I hope that they don't use that formula at all.
[20:30] I hope it a brand formula of not doing a new capital every two years not doing a brand just like Northrend Outland every two years to where you just go and live there Instead you just always live in the old world and then you continue to populate and fill
[20:44] it out. And then eventually, of course, you're going to have to add, you know, some spice around it, some islands and stuff that you can get to by boat, you know, like necessity, but like sparingly and not just like new capitals every year kind of a thing.
[20:58] that is a little bit different of a lens that I'm looking at it through. No portals, it's fine. But I think for doing patches, disconnected zones are actually perfectly fine.
[21:11] So, for example, we have the Undermine. And I think the Undermine's a perfect example because, you know, you go to the Isle of Dorne, you go to Dornegal, and you're like, hey, you know what, I'm going to go to the Undermine. And you go to the portal, and boom, you're in the Undermine.
[21:25] It's its own thing, right? It's still tied into that expansion a bit, but it's its own thing. You go there, you do your thing, and then you leave. And you're like, okay, cool. Like, that felt like its own experience. I understand that it's like a patch, and then you go back to the main continent,
[21:40] which has that overarching theme of whatever is going on in the story or whatever. And you're back to that. You've gone from one immersion back to the other. There's no, like, now I'm in the Zul'Aman aisle, and then I'm back to Zul'Aman,
[21:55] but then I'm back to the Void Storm, then I'm in Harrenia. It's just like, it feels so off. The only other thing I want to mention here isn't like the craziest thing, but it does add a little bit of immersion, and that is zone transitions.
[22:07] And I actually made a whole Pointless Top Ten on this. I'll link it at the end of the video. That's why Pointless Top Ten is on there. You go and work at the transition between each zone in World of Warcraft. It doesn't matter where you are. There's a lot of cool zone transitions.
[22:20] One that I have in the video is from Nagrand and Zangarmarsh. And if you go and you look at where they meet up, you can see how the colors change and the colors shift and the environment shift. And they meet at the border.
[22:33] And you can see there's like some mushrooms growing in the Grand that are from Zangarmarsh. And they're just like gray and they're dying because they're not getting the same nutrients that they got in Zangarmarsh. And so they're trying to grow into the Grand and they're just being halted.
[22:45] They're stopped. And it's like, you can't grow here. Right? This is not a biome. You can't grow here. In reverse of that, we have the Nagrand trees trying to grow into the sides of the mountains in Zangarmarsh,
[22:57] and those trees are dying. They have leaves falling off, they're gray, and it's one of those things where you kind of just see it when you're playing a game, and you're like, okay, that's kind of cool, whatever. And then when you sit down and you actually look at everything, you're like, dude, this is awesome.
[23:09] It shows that the world is alive, or it gives the illusion that it's alive, and that's what a lot of people just want. We want to be immersed in this world, and seeing those types of things, it makes you feel more immersed.
[23:21] You're like, dude, this is awesome. Like, these zones are clashing together on this continent. Or, you know, even something that's man-made. Like, you go to Hillsbred and Orapi, and there's that big wall. Hillsbred and Orapi.
[23:33] And that serves as this type of barrier that people remember. Because you're like, oh, I remember Hillsbred seeing the wall. What's behind that wall? And you go, and you are like, oh, it's an entire new zone. And then, you know, from Orapi, you're like, oh, there's the wall again.
[23:46] I know Hillsbred. Guys, I can't say anything because I say every word wrong. All right? But, yeah, that is. Hillsbred is lit, dude. There we go. Hillsbred's over there. You kind of make this map of all these different zones and zone transitions,
[24:02] and the world starts coming together because of all these landmarks and things that you see. And when you're just playing World of Portalcraft, you're porting all over the place, you don't have that. Your zone transition's a portal. So, yeah, this is a bit of a shorter video,
[24:15] but I just really wanted to get this off my mind. So I've been thinking about... Like we started the video off, when you... Like, eventually, if you add new content, there has to be a new landmass. I think in the lens of Classic Plus,
[24:27] it needs to be sparingly added and intelligently added. And I think eventually, you do have to add mobility to the world. So we haven't really talked much about that. Portals is one way to add mobility.
[24:40] You port to the new zone. But there's also a lot of other forms of mobility in classic WoW. Obviously, you do not want to add flying mounts, right? And you don't really want to go too crazy with the portals because it disconnects things.
[24:52] So it's like, well, what do you do? Because you can't just keep running forever. Running too much kind of sucks. Pacing is good, but running too much can be rough. Optimized flight paths.
[25:04] That's an increased form of mobility, right? That's a conversation. more zeppelins for horde more boats for alliance or horde boats zeppelins
[25:16] flightpads those are all forms of mobility that can help speed up travel to new potential zones in the future that aren't just portals that still make it to where you have to run to the boat then see people
[25:28] then take the boat and have a conversation on the boat versus just clicking a portal right through the classic plus lines I think this is all more appropriate it, then port.
[25:40] Right? Railways for Alliance, sure. There's railways, there's zeppelins, there's boats, and there's flight pods. I'm trying to think of what else. So RuneScape has a lot of forms of mobility. There's like
[25:53] the trees, the spirit trees, and then there's also the uh, crap, what's it called? The staff, the fairy rings. Spirit trees and fairy rings.
[26:05] And those were like interesting ways to like because the RuneScape world eventually after like 10 years got so big to where you still traverse the old areas but people wanted to be able to cross it
[26:17] a little bit more efficiently. What's nice about RuneScape is you still see people in the cities, right? It's not just like they're all in this endgame. They're not all in Barlamore. Like they're still constantly running
[26:29] around. Also, RuneScape's different because there's no mounts at all. So that's just different. But yeah, I think the conversation of increased mobility is a good one to have, but just a ton of increased land mass and a bunch of portals is probably not it.
[26:46] About it, and I think a lot of other people have had the same feelings, and maybe they just haven't, you know, really thought about it as well. So let me know what you think about zone connectivity down in the comments section below, and if you want some more videos like the one I just mentioned earlier, you can check them out right here.
[27:01] So thanks for watching, and I'll see you next time. Okay? Okay. Okay. See ya.