Why do we have 5 zones again?

[Aeluron Lightsong]

This seems to be overthinking if I ever heard any. Now if I had a standard, 5 zones minimum but either way I like to see what's actually there. It is the Broken Isles after all. I also suspect Legion would be different if Artifacts weren't a thing. There's a lot of work being done on that.

[Flabberly]

I don't understand how a name in the map can mean so much to some people. There can be more than one main quest per zone, there can be more than one environment per zone (remember Blade's Edge?).

IF (and that's a big if) anyone who partook in the beta has any information regarding a drought of content or an extremely smaller leveling lifetime, I don't see what the fuss is about.

[Silverware]

imo what really matters is not the number of zones but the size of a continent.

Let's say the next expansion introduces yet another new continent, for the sake of argument let's say that it's the size of Northrend, but it only has a single zone. However, that zone takes up the entire continent. Does it really matter that there's only one zone then?

Thinking about it purely from a development standpoint, zones merely exist so that you don't have to squint to find yourself when you open up the world map. All of their content, quests, and geography, could all be contained in a single zone if Blizzard really felt like doing so.

As a reminder: When MoP was announced Krasarang was considered a part of Valley, and Dread Wastes was considered a part of Townlong. They only got split into their own zones not long before release.

[Avaddon]

To be fair WoW originally came out with 20+ zones most of which were pretty great. I really like Desolace and Winterspring. Variety breeds imagination. Some people like leveling in large beautiful forests and others may like leveling in the cold barren wastes. It helps with bringing your own imagination and tastes into the game and feeling more connected to it rather than saying here's your zone, here's your preset storyline have fun with the one month's worth of content.

Not all the zones in vanilla were great but that's a very opinionated matter. But the fact there was choice made actually kept things interesting. I could level my main in zone A, B and C and say great I've experienced these zones it was fun. Now I can level my alt through X, Y and Z and experience something new without doing the EXACT same content / story. Even if I don't like it as much as zones A, B and C at least it was something new. And after these long content droughts people would be happy just for blizzard to implement a patch with a public swimming pool.

So I have to agree with OP. But Quality has to be balanced with Quantity however I would expect the quantity to be larger given the amount of time they have had. I mean sure they can make 100 REALLY good quests in a zone, but a quest lasts like what, 5 mins? so ideally 2 zones with 100 average quests would be more content and be keeping people busy for longer and less bored.

[styil]

Oh. Maybe we're on the wrong page here. I see the number of zones as Blizzard's design. It's not that they're only capable of doing this many zones, just that this is all they needed to invest their energy into.

This first tier of Legion only requires X many zones.
The later story of Legion necessitates Thal'Dranath.

You tend to really overthink their design decisions. Maybe I'm creatively bankrupt to not demand more more more. But I don't find great joy in pandering to the negativity.

This isn't even demanding "more" at this point. We haven't even been able to get the "same". They haven't been able to supply as much as they have in WoD. How can we really say with a straight face that they are producing all that is required when we've just come off an expansion where Farahlon was outright removed? Where so many storylines were butchered? You cannot seriously tell me that Blizzard produces everything that is required.

imo what really matters is not the number of zones but the size of a continent.

Let's say the next expansion introduces yet another new continent, for the sake of argument let's say that it's the size of Northrend, but it only has a single zone. However, that zone takes up the entire continent. Does it really matter that there's only one zone then?

Thinking about it purely from a development standpoint, zones merely exist so that you don't have to squint to find yourself when you open up the world map. All of their content, quests, and geography, could all be contained in a single zone if Blizzard really felt like doing so.

As a reminder: When MoP was announced Krasarang was considered a part of Valley, and Dread Wastes was considered a part of Townlong. They only got split into their own zones not long before release.

And it has been almost 5 years since MoP at that Blizzcon. 5 years more experience, 5 years more expertise, efficiency, technology and improvements. 5 years of improved quality.

A 50% larger development team. A one major content patch expansion. A 22 month expansion. For zones that have been in production over 2 years ago. With all that in their pockets, you're telling me that they are unable to do any more than what they did 5 years ago?

Note: the wait time for MoP is exactly the same as Legion: 22 months.

[The Stormbringer]

Hopefully Thal'dranath will be a thing and the number will get bumped up to six, but I don't know anymore.

[K2 Kaitu]

I think the quality of the zones is pretty nice. I enjoy discovering treasures in random places. In a single zone, your environment changes pretty quickly, especially in Azsuna where there's a mix of nice rolling hills, fel corrupted zones, and the shipwrecked areas. Once you hit 100 and you can start exploring the Nightfallen structures, it gets even better.
However, I wonder if for the whole duration of Legion, I'll still feel that way. Obviously I haven't taken into account the raids and dungeons, where I suppose I'll be spending most of my time.

[Silverware]

And it has been almost 5 years since MoP at that Blizzcon. 5 years more experience, 5 years more expertise, efficiency, technology and improvements. 5 years of improved quality.

A 50% larger development team. A one major content patch expansion. A 22 month expansion. For zones that have been in production over 2 years ago. With all that in their pockets, you're telling me that they are unable to do any more than what they did 5 years ago?

Note: the wait time for MoP is exactly the same as Legion: 22 months.

You make it sound like one of their mission statements is to arbitrarily have more zones than the previous expansion did.

Be it less or more, zones are made as needed. If they weren't, we'd have Farahlon.

Why did you ignore the first part of my post? I'm saying that the number of zones should not matter as long as their size matches their content. Do you believe that Wrath would've been a worse expansion if the entire continent was categorized under a single zone on the world map? Do you believe splitting Krasarang off on its own made MoP better? Do you believe that splitting northern and southern Gorgrond into their own zones would've made WoD better? Why? To mark off another box on some feature-creep checklist?

[styil]

You make it sound like one of their mission statements is to arbitrarily have more zones than the previous expansion did.

Be it less or more, zones are made as needed. If they weren't, we'd have Farahlon.

Why did you ignore the first part of my post? I'm saying that the number of zones should not matter as long as their size matches their content. Do you believe splitting Krasarang off on its own made MoP better? Do you believe that splitting northern and southern Gorgrond into their own zones would've made WoD better?

And I am telling you that you are missing the point. Even if we take your word for it and acknowledge that Pandaria was really 5 zones (which I don't believe, they felt like 7 full zones to me) that's still as much as Legion (nevermind that we are hearing stories of people struggling to hit 110 as there aren't enough quests).

After 5 years of course the quality is going to get better with more experience, etc. But with a 50% larger development team, with such a long wait and without even needing to spend time producing major content patches in WoD, how they are still unable to release more zones than MoP? Why are they unable to do as much as they did in WoD?

[Silverware]

And I am telling you that you are missing the point. Even if we take your word for it and acknowledge that Pandaria was really 5 zones (which I don't believe, they felt like 7 full zones to me) that's still as much as Legion (nevermind that we are hearing stories of people struggling to hit 110 as there aren't enough quests).

After 5 years of course the quality is going to get better with more experience, etc. But with a 50% larger development team, with such a long wait and without even needing to spend time producing major content patches in WoD, how they are still unable to release more zones than MoP? Why are they unable to do as much as they did in WoD?

If people are struggling to hit 110 then the experience rate will be adjusted. This has happened in literally every expansion's testing phase and was a huge problem in live Vanilla until Dustwallow got revamped.

Your point is that a larger team MUST translate to more zones, but there's not a single shred of evidence that implies that it would. What if the world development team size stayed the same? You and I have no idea how those extra employees might have been used - you don't just evenly distribute your workforce across the board and hope that they all shit out a perfectly average product.

[styil]

That issue got resolved 2 builds ago. At the end of Alpha, people were hitting level cap in 2.5 zones, so required XP per level got bumped up when Beta hit. They bumped it a little too far and pulled it back down a little 2 builds ago. I reached 110 with about 1/3 of the 4th zone left (with the 5th zone being 110 only Suramar).



As quality goes up, so does the time it takes to make the content and simply throwing more people at it does not always speed it up.

Raiding seems to be unaffected. In fact, we are seeing more raid content than ever before.

If people are struggling to hit 110 then the experience rate will be adjusted. This has happened in literally every expansion's testing phase and was a huge problem in live Vanilla until Dustwallow got revamped.

Your point is that a larger team MUST translate to more zones, but there's not a single shred of evidence that implies that it would. What if the world development team size stayed the same? You and I have no idea how those extra employees might have been used - you don't just evenly distribute your workforce across the board and hope that they all shit out a perfectly average product.

But that's the thing. Even if we take the worst case scenario: we assume that MoP was really 5 zones, we'll assume that the 50% extra devs are doing absolutely nothing.

WoD only had 1 major content patch and yet the expansion is 22 months long (comparable to every other expansion). WoD released 1 less zone and raid tier. Just from that foregone content alone, we should be expecting more from Legion. But when you consider every single favourable outcome that has gone Blizzard's way, even accounting for higher quality, it just doesn't add up.

[Nachtigal]

Honestly it doesn't matter how many zones we have, but how much content is in each zone. I would rather have 5 zones, each having their fair share of content, rather than 10 zones with an equal amount of content, spread thin through 10 zones. And yes, smaller continents are better. You have too many zones or too big of a continent, and people won't want to travel via ground mounts, or even flying mounts. I know if I had to travel from Ironforge to Stranglethorn Vale for questing/gathering/raids, I wouldn't want to do much in the world.

- - - Updated - - -

Raiding seems to be unaffected. In fact, we are seeing more raid content than ever before.


But that's the thing. Even if we take the worst case scenario: we assume that MoP was really 5 zones, we'll assume that the 50% extra devs are doing absolutely nothing.

WoD only had 1 major content patch and yet the expansion is 22 months long (comparable to every other expansion). WoD released 1 less zone and raid tier. Just from that foregone content alone, we should be expecting more from Legion. But when you consider every single favourable outcome that has gone Blizzard's way, even accounting for higher quality, it just doesn't add up.

Of course it doesn't add up, there are few who know what future content Blizzard has plans for Legion. Since we're lacking the answer here, we'll need to wait for the whole equation before we start adding things up.

[americandavey]

(nevermind that we are hearing stories of people struggling to hit 110 as there aren't enough quests).

Well that is because Legion is not holding your hand all the way. You have to ACTUALLY EXPLORE and people will run into quests where no one sent them to. Which I believe is one of the vanilla groups complaints that too much hand holding.

[Silverware]

Raiding seems to be unaffected. In fact, we are seeing more raid content than ever before.


But that's the thing. Even if we take the worst case scenario: we assume that MoP was really 5 zones, we'll assume that the 50% extra devs are doing absolutely nothing.

WoD only had 1 major content patch and yet the expansion is 22 months long (comparable to every other expansion). WoD released 1 less zone and raid tier. Just from that foregone content alone, we should be expecting more from Legion. But when you consider every single favourable outcome that has gone Blizzard's way, even accounting for higher quality, it just doesn't add up.

Let me share with you one of my personal experiences.

I graduated uni in late 2011. In my graduating class I had a friend studying some art major who got hired by Blizzard right out of the gate. Lucky her.

Fast forward a year later to December 2012, we get the Throne of Thunder announcement. She posts how excited she is on Facebook, because as it turns out she had actually done concept art for the raid and the zone. It was the first project they put her on when she was hired.

Now my takeaway is this: If she started working at Blizzard in 2011 and the first thing they did was put her to work on 5.2, that means they spent AT LEAST a year developing a single raid and single zone. As a reminder, MoP came out in September 2012. The expansion wasn't even out yet and they had already spent the last 6+ months working on the second patch.

Now think about how long it must take to make an expansion with multiple raids, dungeons, systems, armor and weapon assets, and an entire continent's worth of questing. Even if they started full production on Legion a year before WoD (and we know damn well that they didn't, considering how Tanaan was handled and how the entire post-release felt like they were suddenly trying to just make the expansion end asap), the amount of time that they've had does not at all suggest that they'd be able to do "more" than they have before. And that's keeping in mind that they're likely simultaneously working on Legion's content patches as well.

[boyzma]

The OP is right....I greatly enjoyed the zones in Legion, however its definitely a big drop in content over past expansions. For example, while leveling my mage I completed all 4 zones along with most of the world quests and I was still barely at 109. This means I had to grind out dungeons and look for quests I missed for that last level. I think they nerfed xp requirement in a recent build, but regardless this never even came close to happening in past expansions. You could miss a large amount of quests and never step foot in a dungeon and still hit max level. You can definitely feel the lack of zones when you're leveling and I wish they added at least 1 more.

Couple things wrong with your story. The major one is you CAN'T do World Quests until you're 110...so I call bs right there, with you saying you did most of them. You do realize so far they have either 2 or 3 hundred world quests? Get your facts straight first. Second is when in a zone you might "think" you're done, but go around that corner, drop off that cliff (carefully) and you'd be amazed at what you find. Tons of quests everywhere.

[Sosoulsu]

It's not about the quantity, it's about he quality.

Why does a number matter to you? Can't you just be happy that these zones are extremely well made?

Would you be happy with 10 zones that were all shit?

Blizzdrones, everybody.
WotLK had 10 zones.
1 was Wintergrasp
1 was Zul'Drak (a lot of people dislike it)
1 was Crystalsong; arguably could just say Dalaran.

The rest were very well-made, with good quest flow and stories, with dailies in almost all of them as well as dungeons.

Quantity>Quality?
Why not both?
Because WoW is less of a focus for Activision-Blizzard nowadays. And it shows.

[Deleted]

The number of zones alone isn't everything cos the zones aren't equal.

Gorgrond for example is 1 zone but effectively works as 2 zones - one desert wasteland zone and one jungle type zone. WOD zones are also pretty large and there are a lot of quests in them.

Also they're actually using old world zones in Legion. This game has like 60 zones at this point, majority of them aren't used for anything and it's kinda shameful. Legion tries to fix that via making you go there in world quests etc.

[AwkwardSquirtle]

The drop in zone number is odd. I would be very interested to see actual comparison figures though. Size of the actual zones/content contained within by comparison to other expansions.
Is the arbitrary zone drop an actual drop in content/environments? Zones in Wrath for example were largely environmentally consistent, Storm Peaks was all snowy mountains and caves, Sholazar was a forest, Icecrown was...Icecrown. In Warlords we saw more variety, with zones like Gorgrond contrasting its rocky and leafy zones, and Nagrand ranging from fields to canyons, which are obviously distinct environments, which acts as a buffer to the lack of environments people worry about.
I think there's also the change in emphasis from the levelling content. Is it possible they considered Wrath's dual levelling pathway a failure from a design standpoint? Now people certainly seem to want to be done with levelling quickly and enter the endgame, so in that situation a large amount of devtime crafting a new zone and filling it is largely wasted. Was Wrath the point that this became the case? Cataclysm saw only 5 zones added (though the old world was of course also revamped), so maybe they felt that people just didn't want to level so much?
There's also the issue that the zone has to be filled with something. People have already complained that Legion feels overstuffed with bad guys, resulting in the doomsaying that they're trying to tie up all the loose ends. I'm not saying it's impossible to create something else, but it might not necessarily add to the experience.
Or maybe I'm just talking nonsense. I'm only a panda baby after all, and never experienced these glory days I hear about so often, but I don't think the lack of zones will be a detriment to Legion. There's plenty else threatening to do that.

[SoulSoBreezy]

This isn't even demanding "more" at this point. We haven't even been able to get the "same". They haven't been able to supply as much as they have in WoD. How can we really say with a straight face that they are producing all that is required when we've just come off an expansion where Farahlon was outright removed? Where so many storylines were butchered? You cannot seriously tell me that Blizzard produces everything that is required.

Farahlon is the misused poster child of cut content when there's a village in Gorgrond populated with Laughing Skull orcs that do nothing. Sad song. But that's not even on topic, is it? You're talking about something that was mentioned and then pulled before assets even made it to alpha (correct me if I'm wrong).
As you can see, I respond very poorly to straw men =(.

5+1 zones were announced, 5 zones are being delivered, with one in the oven. Maybe.
Why do we have five zones again? Because they planned it that way. It's a really simple question and answer.

- - - Updated - - -

Couple things wrong with your story. The major one is you CAN'T do World Quests until you're 110...so I call bs right there, with you saying you did most of them. You do realize so far they have either 2 or 3 hundred world quests? Get your facts straight first. Second is when in a zone you might "think" you're done, but go around that corner, drop off that cliff (carefully) and you'd be amazed at what you find. Tons of quests everywhere.

He's probably talking about bonus objectives (that end up being world quests at max level).

- - - Updated - - -

The drop in zone number is odd. I would be very interested to see actual comparison figures though. Size of the actual zones/content contained within by comparison to other expansions.
Is the arbitrary zone drop an actual drop in content/environments? Zones in Wrath for example were largely environmentally consistent, Storm Peaks was all snowy mountains and caves, Sholazar was a forest, Icecrown was...Icecrown. In Warlords we saw more variety, with zones like Gorgrond contrasting its rocky and leafy zones, and Nagrand ranging from fields to canyons, which are obviously distinct environments, which acts as a buffer to the lack of environments people worry about.
I think there's also the change in emphasis from the levelling content. Is it possible they considered Wrath's dual levelling pathway a failure from a design standpoint? Now people certainly seem to want to be done with levelling quickly and enter the endgame, so in that situation a large amount of devtime crafting a new zone and filling it is largely wasted. Was Wrath the point that this became the case? Cataclysm saw only 5 zones added (though the old world was of course also revamped), so maybe they felt that people just didn't want to level so much?
There's also the issue that the zone has to be filled with something. People have already complained that Legion feels overstuffed with bad guys, resulting in the doomsaying that they're trying to tie up all the loose ends. I'm not saying it's impossible to create something else, but it might not necessarily add to the experience.
Or maybe I'm just talking nonsense. I'm only a panda baby after all, and never experienced these glory days I hear about so often, but I don't think the lack of zones will be a detriment to Legion. There's plenty else threatening to do that.

Mountain fences. Everywhere!

[Nachtigal]

Farahlon is the misused poster child of cut content when there's a village in Gorgrond populated with Laughing Skull orcs that do nothing. Sad song. But that's not even on topic, is it? You're talking about something that was mentioned and then pulled before assets even made it to alpha (correct me if I'm wrong).

This was probably around the time of mid/late beta. It made it past Alpha plenty.