What happened to big, immersive quest hub cities? Nowadays all we get is 2 tents

[JustRob]

Honor Hold is fucking shit. It's a couple of stock buildings put together and you only really visit two of them.

Shattrath was cool tho. A lot of quest chains originated there and it really felt like a city of refugees from all corners of Outland.

But look at Suramar, Thunder Totem, Bradensbrook, etc... I don't think we have much to complain.

[baskev]

So in most of the previous expansion quests hubs were pretty big. We were given new cities/towns in each of the new zones with unique architecture. Let's take a look at few of them:

Thrallmar in Hellfire Peninsula:


Honor Hold in Hellfire Peninsula:


Garadar in Nagrand:


Telaar in Nagrand:


Agmar's Hammer in Dragonblight:


Valiance Keep in Borean Tundra:


Even Crossroads in Northern Barrens from Vanilla WoW:


Or Sentinel Hill in Westfall:


Nowadays all we get is a 2 tents with a few NPCs.

Would you like to see bigger quest hubs in the next expansion?

They made into a quest zone. That you hate because you need to run if with your alts.....suramar city....

[A Dark Knight]

blizzard stopped making horde alliance camps to save money/time, why make 2 quests givers with different texts, 2 quest hubs, 2 major lore characters with voice actors if you can do one.
Remember the uproar we had when thrall was (GREEN JESUS HE IS EVERYWHERE), but now we have khdgar shoved in every fucking quest, including the fishing artifact, and not a peep.

[McNeil]

I see so many comparisons to Suramar City but its not the same as the hubs being talked about in the OP. Suramar City is part of a zone which is solely used for a quest chain, while normal hubs are just small towns where you can reside, buy supplies and pick up quests. Hubs are like Goldshire, Brill, Razor Hill etc that are also most of the time faction specific, something TBC and WotLK had a lot of (at least 2 faction hubs for eah zone). These are the kind of hubs we don't see anymore these days, we do get to visit a native capital (Highmountain Tribe) but for most of the part your hub is only a tent or 2.

[JustRob]

blizzard stopped making horde alliance camps to save money/time, why make 2 quests givers with different texts, 2 quest hubs, 2 major lore characters with voice actors if you can do one.
Remember the uproar we had when thrall was (GREEN JESUS HE IS EVERYWHERE), but now we have khdgar shoved in every fucking quest, including the fishing artifact, and not a peep.

That's because Khadgar is really funny and charismatic and just a mage. Powerful as fuck, but just a mage.

Thrall was always serious as fuck and got ridiculous titles such as the "World-Shaman", he was made out to be the only person capable in the world of holding it together. Then we got retarded shit like Thrall getting married. And they ditched his name "Thrall" and made him use his orc name which sounds stupid as fuck.

They finally did Thrall right in WoD. He was just a powerful fucking shaman wielding a hammer and he stuck with his people, the orcs. Alliance mostly didn't have to deal with him. He was also flawed, as shown in how he misused his shaman powers to execute Garrosh.

But still, the guy is way too stuck up. Khadgar drops a joke or two in every appearance he makes. People like that.

[TheVaryag]

So in most of the previous expansion quests hubs were pretty big. We were given new cities/towns in each of the new zones with unique architecture. Let's take a look at few of them:

Thrallmar in Hellfire Peninsula:


Honor Hold in Hellfire Peninsula:


Garadar in Nagrand:


Telaar in Nagrand:


Agmar's Hammer in Dragonblight:


Valiance Keep in Borean Tundra:


Even Crossroads in Northern Barrens from Vanilla WoW:


Or Sentinel Hill in Westfall:


Nowadays all we get is a 2 tents with a few NPCs.

Would you like to see bigger quest hubs in the next expansion?

Not had that since like Cataclysm launched, and even then Cata had some nice areas but not really big cities.

I can just see people claiming Suramar Is a big Immersive city... yes, but It's for everyone, It's not a HORDE city. I'd like to go Into the next expansion knowing we'll be building the next Warsong Hold like from Northrend but bigger and with more bloody spikes, because Horde. And a silly Alliance city with a lot of... statues I guess, dunno they're boring.

Again this goes with my argument Blizz have abandoned their D&D Inspired vision for WoW that ended when Cataclysm launched.

And sure, this guy's saying big immersive quest hubs, but all he means Is just quest hubs... because nowadays we just get world quests everywhere. There's a few layers of problems here.

Big quest hubs are also the basics of an RPG, and since Cata we've not really built that many apart from a few exceptions. Definitely not since Mists unless you count 5.1 Landfall and WoD does not count as the "Garrison" and "Garrison outposts" are phased and different for everyone. Also a problem, phasing - But that's for another post.

[huth]

blizzard stopped making horde alliance camps to save money/time, why make 2 quests givers with different texts, 2 quest hubs, 2 major lore characters with voice actors if you can do one.

Stormheim. Also, Alliance and Horde play very little role in Legion, so of course there isn't much of that. Which isn't exactly new, either.

[RobertMugabe]

But again, what kind of town did you expect? Horde and Alliance, impossible, we are one of the first ally and horde to set foot on Broken Isle, not enough time to build foritfied outpost. Elves? You have them. Highmountain? You have it. Vrykul? You have them also a big neutral one in Suramar (even if most are hostile).

Well, I mean just compare all those hubs. They are all very small, for example the Vrykul hub one is basically 1 tower and 1 tent (the elven, azsuna and suramar ones are also tiny). Compare this then to all the towns in WoD or MoP (or well any other xpac) and you'll see the difference (basically you have only small camps, while in previous xpacs most zones would at least have 1 town). The only exception is Thunder Totem.

Though to be fair, I didn't notice this or care at all until OP mentioned it... so it's not really significant, but it could be better.

[Queen of Hamsters]

blizzard stopped making horde alliance camps to save money/time, why make 2 quests givers with different texts, 2 quest hubs, 2 major lore characters with voice actors if you can do one.
Remember the uproar we had when thrall was (GREEN JESUS HE IS EVERYWHERE), but now we have khdgar shoved in every fucking quest, including the fishing artifact, and not a peep.

They didn't stop shit.

MoP

WoD

Legion

All had/have areas with faction-specific hubs and quest givers.
What's preferable though? Shallow hubs made for you to pass through once and never again in every zone, sometimes several of them, or devs designing zones around a story they wanna tell rather than adhering to "must place hubs!"-mentality? Considering the quality of questing since MoP, I know what I prefer...

[FertsBlert]

Let's all be fucken' honest here.

If Jaina is going to play a prominent role in 8.0 then we are probably going to have Dad'gar teleport Dalaran to wherever it needs to go.

Because Blizz is lazy like that.


Violet Hold 3.0!

I wouldn't have a problem with that anyway Dalaran is still the best designed major city we've had.

[Funky Kong]

Thrallmar, you visit the watch tower once for a quest, everything else is in the center building. A shit ton of empty useless space
Honor Hold, go inside inn once, go inside keep once then you never come back as all quests are from outlying outposts. Again ton of empty useless space
Garadar, Holy mother of space that is never used. The big center building + the camp fire down the ramp is all you ever interact with.
Telaar, big building in the back, rest of the town is completely unused.
Agmar's Hammer, better concentration of stuff rather then the previous sprawls. I actually like this one.
Valiance Keep, Inn + keep is all you use, lots of annoying walls and stairs to get in your way if you dont have flying.
Cross Roads, so... much... empty space.
Sentinal Hill, Echo.... Echo....

Why is empty space a bad thing? Why does everything need to be condensed and claustrophobic? Especially in terms of mob density lately.

[Funky Kong]

Thunder Totem is an odd one since the quests we get just tell us to seek out the tribe camps who will give us actual quests.

[Zelk]

Been a long time since we went anywhere with a big alliance/horde presence, and of the ones you linked the only actual good one is Valiance Keep

[ryanmahaffe]

Suramar
Thunder Totem
Temple of Elune
That main Azsuna city
The Vindicaar

[Mellrod]

Are you just... conveniently ignoring Suramar?

Everybody bringing up Suramar seem to be misunderstanding OP. Judging from the pictures he's showing, i'm pretty sure by "big, immersive quest hub towns/cities" he's referring to the functionality of these areas and not semantics. Suramar is a big immersive city, sure. But is it a hub? Nope! It's a city crawling with hostile enemies ready to gank you as soon as your disguise drops. You're always on edge there. You don't go there to receive quests, sell vendor trash and set your hearthstone, you go there to do quests and loot vendor trash before hearthstoning out.

To OP, we still have the kind of big immersive hubs you're referring to, they are called your Order Hall. There might not be one in every zone like in the older days of WoW, but the order hall (along with the Vindicaar for that matter) act as your "quest hubs". If you want something in every zone, more like Honor Hold or Wintergarde Keep, then Thunder Totem in Highmountain, Meredil/Shal'Aran in Suramar, Thas'talah in Val'sharah, Valdisdall in Stormheim (to some extent), and Deliverance Point on The Broken Shore also count as a "immersive hub zones" in this expansion.

But generally you dont feel like there are any stationary towns to return to for quests and supplies because nowadays the zones and their stories are a lot more dynamic. Unlike Hellfire Peninsula where one town sends you to eat 15 bear asses at various locations around the map, the story has you constantly moving and progressing through the zone until finally obtaining the zone's MacGuffin of Creation and returning to your Order Hall to continue your class quests and choose a new area to quest in.

TL;DR - While a few exist here and there on the Broken Isles, the stationary hubs of old have been, for the most part, functionally turned into our Order Halls and the Vindicaar. This is probably because each zone's story is more dynamic and has you moving around a lot rather than doing fetch quests in every corner of the map before returning to one spot.

[Brewhan]

yall bashing the OP but I understand his point, those safe havens back in the day were like community hot spots just for chilling. Now its dalaran. Back in BC you could go AFK in honor hold/thrallmar and come back and see opposite faction doing some huge gank squad or something or people dueling each other for fun. Wow now is so on rails that you can't even detour 2 steps off the path because there is nothing even there for you to do or explore. Suramar/Thunder totem/ all the legion places are just 5 minute quest hubs but have no lasting reason to stay around. You don't go to thunder totem to admire the cool design you only go there for the stupid world quests repeat forever x 1000000.

[Mellrod]

Not had that since like Cataclysm launched, and even then Cata had some nice areas but not really big cities.

I can just see people claiming Suramar Is a big Immersive city... yes, but It's for everyone, It's not a HORDE city. I'd like to go Into the next expansion knowing we'll be building the next Warsong Hold like from Northrend but bigger and with more bloody spikes, because Horde. And a silly Alliance city with a lot of... statues I guess, dunno they're boring.

Again this goes with my argument Blizz have abandoned their D&D Inspired vision for WoW that ended when Cataclysm launched.

Not sure what D&D has to do with Quest Hubs in WoW. And WoW was inspired by EverQuest, with Warcraft originally being intended as a Warhammer product before becoming it's own IP.

Looking past your strange affixation with bloody spikes and hatred for statues, I would ask you to think about how the old zones with town hubs functioned. In Hellfire Peninsula you land get to the new zone, get a quest telling you to step on 15 babies, go out and do that, come back, get another quest, repeat until you're too high level for that zone and they send you to the next one. Sure sometimes they'd send you to small outposts, but you'd always return to Honor Hold. I get that a you might have nostalgia for the old hubs, but it's rather repetitive, is it not?

Nowadays it's more like: Land in new zone, get a quest to assist with: the local base's defenses, helping gather supplies, defend from attackers, etc. Come back, get told you're needed elsewhere in the same zone and/or a lead on your overall objective (pillars of creation) has been found, head off to continue the rest of the zone's story until you have the pillar and you can return to your order hall for a class campaign quest/another zone.


If you're talking about hangout places, you guys are acting as though we don't have community hotspots in Legion when we have several that manifest in the Order Halls.

[Mafic]

So in most of the previous expansion quests hubs were pretty big. We were given new cities/towns in each of the new zones with unique architecture. Let's take a look at few of them:


Would you like to see bigger quest hubs in the next expansion?

I agree.

The elements of RPG and world building are slipping. Argus is a big nothingburger..homeworld of the Legion that resembles a pile of rubble. Sad.

[Noblebanned]

So in most of the previous expansion quests hubs were pretty big. We were given new cities/towns in each of the new zones with unique architecture. Let's take a look at few of them:

Thrallmar in Hellfire Peninsula:


Honor Hold in Hellfire Peninsula:


Garadar in Nagrand:


Telaar in Nagrand:


Agmar's Hammer in Dragonblight:


Valiance Keep in Borean Tundra:


Even Crossroads in Northern Barrens from Vanilla WoW:


Or Sentinel Hill in Westfall:


Nowadays all we get is a 2 tents with a few NPCs.

Would you like to see bigger quest hubs in the next expansion?

You're fucking high if you think that all of those shithole combined could equal Suramar by itself, not to mention Vengeance point and the Vindacaar. Try again

[Servasus]

The rose-tinted glasses are strong in this one.