Would be nice if they made zones way bigger.

[Deleted]

With this I don't mean put more content inthem, just make areas larger.
In the original 1-60 zones there were many- and huge area's that had really nothing much in them but helped created a feeling of being in a huge world.

I would like to see bigger forrests, large plains and fields, giant lakes and just more "filler" in ADDITION to plenty of content.

[logintime]

I don't necessarily disagree, but it's worth noting that a) most Vanilla zones were much smaller than the ones we play in now, but still had that empty space, and b) Wrath and TBC also had unused spaces in most of their zones. The shift toward making content use every little patch of dirt in a zone really came about from Cataclysm onward, right when the on-rails leveling was introduced.

Instead of making the zones bigger (although that would certainly be nice), they could condense the areas where their content is located. Put mobs closer together rather than sprawled out over a large space, make more than three quests for a single locale, etc. That's largely what the earlier expansions did, and it worked beautifully.

[Deleted]

Yeah if they can finish them in time

[Neyze]

Yeah zones are so small it's pathetic. Like, I can fly across a zone in Draenor in like 3 minutes. It's ridiculous.

[threads]

yea didn't really like some of the draenor zones for that reason. felt like they covered every inch of the zone with something and ended up feeling kind of claustrophobic at times. i like zones that are a little more open.

[Deleted]

Hard to say. Old Barrens were awesome (but full of empty space and hated by many). BORE-ean Tundra was probably the biggest zone in WOTLK, if not the game, yet few people seem to like it. There is some sort of compromise that works, I guess. WoD zones seemed very small to me at times, but it's probably because they were so damn labyrinthine (by which I mean, they were built in such a way as to increase travel time as much as possible).

[McNeil]

I've always liked bigger zones for the immersion, both while on foot and flying. This is why I love WotLK zones like Howling Ford, Storm Peaks and Icecrown. They might have a lot of empty space, but they have some atmosphere and still some great questlines. When you use on-rails quests like in Cata, the zones feel a lot smaller as you move way too fast. and only doing a few quests in a single area. The older expansions also needed bigger zones because of the impact when a shitload of players played at launch, making players spread out more across the zone and giving them the options to quest where they want. With todays phasing it shouldn't be much of an issue.

[sethman75]

Stupid idea.

It doesn't make it any more immersive in fact it creates frustration when it takes 5 minutes to get to place on the map and then they send you straight back.

SWTOR does this all the time and it's annoying as hell even with a mount.

[Ihsatakar]

Hard to say. Old Barrens were awesome (but full of empty space and hated by many). BORE-ean Tundra was probably the biggest zone in WOTLK, if not the game, yet few people seem to like it. There is some sort of compromise that works, I guess. WoD zones seemed very small to me at times, but it's probably because they were so damn labyrinthine (by which I mean, they were built in such a way as to increase travel time as much as possible).

Aren't dragonblight, stormpeaks and icecrown all larger than borean?

[WintersLegion]

Yeah zones are so small it's pathetic. Like, I can fly across a zone in Draenor in like 3 minutes. It's ridiculous.

You do know someone had timed how long it takes to fly across both Draenor and Outland and they are just about the same.

[High Marshal Sigismund]

I made a thread on this a while back. Instead of having 6-7 zones in an expansion, they could have about 3. This would effectively double the size of each zone, the area remains roughly the same. But you wouldn't have that drastic terrain palette change.

[Muadiib]

Agreed, I've been going through Northrend a lot recently and I'm like "man this place is so huge and epic, why did they shrink the new continents?!".

- - - Updated - - -

I made a thread on this a while back. Instead of having 6-7 zones in an expansion, they could have about 3. This would effectively double the size of each zone, the area remains roughly the same. But you wouldn't have that drastic terrain palette change.

But in WotLK we had huge zones and many of them. Something that WotLK (and to a degree BC) has that the new zones don't have is great verticality. It's almost like they built the zones to take advantage of the flying mounts that we have spent hundreds of hours acquiring!

[WintersLegion]

I made a thread on this a while back. Instead of having 6-7 zones in an expansion, they could have about 3. This would effectively double the size of each zone, the area remains roughly the same. But you wouldn't have that drastic terrain palette change.

So in other words make the whole place less interesting

[proteen]

It depends on how the space is used. Un'goro Crater is a small zone, but it feels right. Sithilus is huge and barren, but it fits the zones feel. Hellfire Peninsula (BC) is massive and is a bit awkwardly-large now, but truly felt epic to step into at the start of the BC expansion.

[High Marshal Sigismund]

So in other words make the whole place less interesting

Depends on what you think is interesting. If you need to see red one minute and blue the next, then I guess that wouldn't be interesting. Might as well just go to a rave party, then.

[Deleted]

I would also like to see some larger areas. Not necessarily all the zones, but a lake that really looks like a lake not just a puddle and a forest instead of like 50 trees would be nice.

[Rivin]

Depends on what you think is interesting. If you need to see red one minute and blue the next, then I guess that wouldn't be interesting. Might as well just go to a rave party, then.

I don't recall anything like that happening since BC. Even Northrend zones generally transition into each other well, aside from the Sholazar-Icecrown border. Pandaria kind of had one with the open farmlands of Valley of the Four Winds suddenly becoming a dense jungle in Krasarang. What else was there recently?

[Tanthoris]

Gorgrond and Frostfire both have a lot of wasted empty space because blizz made the zones too large. Some of the zones did feel very cramped, but others just felt half empty. It's nice to have large zones like Icecrown that are all full of quests and npcs to interact with, but there comes a point when Bigger zones doesn't make for more content.

[Deleted]

Have you seen Jade forest? Kun Lai? Twilight Highlands? Vash'jir?