What's the Deal with Disconnected Zones?

[Daedius]

They're not a singular plain, they're realms existing in their own dimension... so to speak.

[Ishayu]

It doesn't matter anymore because we're all thinking with portals anyway, to borrow a phrase.

The whole point of connecting zones is that they feel like one big place that you travel around, which can be really immersive and great and Classic WoW does it very well, and actually so does Zandalar and Kul'tiras individually, but they can just as well be connected to old zones as they can be connected to new ones.

I have to admit that in this case it makes perfect sense for them to be disconnected, but I do understand why people want connected zones, but these same people have been let down quite a few times by WoW already so they're probably not surprised. I mean ffs BFA literally features a ship that's actually a teleporter instead of a ship that sails you over, and it's LITERALLY AN EXPANSION ABOUT SHIPS ON THE SEA. Blizzard wouldn't know what immersive worldbuilding was anymore even if it hit them in the face, so yeah - not much reason to care anymore.

[Shakana]

So let us talk about Shadowlands map design. Can someone tell me what is so bad about the zones not being physically connected? No one I've read talk about it seems to provide a reason other than "It's different from what I'm used to and therefore bad." I genuinely do not see what the big deal is. I did not see a problem in Cata and I don't see one now for Shadowlands. In TBC, Cata, WoD, Legion, and BFA zones have been pretty much completely independent from one another in both design and story.

Since The Burning Crusade expansion Blizzard has created zones to have had such contained stories that do not spill over into other zones and such distinct designed from one another that they might as well be disconnected. WotLK and MoP did a pretty good job at spilling over into other zones with the story, and it was kind of cool, but even in those Blizzard has shown their best work at creating a zone-contained story with a few key characters moving on to the next zone with you. While those two expansions may have been Blizzard's most successful, I would not attribute it to this element, but rather the mechanics and gameplay design of the game in place at those times.

Since as long as I can recall in playing this game moving through the mountain/river border of two zones might as well have them be on separate continents. More often than not the designs and storylines of two adjacent zones look like they shouldn't be sitting anywhere near each other. With Shadowlands I think borrowing from Final Fantasy 14's idea of instancing each zone separately can improve on load times and allow Blizzard to go all out with their visual designs without having to worry about what you can see in the distance.

I don't see anything wrong with the zones. I think all this entire expressions comes from the lack of information about the expansion because we barely have anything before hand to talk about. I mean you even go to the forum section of shadowlands and see there's nothing new to talk about besides what was told in blizzcon.

[Cyram]

I think it's because people wanna see an immersive whole new world, maybe.
But then they just wanna ruin the immersion with flying and shortcuts and hate it when an immersive world has the smalles of difficulties on the roads.
I don't mind it, particularly. It reminds me a bit of Argus and having those portals to travel around those 2 awful zones and Mac'aree - and I always wished that system was used more (can you imagine Nazjatar with some underground current bullshit system of travelling connecting different zones? I would've loved that).
... so, yeah. I think it's because people wanna bitch about every single thing that feels like a change.

[Redroniksre]

A large, interconnected world is what World of Warcraft sold itself as on the original box art with pride as a game with less loading screens than its competitors. It was a mark of quality. And as consumers, when we start to expect that quality and then it slowly gets taken from us then it feels bad on its own. But more than that, loading screens waste player's time, break immersion, and most importantly aren't fun.

Who said anything about there being loading screens? They could all very well be on the same "map" just not connected, like how TBC was structured.
Anyways, there is nothing inherently wrong with disconnected zones so long as the story flows well between them, and given that they are not doing the choose your own adventure it seems like it should.

[Corroc]

Uh yes. It was a thorougly bad expansion that suffered from content drought from day one.

Content drought from day one? Explain.

[Kralljin]

Not a huge dealbreaker for me, but personally i sort of miss the aspect of being sent to another zone and then actually traveling there rather than getting a teleport / quick ride.
Always felt kinda cool, you're walking to another zone, have this slightly mixed area between those two zones, perhaps going over some hill / river to cross over.

Again, nothing big, but it added to the scenery of the continent in my opinion.

[Sithalos]

I've literally never heard someone complain about the zones being disconnected.

I guess if that's the only thing people can find to bitch about, SL is in a fairly good spot.

[Darknessvamp]

The only issue I think there might be is with the Maw's zone with the random effects that build up over time whilst you're there. Trying to get out will likely require going to a specific point/s in the zone rather than just riding into another zone if they weren't all disconnected and since the effects are supposedly meant to make it harder to travel through the zone, I can see it becoming a point of annoyance. Additionally the only other issue I've heard of is an increase in the number of loading screens.

[Katchii]

While I prefer to have connected zones in an expansion for continuity, I never had issues with the Cata style disconnected zones due to the story making that disconnect make sense. As long as there's an easy way to travel between the zones and the story makes sense for why the zones are disconnected I don't have any issues with it at all.

In this case, the disconnect makes sense because they're all difference realms within the Shadowlands, it wouldn't make much sense for someone relegated to one zone for eternity/ whatever their sentence is to just be able to saunter over to a different realm with ease by simply walking a little bit.

[Kaibhan]

I'm not generally a fan of games who have to portal to each zone or what is usually referred to as instanced zones as it makes the world feel smaller and disconnected. Like for example TSW, AoC, or GW2 That being said, if the game play (GW2) and or story(GW2/TSW) is good enough it can definitely be forgiven so not a game breaker by any means but can still be added to a cons list for a game.

[Ehrenpanzer]

Outside of the horrid DS patch, people look at Cata in a negative light?

Unfortunately yes. Many people joined at the peak of Wrath, when dungeons were loot hallways, you basically had catchup gear mailed to you upon character creation and raids were dumbed down to the lowest common denominator outside of hardmode. Then Cata hit and they tried to go back to the TBC model where you needed more then 3 functioning brain cells to play the game and the general populace lost their shit.

[alturic]

Unfortunately yes. Many people joined at the peak of Wrath, when dungeons were loot hallways, you basically had catchup gear mailed to you upon character creation and raids were dumbed down to the lowest common denominator outside of hardmode. Then Cata hit and they tried to go back to the TBC model where you needed more then 3 functioning brain cells to play the game and the general populace lost their shit.

Ahh, perhaps that's why I didn't think Cata was bad until DS. Funny enough, I also thought Wrath was a pretty good expansion. Perhaps because it was mindless fun, lol.

[Ehrenpanzer]

Ahh, perhaps that's why I didn't think Cata was bad until DS. Funny enough, I also thought Wrath was a pretty good expansion. Perhaps because it was mindless fun, lol.

And if what you want is to run through and just blow shit up, that's great, if that's what you find fun you should do that... but the supposed highest level of difficulty of dungeons should not be roflaoetheinstanceinthreepulls level of difficult. Dont even get me started on the epic failure that was DS (which would have been fine as a mid tier filler raid though)

[RobertMugabe]

Outside of the horrid DS patch, people look at Cata in a negative light?

Well yeah they do I suppose?

I am rather surprised how recently quite a few people are saying that Cata was good besides 4.3 (which I personally don't really disagree with though)

Cata was very negatively received after it's launch, much worse than even WoD I'd say. I even remember when MMO-news-sites and fanpages started shittalking the expansion for how bad it was and (more importantly) how little content it offered compared to Wrath... and 4.1 and 4.2 just made everything even worse IIRC with being VERY small patches compared to what we got in the past and 4.2 caused some huge drama with the dungeon nerfs, where even Totalbiscuit (at this point the fastest growing WoW youtuber) infamously quit WoW becuase of it.

Like heck dude WoW lost 3 million subscribers in this expansion too, which was a big deal (even compared to MoP's and WoD'd sub loses), considering that up to this point WoW's sub numbers have only been increasing.

[Kyphael]

Nothing, contrary to the consensus, I loved Cataclysm and how disconnected every zone was. Felt like a mini expansion every time I went to Vashj'ir, Deepholm, Ramkahen, etc.

[RobertMugabe]

I certainly don't, every time I'm levelling a low level toon I am reminded of how badly was the old world trashed. And that's only one of the things that went bad (imo) with Cata, but that has been discussed to hell and back, so I won't elaborate here.

I tend to agree. I initially thought actually that the world revamp was amazing and some zones really did end up being great.

However many if not most other zones are just pure garbage. They all have a storyline connected with Deathwing and outside of that the story is either meh or it's literally an easter egg/movie reference of some sort. And they all have linear questing with no choices and no kind of challenge whatsoever. Basically most of these zones lost what made them interesting and at time mysterious... and instead they became memes.

They also didn't utilize that revamped content at all for endgame, even though it made up probably most of their development time and thus Cata's endgame felt so lackluster too despite being the largest expansion ever.

[Wilian]

Content drought from day one? Explain.

The focus on revamping leveling made sure the end game content was lacking. Outside of the raid, all the other content was finished within couple of weeks and then it took half a year for first content patch to hit, which was just 3 quests and two revamped troll dungeons. Then it took nearly yet another half a year to hit for Firelands and the accompanied nonraid content that was finishable in 15 minutes/day.

There was very, very little to do.

[prwraith]

I also think that some people are just being reminded here of Cata, which is often seen as the worst or 2nd worst expansion ever.

But then again, I don't think that Cata sucked, because it had disconnected zones.

I still don't get that, other than Dragonsoul CATA was amaze-balls

[Corroc]

The focus on revamping leveling made sure the end game content was lacking. Outside of the raid, all the other content was finished within couple of weeks and then it took half a year for first content patch to hit, which was just 3 quests and two revamped troll dungeons. Then it took nearly yet another half a year to hit for Firelands and the accompanied nonraid content that was finishable in 15 minutes/day.

There was very, very little to do.

So basically just like every other wow expansion at that time?