What's the Deal with Disconnected Zones?

[Shelly]

why is it such a big deal?

Mostly because the strength of WoW is that excepting going into instanced content and swapping from one expansion to another there aren't any loading screens.

That's been one of the primary selling points of WoW since it was released and has made the world feel seamless. I know I hate going into new areas and dealing with loading screens, I don't think I'm all that unique.

[Hobbidaggy]

My only problem is the disconnect of story. The idea of both alliance and horde having a disconnected story annoys me for these zones. I hated being alliance and not having a proper zone experience in Frostfire ridge and horde in shadowmoon valley, just like in BFA with Kul Tiras and Zandalar. I hate not having the full story on my character and needing to play the other faction to understand the story happening. I don’t care if the zones are disconnected or joined or whatever just as long as I have the same story experience in each zone.

[pfbe]

The problem with disconnected zones is pretty much the same problem we had with Argus: they start to feel really small, really fast.

[Logwyn]

Just gives them a reason to nix flying until the expansion is almost over then add in stupid pathfinder rather than using creativity and make zones that have to have flying....

[Nevcairiel]

I think it's because Dragon Soul was the last patch of the expansion it imprinted to the people's mind so well that it's all they remembered of Cata

I stopped in the middle of Cata for personal/time reasons, and I never thought it was really bad, so there is that! Only played DS in LFR once shortly before the end (and the other modes for farming mog and mounts since then), and immediately thought wtf kind of raid is this, just bosses piled up with no context or atmosphere.

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Just gives them a reason to nix flying until the expansion is almost over then add in stupid pathfinder rather than using creativity and make zones that have to have flying....

They don't need any magical reasons for that. Legion and BfA were proper continents and they got flying on their planned schedule.

[MrLachyG]

Mostly because the strength of WoW is that excepting going into instanced content and swapping from one expansion to another there aren't any loading screens.

That's been one of the primary selling points of WoW since it was released and has made the world feel seamless. I know I hate going into new areas and dealing with loading screens, I don't think I'm all that unique.

Yeah that would suck. Hopefully that doesn’t happen

[Shadowsgrace]

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

Not many that I know of do, and the only thing "wrong" with Dragonsoul was the fact we had it for a bit over a Year. They do consider the "Spawn of LFR" as a reason to Hate Cata, but again that was only a thing in Dragonsoul. As a player of many Alts, I quite enjoyed having LFR there, to help get them some gear.

[Valysar]

Disconnected yes and no. I think you'll portal to every zone in Oribos, and vice et versa. And that's ok

[alturic]

Not many that I know of do, and the only thing "wrong" with Dragonsoul was the fact we had it for a bit over a Year. They do consider the "Spawn of LFR" as a reason to Hate Cata, but again that was only a thing in Dragonsoul. As a player of many Alts, I quite enjoyed having LFR there, to help get them some gear.

Well, I do admit I unsubbed the minute I stepped foot into LFR and seen the direction they were going, but that's the patch that ultimately led to me leaving WoW on a full-time basis. Of course, I was most likely already on my way out as I started drinking heavily during Firelands when people couldn't figure out a simple leg to attack/not attack, how to kite spiders, how to fly through rings, let alone me as the MT having to kite Seth and dogs but still. After all that, I'm still shocked we actually killed HRag pre-nerf.

[ro9ue]

I don't think disconnected zones are inherently bad by design, but it may feel a bit synthetic compared to a new continent with everything connected and explorable. Frankly Shadowlands as just another place when its the afterlife seems really odd to me.

I know people are making a lot of Cata comparisons, but going by lack of features and how odd the lore seems surrounding it, I feel a more apt comparison is WoD.

[GreenJesus]

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.

The home base of the legion should be graded for easy transport of machinery and troops. No wonder the legion lost. They need portals just to move anything 5 feet.

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Not many that I know of do, and the only thing "wrong" with Dragonsoul was the fact we had it for a bit over a Year. They do consider the "Spawn of LFR" as a reason to Hate Cata, but again that was only a thing in Dragonsoul. As a player of many Alts, I quite enjoyed having LFR there, to help get them some gear.

I think Thrall doing a Kamehameha as a replacement dragon aspect and then the expansion ending with Aggro getting preggers was a little cringe for a lot of people. Uldum has Indiana Jones which was pretty cringe. A lot of the zones just became memes. Many of the memes were well executed like Orcus the Kingslayer and sparkle pony blood elf boi, but "The Day Deathwing came" although hilarious was a bit over the top on the meme side. Cataclysm was probably more cartoony and silly than mists of pandaria was despite what blind panda haters might say otherwise. Cataclysm leveling zones were basically just a big joke.

[Shadowsgrace]

I think Thrall doing a Kamehameha as a replacement dragon aspect and then the expansion ending with Aggro getting preggers was a little cringe for a lot of people. Uldum has Indiana Jones which was pretty cringe. A lot of the zones just became memes. Many of the memes were well executed like Orcus the Kingslayer and sparkle pony blood elf boi, but "The Day Deathwing came" although hilarious was a bit over the top on the meme side. Cataclysm was probably more cartoony and silly than mists of pandaria was despite what blind panda haters might say otherwise. Cataclysm leveling zones were basically just a big joke.

Yes Greengeebus Stealing the Kill, did kind of, and still does, piss me off, Uldiana Jones was kinda funny though.

[Halicia]

Mostly because the strength of WoW is that excepting going into instanced content and swapping from one expansion to another there aren't any loading screens.

That's been one of the primary selling points of WoW since it was released and has made the world feel seamless. I know I hate going into new areas and dealing with loading screens, I don't think I'm all that unique.

Good point. There were bigger reasons for me to dislike Cata... (namely: complete and total lack of content), but there's just so many separate elements of disconnected zones that "break the immersion" of a contiguous set of expansion zones. While loadscreens on my current computer aren't as bad as they were, even a second or two "gap" breaks the spell I can fall under if the gameplay is otherwise continuous.

[shoc]

I imagine each of the zones will be broken up into at least 2 or 3 subzones.

[Whitedragon]

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

Pre firelands it was rampant with "To hard, to memey, less content, stupid rares, worse daily quests, underwater zone, and a less interesting villein"

[Azerate]

I'm not someone who cares too much about PTR, leaks and all that, so I found out about this from this forum. It's not that big of a deal for me, but I do dislike that design decision. Why? It's really simple - I want to be able to reach every zone from every other without teleporting too much around "hub" zones. This probably matters more for when Pathfinder is available, but it's also true for the earlier phase, for flight paths. In Pandaria you can hop on your mount, fly up and autofly from jade forest to the heart of fear for example. In BfA you have to port to Boralus, use the npc to go to Zandalar, and only then can you reach the Horde zones. It's just annoying busywork

PS. And yeah, Cataclysm is my least favorite expansion so far. The casual content was just too hard, we went into Cata and doing any instances with pugs was pretty much impossible. Luckily I was in a heroic guild who killed heroic lk on 10 man and 11/12 on 25h, so I was able to get somewhere, but the dungeons were just tedious and annoying. Raids weren't too interesting either, classes were made overcomplicated etc.

The detached zones was also an issue there, but not as much, because you didn't even need to go those zones really once you were done with leveling and reps. In the 2020 WoW, you are never done with reps, and you are never done with world content, that's why it hurts that much more.

[Nyel]

One of the outstanding points of WoW was the coherent / cohesive world building that was seamless. In Shadowland this is gone which is a shame because there aren't many games left were you can travel a gigantic world without loading screens.

[CrawlFromThePit]

Um yes. It was a very ambicious project that unfortunately fell short on many aspects.

But succeeded in what it actually did. The only xpack that made it worth it to go back and re-experience the old zones and leveling in a new way, with better quests and better route than the unorganized badly designed, badly written, and disgusting mess we got (and was already outdated) in 2004.

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It isn't really, within the context of the Shadowlands having different realms within it, there is no issue with the zones not being connected to one another.

The problem with Cataclysm in my opinion was that the zones were all over the place, you had Uldum and Mount Hyjal in Kalimdor, Twilight Highlands in Eastern Kingdoms, Vash'jir somewhere in the sea and Deepholme in.. Well Deepholme, It felt like the zones were very far flung from each other.

Now Blizzard have said that Shadowlands won't be like Legion and BFA where we choose where to go in what order ( atleast first time doing the story ) which means that how connected it feels, depends on how well they tell the story as we journey from one zone to the next.

How does that change anything? We literally NEVER HAD to physically travel between the zones. Zones in Legion/BfA have no reason to be connected, we never have to go from one to the other. We finish a zone by talking to an NPC in town and he sends us to the other zone AS IF IT WAS ALL DISCONNECTED.

Vanilla and TBC were the only times I actually went from one zone to the other without passing by the city in between.

In fact I think making the Cata zones connected to the main continents was a much better idea than pulling an island out of their ass.

[lollerlaban]

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

It didn't have content drought though, it just removed previous tier of content everytime they released content because all the new things had better gear.

ZG/ZA
Twilight dungeons etc

[CrawlFromThePit]

Can someone tell me what is so bad about the zones not being physically connected?

There's absolutely not a single negative thing about it. People who claim there is are just trying to push a weird twisted narrative based on previous biases that are not proof or evidence of anything.