Shadowlands will fail based on this alone

[froschhure]

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Wrong. The trend is bigger maps. Expansion after expansion, the maps got bigger.

You seem to be blind man.... or you believe your own lies. Not sure here.

[Rucati]

Considering they're taking away flying yet again for no reason I'll be very glad if the zones are small. If they could just be like one little town with tons of quests within a 30 second radius that would be amazing, nothing worse than being forced to run all over the damn place on a ground mount.

[Dellis0991]

You don't know shit.

[MORGATH99]

this post will fail based of this ASUMPTIONS alone

[Ielenia]

You seem to be blind man.... or you believe your own lies. Not sure here.

You made a claim, I disputed your claim. I think you're wrong, that the maps are bigger. If you're oh-so-sure that your claim is the "true" one... show the evidence.

[munkeyinorbit]

You dont really know how scale works ? how can you say make them larger when you dont even know the scale, and if you dont know the scale the picture is made in, you have no clue how big the zone actually is.

And all zones are connected, not to each other but to Oribos in the middle.

Less damn mountains, no clue where you get all mountains from.

You can guarentee there will be mountains to force people into travelling where blizzard wants them to. Fuck mountains.

[Mellrod]

As others have said, we don't know how large those zones are. They could be like BfA's world design where they are multiple "mini continents" rather than single zones. If they are single zones, they could be the largest singular areas in the game. (They already look to be on par with Pandaria and Kul'tiras/Zandalar if i had to guess.) If they are small, they'll still feel huge when playing through them as Blizzard's level designers have shown countless times with virtually every zone they've created since Classic.

Sheer size alone doesn't always provide the proper sense of scale. Even if the zones are physically small, they will definitely be made to feel larger, sometimes endless depending on context. Set pieces, smoke, and mirrors are all you really need and WoW does this a lot due to the nature of handcrafted levels over procedural generation. While it may not be as satisfying exploration wise, they've been able to use that to make some of the most visually interesting areas in the game:

Maw of Souls


Antoran Wastes


(actually found a blogpost from someone on the art team who worked on designing the various skyboxes and set pieces of argus, pretty cool to look at.)

So TL;DR, what this guy said.

Legion zones weren't exactly the biggest nor were MoP AND yet... -sips tea-

Quality > Quantity

Even a zone that takes 10 minutes to cross on foot can still feel as vast as if Azeroth were on the same scale as real life Earth, so don't doubt their environmental design abilities. Of all the things to question about Shadowland's success, music and level design are probably the strongest links in the chain. They've proven that time and time again.

[TheramoreIsTheBomb]

Is my mind playing tricks on me? Are my memories hazy? The zones in MoP were fucking huge, easily the biggest in the game.

nope. draenor and Northrend are much bigger

[Mellrod]

So many delusional blizzard defenders in this topic.
My goodness, all this talk of scale and you don't know shit and bla bla.
After all this time people still blindly follow what this game has become, it's sad.

How does disagreeing with Blizzard bad circlejerk = being delusional? Especially when in this context there's plenty of material to argue the opposite?
How do we know nothing of scale? Is there an actual argument you're making here, other than essentially saying "no u?"
Blind? I could show you a million screenshots of amazing zones in WoW. Of all the problems with the game, music and level design are one of the few things Blizzard consistently does right, even in small zones. Hence there's little reason to worry that this is what they would mess up of all things.

The only reasoning OP makes for this argument is that the zones on the map he linked look small to him. That's practically no reason at all. He hasn't seen the actual zone maps, hasn't seen more of the maps than the few snippets from the announcement trailer, nothing. I know it's the annual "bash-the-unreleased-xpac" season, but you folk are really grasping at straws with this one.

[Lolites]

I'm amazed that people still eat up the literal dung being served by Blizzard these days. It doesn't matter what valid points you make against Shadowlands because there are contrarians ready and waiting to argue against you even if they have no clue what they are talking about. Based on history alone we know this will likely be the least effort expansion in the history of the game. Based on all of their current failures we know they are trending down in quality and not up.

"Overall the team is happy with how corruption turned out."

You people are so delusional its sad. All that will remain in Shadowlands are whales that were going to buy the game no matter what because they are hopelessly addicted.

well if you consider saying expansion will suck based on map that shows nothing other than number of zones, that is not a "valid" point, thats baseless whining...

and based on history, after WoD, worst expansion in history, they man up and make legion which was great, so your kinda twisting it there...

[DesoPL]

Yeah because zones are smaller af, expac will fail. Actually an clever joke.

Not pretending to defend Blizzard, just saying it is an cool joke that's all.

[Lolites]

I realise that you are approaching this with logic and reason and most of all hope.
But mark these worlds, it will be shite.

might be, but definitely not bcs "zones on this map without scale seems small"

[Zexaniro]

I mean, scale looks okay. Nothing unusual to be honest

uhh. it looks like the size of Nazjatar? a patch continent. if one of three zones is looking to be this small, then it's not a good look for Blizz.

[enigma77]

What hype is there supposed to be?

All the bad shit that has been tainting the game for years is still in Shadowlands: Crossrealm zones, phasing, 4 raid difficulties, matchmade pve, terrible gearing system, terrible class design/talents, no sense of progression, constant devaluation of your accomplishments, no rpg elements, everything served to you on a silver plater and so on.

They can keep their cheap trash.

[Ielenia]

So many delusional blizzard defenders in this topic.
My goodness, all this talk of scale and you don't know shit and bla bla.
After all this time people still blindly follow what this game has become, it's sad.

So much projection, it's astounding.

[Pakheth]

That system of measuring doesn't really mean much, though. It's not just the size of zones in pixels that matters, but how that space is used. Pandaria may be technically smaller, but with the way zones were designed it feels gigantic. And Outland was very large but a lot of that space was poorly utilized, huge swaths of Hellfire for example are essentially empty.

I think one of the best examples of this is Eastern Plaguelands, if you quest through the Cataclysm version properly at low level with only a ground mount, doing the whole stagecoach progression. The way that zone and its quests are structured makes it feel huge, even though it probably has far less traversable area than Western Plaguelands, which feels comparatively small because it's just a bunch of flat, open quest hubs.

I mean, let's be honest, despite each only being three zones, Zandalar and Kul Tiras actually have a pretty tremendous sense of scale and a solid variety in biomes represented. Compare the sense of scale in Nazmir to, say, Swamp of Sorrows, or Vol'dun to Tanaris.

This here is a good explanation of why zones feel so small.

Vol'dun feels small too me and that might because the zone is so full of stuff. It doesn't feel like a desert because there is barely any desert. Tanaris feels like a desert because it has large parts of just sand. Even Uldum has more sand and back in Cata I even felt the sand parts could have been bigger to emulate a real desert.
Storm Peaks is a large zone and it has a lot of obstacles. Highmountain does the same and is smaller. Zandalar however feels tiny because most of the land is taken up by a few huge mountains and you can't even climb them. Even when you get flying there is nothing interesting up there which to me was a hug letdown.

The dark forest part of Spires of Arak was very interesting to me as it made the zone feel a lot bigger. The swamp part of Tanaan had the same effect if you turned down your view distance a little bit and it made the swamp look a lot cooler. This was shown in trailers but the effect wasn't there automatically for players which made that part of the zone rather forgettable.

I think that if Blizzard wasn't afraid of limiting players visibility shortly, like with local snowstorms or sandstorms that feeling of crowdedness we have in newer zones could be dealt with. It's just one way to trick the human mind into thinking places are bigger because you can't just see the end immediately. Anyone who played vanilla zones with limited view distance knows that feeling when returning to the zones later with larger view distance.

[Aeula]

All the zones will also be separated I think they said. So they’re all in their own individual instances.

[Lora]

well considering we dont know the scale of the zones. also smaller zones isnt a bad thing necessarily

[deenman]

For all we know, those could be continents, and not actually zones. For all we know, there could be 5 zones in each landmass.

LOL,dont do drugs kids

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What hype is there supposed to be?

All the bad shit that has been tainting the game for years is still in Shadowlands: Crossrealm zones, phasing, 4 raid difficulties, matchmade pve, terrible gearing system, terrible class design/talents, no sense of progression, constant devaluation of your accomplishments, no rpg elements, everything served to you on a silver plater and so on.

They can keep their cheap trash.

crossrealm and phasing are good features,personaly I feel phasing should be used far far more and in more creative ways,4 raid difficulties I agree is kinda annoying,tbc was a nice fit,with a different raid like karazhan being the ''lfr'',and then just have the main raid normal(flex) and hc as the set one,and as gearing system.class design,talents,progressions goes...are you from the future?we know almost nothing of shadowlands,also I didnt know you got every cutting edge served on a plater

[DarkAmbient]

All the zones will also be separated I think they said. So they’re all in their own individual instances.

Wait what? Is that true? Continents being in their own instance makes sense, but individual zones now? That is not good.