The name Bastion just makes me think of Sanctuary from Diablo. Given that it's a Shadowlands leak and that it's based around death, going to WoW heaven as our base sounds pretty reasonable to me. The name isn't necessarily great, but I don't think it's weird.
It got 3 zones, but those were 3 really small zones. And even more importantly, they were a patch area. Spending the entire expansion in the Shadowlands would be about as exciting as spending the entire expansion in Suramar.
Give me 10 minutes and i can come up with an expansion set entirely in the city of Suramar, including dungeons and raids. But even with that it would get boring after a while. Same thing with Shadowlands.
The world revamp dream will never die!
If each zone is a different interpretation of the afterlife, there's really quite a lot of material to work with. Not to mention that we know that there are actual living beings in the Shadowlands, according to the Odyn story. Maybe it's not so restrictive as we thought.
#1 Hype-Thread Shitposter - Overlord of the Hypethread
One thing that makes the Shadowlands logo leak so credible is that I'm having trouble to speculate on what's it all about. From the looks of the place, it seems like a race AND class is definitely involved.
Should I let myself hope that I'll be free of Shadowpriest after 10 years or should I withhold expectations? Obviously the second, but I want to hop on the train. xD
Again. It is easy to make something look varied, what is more difficult is to give the illusion of it feeling varied when you are basically in the same area the entire time.
Consider for a moment spending the entire Legion expansion in Suramar. It does not matter how varied you make it look, or how many different sections of the city, or how many different subsets of Nightborne you meet. After a while the fact that you have spent the entire expansion in the same city is going to get boring.
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I mean just the city, the part under the dome. I will even throw in Broken shore because it is connected to the city to be generous.
There is plenty of variety you could squeeze out from it. You could have artifical biomes teh Nightborne use to gather food, you could have ethereal visions in an observatory, you could have grimy underground slums filled with the disenfranchised.
But in the end the entire expansion would just take place in that one city, and that gets draining after a while. It is much better to take concepts like that and spend all that creativity in a single zone so players do not get fatigued from it.
The world revamp dream will never die!
Well that the thing. Before Legion the broken isles were just Tomb of Sargeras + naga
But they managed to greatly expand it. Why couldn't they do it with the shadowlands since we know almost nothing of it as is. It might have plenty of native races.
Also, a bit off topic. But I feel they could've made a proper Emerald Dream by looking up different MTG forest cards and going off of that for inspiration.
#1 Hype-Thread Shitposter - Overlord of the Hypethread
I think Blizzard has proven time and time again that they don't mind following the quite literal theme park approach when it comes to designing zones. Look at the Broken Isles for example; every zone is aesthetically different despite being positioned right next to each other.
The idea that an expansion set entirely in the Shadowlands is boring isn't taking this precedent into account. If Shadowlands is the new "continent" of the expansion, you can bet that it will have several zones and each will have its own unique flair to it. Different colors, assets, architecture, and stories.
Right, but it's an entire plane of existence. Why should it just look like one city? Why should the themes be consistent throughout? There's no reason that one area of the Shadowlands shouldn't be a heavenly area with light colors and large ornate buildings, while another is influenced by shadow, or the home of some natural death and rebirth themed zone, etc etc. They can all have rivers of souls going to the same place, a deeper layer of the Shadowlands. Nothing prevents there being varied cultures and zones. Obviously my examples are just headcanon, but if Blizzard wanted to make a Shadowlands expac, that's the sort of thing they would do.