The War Within 11.X Patches & World Soul Saga Speculation Thread

[Chickat]

FWIW, I just rewatched the post BlizzCon Q&A, and realised they said both Quel'thalas and Northrend will be rebuilt and reimagined. I wonder what they'll come up with.

I have to admit, Howling Fjord, Sholazar Basin and Storm Peaks would be nice to revisit in HD. We kinda already saw what they can do with the Grizzly Hills in DF.

I imagine parts of some zones sunk into the ocean or were flooded. I think it will be around Northrend sized still, but there will be at least 1 new zone. Like turning Ulduar into an actual zone.

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I think they will lean pretty heavily into Howling Fjord, and it will be interesting to see a third revision of Vrykul.

Hopefully playable this time.

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I feel like Wymrest is too small to be a "Hub city" its just one tower and not a very big one at that, you could fit the entire tower inside the Valdrakken tower

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Curve-ball - the hub is Strand of the Ancients

The Hub is a ground based mage city in crystalsong Forrest. New Dalaran. Big city though taking up most of the zone.

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Why not. It's big enough, it's definitely impressive. It does have too strong a theme though given that the expac is unlikely to be about undeath in any major way.

They can paint it and put little rubber balls on every spike. Childproof ICC lmao.

[allegrian]

SL had worse writing and the stupid "Jailer was behind everything" + "titan's titans" rehash which made no sense. But I'd say BFA made more lasting damage to the franchise. While SL did do damage, you can ignore that or retcon it more easily than the horde stupid villain batting 2.0 and night elf massacre. At least Kul Tiras had great zones, world building and music, and Zandalar was nice as well.

[Chickat]

While it feels fairly obvious how they will expand QT in Midnight, I think there will be some big curve balls for Northrend to spice it up. A lot of the continent is flat and sparse (Tundra, Dragonblight) so I expect some cata-level shakeups. Maybe Dragonblight gets caved in.

DB gone, Wyrrmrest temple saved by magic and now floating above. New zone is Nerubian zone.

[Khaza-R]

Didn't they say one of the zones is the biggest they have ever made, or am I misremembering a quote?

I believe they said Azure Span is possibly the largest zone they've made to date. That might be what you're thinking of.

I don't think they made that claim about TWW zones but I could be wrong. But just looking at a very urban space like Azj-Kahet, I think its very unlikely it will be anything to the scale of DF zones. But even if it was 20% of larger than Suramar, that would be very impressive in my opinion.

[allegrian]

I believe they said Azure Span is possibly the largest zone they've made to date. That might be what you're thinking of.

I don't think they made that claim about TWW zones but I could be wrong. But just looking at a very urban space like Azj-Kahet, I think its very unlikely it will be anything to the scale of DF zones. But even if it was 20% of larger than Suramar, that would be very impressive in my opinion.

DF zones could have 2-3 northrend zones inside them, if not more. But it doesn't feel that way as we're all just speed boosting through them from the air. I liked ground based gameplay in the first patches from the expansions from wod to SL, it made it feel more real and made you get to explore and know each zone. I loved it in BFA alongside war mode, which is a nothing burger now. When I stop on the ground on DF zones like the azure span and start walking, it feels as if it was the first time I got to that zone.

Maybe I should limit myself to play grounded at the start of the next expansion when possible.

[Chickat]

Well, we know Icecrown is melting, so that alone should cause some major environmental changes across the continent.

Icecrown laid bare, revealing whatever is frozen beneath the permafrost.
More water pouring into Crystalsong.
Maybe Sholazar gets a dam and aquedact system to stop it from getting flooded from the east.
The titans would probably start cleaning up in Storm Peaks.

Dragonblight getting caved in would make a lot of sense with Iridikron around and the zone having all those tunnels underneath it since Dragon Soul.
Could involve the Nerubians too.

Grizzly Hills and Howling Fjord would likely stay mostly the same.

Without the scourge and the plague, Zul'Drak could probably start to heal.
Maybe a new Loa sets up base and is revitalizing the zone.

Borean Tundra could get some climate shake up, or maybe be influenced by Sholazar, or have some titan shenanigan in Coldarra causing some major leylines to pop up and cause havoc.

Yeah, I see 6 distinct zones.

Borean, Caldera and Sholazar combines into one jungle zone with a lot of sholazar being a flooded lake now.

Wintergrasp and Icecrown still snowy but melting.

Storm Peaks mostly melted and lots of titan tech exposed.

Crystalsong tiny zone with the player capital there. Some minor dailies but nothing major. Maybe some underground stuff.

Dragonblight caved in and 80% of the zone is Nerubian now.

Zuldrak, Grizzly Hills, and HF all one zone Lush forrests with troll ruins in the north.

Patch zone 1 is underground Iridikrons lair.

Patch zone 2 is Ulduar and taking the fight to a few Titans with the help of the good titans and keepers. A titan war if you will. Eonar and Sargeras at least along with the Dragonflights, half the keepers, and maybe even the Covenants from Shadowlands helping us to beat Amanthul and Odyn.

Resolution is we stop meddling with Azeroth and let her become what she wants to become. No longer forced to become a titan. Eonar and others against us at the beginning but find out Amanthul also corrupted them as world souls and twisted them into Titans. They deffect and want to allow Azeroth to grow naturally.

We protect Azeroth now from other cosmic threats along with the remaining Titans/keepers, but they no longer try to force her to be a titan.

[Zardas]

TBC is popular, just not as popular as vanilla. Are you implying TBC didn't bring over 1m players back because thats a take for sure lmao.

Do you see a 1m sub spike with the release of TBC classic on the sub curves ? Sub losses are smooth downwards tendencies, while sub gains are generally updwards spikes at major releases. With TBC classic, we just see a steady decline, sure mostly caused by SL, and sure TBC classic likely slowed it down, but it wasn't a huge sub magnet

[Chickat]

Do you see a 1m sub spike with the release of TBC classic on the sub curves ? Sub losses are smooth downwards tendencies, while sub gains are generally updwards spikes at major releases. With TBC classic, we just see a steady decline, sure mostly caused by SL, and sure TBC classic likely slowed it down, but it wasn't a huge sub magnet

We have no way of proving anything. Both of us. IMO 9.1 was so bad WoW lost a ton of subs, but TBC ate those sub losses and added more on top. It could also be that TBC barely moved the needled and SL had stopped bleeding, but we will never know for sure. Im just talking from my personally biased experience. Anyone I knew in SL quit right after 9.1 if they hadn't already quit. Meanwhile I started playing classic in TBC because SL sucked so bad and made tons of friends. Again no proof, but no one has proof just biases.

[Zardas]

We have no way of proving anything. Both of us. IMO 9.1 was so bad WoW lost a ton of subs, but TBC ate those sub losses and added more on top. It could also be that TBC barely moved the needled and SL had stopped bleeding, but we will never know for sure. Im just talking from my personally biased experience. Anyone I knew in SL quit right after 9.1 if they hadn't already quit. Meanwhile I started playing classic in TBC because SL sucked so bad and made tons of friends. Again no proof, but no one has proof just biases.

Well, based on every other experience and basic reasonning, we know that sub decrease are slow and smooth, while sub increase and quick and very specific timely speaking. The curves we have just don't fit the postulat of TBC couterbalancing losses of 9.1, but they do fit the one of TCB classic just not being very popular overall. Of course we don't have definite proof, but nothing is leading us to believe your theory.

[Hitei]

I believe they said Azure Span is possibly the largest zone they've made to date. That might be what you're thinking of.

I don't think they made that claim about TWW zones but I could be wrong. But just looking at a very urban space like Azj-Kahet, I think its very unlikely it will be anything to the scale of DF zones. But even if it was 20% of larger than Suramar, that would be very impressive in my opinion.

I think that Azj-kahet's size is deceptive, because it's roofed in a way similar to the outer parts of Zaralek, it feels more closed off than it actually is. Like I said at the start of this observation, they focused all their screenshots on specific set pieces which makes it feel like zones are only one thing. Almost all of the Azj-kahet pictures are of that central nerubian city, but if you look at the few other ones:




That seems like it might be a pretty significant distance going straight back. The cave nature just makes it hard to tell because there's so few places (outside of Hallowfall) where you get a long straight view deep into a zone.

Especially curious if this thing is to scale:


Cause that's a whole lot of Hallowfall(?) and very little of the top two zones.

[Woggmer]

The choice in bfa made no sense and has no place in wow. In lore, loyalist playable characters should be dead or have left the horde, instead they join Tyrande to help her defend her new tree. It doesn't make sense, hell, not even Sylvannas herself should like the playable loyalist characters as they helped and agreed with her evil self, which she hates (thus the speciall message for loyalists in the undead heritage makes no sense).

You can't be evil just sometimes and then be a hero like everybody else afterwards while helping your former victims for no reason. If they want a villain faction/race, they have to be always evil and have limitations and different quest options for the whole game.

Loyalist choices were a rushed afterthought and the whole horde as playable faction is a mess lorewise thanks to BFA. That's why it's hard for me to play it and stay inmersed in the game world, story and logic.

Because it's a war.. there are no such things as heroes and villains in war there is only what your character believes is right, but Blizzard abandoned that plot to focus on N'zoth and be like "Just kidding, you're all heroes!" which is why I loathed the Amirdrassil stuff because it makes zero sense and the only way it does make sense is because it's tied to the Emerald Dream, so if the Emerald Dream is destroyed, then the whole planet goes with it. (That and they did Smolderon dirty). A lot of it is them trying to recapture the same feeling that Legion had but each time they failed and it blows up in their face because there's no other threat in WoW that's as massive as the Legion except for the Void, (The Mawsworn were close but we never see them attack the living world except for the pre-patch event, everything else was contained in the Shadowlands. It's like if in Legion instead of having it on Azeroth, the entirety of the expansion was spent on Argus and we spent that whole time pushing the Legion back before they could do harm to Azeroth.)

The player character isn't 100% good all the time, they've committed crimes and atrocities before like torturing a guy with a shock wand while a Kirin Tor agent looked the other way, or the time we've falsely surrendered to a bunch of enemy murlocs and killed their leader once we got into enemy lines.. and even going so far as to take pictures of dead Runeforge dwarves for a guy to study them.

A war story can work, but with Blizzard's current team it isn't possible and it'd be easier just to make the player character more like Med'an than a soldier grunt following what they believe in.

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SL had worse writing and the stupid "Jailer was behind everything" + "titan's titans" rehash which made no sense. But I'd say BFA made more lasting damage to the franchise. While SL did do damage, you can ignore that or retcon it more easily than the horde stupid villain batting 2.0 and night elf massacre. At least Kul Tiras had great zones, world building and music, and Zandalar was nice as well.

You can't ignore the Jailer... because no matter how many times they reset the universe, the Jailer will always be there (the only option is to improve him, but even then Shadowlands did way more damage as a whole not just because of the Jailer but because of the way the Afterlife actually works.)

If they reset everything back to Warcraft 1 (like before the Dark Portal opens up) they could make changes and fixes to the Night Elves, the villain batting.. and everything else. What they can't undo is the nature of the Shadowlands itself and the existence of the Zereths and the First Ones.

[Vakir]

I didn't put down Volume 1 of the Chronicle thinking that the Void Loids were next up on the menu. They didn't even sound like that much of a threat in and of themselves. My main takeaway was that any story you told on Azeroth was now important, because it could be argued that it all tied into shaping the consciousness of the world-soul.

I wish I could've had that optimism, but Metzen didn't even play coy - "Haha, perhaps it'll contain even hints at the next threat?? " or some other vaguely worded and coked out hype-manning.

But now it's whatever. Anything and everything can happen, for better or worse, because none of it matters and nothing is codified at all. At least the Zereths are, hopefully, dead and buried as a concept.

[SunspotAnims]

Cause that's a whole lot of Hallowfall(?) and very little of the top two zones.

I think in this image, Azj-kahet is purple, Hallowfall is blue, Ringing Deeps is both the brown and yellow-green tiles for some reason, and the Isle of Dorn is the big green tile off to the side, while the yellow tube is a sort of "main shaft" connecting them all. Given that this was presented as an early mockup, and how rough it is in general, I don't really know how much it can be trusted as an accurate reference for the zones at all. As far as I know, no official comments were made about the size of the zones but if I had to guess it's probably not as big as the Dragon Isles but their "actual" size probably wouldn't be a good gauge for how big or small they feel anyway due to the unique setting.

As a side note, the main thing I gleam from this map is that Khaz Algar might not be as heavily reliant on the airlock tech as it initially seemed. For sure it'll be necessary to use airlocks to get from the Isle of Dorn to the rest of the zones, but regardless of depth the other zones seem to take up their own section of a sort of pie and don't seem to sit directly on top of each other, meaning it probably won't be strictly necessary to instance them off from each other.

[Throren]

Cause that's a whole lot of Hallowfal

Keep in mind Hallowfall is on the shore of an underground sea, it looks much bigger on that mock up map because all of that lighter blue is water

[Viridiel]

I think in this image, Azj-kahet is purple, Hallowfall is blue, Ringing Deeps is both the brown and yellow-green tiles for some reason, and the Isle of Dorn is the big green tile off to the side, while the yellow tube is a sort of "main shaft" connecting them all. Given that this was presented as an early mockup, and how rough it is in general, I don't really know how much it can be trusted as an accurate reference for the zones at all. As far as I know, no official comments were made about the size of the zones but if I had to guess it's probably not as big as the Dragon Isles but their "actual" size probably wouldn't be a good gauge for how big or small they feel anyway due to the unique setting.

As a side note, the main thing I gleam from this map is that Khaz Algar might not be as heavily reliant on the airlock tech as it initially seemed. For sure it'll be necessary to use airlocks to get from the Isle of Dorn to the rest of the zones, but regardless of depth the other zones seem to take up their own section of a sort of pie and don't seem to sit directly on top of each other, meaning it probably won't be strictly necessary to instance them off from each other.

I think so. The Ringing Deeps might be broadly split into the earthen half and the kobold half.

Hopefully the fact that the zones aren't heavily layered on top of each other means they don't have to do anything annoying with the map like they had to with Zaralek and the Emerald Dream, but it looks like it might need to at least be split between Dorn and the rest. Maybe they'll figure out a better way to handle it.

[Hitei]

I think in this image, Azj-kahet is purple, Hallowfall is blue, Ringing Deeps is both the brown and yellow-green tiles for some reason, and the Isle of Dorn is the big green tile off to the side, while the yellow tube is a sort of "main shaft" connecting them all. Given that this was presented as an early mockup, and how rough it is in general, I don't really know how much it can be trusted as an accurate reference for the zones at all.

I agree with your read, and I think the bolded is because the Deeps are split into two areas, a waterfall canyon area with lots of green and then a more industrial BRD type area with lava flows.

I don't think this blocking is perfectly 1:1 to what the end product is or anything, but I do think it probably reflects at least early development area volume placement. Like the way that they started off making these zones was building the rough cave shapes from the pictured hollow shapes/volumes and then sculpted it out into more natural terrain. Which means that it could very well be a good indication of general zone orientation, size, etc.

What we've seen in screenshots and video seems to match up decently with the map. Azj-kahet is a bunch of low-ceiling far spreading caverns that all slope downwards, and we can see in the blocking map that the purple is a bunch of fairly squashed sections that slope from the 'north' side towards the 'south'. Hallowfall has a large open region with the light crystal that wraps around the Arathi cliff city and more squat cave sections behind that; and the map has a large open curved section of light blue with more squat sections to the 'south'.

We can also see that the Ringing Deeps sections uniquely have straight, square tunnel bits, which checks out with that part being half-made of Earthen architecture and construction.

Which also makes the tentacle-y bit in the azj-kahet section quite interesting, because my guess is that a good section of that zone (the more flesh-y looking video bits) is actually a large scale old god interior. Like the Twilight Highlands/Dragon Soul flesh pits, but on a much larger scale.

That or the little bits of 'root' we see in some of the screenshots are actually part of a zone-wide tree structure.

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Keep in mind Hallowfall is on the shore of an underground sea, it looks much bigger on that mock up map because all of that lighter blue is water

Yeah, I was operating under that assumption. It's just hard to gauge how much of that space is playable. The crystal looks very far out past the cliffs, over that supposed sea, but we have a screenshot showing one of the Arathi balloons getting very close to the crystal tip, so that space is theoretically not just skybox and invisible walls. I don't think we've gotten any actual look "down" towards the sea, so it could be stuffed full of islands or completely empty and we wont know until we get the maps.

[Skildar]

and let's also not forget that this map was an old concept map that they had already discarded at blizzcon

[Sondrelk]

Especially curious if this thing is to scale:


Cause that's a whole lot of Hallowfall(?) and very little of the top two zones.

Using this as a rough guide, I would imagine that the ringing depths will be the smallest zone in edge to edge area, but also mostly smaller caves, meaning it takes longer to get through.
Hallowfall will be much larger in area, but also not as big as this one in terms of actual playable area given much of it will probably be dead space like cliffs and such to make it look bigger.
Azj'Kahet will be smaller in size, but also very dense due to being an urban zone.
The Isle of Dorn however I would actually guess is far larger than this image makes it seem. I believe that it could actually be the supposed biggest zone they have made due to it being the easiest to make, meaning they might want to make it big just so it doesn't feel like a tiny island when you are actually on the surface. This zone also seems to have the main hub, so I imagine that will be a large chunk of it, similar to Valdrakken.

If the Isle of Dorn isn't the biggest then my assumption is that Hallowfall is the biggest due to adding so much water to make an underground ocean below the actual ocean.

[Woggmer]

I wish I could've had that optimism, but Metzen didn't even play coy - "Haha, perhaps it'll contain even hints at the next threat?? " or some other vaguely worded and coked out hype-manning.

But now it's whatever. Anything and everything can happen, for better or worse, because none of it matters and nothing is codified at all. At least the Zereths are, hopefully, dead and buried as a concept.

I don't think we'll be exploring the other Zereths for a while, especially given that one NPC mentioned that 3 zereths are the same being Light, Order, and Death..focused on construction and rhythm. While another 3 are Life, Discord, Void being different that they focus on evolution and change. So if they ever make us go to another Zereth, it'll be either one in Life, Discord, or Void since if we go to Order or Light's they'll be the same as Zereth Mortis (Death).. only with no mawsworn or Brokers.

Though I agree, the whole Zereth and First Ones isn't bad but this is way beyond anything relating to WoW... it seems more like something you'd see in one of those artsy video games where "anything and everything is a concept. So deep. So profound. Life is empty" ...This is World of Warcraft, it's game that started with orcs fighting humans, it isn't THAT deep.

[Annihilas]

too many emotions, I will say that he is one big emotion

I dare you to say that about war vets that have PTSD... come on, go ahead now.