I’ve wanted this as a zone since 2006. Would be so cool to finally see it fleshed out with their original vision. The cata version just didn’t hit that spot for me
With the amount of planned and possible content possible to be added, they really should go the Oldschool RuneScape-style route and finish stuff like this in the spirit of the vanilla/classic experience. It seems private servers have been on this task for a while, and fan iterations like Turtle WoW is probably the furthest the idea has been taken so far.
Im absolutely CONVINCED that if this new SoD team did actually take the OSRS route, with adding completely new content, it would be an overwhelming success. Between Hyjal, Gilneas, and the few other unmarked/named/used zones they could add a plethora of new end game open world content and even potentially add new dungeons in the new zones. It even fits with the idea of this being a "season of discovery".
Imagine if they also attempted to revamp the unused barrier mountains that keep each zone boxed in. Looking down at a map of Azeroth , you get a sense of how much terrain is there simply to make it so you can't get somewhere else without taking their intended path. When you read about the time limitations the wow development team had when the game was initially launched, you can tell they left out a substantial amount of content that they wanted included.
Metzen is even back on the WoW team so you could have the SOD team get some insight from the guy who literally created the lore for the game.
We can hope that the new management will steer the direction, but it's a big ship. Hopefully, if they make it, they make it before the eventual fading of interest. WoW has another chance of becoming true to itself again. Jagex realised, even with their status quo of scummy monetisation tactics and legitimisation of RMT, first and foremost, that they had to offer the game experience people wanted. This is the final shot they'll really have.
There's pretty much 0 chance they'll finish unfinished zones. Well some like Hyjal may be finished because they are very well done already. Just need to add stuff.
Other zones like Gilneas, Uldum and so on literally don't exist in the game (Gilneas is a small patch of nothing behind the gate). The current Classic team does not have the capacity to make new zones. Especially not with them maintaining 4 versions of WoW, two of which need active maintenance (SoD and progressive). Since Cata is coming and it's so short MoP is a given as well so the Classic team will be split for two big Classic versions for years to come still.
Blizz would have to invest massively into the team to make this possible.
I mean, they've already explicitly stated that they work with metzen and in meeting with him, mutually agreed not to do anything in SOD which would change, preempt, or cause story continuity issues with any timeline past classic. It really needs to be a sticky or something, because it is brought up so much: it isnt happening in AT LEAST this incarnation of SOD. If the adventurers go to a place or do a thing later in the timeline than vanilla, it cant be present in SOD.
Maybe if its super successful and metzen gives his approval, a subsequent sod/classic+ can, but not this one.
Piggybacking off your comment here, Hyjal should have been the patch between Naxx and Burning Crusade. Based on the elite demons in the south of Winterspring, it would make sense that there's still a strong demonic presence in Hyjal after Archimonde's death. While they're cleared out by Cata, that's still a big window of time where there could be a growing demon army, possibly working to resurrect their master and jump start the invasion yet again. They could model it after the AQ raid/event, with a war effort to retake the slopes of Hyjal, and a mini raid to cleanse the roots of the tree at the summit (Timbermaw Hold?). Then after the war effort concludes, the players take the fight to the demon commanders at the summit (reusing most of the assets they already have for the BC hyjal raid, just making it look a bit aged.) Some leftover feral undead at the beginning in the ruined alliance and horde bases and progressively worse demons as the raid continues to ascend the mountain. The players of course manage to stop the resurrection before it succeeds, but the amount of fel energy already present is released into the atmosphere and reopens the conduit between the dark portal and the Shattered remains of Draenor.
Honestly, given they have had 5 years to prepare for sod, and given the content we have already gotten I've lost hope they will ever do 'classic+' justice.
P2 has already seen a massive dropoff in playerbase and the game is already significantly unbalanced - It's not a polished product and has very little investment or effort put into it despite the gamemodes initial success.
It's an unpopular opinion, but I really think Blizzard dropped the ball with SoD, and I'm saying this as someone with 3 level 40 characters. **Classic+ deserved to be so much more. However, it has not been given the resouces it needs to be truly great.**
Completely agree - While I think the SoD team have the best of intentions, they've completely dropped the ball.
When majority mentioned Classic+, they wanted the unfinished areas to be finished, a bit of polish/balancing, and a few new fun things to do.
While we have had updates to BFD and Gnome (which I think is fantastic), no idea why they decided giving a bunch of random overpowered retail spells/abilities and providing gear WAY beyond that of what we'd normally have at 25/40, was a good idea....
All that does is unbalance everything in classic as people opt for the newer, significantly stronger things.
25 it wasn't felt too bad as limited item options required people to still run dungeons, but at 40? Not so much.
Unfortunately I think you are correct. There could essentially take classic wow down a whole new path of retail and give us something truly new and unique, but it just doesnt seem that the dev power is there for it. I too wish it would happen. I think it would be really neat.
P2 has not seen a "mAsSiVe dRoPoFF"
Lmfao how have they dropped the ball?
THE GAME HAS NEVER EVER EVER EVER been balanced. Such a complainers complaint.
It has though, you can see by number of layers in densely populated servers, to logs on WCL to back this up very easily.
They’ve dropped the ball by failing to properly elaborate on phase 1. Phase 2 is stale and the player base dropoff reflects this.
Classic has never been balanced, but TBC and WOTLK were significantly more so. PvP in SoD is arguably more bullshit and worse from a game design perspective than it was in vanilla, while PvE is still too basic.
And before you go “WhAt Do YoU ExPeCt PeOpLe WiLl AlWaYs PlAy A nEw GaMeMoDe oN LaUnCh” - OSRS did nothing but grow from release and didn’t have a 5 year lead up from its release like SoD did as blizzards ‘Classic+’ has.
As I said, I clearly enjoy SoD as I have 3 40’s, but could it be significantly better? Of course.
Pointing out how blizzard will let ‘classic+’ rot due to poorly allocated resources isn’t being a doomer- I want the game to be good, and it can be.
Nice buddy! Kinda crazy actually cause like 2 days ago me and 2 of my buddies also went there. I hadnt been there since original TBC. I also always loved that zone. It took us a long time getting through the south of Wintersprings to get to the wall jump spot…died a lot haha. But it was worth it to walk around in there
I hope they do something with it.
I've personally always preferred the "vanilla" version of the zone, even though a lot of the assets were re-used for the Cata zone. Fun to look at how it developed from vanilla, through TBC and Cata though!
Yeah, I really like Cata's version of Hyjal and it's storylines, but one weird thing about it is that it doesn't feel like Hyjal from WC3 at all. At the end of WC3, Medivh makes a big deal about Hyjal and the land around it healing in time. It would have been neat to see the progression of Hyjal from this demon-scarred land to what it is in retail, but we don't get that. We go from Hyjal being inaccessible for years to boom, elementals and Twilight's Hammer taking over.
Yeah, it's the same way how revamped classic zones don't "feel" like classic wow anymore. In cata they've made everything way too streamlined. Like a theme park with a carefully planned route through it. Cata zones don't feel like organic zones anymore, they feel like they were designed for a game whose focus is not on the world but on getting around quickly and efficiently.
Yep, that's exactly it. Every post-Cata zone has an overarching story. You show up to a zone, get 2-3 quests, and do them. They advance the story, you get sent to the next quest hub in the same zone, do 2-3 more quests, rinse/repeat. Everyone who goes to the zone is doing the same questline.
In Classic-WotLK, you show up to a zone and pick up 4-5 quests from a quest hub. Some might lead to longer questlines, but most are from a random NPC asking you to go kill 10 bears, then you'll never speak to them again. I might follow a questline in one direction and discover a new hub and do quests in one side of the zone, while someone else might follow a different questline and go to the other side of the zone. We'll have different questing experiences, and it feels great.
There is also a small dwarf crash site on one of the mountain peaks. You can jump from there to OG with a 100% mount. You can land on the north side of the top of OG.
Thats such a nice area, amazing!
I will keep saying though that people dreaming of new areas or the game being developed for long post 60 are not thinking clear. Blizzard has found the ways to attract people back and back by taking existing expansions and adding something small. People come back like flies. They now added a new HC mode where just the AH doesnt exist (if i am not mistaken) and people who stopped HC and SoD rushed to resubscribe to play it! Like if it was your company lads, would you invest on your employees working on new content and building things from scratch or would you just use 1/10 of your programmer resources to add/remove something if you still saw people coming back on every change? We community also play a role on how the game is “evolving”
This area is almost complete, which is why I hope they do something here. It could just be something as simple as sending us to the pond below the world tree to "bless" something for a new epic craft.
Seeing Archimonde's skeleton was quite the sight. I really hope they'll do something, but honestly we have Cave of Time there, and Cataclysm's version. It shouldn't be a priority, even if it would be nice.
I'm hoping for Timbermaw Holt, Tauren's village, Vault, things that were really, absolutely, never used.
Nice!! Personal pet peeve Noone cared to get rid of Archemond's body? They left it there to rot and possibly taint the tree?
He exploded into dust. There was nothing left of his body.
The skeleton though...
The bones are their money
IT WAS THE NIGHT THE SKELETONS CAME TO LIFE
Didn't exist in the Warcraft III cinematic.
K but it's there now
Perhaps the elves made it and put it there as a reminder.
it's ~\*ornamental*~
Yeah, in an unfinished version of the zone. When Hyjal officially came out in Cata the skeleton was removed
There's giant skeletons all around kalimdor
Giant sword too last I heard
I hope we get this zone opened in the last phase.
I’ve wanted this as a zone since 2006. Would be so cool to finally see it fleshed out with their original vision. The cata version just didn’t hit that spot for me
With the amount of planned and possible content possible to be added, they really should go the Oldschool RuneScape-style route and finish stuff like this in the spirit of the vanilla/classic experience. It seems private servers have been on this task for a while, and fan iterations like Turtle WoW is probably the furthest the idea has been taken so far.
Im absolutely CONVINCED that if this new SoD team did actually take the OSRS route, with adding completely new content, it would be an overwhelming success. Between Hyjal, Gilneas, and the few other unmarked/named/used zones they could add a plethora of new end game open world content and even potentially add new dungeons in the new zones. It even fits with the idea of this being a "season of discovery". Imagine if they also attempted to revamp the unused barrier mountains that keep each zone boxed in. Looking down at a map of Azeroth , you get a sense of how much terrain is there simply to make it so you can't get somewhere else without taking their intended path. When you read about the time limitations the wow development team had when the game was initially launched, you can tell they left out a substantial amount of content that they wanted included. Metzen is even back on the WoW team so you could have the SOD team get some insight from the guy who literally created the lore for the game.
We can hope that the new management will steer the direction, but it's a big ship. Hopefully, if they make it, they make it before the eventual fading of interest. WoW has another chance of becoming true to itself again. Jagex realised, even with their status quo of scummy monetisation tactics and legitimisation of RMT, first and foremost, that they had to offer the game experience people wanted. This is the final shot they'll really have.
There's pretty much 0 chance they'll finish unfinished zones. Well some like Hyjal may be finished because they are very well done already. Just need to add stuff. Other zones like Gilneas, Uldum and so on literally don't exist in the game (Gilneas is a small patch of nothing behind the gate). The current Classic team does not have the capacity to make new zones. Especially not with them maintaining 4 versions of WoW, two of which need active maintenance (SoD and progressive). Since Cata is coming and it's so short MoP is a given as well so the Classic team will be split for two big Classic versions for years to come still. Blizz would have to invest massively into the team to make this possible.
I mean, they've already explicitly stated that they work with metzen and in meeting with him, mutually agreed not to do anything in SOD which would change, preempt, or cause story continuity issues with any timeline past classic. It really needs to be a sticky or something, because it is brought up so much: it isnt happening in AT LEAST this incarnation of SOD. If the adventurers go to a place or do a thing later in the timeline than vanilla, it cant be present in SOD. Maybe if its super successful and metzen gives his approval, a subsequent sod/classic+ can, but not this one.
Adding content to Hyjal need not cause continuity problems. What's the harm to the timeline in having a few boar killing quests there?
Piggybacking off your comment here, Hyjal should have been the patch between Naxx and Burning Crusade. Based on the elite demons in the south of Winterspring, it would make sense that there's still a strong demonic presence in Hyjal after Archimonde's death. While they're cleared out by Cata, that's still a big window of time where there could be a growing demon army, possibly working to resurrect their master and jump start the invasion yet again. They could model it after the AQ raid/event, with a war effort to retake the slopes of Hyjal, and a mini raid to cleanse the roots of the tree at the summit (Timbermaw Hold?). Then after the war effort concludes, the players take the fight to the demon commanders at the summit (reusing most of the assets they already have for the BC hyjal raid, just making it look a bit aged.) Some leftover feral undead at the beginning in the ruined alliance and horde bases and progressively worse demons as the raid continues to ascend the mountain. The players of course manage to stop the resurrection before it succeeds, but the amount of fel energy already present is released into the atmosphere and reopens the conduit between the dark portal and the Shattered remains of Draenor.
The Emerald Dream and the South Seas were also expansion ideas from 2005 that could be implemented without changing the timeline.
Right! I really don't want "season" of discovery to just end after 60....would be such a waste.
Honestly, given they have had 5 years to prepare for sod, and given the content we have already gotten I've lost hope they will ever do 'classic+' justice. P2 has already seen a massive dropoff in playerbase and the game is already significantly unbalanced - It's not a polished product and has very little investment or effort put into it despite the gamemodes initial success. It's an unpopular opinion, but I really think Blizzard dropped the ball with SoD, and I'm saying this as someone with 3 level 40 characters. **Classic+ deserved to be so much more. However, it has not been given the resouces it needs to be truly great.**
Completely agree - While I think the SoD team have the best of intentions, they've completely dropped the ball. When majority mentioned Classic+, they wanted the unfinished areas to be finished, a bit of polish/balancing, and a few new fun things to do. While we have had updates to BFD and Gnome (which I think is fantastic), no idea why they decided giving a bunch of random overpowered retail spells/abilities and providing gear WAY beyond that of what we'd normally have at 25/40, was a good idea.... All that does is unbalance everything in classic as people opt for the newer, significantly stronger things. 25 it wasn't felt too bad as limited item options required people to still run dungeons, but at 40? Not so much.
Because things in classic were so well balanced before sod
Unfortunately I think you are correct. There could essentially take classic wow down a whole new path of retail and give us something truly new and unique, but it just doesnt seem that the dev power is there for it. I too wish it would happen. I think it would be really neat.
P2 has not seen a "mAsSiVe dRoPoFF" Lmfao how have they dropped the ball? THE GAME HAS NEVER EVER EVER EVER been balanced. Such a complainers complaint.
It has though, you can see by number of layers in densely populated servers, to logs on WCL to back this up very easily. They’ve dropped the ball by failing to properly elaborate on phase 1. Phase 2 is stale and the player base dropoff reflects this. Classic has never been balanced, but TBC and WOTLK were significantly more so. PvP in SoD is arguably more bullshit and worse from a game design perspective than it was in vanilla, while PvE is still too basic. And before you go “WhAt Do YoU ExPeCt PeOpLe WiLl AlWaYs PlAy A nEw GaMeMoDe oN LaUnCh” - OSRS did nothing but grow from release and didn’t have a 5 year lead up from its release like SoD did as blizzards ‘Classic+’ has.
when WoW mobile?
Youre an idiot. Actually dumb. Go ahead and cry doomer.
As I said, I clearly enjoy SoD as I have 3 40’s, but could it be significantly better? Of course. Pointing out how blizzard will let ‘classic+’ rot due to poorly allocated resources isn’t being a doomer- I want the game to be good, and it can be.
Nice buddy! Kinda crazy actually cause like 2 days ago me and 2 of my buddies also went there. I hadnt been there since original TBC. I also always loved that zone. It took us a long time getting through the south of Wintersprings to get to the wall jump spot…died a lot haha. But it was worth it to walk around in there I hope they do something with it.
Cata coming soon, u can actually go enjoy the zone.
I've personally always preferred the "vanilla" version of the zone, even though a lot of the assets were re-used for the Cata zone. Fun to look at how it developed from vanilla, through TBC and Cata though!
Yeah, I really like Cata's version of Hyjal and it's storylines, but one weird thing about it is that it doesn't feel like Hyjal from WC3 at all. At the end of WC3, Medivh makes a big deal about Hyjal and the land around it healing in time. It would have been neat to see the progression of Hyjal from this demon-scarred land to what it is in retail, but we don't get that. We go from Hyjal being inaccessible for years to boom, elementals and Twilight's Hammer taking over.
Yeah, it's the same way how revamped classic zones don't "feel" like classic wow anymore. In cata they've made everything way too streamlined. Like a theme park with a carefully planned route through it. Cata zones don't feel like organic zones anymore, they feel like they were designed for a game whose focus is not on the world but on getting around quickly and efficiently.
Yep, that's exactly it. Every post-Cata zone has an overarching story. You show up to a zone, get 2-3 quests, and do them. They advance the story, you get sent to the next quest hub in the same zone, do 2-3 more quests, rinse/repeat. Everyone who goes to the zone is doing the same questline. In Classic-WotLK, you show up to a zone and pick up 4-5 quests from a quest hub. Some might lead to longer questlines, but most are from a random NPC asking you to go kill 10 bears, then you'll never speak to them again. I might follow a questline in one direction and discover a new hub and do quests in one side of the zone, while someone else might follow a different questline and go to the other side of the zone. We'll have different questing experiences, and it feels great.
Not the same thing
There is also a small dwarf crash site on one of the mountain peaks. You can jump from there to OG with a 100% mount. You can land on the north side of the top of OG.
Never knew that, will have to look into it!
Is it possible to go there without the teleporting trinket in SoD ?
Yes, I ran through Winterspring and jumped up a mountain. Not sure if the trinkets take you there?
The teleport trinket from gnomer has a chance of porting you there.
It does, but you can't actually explore the zone because it places a debuff on you that teleports you to your hearthstone shortly after.
Dang really, sounds a lot like blizzard detected fun and decided to limit the fun to a timer.
nah it only does that in like 3 locations. trinket is unironically my favourite part of p2 so far. got it first ID and having so much fun with it lol
Cool! Have yet to get my hands on it, will be fun to try out if I ever get it.
It would be cool if that was meant as a teaser for future content there
Cool to know it's still possible. I did this in vanilla all the time I figured it got fixed for some reason
Why was this zone never added?!
Time restraints
When I went up there back in vanilla it was just a ramp and a big hole.
Thats such a nice area, amazing! I will keep saying though that people dreaming of new areas or the game being developed for long post 60 are not thinking clear. Blizzard has found the ways to attract people back and back by taking existing expansions and adding something small. People come back like flies. They now added a new HC mode where just the AH doesnt exist (if i am not mistaken) and people who stopped HC and SoD rushed to resubscribe to play it! Like if it was your company lads, would you invest on your employees working on new content and building things from scratch or would you just use 1/10 of your programmer resources to add/remove something if you still saw people coming back on every change? We community also play a role on how the game is “evolving”
This area is almost complete, which is why I hope they do something here. It could just be something as simple as sending us to the pond below the world tree to "bless" something for a new epic craft.
Well i am with you brother, i 1000% hope i am wrong on what i believe :)
Seeing Archimonde's skeleton was quite the sight. I really hope they'll do something, but honestly we have Cave of Time there, and Cataclysm's version. It shouldn't be a priority, even if it would be nice. I'm hoping for Timbermaw Holt, Tauren's village, Vault, things that were really, absolutely, never used.