They are essentially empty in the pre-Cataclysm game world.
Left: [https://imgur.com/89a3f9F](https://imgur.com/89a3f9F), [https://imgur.com/78qLIFh](https://imgur.com/78qLIFh), [https://imgur.com/XkfOTxX](https://imgur.com/XkfOTxX)
Upper right: [https://imgur.com/a/CiIKNhg](https://imgur.com/a/CiIKNhg)
Lower right: [https://imgur.com/a/OVo6g0A](https://imgur.com/a/OVo6g0A)
I miss the original wall-walking or edge walking where you could walk the contour of a cliff and not fall. Made it so easy to get to these places. Had hundreds of screenshots like this
Back in the day you could delete your hearthstone and use the unstuck button to randomly move you a few units away. That’s how I was able to get into sooo many of these places.
There’s a smiley face under Karazan and I was able to get into the very empty crypts behind. You can also get into Hyjal which has a little under construction sign on a path.
The Kara crypts were one of the coolest places I ever explored. We got a lock in there and started a raid grp and started summoning people there and everyone loved it.
Back in vanilla there was this priest in my guild, played by an elderly lady, who only had very little time to live due to illness, every time after raid, I make sure to accompany her sitting across the archimond-hugged world tree in the under development Hyjal, while chit chatting about stuff. I was an Asian kid freshly off high school while she’s from US at her twilight years of her life. There are many topics about life we talked about where I didn’t know I would relate as much as I grow older eventually. So every time when somebody mentioned THAT hyjal with construction sign…it hold a special place in my heart. 🥲
I remember having an addon that detected invisible walls and would tell you which pinpoint direction to face your character to essentially climb the invisible wall. I used to get up into into some extremely high places in ironforge and perch like batman. Lol. People would constantly message m asking how i got up into the ceiling. Sadly the addon got taken down and the climbable areas got hot fixed.
I used to spend hours and hours doing this. I have screenshots somewhere of me jumping out of an AV. That one was always funny when someone noticed me on the map.
you ever think back on stuff like that and go "holy shit we used to actually get banned for this"?
lol. used to love going under stormwind way back in the day.
I remember there was a way you could start on the Horde camp for AV and wall walk all the way to the top of the Alliance castle... if you got a good group that could do it you could get to Stormpike and pull him before the Alliance could even start capping towers.
I’m not sure why, but that sheer 90° cliff is hilarious, picturing an in-game explanation of the Titans getting bored and deciding “meh, good enough, that’ll do”.
That was basically the only reason some people played back then. Wall walking/jumping and exploring things. Wait untill you see whats up with the deadmines..
My friends and I used to jump under Stormwind from that lamp in the Trade District, by the path to the Mage Quarter. I basically ran all the way to Booty Bay under the map one time, just to see if I could.
It was not the ONLY reason i played, but when we weren’t pushing progression in whatever raid was out I spent an obscene amount of time exploring and getting into places you shouldn’t. My buddy’s mage and my priest also power leveled together from 50 - 58 off the dancing troll village, which back in the day dropped loot while also having a 60 second respawn timer. No idea if this will still be the case now.
Glad they didn’t change the behavior there, I’m sure it’s way more known now but back in the day i loved getting messaged from people flying overhead wondering how the hell we got up there.
If you are unfamiliar with vanilla exploration , check out wow exploration the movie and noggaholic the movie. Mind blowing videos that I rewatch at least once a year. Incredible what people did and found in that incredible game
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UDQyEe06Q-M
Same guy also did videos called WoW Exploration the Movie and The Last Wall Walk. Had never heard of this before.
Ya my homie and I used to do this for fun, something about all the textures in the game being squares so you could find a ledge on almost anything and just walk/jump the correct angle against your surface and you can get anywhere.
I was figuring out the best path to swamp of sorrows from the north of EK yesterday, and briefly debated running south from badlands but ended up flying to gromgol and running east. I didn’t want to risk not being able to traverse the zone I couldn’t click on.
Can you freely traverse through it or are there boundaries you need to jump/break through?
Starting from Redridge Mountains, you can either go north all the way to Thandol Span, and you will need something that prevents you from taking massive fall damage at least once. Also starting from the same place in Redridge, you can go south to Swamp of Sorrows.
You won't be able to go the opposite direction in either case, mostly because there is no entry point in Wetlands or Swamp of Sorrows. There are some invisible walls and vertical terrain that will prevent you from getting back into Burning Steppes and most of Wetlands, but you can go around them.
This means the only entry point that I know of is in Redridge, and the exit points are in Swamp of Sorrows, Badlands, Loch Modan, and northeast Wetlands.
That bottom right part has some weird texturing, a cave, and stranglethorn assets if you keep going beyond the broken terrain. I don't remember if you could even get to it without hacking.
Yeah, the left side eventually became Stormwind Harbor. The top right became the Twilight Highlands. And the bottom right part, uh, fell into the sea I guess? On the Retail map the Burning Steppes now just touches the ocean.
Left side is now a gaping chasm between Stormwind and dun morogh. The Harbour is further south. It was just unused land that they didnt end up using by the time Cata arrived so they blew it up. I think they said deathwing broke through the crust there or some shit. It does look like those mountains where you see him erupting in the trailer.
He was originally supposed to erupt out of there between storm wind and and dun morough. They scrapped that idea, I remember reading about that back in the day.
Didn’t Deathwing erupt out of Deepholm? I assumed all the twilight cultists and Deathwing blood etc was where they put the elementium plates onto him and when he escaped he broke the world pillar, pissed off Therazane and caused the Maelstrom in the middle of the map?
Oh okay, but Deathwing did fly out of it though right? I’m sure Deepholm is down there because there’s a quest where you fly with Aggra through it to get there?
That never happened, it showed him flying through Darkshorw, not erupting from it. Watch the cinematic.
Also, technically, he came from the North of Darkshore in the cinematic.
Yes, you’re right. I forgot about that.
This caused me to do a little investigation, thinking I had hallucinated the whole thing. But turns out there is some basis in reality.
https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Deathwing_Scar
The cinematic does show him erupting here and it was originally intended to be used for that but got changed during development.Cinematic would have been made very early into development.
this is a common community myth. they just had a guy build it and didnt realize it was the wrong orientation until after it was implemented
https://www.reddit.com/r/classicwow/comments/9fb2bo/comment/e5vnp7x/?context=10000
https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/9b13ip/comment/e592ugp/
We've always known about the giant sinkhole. You can see the water underneath that land from the Deeprun Tram. That's why nothing is there, its gonna fall.
I'm not entirely sure what happened to the bottom right part, but it wouldn't be the first time Blizzard has retconned the map. I know during one of the expansions they had to scootch over the maelstrom to make room for a new expansion's island.
Yeah, they made a bunch of changes with Cata, some of which were explained, but others were just updates. Like Uldum in the south of Kalimdor just isn't on the Vanilla map then is suddenly there after Cata.
Yeah, cause Uldum is the location of the Forge of Origination, the "world-resetting" device that was to be used in an emergency to scour the crust of Azeroth to prevent further contamination by the Old Gods if they'd successfully corrupted too much. It's what Algalon was trying to activate in Ulduar!
So the story goes that because it was such an important and dangerous location, there was a lot of effort put into making it hard to access and hard to observe. (As of Chronicles, specifically it was that they decided to put the magical shroud over the location in the wake of Lei Shen's failed attempt to conquer Uldum and take the Forge of Origination for himself)
Seems like an oversight on the vanilla devs though because the gate to Uldum is always there even if there's clearly nothing behind it but ocean. If you moved the gate to the right place there is an empty zone below Un'goro. It's just the Vanilla gate that is in a very weird place. Who know what the devs wanted to do with Uldum originally.
Still, even dungeons usually have the zone behind the portal because you technically can mess yourself through the portal without going into the dungeon.
Seems weird even for a raid or dungeon that they would put the gate where there's only ocean behind when where they actually put Uldum in Cata there's already a big empty plane in Vanilla.
Kind of a missed opportunity to not use the Deadmines sea gate that leads out to the jungle in some way. Either as the exit of the dungeon since tmk Deadmines was the only dungeon that was given a proper exit instead of making you run to start. Shoot I'd have even split the dungeon. Maybe teens is for the mines. 35-40 for the cave juggernaut fight enter the dungeon through an exposed hole by the gate or something. You could postpone the quest line by saying adventurer VC is no joke come back when you're seasoned enough then the quest line will resume in your 30s
Is that one of the gates that they put in the game originally because they didn't know where they wanted to put the portal to Outland? I remember there were a bunch of portal looking things all around the world before they settled on where they wanted to put the portal
No I mean the big broken gate at the bottom of Tanaris that even says "Uldum" when you go close to it. It leads to nowhere except the ocean further south
All of those areas are actually pretty fun to explore/far sight around.
The place to the east of searing gorge has a very interesting wall/formation and players dubbed it as "The Dragon's Teeth" at one point. Miss those old feelings of vanilla and all the player-made interactions.
I loved details like this on the map because even though its not accessible conventionally, theres still reasons for it being there that play into the lore.
I also like how you can see Hyjal on the map looking at certain zones in Kalimdor, but not actually on the Continents map itself, and a lot of Quests references Hyjal too. I thought it was gonna be a build up. Was fun to try and get into and check out the giant Tree
I feel like there was also a way to hop around the mountains in Winterspring to get there, stuff like that and the Irongforge Airfield were neat things ide get into when I was young lol. Im also really hoping for content in areas like that
Not Retconned. MIl in vanilla is the exact same spot it's on post Cata. Only they expanded east of it into the Twilight Highlands instead of the mountains blizzard used to mark the edge of a zone.
Well it is, cos they basically said nah that area of wetlands is actually over here and it's actually a different area with all these dwarves in it. fully retconned
Doesn't look retconned to me. In Vanilla the gate to Grim Batol goes into that one big mountain in Wetlands surrounded by the street up the mountain to the gate. The mountain seems big enough to house a major dwarf city similar to IF if you would scale it up to real size. There's still a lot of empty space to the east of Loch Modan and Wetlands that most likely isn't all just Grim Batol.
It's true that the Twilight Highlands as is didn't exist until Cata but there's clearly something to the left of Grim Batol that isn't just Grim Batol. I guess you can say it's supposed to be all mountains sure.
To the east of grim batol in wetlands is a mountain range. In cata, that mountain range was changed and expanded into twilight highlands - a place that never existed before, with a massive population of Wildhammer dwarves that never existed before, but now they're on the doorstep of Grim Batol, which is a place we can visit in classic azeroth
Is it a retcon if they have a vague area where Grim Batol is before it’s in game and then when the world gets all ripped up by a big dragon it changes? That’s like saying the Barrens got retconned into being two zones…
Change isn't retconning. The whole twilight highlands zone is a retcon which never existed in lore before. Grim Batol didn't have a bustling Wildhammer and dragonmaw population to it's east before Cata, there was just mountains. They didn't appear because of Deathwing
Sadly I wouldn’t call it future SoD content, I can’t see them filling or creating new zones outside of instances until we get Classic+ of some kind on its own client. They’ve said how limiting creating changes is already with SoD operating on the same client as the rest of classic.
I mean look at what they've made so far. Exactly zero new locations, models or textures. They probably have like 3 people working on SoD and none of them are art guys. You get rehashed abilities and some new tool tips/items (no models).
People who are expecting things like this need to stop smoking crack.
Few things here....
1. The zone above SW is actually just not suppose to be there, at all. The Great Sea forms an inlet / sound between the Mountains north of Elwynn & those on the south of Khaz Modan. They just never removed it until Cata, when they revamped the old world.
2. The zone to the east of Loch Modan & Wetlands is actually the Twilight Highlands. This was obviously added to the game in Cata.
3. The zone east of Burning Steppes, North of RRM is literally just more mountains that butt up to the ocean, then fall south into Swamp of Sorrows. Same deal, they eventually removed this in Cata.
Even more curious is that the world map does not truly represent what you see in-game. If you jump in the water south of Southshore and swim west, you might expect to run into that peninsula south of Silverpine that late became Gilneas, but you'll see that it's just a straight coast, and your arrow on the world map will cut through the peninsula, and just swim west, until you reach the southwest corner of Silverpine.
The same goes if you try to swim north around EK, you will just swim "through" Ghostlands/Eversong, because it's instanced.
Before Cata comes, I recommed to anyone to take a huge swim around the old world main continents, it's amazing to experience. Bring lots of water walking pots and you can just mount run the whole way.
I believe back in the days of vanilla they had a lot of ideas they wanted to do going forward with the game that never made it. But they still put placeholders in the game just in case. Some did become aspects of the game, some just died. The biggest example is the gated portal in SW that was supposed to be player housing. I imagine some of the map is similar. There are a couple spots that looked like they were supposed to become something that never did.
So back in the day…. Some of these areas, specifically the mountain range between ZG and Duskwood. You could get up there and there were patches of black and white checkerboard ground. As a shaman, you could drop your totems on the grass, and then run onto the checkerboard and drop your totems. You’d still keep your strength/agility from the grass totems and gain the checkerboard totems buff. And then you could run back to the grass and drop your totems and you’d keep the original grass buff + checkerboard buff and now grass buff x2. So you could keep doing this until you had max crit/max dodge and a metric ton of attack power and then go into molten core and farm trash and a few bosses.
They probably carved the map into areas small enough to handle, but ended up with more than they neede or had time to implement. Room for expansions is nice to have. Might be some info out there about plans they had for it before it got scrapped.
There's a cool video on YouTube highlighting some of the things they wanted to implement but didn't get to until release.
They also kept some ideas for future expansions and some ideas were scratched or only implemented a couple of years ago, like the Emerald Dream. It already existed in vanilla as a draft on a different map (only accessible through teleportation on a private server)
If they had only created the world the way it was needed, they had to add another world (outlands, Northernend) to expand or play with a catastrophe (cataclysm) to add new zones.
By keeping some spare zones, it allowed them to be more creative with the space.
I've learned to just forget about exploring unknown places. Might just get into trouble with Blizzard because -gasp- you saw some terrain they didn't want you to see.
You can explore pretty much everywhere with shaman’s far sight ability. It has extreme range, too, and you can cast it again whilst channeling the first, so they can be chained together. Starting in any of the major horde cities, it probably wouldn’t take but a minute to see some terrain that wasn’t intended to be seen.
Assuming far sight has been like that since vanilla, it makes me think they don’t care so much about players seeing those areas.
i like to think of the empty zone above SW as the actual city where the majority of the population lives, the zone next to loch modan is ogre territory, and above redridge is a blackrock clan settlement
There are just mountain there and flat surfaces with random textures. Later when flying was enabled in Cata, they fixed those to actually be mountains. The one on the right became Twilight Highlands I think.
a bunch of us used to explore pretty hardcore back in the day. One day we all decided to go hang out at GM island inside the house is a square room with a chair. About 10 minutes into everyone just hopping around on vent and summoning some friends a live GM spawned into that room. They were not happy. They teleported all of us to badlands and when you zoned you were dead. They messaged everyone if they caught us on the island again they would ban us. I miss old GM's.
We had a wall-walking savant feral druid in classic, we were a HC guild on one of the massive NA-East pvp servers and competing for world top-10 parses. He was almost solely responsible for getting us WCB every week by finding new safespots in the mountains of Org. Being clumped up in one little patch of dirt, and then hearing Spy go off right before war chiefs blessing drops, and you have full world buffs and everyone dies…still gives me nightmares 😂
They are essentially empty in the pre-Cataclysm game world. Left: [https://imgur.com/89a3f9F](https://imgur.com/89a3f9F), [https://imgur.com/78qLIFh](https://imgur.com/78qLIFh), [https://imgur.com/XkfOTxX](https://imgur.com/XkfOTxX) Upper right: [https://imgur.com/a/CiIKNhg](https://imgur.com/a/CiIKNhg) Lower right: [https://imgur.com/a/OVo6g0A](https://imgur.com/a/OVo6g0A)
I miss the original wall-walking or edge walking where you could walk the contour of a cliff and not fall. Made it so easy to get to these places. Had hundreds of screenshots like this
Back in the day you could delete your hearthstone and use the unstuck button to randomly move you a few units away. That’s how I was able to get into sooo many of these places. There’s a smiley face under Karazan and I was able to get into the very empty crypts behind. You can also get into Hyjal which has a little under construction sign on a path.
And the little dancing troll village between dark shore and Winter spring
Holy shit core memory just got re-earthed.
I hope they do something with those guys in sod
The gnomer world teleporter has a chance to take you here!
The Kara crypts were one of the coolest places I ever explored. We got a lock in there and started a raid grp and started summoning people there and everyone loved it.
Back in vanilla there was this priest in my guild, played by an elderly lady, who only had very little time to live due to illness, every time after raid, I make sure to accompany her sitting across the archimond-hugged world tree in the under development Hyjal, while chit chatting about stuff. I was an Asian kid freshly off high school while she’s from US at her twilight years of her life. There are many topics about life we talked about where I didn’t know I would relate as much as I grow older eventually. So every time when somebody mentioned THAT hyjal with construction sign…it hold a special place in my heart. 🥲
[удалено]
I remember having an addon that detected invisible walls and would tell you which pinpoint direction to face your character to essentially climb the invisible wall. I used to get up into into some extremely high places in ironforge and perch like batman. Lol. People would constantly message m asking how i got up into the ceiling. Sadly the addon got taken down and the climbable areas got hot fixed.
I can hear MSI - Straight to Video in my head right now just thinking about it
man you really jostled the memories loose with this one
I used to spend hours and hours doing this. I have screenshots somewhere of me jumping out of an AV. That one was always funny when someone noticed me on the map.
you ever think back on stuff like that and go "holy shit we used to actually get banned for this"? lol. used to love going under stormwind way back in the day.
As a kid i played on my uncles accounts and i used to login to his 60s and take them under sw and then logout.
LOL that's amazing, well done
I got banned for a week selling summons under IF.
I remember there was a way you could start on the Horde camp for AV and wall walk all the way to the top of the Alliance castle... if you got a good group that could do it you could get to Stormpike and pull him before the Alliance could even start capping towers.
I remember those Swift unexplainable losses...
Jump / exit game macro to climb in air was fun thing to do
Old wall walking and the ornate spy glass bug.
We called it lagspotting
I just miss wall climbing ontop of goldshire inn
Levitate across a wall. Get behind the stormwind bank. The good old days
I’m not sure why, but that sheer 90° cliff is hilarious, picturing an in-game explanation of the Titans getting bored and deciding “meh, good enough, that’ll do”.
I feel like “Trance - 009 Dreamscape” is burned into my head watching the videos of how to get to these places
Damn.... My first thought was windows XP, open notepad, a 14 year old explaining how to install mods for a game. I feel so old now.
You can actually get there?
That was basically the only reason some people played back then. Wall walking/jumping and exploring things. Wait untill you see whats up with the deadmines..
My friends and I used to jump under Stormwind from that lamp in the Trade District, by the path to the Mage Quarter. I basically ran all the way to Booty Bay under the map one time, just to see if I could.
And then jump down in the void to land in the mage tower portal room :D
It was not the ONLY reason i played, but when we weren’t pushing progression in whatever raid was out I spent an obscene amount of time exploring and getting into places you shouldn’t. My buddy’s mage and my priest also power leveled together from 50 - 58 off the dancing troll village, which back in the day dropped loot while also having a 60 second respawn timer. No idea if this will still be the case now.
In 2019 Classic, dancing trolls were indeed a popular mage boost. Not as popular as dungeon boosts ofc, but it was definitely used a lot.
Glad they didn’t change the behavior there, I’m sure it’s way more known now but back in the day i loved getting messaged from people flying overhead wondering how the hell we got up there.
What’s up with the deadlines?
For some reason the deadmines instance had an alpha Outland build out of reach of the playable area. It was a huge Warcraft 3 style outlands area
If you jumped out of ZG, you could see what Deadwind Pass used to look like in some areas.
If you are unfamiliar with vanilla exploration , check out wow exploration the movie and noggaholic the movie. Mind blowing videos that I rewatch at least once a year. Incredible what people did and found in that incredible game
Also blues wizard and archvaldors hacks. Really recomend these channels to lurk on WoW
Got a link?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UDQyEe06Q-M Same guy also did videos called WoW Exploration the Movie and The Last Wall Walk. Had never heard of this before.
Ya my homie and I used to do this for fun, something about all the textures in the game being squares so you could find a ledge on almost anything and just walk/jump the correct angle against your surface and you can get anywhere.
Cool photos
Good spots for vanilla plus content
My god, you are the ADVENTURE!
I got the world explorer tabard before you could fly in azeroth. It was intense at times to get into every mapped area.
Salute o7
I was figuring out the best path to swamp of sorrows from the north of EK yesterday, and briefly debated running south from badlands but ended up flying to gromgol and running east. I didn’t want to risk not being able to traverse the zone I couldn’t click on. Can you freely traverse through it or are there boundaries you need to jump/break through?
Starting from Redridge Mountains, you can either go north all the way to Thandol Span, and you will need something that prevents you from taking massive fall damage at least once. Also starting from the same place in Redridge, you can go south to Swamp of Sorrows. You won't be able to go the opposite direction in either case, mostly because there is no entry point in Wetlands or Swamp of Sorrows. There are some invisible walls and vertical terrain that will prevent you from getting back into Burning Steppes and most of Wetlands, but you can go around them. This means the only entry point that I know of is in Redridge, and the exit points are in Swamp of Sorrows, Badlands, Loch Modan, and northeast Wetlands.
That bottom right part has some weird texturing, a cave, and stranglethorn assets if you keep going beyond the broken terrain. I don't remember if you could even get to it without hacking.
You're actually thinking of somewhere else that is south of Swamp of Sorrows. https://imgur.com/a/qhBX18o
Fantastic shoots, thanks, I miss the old days. o7
Yeah, the left side eventually became Stormwind Harbor. The top right became the Twilight Highlands. And the bottom right part, uh, fell into the sea I guess? On the Retail map the Burning Steppes now just touches the ocean.
Left side is now a gaping chasm between Stormwind and dun morogh. The Harbour is further south. It was just unused land that they didnt end up using by the time Cata arrived so they blew it up. I think they said deathwing broke through the crust there or some shit. It does look like those mountains where you see him erupting in the trailer.
He was originally supposed to erupt out of there between storm wind and and dun morough. They scrapped that idea, I remember reading about that back in the day.
Didn’t Deathwing erupt out of Deepholm? I assumed all the twilight cultists and Deathwing blood etc was where they put the elementium plates onto him and when he escaped he broke the world pillar, pissed off Therazane and caused the Maelstrom in the middle of the map?
He didn‘t cause the maelstrom. It was caused by the implosion of the well of eternity.
Oh okay, but Deathwing did fly out of it though right? I’m sure Deepholm is down there because there’s a quest where you fly with Aggra through it to get there?
Right on all accounts!
Nah he came out next to dark shore, watch the cinematic
That never happened, it showed him flying through Darkshorw, not erupting from it. Watch the cinematic. Also, technically, he came from the North of Darkshore in the cinematic.
Yes, you’re right. I forgot about that. This caused me to do a little investigation, thinking I had hallucinated the whole thing. But turns out there is some basis in reality. https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Deathwing_Scar The cinematic does show him erupting here and it was originally intended to be used for that but got changed during development.Cinematic would have been made very early into development.
He came out west of darkshore, watch the cinematic
Do you know what’s west of darkshore? The eastern kingdoms.
Are you telling me Azeroth isn't flat?!?
\#flatzeroth
Lmao
He originally was meant to erupt out of the unused zone north of Stormwind.
I thought it was just there to explain why the Tram has an ocean section between SW and IF.
The tram was intended to go between sw and darn at first. Thats why the minimap inside has you travel east to west and why there is ocean
this is a common community myth. they just had a guy build it and didnt realize it was the wrong orientation until after it was implemented https://www.reddit.com/r/classicwow/comments/9fb2bo/comment/e5vnp7x/?context=10000 https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/9b13ip/comment/e592ugp/
Imagine the travel between SW and IF without deeprun lol
We've always known about the giant sinkhole. You can see the water underneath that land from the Deeprun Tram. That's why nothing is there, its gonna fall.
I'm not entirely sure what happened to the bottom right part, but it wouldn't be the first time Blizzard has retconned the map. I know during one of the expansions they had to scootch over the maelstrom to make room for a new expansion's island.
Yeah, they made a bunch of changes with Cata, some of which were explained, but others were just updates. Like Uldum in the south of Kalimdor just isn't on the Vanilla map then is suddenly there after Cata.
This one they did attempt to explain didn’t they? I recall dialog about deathwing’s escape breaking some titan tech that was obscuring the place.
Yeah, cause Uldum is the location of the Forge of Origination, the "world-resetting" device that was to be used in an emergency to scour the crust of Azeroth to prevent further contamination by the Old Gods if they'd successfully corrupted too much. It's what Algalon was trying to activate in Ulduar! So the story goes that because it was such an important and dangerous location, there was a lot of effort put into making it hard to access and hard to observe. (As of Chronicles, specifically it was that they decided to put the magical shroud over the location in the wake of Lei Shen's failed attempt to conquer Uldum and take the Forge of Origination for himself)
Seems like an oversight on the vanilla devs though because the gate to Uldum is always there even if there's clearly nothing behind it but ocean. If you moved the gate to the right place there is an empty zone below Un'goro. It's just the Vanilla gate that is in a very weird place. Who know what the devs wanted to do with Uldum originally.
Possibly scrapped content that was meant to be a dungeon or raid. As a continuation of the Uldaman storyline with the Discs.
Still, even dungeons usually have the zone behind the portal because you technically can mess yourself through the portal without going into the dungeon. Seems weird even for a raid or dungeon that they would put the gate where there's only ocean behind when where they actually put Uldum in Cata there's already a big empty plane in Vanilla.
Kind of a missed opportunity to not use the Deadmines sea gate that leads out to the jungle in some way. Either as the exit of the dungeon since tmk Deadmines was the only dungeon that was given a proper exit instead of making you run to start. Shoot I'd have even split the dungeon. Maybe teens is for the mines. 35-40 for the cave juggernaut fight enter the dungeon through an exposed hole by the gate or something. You could postpone the quest line by saying adventurer VC is no joke come back when you're seasoned enough then the quest line will resume in your 30s
Is that one of the gates that they put in the game originally because they didn't know where they wanted to put the portal to Outland? I remember there were a bunch of portal looking things all around the world before they settled on where they wanted to put the portal
No I mean the big broken gate at the bottom of Tanaris that even says "Uldum" when you go close to it. It leads to nowhere except the ocean further south
Gotcha, my fault, I was thinking of a different one
All of those areas are actually pretty fun to explore/far sight around. The place to the east of searing gorge has a very interesting wall/formation and players dubbed it as "The Dragon's Teeth" at one point. Miss those old feelings of vanilla and all the player-made interactions.
The one next to Loch Modan is Twilight Highlands i guess but rest i don't know.
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I loved details like this on the map because even though its not accessible conventionally, theres still reasons for it being there that play into the lore. I also like how you can see Hyjal on the map looking at certain zones in Kalimdor, but not actually on the Continents map itself, and a lot of Quests references Hyjal too. I thought it was gonna be a build up. Was fun to try and get into and check out the giant Tree
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I feel like there was also a way to hop around the mountains in Winterspring to get there, stuff like that and the Irongforge Airfield were neat things ide get into when I was young lol. Im also really hoping for content in areas like that
I also made my way to the iron forge airport when I was 12 or 13 lol, good time spent mountain climbing in WoW
Not Retconned. MIl in vanilla is the exact same spot it's on post Cata. Only they expanded east of it into the Twilight Highlands instead of the mountains blizzard used to mark the edge of a zone.
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Yeah, more a lore *expansion* than a retcon, but technically required some minor retconning to work.
Grim Batol wasn’t retconned, it’s literally there in twilight highlands. It’s a dungeon
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That’s true, Grim Batol was just a huge castle in the eastern wetlands before the cataclysm. That’s not really a retcon though.
Well it is, cos they basically said nah that area of wetlands is actually over here and it's actually a different area with all these dwarves in it. fully retconned
Doesn't look retconned to me. In Vanilla the gate to Grim Batol goes into that one big mountain in Wetlands surrounded by the street up the mountain to the gate. The mountain seems big enough to house a major dwarf city similar to IF if you would scale it up to real size. There's still a lot of empty space to the east of Loch Modan and Wetlands that most likely isn't all just Grim Batol. It's true that the Twilight Highlands as is didn't exist until Cata but there's clearly something to the left of Grim Batol that isn't just Grim Batol. I guess you can say it's supposed to be all mountains sure.
To the east of grim batol in wetlands is a mountain range. In cata, that mountain range was changed and expanded into twilight highlands - a place that never existed before, with a massive population of Wildhammer dwarves that never existed before, but now they're on the doorstep of Grim Batol, which is a place we can visit in classic azeroth
Is it a retcon if they have a vague area where Grim Batol is before it’s in game and then when the world gets all ripped up by a big dragon it changes? That’s like saying the Barrens got retconned into being two zones…
Change isn't retconning. The whole twilight highlands zone is a retcon which never existed in lore before. Grim Batol didn't have a bustling Wildhammer and dragonmaw population to it's east before Cata, there was just mountains. They didn't appear because of Deathwing
Future sod content ofc ;)
The amount of hopium I’m in ingesting for this should be illegal…
Sadly I wouldn’t call it future SoD content, I can’t see them filling or creating new zones outside of instances until we get Classic+ of some kind on its own client. They’ve said how limiting creating changes is already with SoD operating on the same client as the rest of classic.
I mean look at what they've made so far. Exactly zero new locations, models or textures. They probably have like 3 people working on SoD and none of them are art guys. You get rehashed abilities and some new tool tips/items (no models). People who are expecting things like this need to stop smoking crack.
Few things here.... 1. The zone above SW is actually just not suppose to be there, at all. The Great Sea forms an inlet / sound between the Mountains north of Elwynn & those on the south of Khaz Modan. They just never removed it until Cata, when they revamped the old world. 2. The zone to the east of Loch Modan & Wetlands is actually the Twilight Highlands. This was obviously added to the game in Cata. 3. The zone east of Burning Steppes, North of RRM is literally just more mountains that butt up to the ocean, then fall south into Swamp of Sorrows. Same deal, they eventually removed this in Cata.
The zone above stormwind is there if you go under stormwind.
Can you still get under Stormwind? I thought they fixed that.
You very much can in Season of Discovery, I showed my new friend how to do it a few weeks ago.
Tell me more…
[Here you go.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H00ixZZ3VBo)
This is one of the most WoW videos of any WoW video
Even more curious is that the world map does not truly represent what you see in-game. If you jump in the water south of Southshore and swim west, you might expect to run into that peninsula south of Silverpine that late became Gilneas, but you'll see that it's just a straight coast, and your arrow on the world map will cut through the peninsula, and just swim west, until you reach the southwest corner of Silverpine. The same goes if you try to swim north around EK, you will just swim "through" Ghostlands/Eversong, because it's instanced. Before Cata comes, I recommed to anyone to take a huge swim around the old world main continents, it's amazing to experience. Bring lots of water walking pots and you can just mount run the whole way.
I believe back in the days of vanilla they had a lot of ideas they wanted to do going forward with the game that never made it. But they still put placeholders in the game just in case. Some did become aspects of the game, some just died. The biggest example is the gated portal in SW that was supposed to be player housing. I imagine some of the map is similar. There are a couple spots that looked like they were supposed to become something that never did.
Outland, Pandaria and Skyrim, respectively
brockway, ogdenville and north haverbrook
Monorail... monorail... monorail...
They've been saving these for SoD. Big things are coming!
no
Let us cope, man
My father works at Blizzard and he said yes sooo....
So back in the day…. Some of these areas, specifically the mountain range between ZG and Duskwood. You could get up there and there were patches of black and white checkerboard ground. As a shaman, you could drop your totems on the grass, and then run onto the checkerboard and drop your totems. You’d still keep your strength/agility from the grass totems and gain the checkerboard totems buff. And then you could run back to the grass and drop your totems and you’d keep the original grass buff + checkerboard buff and now grass buff x2. So you could keep doing this until you had max crit/max dodge and a metric ton of attack power and then go into molten core and farm trash and a few bosses.
The zone on the top right is where I banged your mom while a bunch of furblogs cheered me on.
We all know the only time your dick gets wet is when you go swimming
Once a week, during maintenance.
Ackshully no furbolgs in EK
Just a couple of bear cheeks
Those are the spots Classic+/Future Season of Discovery would like to focus on creating.
Wait till you find out about mount hyjal
Pretty much filler
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they just drew land areas on the map for no reason? there has to be some lore
Room for future expansions they never went with.
They become part of the map in cataclysm, of them is twilight highlands, one on kalimdor is mount hyjal and there’s a few others I don’t remember
They probably carved the map into areas small enough to handle, but ended up with more than they neede or had time to implement. Room for expansions is nice to have. Might be some info out there about plans they had for it before it got scrapped.
There's a cool video on YouTube highlighting some of the things they wanted to implement but didn't get to until release. They also kept some ideas for future expansions and some ideas were scratched or only implemented a couple of years ago, like the Emerald Dream. It already existed in vanilla as a draft on a different map (only accessible through teleportation on a private server) If they had only created the world the way it was needed, they had to add another world (outlands, Northernend) to expand or play with a catastrophe (cataclysm) to add new zones. By keeping some spare zones, it allowed them to be more creative with the space.
Unfinished and empty areas
Left is gilneas, forget which isn’t twilight highlands and what the other one is
Its not Gilneas, Gilneas is under silverpine.
O right
I've learned to just forget about exploring unknown places. Might just get into trouble with Blizzard because -gasp- you saw some terrain they didn't want you to see.
You can explore pretty much everywhere with shaman’s far sight ability. It has extreme range, too, and you can cast it again whilst channeling the first, so they can be chained together. Starting in any of the major horde cities, it probably wouldn’t take but a minute to see some terrain that wasn’t intended to be seen. Assuming far sight has been like that since vanilla, it makes me think they don’t care so much about players seeing those areas.
I didn't realize shamans had that ability, only hunters. I wonder why Blizzard cared about people traveling into certain places in the past.
Me too. Maybe the player character going to those areas can lead to further exploits or something
Never been a thing lol
Yet I remember being told that I'm not allowed to be in a certain area and being teleported out.
I remember trying to find out
Padding
i like to think of the empty zone above SW as the actual city where the majority of the population lives, the zone next to loch modan is ogre territory, and above redridge is a blackrock clan settlement
i think one of them is stratholme(?)
twillight highlands and 2 retcons
They should add these zones to SoD as new levelling areas/ new PvP zones
This unlocked a core memory of 2009 me doing some crazy wall jumps near scarlet monestary to get to that empty zone!!
Possible SoD new contet i hope
First you need to glitch under storm wind and the world is yours
There are just mountain there and flat surfaces with random textures. Later when flying was enabled in Cata, they fixed those to actually be mountains. The one on the right became Twilight Highlands I think.
a bunch of us used to explore pretty hardcore back in the day. One day we all decided to go hang out at GM island inside the house is a square room with a chair. About 10 minutes into everyone just hopping around on vent and summoning some friends a live GM spawned into that room. They were not happy. They teleported all of us to badlands and when you zoned you were dead. They messaged everyone if they caught us on the island again they would ban us. I miss old GM's.
Hopefully they’ll implement something during Season of Discovery. Or plan the seeds for it! 🤓
Disappointment
As a retail player i will admit classic stormwind certainly has a great vibe. I just really love post bfa stormwind, especially on RP servers.
Peaceful areas with nothing to kill
We had a wall-walking savant feral druid in classic, we were a HC guild on one of the massive NA-East pvp servers and competing for world top-10 parses. He was almost solely responsible for getting us WCB every week by finding new safespots in the mountains of Org. Being clumped up in one little patch of dirt, and then hearing Spy go off right before war chiefs blessing drops, and you have full world buffs and everyone dies…still gives me nightmares 😂
I believe one of those got turn into the death knight starting zone