The Broken Isles

Why are they so ugly Sup Forums? Why can't they make good zones like Storm Peaks or Uldum?

>Uldum
>good

Uldum was cool, man.

it's lifeless and bland, user.

>One biome is boring
>But large zones are too much work
Welcome to the frozen tropical temperate wasteland paradise of Northrend.

Howling Fjord was reasonable, it was only Sholazar that stood out and it was Ungoro 2.0 anyway.

Yes that was the point

Uldum looked great, it's main flaw was being unfinished as fuck.

Northrend also has
>A FUCKING LEAF-land : World of Warcraft Edition

Personally, I hated the Harrison Jones quest chain. Too many fucking cutscenes. I'm trying to level through Uldum, not watch a movie.

Nobody liked the Harrison Jones meme quest chain and felt it was a huge waste of resources. The zone was just so fucking unfinished it was painful.

According to the Warcraft lore, all of Northrend should have looked like Icecrown

don't you want to be entertained?

He was fine in ZA as a fun little easter egg.
He did not need to come back and get an entire zone dedicated to him. Though ruining good zones with awful ideas was what Cata was all about

It's a disjointed mess of checklist race-themed zones that took blatant retconning to shoehorn in, that's why
[x] Night Elf zone
[x] Vrykul zone
[x] Tauren zone
Only Suramar and Azsuna actually feel like they belong in something called "Broken Isles".

>WoW zone design then
>Lets make a large area then add some points of interest here and there with clear roads.
>WoW zone design now
>Lets take this tiny block and now lets fill it with walls and mountains and cliffs everywhere and now lets make the map very shitty so that people can't take a direct path to their quest they need to go around this whole mountain to waste their time.

>Crystalsong forest
>prettiest zone they ever made
>literally did not use it
>like at all

what the FUCK was the point?

it'd be boring as hell tho

They originally intended to set the Argent Tournament there, but Dalaran being a black hole of endless lag ruined that.

>Stormheim
>Not good

nublizz

>Howling Fjord, now in orange
Yes, how incredibly fascinating.

>Silverpine
>nice zone, could be a good alternative to Barrens leveling
>has a grand total of like seven quests, barely gets you to lvl 16 maybe
Not using good zones is kinda their thing, really

Icecrown is a massive glacier, most of northrend even back then was at the very least described like borean tundra and dragonblight. Sholozar is based on on the hollow earth theory that states there's a tropical jungle under an ice window in the north pole.

At least in Vanilla it was a good idea to level in Silverpine to maybe 14 before actually heading to the Barrens.

Are we talking pre-Cata or post-Cata?

He probably meant visually, Uldum WAS a great looking zone

But after teasing players with the gates since the beginning of WoW, having the majority of the zone devoted to a joke quest line was a slap in the face

Now that I've been leveling characters since literally Cataclysm, I have to say the WotLK zones are shit to level in. Too many bullshit RPs and vehicle questlines with meandering requirements.

Biggest fuck you was having the entrance to it off the side of some random mountain chain. Catalcysm ripped down the original entrance but once you get in there is a dead end.

So in your personal opinion they shouldn't be there because you dislike it.

>Uldum WAS a great looking zone
Chiefly this. It nailed the Ancient Egypt aesthetic perfectly and the Titan stuff (like that giant underground vault you fall into with HJ) looked amazing.

And they've fucked it all up.

Remember the hole something had made in it that was there since Vanilla? Teasing about something that had escaped Uldum? Taht went nowhere too.

I prefer WotLK zones to Post-Cata 1-60 Azeroth, WoD, and Legion questing. These were horrifically linear with only rarely giving you more than 3 quests at once. I see where you're coming from though, there's a huge number of individual quests I would skip even back in WotLK. Far more than any other expack.

>theres a giant hole here
>made by something really fucking big
>lol nah theres nothing in there but a box
>time to watch a 15 minute cutscene

No, they shouldn't be there because they are blatant rehashes of earlier content put there for no adequately explained or even plausible reason. Why is there a Vrykul population half the world away from where they're supposed to be? Who the fuck are all these night elves and how have they survived there all this time? Why does one look like a copy/pasted Howling Fjord and the other is the same for Ashenvale? At least the mountain-dwelling Tauren are somewhat different, even if the question of "why the fuck are they all there and how come four (f not five, I don't remember BtDP that well) separate orc clans, Aegwynn, Illidan, the naga and Maiev didn't notice any of them?"

yes

Obviously pre

Have the broken isles been mentioned in lore before legion? I skipped a bunch of expansions.
It would be really weird if such important places just showed up randomly.

While there are a lot of tedious quests in Wotlk every zone is extremely memorable.

>Have the broken isles been mentioned in lore before legion?

wc3 m8

shit it might've even had mentions in the wc1 or 2 manuals

WC2 and WC3.
Basically, the pre-retcon version of the Broken Isles would be to cut away everything except Broken Shore and the Tomb.

...

It used to just be the island where the Tomb of Sarg was, but they added a bunch of shit to it beyond just night elf ruins, like Huln Highmountains descedents and some Vykrul land.

storm peaks blows and at least a third of the legion zones look great

Oh yeah, I forgot about the Tomb of Sargeras maps.
But I mostly meant stuff like Suramar and Val'sharah being there since they seem to be very important.

Suramar was shown off in WC3 as a recently raised underwater ruin.
Val'sharah, like the rest of the zones, was never even alluded to.

Suramar was there, but in WC III Richard Knaak had yet to write out the more detailed parts of Tyrande and Malfurion's childhood, so it wasn't that important beyond the place that Aegwyn sealed Sarger's avatar's corpse.
The main retconn is the city used to be ruins but the new lore has it so a portion of the city was under a magic bubble that was so impenetrable night elves never bothered knocking on the door, with the Nightborne inside. Since highborne were all exiled, there was no reason for the new Night Elven society to bother with it even if they probably knew highborne were within.

The worst thing in terms of retconn is the presence of Vykrul, since Vykrul forced themselves into stasis in Northrend in an effort fo preserve themselves until a cure for the curse was found nobody knew much of their society.
Blizzard never really added much lore to describe the interactions between the progenitor race of men and the kal'dorei empire.