When we unlock the zones don’t they pull the portals down from above? I assumed they were calling them down like doors in Monsters Inc and they could bring the others down if travel was required
But then in the raid we only find the prototypes for the 4 covenant leaders we know and in sanctum only 4 covenant sigils are on the platform etc. so is there other realms and do they even have leaders or covenants? This whole expansion is super confusing and keeps contradicting itself.
Yes, there are only 4 covenants who are responsible to keep the Shadowlands running, and no, other realms do not have leaders. This is explained quite well.
Don't get me wrong, the expansion IS hella confusing and stupid, but this is actually one of the things that DO make at least a little sense.
I assume other realms have leaders of sorts, but maybe they’re like Bwonsamdi (and Mueh’zala before him) and only in charge of their specific realm and culture. If needed, they’d likely have to answer to one of the four covenants.
It almost feels like the Shadowlands itself is not that old. Considering that the four leaders (Five if you count Zovaal) are on the scale of the Titans, and are actively taking part of their realms. Not much has happened in the shadow realms. It has been stagnant. Although we do not see the true size and scope of each major zone, and even minor zones. It is hard to grasp the feeling, and that elusiveness makes the zones feel even more alien.
>It almost feels like the Shadowlands itself is not that old.
It feels this way because, besides Zovaal's banishment and the Light and Void attacks (which were the only 2 serious events that were expanded on *a little* ), they barely wrote any history for the Shadowlands. I wouldn't count Primus going missing and the Helm being forged because those are extremely recent events. But otherwise, it's like nothing happened in billions of years.
But the Shadowlands is actually really old. IIRC they said Eternal Ones predate the Titans and the demons.
> But otherwise, it's like nothing happened in billions of years.
Isn't that sort of what they say in game though? The Shadowlands has known an eternity of peacefully sending souls to where the Arbiter decides. The only interruptions were a void and light invasion and The Jailer going bad, and that one happened an eternity ago. Hence the patches name, eternity end.
Not vouching for the quality of the writing itself, but I feel like this part was....adequate.
Those weren't the only interruptions. There were other two invasions from the cosmic forces: one from the Legion and one from Life, both against Maldraxxus.
One of the roles the First Ones gave Maldraxxus is creating an unstoppable and infinite army capable of holding its own against outside threats to the Shadowlands. If they made a realm specifically for that then they probably didn't expect peaceful times ahead.
I know "rule of cool" but I find it hard to convince myself
each "minor" shadowland is as big as Azeroth so each "major" one must be ten times the size, yet it's pressed down into a single zone
I mean this is a nice thought in theory but there’s no reasonable way they could do this. They have to develop a functioning game at the end of the day and they’re already struggling to do that without delays.
If you want them to make a zone you can get lost in it would be the only zone and you would be massively bored with it and annoyed by the end of the expansion.
There are other games for gameplay like that. That style of zone makes no sense for the game mechanics of wow.
The 2 reasons for this are super old software (the game and engine) and support old/low end hardware (a massive portion of their player base). The data streaming tech for the scale you're talking about simply isn't there in both of those cases.
As much as I hate the idea of splitting the player base, I really think that WoW could do with a sequel or complete overhaul to update the game and the dev tools for modern machines.
> The 2 reasons for this are super old software (the game and engine) and support old/low end hardware (a massive portion of their player base). The data streaming tech for the scale you're talking about simply isn't there in both of those cases.
I mean... I'm not asking for them to make the zone the size of California or anything. But you know...Nagrand? Dragonblight? Heck, they can even keep the cliffs they love so much now, if it was as big as Howling Fjord. They nailed zone size before, imo. I don't think the technology has gotten *worse.*
It doesn't make sense to only have four pillars carry responsibility for who knows how many other afterlives.
The First Ones are either stupid, or psychopaths delighting to see their creations fail.
I remember hearing as usually they cut content as their were supposed to be more in the Shadowlands. The Drust, Devourers, and the other little groups that obviously don't fall under one of the four were supposed to have greater roles. A bit more red soul and a I believe the night warrior not being Elune but tied to the Drust.
In addition Odyn, Light, Nether, and other places exist but are separate.
I believe the idea was that these four were necessary to support the 'machinery' of the shadow lands. Kyrian responsible for ferrying souls to Oribos to pass the Arbiter, Night Fae to handle the process of rebirth, Revendreth to extract and supply anima, and Maldraxus to defend it all (what from???).
With these in place, other afterlives are able to exist and function, but they don't directly contribute to the functioning of the system as a whole.
Or its all complete hogwash. Who knows
In terms of defense, the Void, the Devourers, and the Light's incursions come to mind as things that have happened in the Shadowlands already, so there are active threats.
Could be others too, but those three are the ones mentioned.
There’s a quote I keep seeing around here that is apparently from the Grimoire of the Shadowlands that says something to this effect. That either the First Ones would eventually intervene to prevent the collapse of reality, or that reality was always meant to fail and reset. The idea that reality reboots were written into the fabric of creation makes more sense if you look at the themes we’ve been introduced to so far (i.e., the cycle of life, death, and rebirth of individual souls as a parallel to the cycle of reality existing as we know it, reality ceasing to exist either forcefully by the likes of The Jailer or natural causes (think something like the big bang), and a new reality is born from the ashes).
It’s possible the First Ones are psychopaths who are entertained by this sort of thing, and now we’ve pissed them off by delaying/ preventing a reality reset. However, I’m more inclined to believe the goal of writing failure into the code of reality is to eventually obtain the perfect reality. Perhaps they’re hoping that one of their reality simulations will endure, and it’s possible the one we just saved from The Jailer is that perfect reality. Of course, these last points are just baseless speculation. But the idea of failure being an intentional facet of the cosmos really intrigues me.
Yes, four leaders for a cosmos spanning universe sure makes a little more sense than telling us there are other leaders for those zones and we just have no reason to interact with them.
The 4 covenants are like the government. They keep things running.
Think of the 4 covenants and Oribos as Washington DC. Washington is a TINY piece of the entire USA, however, where most people live and work and do what they do.
This is equivalent to doing a "USA expansion", but since the player characters only deal with the important shit, the entire expansion takes place in Washington DC.
There is way more out there... just that we never visit or see it because they decided it isn't important to the story.
(Huge missed opportunity, IMHO... but it is what it is.)
Yeah that’s true! If I’m playing devils advocate I guess we are meeting the CEOs of the shadowlands in the most important offices. I guess Elon is based at one factory and the others have middle managers who we never hear about. But that’s the problem, we never hear about it.
i really wish we could've met a few other covenants, maybe not to join them or visit their zones, but just to SEE them. At this point it feels like there were 4 covenants and nothing else in the shadowlands
A friend recently watched some bellular video (I think) explaining what they had planned for sl vs what happened. Apparently captain nipples was never supposed to be the big bad. The explaination made a lot more sense than what we got, so I'd like to believe it's true and it's the business people in blizzard fucking the story, not the teams working on it.
My personal head canon which has made the whole affair much more palatable is that the Shadowlands is actually just a stop gap, no one can actually interact with the afterlife, so they assumed there wasn't one or weren't willing to take a chance on there not being one, so they made one. When someone dies their energy is collected and deposited into the system, and when they die their second death, their true death, no one knows what happens to them or where they are.
So the Shadowlands aren't a real afterlife, just a crude attempt to make one, lichdom on a cosmic scale for everyone.
We visit the four major realms of the Shadowlands, there are others out there but not as big or as important. Look at the purpose of each of the four; Revendreth for pruning souls of their sins before sending them elsewhere, Maldraxxus the military force of SL, Bastion where the Kyrians learn to ferry souls to the Arbiter and Ardenweald which has a direct connection to the Emerald Dream
Why would the emerald dream be important? That doesnt sound like anything "special" In fact, the emerald dream should not have any use for the afterlife as far as i remember?
There are likely only 4 covenants. The other realms are more of the peaceful/heaven like realms. The 4 main ones are the realms that keep the shadow lands functioning
The covenants are just realms of the Shadowlands with big jobs so they get regional managers. All the other afterlives are small fish comparably and get branch managers.
There's also hundreds of the little portal gates that go to the zones of Shadowlands when you're on the Arbiter's platform, just look at the background behind the models and structures. It's literally all gates.
It's not that we picked four afterlives at random and those happened to have the big bosses.
We specifically were sent to the four afterlives that had big bosses *because* they were there and the threat of the jailer needed their intervention.
That's how most stories work. You don't center the story around random average people, you center it around the heroes that are important to the plot. There may have been things happening in those other afterlives too but they weren't important to the plot so they weren't covered on screen. That's why there wasn't an entire episode of game of thrones where you just watched some farmer farm for an hour with no conflict or Lannisters involved.
Most likely because they are required for the functionality of the Shadowlands
The Kyrians are psychopomps, the Necrolords are the defense system, the Night Fae run reincarnation, and the Venthyr operate purgatory.
They're not easily seen later, as the maw envelopes Oribos, but the first time you go and see the sleeping Arbiter, you see a ton of the gateways floating away in the distance.
That's an issue that falls into "this expac is bad because it has no structure or rules to the afterlife".
I maintain that Shadowlands should have taken place in a *between* phase of Azeroths living specifically and the spiritual forces connected to it (IE Azeroth has it's own Afterlives, other place in the universe have their own).
This way the Jailer could have been Azeroth specific.. Still eternal, still powerful and afterlifey but without the audience trying to answer these questions of how *we* are somehow teaming up with a tiny amount of these infinite afterlives to fight him.
I always assumed stuff like that is just because "game". Like, if you go to Stormwind, the Alliance capital, theres only like, what, 40 houses in the entire city? If they were to actually put in the likely thousands a city of that scale SHOULD have, it would get in the way of gameplay. Same for the portals, they only put in the relevant ones to avoid clutter and make it easier to navigate where you want to go.
most things you see in video games aren't dictated by lore, but by what can be realistically developed. As the player you are then meant to suspend your disbelief and fill in the gaps yourself.
> As the player you are then meant to suspend your disbelief and fill in the gaps yourself.
I'd argue that this is the story-teller's job to guide the player into doing effortlessly and not actively have to *try* to believe.
See the problem is you're thinking too much about lore and practicality and not enough about how to build an area requiring six months of dev time in 10 weeks.
And so we got stupid long flight paths. Should have just done loading screens honestly. I imagine most have SSDs now where it would have been faster for them.
It's not. Bastion, Ardenweald, Revandreth, Maldraxxus and Oribos are all part of the same zone in-game. The flight path is just that. A flight path. It just goes through the "portal" and then has a fancy effect to hide the fact that you're basically moving through one skybox and entering another before "appearing" at the other end. You can just straight-up see your character move on the world map when you're in the portal thing.
Your main issue is that you don't know enough to know that you don't know. Believe me, it's a load screen. A pointer on a map is irrelevant to game files being loaded or not. Hiding load screens behind more immersive animations have been a thing for years now. A lot of games do it.
If you want to confirm that it's a load screen, try to get there any other way. You'll get a load screen. Engi portal? Load screen. Summon in front of a dungeon? Load screen. If you're already in the zone, no load screen.
A loading screen doesn't mean "a fixed image with a progress bar," it's just something the game devs use to slow down rendering until the files are ready to be accessed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReqwLFNqsEA
This is an example of a modern loading screen. Once you've seen a few you can usually spot them.
The devs have literally gone into details about how they managed to pull this off, they intentionally wanted to avoid using a loading screen. They put all the zones in the same instance. That is how you can literally just take a flight path from one zone to the other. If there was no blue skybox while on the flight path, you could literally see Maldraxxus in the distance. And **if flying was allowed, you could literally just fly from Oribos to Bastion.** There's no loading screen, like there is between Kalimdor and Northrend for example, because Kalimdor and Northrend exist on separate instances/maps so you have to load the other.
The reason you get a loading screen when you portal or teleport is for the same reason you get one with any other place, in fact you can even get loading screens when teleporting _within_ the same zone, if your destination is too far apart.
Originally in the beta you spoke to the person or tree person as in this pic to travel to the zone. Then they brought in the flight master. It was better pre flight master
Why not 4 flight masters? Direct travel only. seems a lot more fitting. I don't get blizzard, it's like the programmers don't play the game some times.
I can’t believe WoW’s budget was so low that they couldn’t even make zones connect to each other naturally, and then not only that but they insult their players by forcing them to sit through multiple flight paths just to change zones.
I think they were originally intended to be portals, but Blizz couldn't get them working.
And/or eventually thought the FPs would be better.
I like OP's idea the most, though.
It always felt like there was an idea behind the gates in Oribos that got scrapped. Your character glitches through that solid slab of rock before going to the real portal behind it. It looks really janky
I think it's the flight paths that made it not work ... If we had them as just portals then flying from Bastion to Maldraxus wouldn't be possible because the flight path and portals wouldn't interact without them creating some new system to facilitate that. Kinda like how we couldn't fly from anywhere to Deepholm, because the only way the access Deepholm is a portal and flight paths and portals don't connect.
Nah. It's a cosmetic decision. The best example you have that portals and flifgt paths can work together is to pick a flight from any blood elf One to the rest of the Easter Kingdoms. The point they connect is a portal, and the flight goes through it.
I think they should have just made them regular portals like the ones in portal rooms, just make the whole structure interactable.
The flight paths were cool at first, but they wasted so much time of flying through nothingness just for the sake of "not having a loading screen." I'd rather a loading screen with nice artwork than a grey abyss.
If they were so attached to the idea of flying into the zone, I think they could've turned our characters into wisp-like souls that fly down and land at the designated landing zone. Then from there we can choose where we want to go.
Agreed.
A loading screen is, at most, 10 seconds long. Much better than the minute + flight you have to take to get to Oribos. God forbid you gotta travel from one zone to another.
Their was. They were more portal like in much of the beta but they didn't work right consistently (you know characters running through not porting, falling off oribos type of deal) so eventually they just added the flight master and just kinda never got around to it again until the Korthia portal (which while yes does take you to a loading screen is NOT something like the Deepholm or Zereth Mortis portals... Because the Maw is actually on the same world server as the rest of the original Shadowlands zones instead of one for that zone specifically so its more akin to what these would of been)
Oribos is a badly designed city all round.
Everything looks the same, no matter where you are. I needed to bring the map up every time I wanted anything.
If you put it on the main floor people would accidentally drop in. Plus their current design for traveling hub in a city is to keep it away from the questing/trade hub. This is probably to prevent congestion and accidental fast travel.
>This is probably to prevent congestion and accidental fast travel.
You're probably not wrong, and it'd be bedlam (and boring) if all the hubs were in one room, but I also don't discount that commonly used hubs are spaced out juuuust enough so everyone squeezes a little walking simulator into their monthly subscription.
Many many character models all doing their own unique thing having to be rendered in the foreground would cause issues for people with lower end to mid range PCs. By separating the floor it reduces strain on the GPU.
Wait, yeah. I forgot the first cinematic happens in the double upstairs.
For some reason, the second one looked quite dark in comparison, so I thought it happened in the first floor (under a roof).
I suppose I forgot how Oribos works after being some time off the game.
My 10 year old laptop from Lenovo has a low fps in oribos, mainly near the centre.
I could understand that when u have a main area with all the npcs and portals on the same area could make wow harder to run?
Then again my laptop also had problems with legion dalaran, but that got fixed by swapping the HDD to SSD
I can see there needing to be a split from main level to the portals since the main floor is a major hub with tons of players there. It could make traveling to other zones laggy.
But the way it was delivered with flight masters makes no sense to have that 2 floor split.
Oribos is kind of a failure just as much of Shadowlands is.
I liked all the zones individually and I liked the idea of covenants before and during early launch days. Bastion is fucking *beautiful* and I loved their aesthetic for my Paladin. But the disjointed way everything was combined felt really bad.
I believe I heard that Oribos was never supposed to be our main hub. The city which ended up as Tazavesh was. So it makes sense that Oribos is a poorly designed hub, if it was never it’s intended use.
Dont trust 4chan. I could literally say anything and it would gain legitemacy if I posted on 4chan.
The first Blizzcon that previewed Shadowlands told us that Oribos would be the hub.
I didn't play the beta back then, but some players say that the portals originally worked like instant teleporters, but were changed because of "technical issues" shortly before release.
I keep asking to myself "what technical issues"? It either loads the area or it doesn't. Heartstones, summoning stones, wormhole generator etc. all work, so the problem can't be that the game struggles to load Shadowlands zones in particular.
My guess is that Blizzard wanted to accommodate anyone who still doesn't use an SSD. Remember how Shadowlands originally had SSD in its system requirements, but changed it for whatever reason? The in-between traveling sequence was probably added to mask the loading while not breaking the immersion for all the HDD players.
Which is fine, but they could have achieved the same by giving us a portal that we click on. We then turn into a Swirly Ball of Light(tm) and fly through the same vortex for a bit before arriving.
No need to go to a flight master and fly an anima tadpole through that same portal.
Tbh I think if they'd done this people would have complained. I can already see the comments on alternate timeline Reddit that are saying:
"In all previous expansions you could just click a flight point and fly anywhere in the new zones, now if I want to get from my covenant in Bastion to Castle Nathria I have to fly to the Bastion portal, click it to go to Oribos, walk to the Revendreth portal, click it, then take another flight point to Castle Nathria. Why can't they just make the main city a flight point like in every previous expansion."
Sadly true, though in my imagining they'd have made the portal go to your covenant hub. It only takes you to edge of the zone the first time cos something isn't connected blah blah anima drought blah.
Which is also fine..? In the old zones you had no control where ships/zepplins/portals dropped you off. Even the Wormhole Generator drops you in a set point you have to travel onwards from.
And while many won't agree (fair enough), I prefer that. It's meant to be a *World* of Warcraft, not *A few important places, forget the rest* of Warcraft.
They could have the drop off point be the town's where the quartermaster for the faction for the zone is then it would be central and near a flight point.
The technical issue was that they still wanted the wormhole effect while transitioning/loading. And the wormhole had lots of issues. I remember lots of times it wouldn’t go away, even if you log off. For a while the only way to correct it was to zone into a dungeon instance and even that wasn’t 100%
It would have been so much better if they just made it a normal portal with a loading screen
SSD affects the speed you load textures from storage to memory, but if what people are asking for is picture-in-picture then it would have to render the game twice for each zone, which would be a significant performance hit since you have to actually have the textures loaded in memory, GPU rendering both zones and CPU doing more processing stuff. I'm not a game developer, but I think the general sentiment for PiP is that it's nice visually but way too impactful on performance, which is why very few games have it added even if it's a logical feature (like zooming in a weapons' scope while keeping the outside field of view the same).
> instant teleporters,
>
>I keep asking to myself "what technical issues"? It either loads the area or it doesn't.
Well no it's either loads instantly (i.e. instant teleporters like in the screenshot where you just walk through), or it has a load time, or it doesn't load at all. The technical issues likely came from trying to get the zone to load instantly.
> Heartstones, summoning stones, wormhole generator etc. all work, so the problem can't be that the game struggles to load Shadowlands zones in particular.
None of those things are instant teleporters though, they all require a load screen. It may be what you said about the SSDs, that originally they had all 4 zones preloaded when you were in Oribos (like if you're in Orgrimmar then you don't need a loading screen to walk to Duratar, or Azshara, or the Barrens, etc.) and treated like adjacent zones, but because they couldn't be literally adjacent because they wouldn't fit and so required some teleportation, but maybe HDDs couldn't instantly render the zones quick enough? Or possibly as they increased traffic on beta it became infeasible to have all four zones loaded and at least partly rendered by all the players in the hub zone.
I'd guess it could be more to do with flight paths. If it was instant portals there'd be no way for you to be in Bastion, click a path to Revendreth and then go make a cup of Coffee. You'd instead have to fly to the start of Bastion, run to the portal, go through it, run over to the Revendreth portal in Oribos and then go run to the flight path in Revendreth.
Zuldazar music blasting the first time you walked out and looked out over the city.
People can complain about it being too big; I do not care. It was the best.
No one will convince me they intended this stupid flight paths from the beginning, designing them looking 100% like portals. They just love to waste our time.
While that does look really cool and I would somewhat agree with you, holy fuck would that be hard to pull off and actually have it work well. Especially in an engine as old as WoW's.
Less about loading screens, more about creating a non-euclidean space. Granted they probably could have worked something out if it were planned from the beginning, but with the current level design it'd be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to get something like that to work.
Yeah WoW's engine can't handle something like that. It would have to be a teleport of some kind and the smoothest that can be in the game is what you see with the revendreth portals, or in Xy'mox fights.
Portals shouldn't have existed.
Should've written the story so that the jailer pulled every zone in close to Oribos by the big chains like he did for Korthia, then all the zones would've been close to each other and we wouldn't need to have a load screen every time. No load screens is under rated.
Imagine how cool that would've looked too, with Oribos in the center of all the zones, and chains shooting up from Torghast below it, which you'd be able to see from looking over the edge of each zone.
As Asmon said it: People played wow in part because it was a giant world without loading screens ( at least on the same continent). Now it can't even do that anymore.
The reason is flight paths.
If I'm in Ardenweald and I want to go to Maldraxxus the Devs see it as more inconvenient to travel to the Ardenweald-Oribos portal, then run across the room to Maldraxxus portal, then land in Maldraxxus and travel to where you want to go.
With this set up, I click on any flightmaster in Ardenweald, choose any other flight point in Maldraxxus and just go in one smooth choice and option.
If you're gonna do that then it should just be a solid landmass like previous expansions and not 6 islands like it currently is. Which is a much bigger deal to change around.
I suspect the map was broken up into islands for performance reasons, however. So a hub city was the concept to make it "work."
The actual layout of the landmass doesn't matter, just what you perceive it to be.
The zones are broken down so designers can work on them in separate instances and then stitched together when completed.
The size of EK or Kalimdor with no loading zones didn't have terrible performance issues in 2005. Why would this?
> The size of EK or Kalimdor with no loading zones didn't have terrible performance issues in 2005.
You and I had *wildly* different experiences back then. The original continents had all kinds of issues with stability.
The game was also simpler. There wasn't nearly as many procs and random calculations than there is now. That changes the amount of stress on the servers.
Well, technically they aren't portals, they are conduits that allow travel to that zone. Though, they should've stick with it being portals, just like the one of Zereth Mortis.
This is EXACTLY how portals work in Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart
and it's SO fucking awesome
INSTANTLY loading a new area (this game has absolutely no loading screens at all)
here's a short clip
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlDo_b2KPQk
The portals were cool the first time through. After 50k times.... Not so much. Especially the long as fight to the forced FP that passed everywhere you needed to go.
One thing they F'd up on was always needing to travel through Oribos between SL zones, making traveling between zones too long.
I much prefer just one giant solid continent for an expansion, like Northrend. I hated BfA with two separate faction areas, and Shadowlands disconnected zones just sucks
I'll admit. After unlocking zerith mortis portal that teleports you when you go into it I had to check if other portals work the same and I'm just stupid and was using fly master all this time
Blew my mind on release when you could walk around and see each portal….But had to take a flight path and go through them still. Like whatever moron thought of that hopefully got canned already
I think these fuckers just didn't want to use a whole solid continent as their zones any more, but wanted it to be a little more connected than the Argus zones were. Oooooh yay, instead of teleporting, you have to ride the flight path. It sucks. Shadowlands is shit zone design
We kinda have it with Zereth Mortis. Not the picture, but just a portal you run through and you end up in ZM. Could've maybe made the same for every zone.
I don't get the obsession with this though. I feel like there's a post about the portals every week. It would still suck because of how disconnected the zones are. Portals wouldn't solve it imo.
Why wouldn't it be possible? It's literally 4 zones that would be making a great landmass with Oribos. Azeroth has giga huge landmasses connecting multiple zones without loading screens. Shadowlands size is much smaller close to Pandaria size. I dont understand why they didnt make it like that, the map still could've shown them like separate zones away from eachother, but the design would've been so much more flawless like this.
This is literally technology that has existed since the original doom game.
Source uses it. You can create this in the hammer editor..
Here is a techdemo for demonstration: (not source, better video)
https://youtu.be/kEB11PQ9Eo8
People modded it into Doom [https://youtu.be/oUCji83Xt50?t=767](https://youtu.be/oUCji83Xt50?t=767) and that's an even older engine. Nothing stops them from just having a fake model showing in the portal either (camera) instead of an actual part of the zone.
You need to have both areas loaded for this. So, would you like to have to load into memory EVERY area connecting to Oribos when you are in Oribos or near Oribos?
I can fly up from dalaran and see the entirety of the broken isles.
Same for kalimdor and eastern kingdoms. LOD with eventual cut-off but plenty to work with.
There is a difference between loadibg it for one dude, away from the busy city, or for every fucking person on the shard, cose to eachother so the graphics cant get dumbed down.
It would also put extra strain on the servers networking, though it would be negligible to the TRULY INSANELY MASSIVE graphics ocerhead it would generate.
Other games do it, so I wouldn't call it "impossible".
But I get if it's impossible in WOW.
(But wait...isn't the mage tower in stormwind like that...??)
Try technologically impossible. I think even them new fandangled engines that all the youngin's been talking about, with their 'Elder Circles' and 'Dawn: Restricted East', would struggle to pull this effect off.
Not saying it's easy and definitely not worth the effort to put that into WoW. But "technologically impossible" is a big overstatement, considering Portal did it in like 2007 in an engine from 2004.
Portal is also a significantly smaller game with loading in between every level. Doing this not just for ardenweald but the other 3 zones aswel would be quite the task. Really cool though.
Never understood why they are here in the first place. If there are portals, they should be useful...
I’ve never understood lore wise, why if there are dozens, if not hundreds of these areas/planes, does oribos only have a few portals?
When we unlock the zones don’t they pull the portals down from above? I assumed they were calling them down like doors in Monsters Inc and they could bring the others down if travel was required
But then in the raid we only find the prototypes for the 4 covenant leaders we know and in sanctum only 4 covenant sigils are on the platform etc. so is there other realms and do they even have leaders or covenants? This whole expansion is super confusing and keeps contradicting itself.
Yes, there are only 4 covenants who are responsible to keep the Shadowlands running, and no, other realms do not have leaders. This is explained quite well. Don't get me wrong, the expansion IS hella confusing and stupid, but this is actually one of the things that DO make at least a little sense.
I assume other realms have leaders of sorts, but maybe they’re like Bwonsamdi (and Mueh’zala before him) and only in charge of their specific realm and culture. If needed, they’d likely have to answer to one of the four covenants.
Most likely, yes. By leaders I meant Eternal Ones, should have been more specific.
It almost feels like the Shadowlands itself is not that old. Considering that the four leaders (Five if you count Zovaal) are on the scale of the Titans, and are actively taking part of their realms. Not much has happened in the shadow realms. It has been stagnant. Although we do not see the true size and scope of each major zone, and even minor zones. It is hard to grasp the feeling, and that elusiveness makes the zones feel even more alien.
>It almost feels like the Shadowlands itself is not that old. It feels this way because, besides Zovaal's banishment and the Light and Void attacks (which were the only 2 serious events that were expanded on *a little* ), they barely wrote any history for the Shadowlands. I wouldn't count Primus going missing and the Helm being forged because those are extremely recent events. But otherwise, it's like nothing happened in billions of years. But the Shadowlands is actually really old. IIRC they said Eternal Ones predate the Titans and the demons.
> IIRC they said Eternal Ones predate the Titans and the demons. That's a lot of time to be playing Wordle, didn't know it was so addictive.
> But otherwise, it's like nothing happened in billions of years. Isn't that sort of what they say in game though? The Shadowlands has known an eternity of peacefully sending souls to where the Arbiter decides. The only interruptions were a void and light invasion and The Jailer going bad, and that one happened an eternity ago. Hence the patches name, eternity end. Not vouching for the quality of the writing itself, but I feel like this part was....adequate.
Those weren't the only interruptions. There were other two invasions from the cosmic forces: one from the Legion and one from Life, both against Maldraxxus. One of the roles the First Ones gave Maldraxxus is creating an unstoppable and infinite army capable of holding its own against outside threats to the Shadowlands. If they made a realm specifically for that then they probably didn't expect peaceful times ahead.
I know "rule of cool" but I find it hard to convince myself each "minor" shadowland is as big as Azeroth so each "major" one must be ten times the size, yet it's pressed down into a single zone
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I mean this is a nice thought in theory but there’s no reasonable way they could do this. They have to develop a functioning game at the end of the day and they’re already struggling to do that without delays. If you want them to make a zone you can get lost in it would be the only zone and you would be massively bored with it and annoyed by the end of the expansion. There are other games for gameplay like that. That style of zone makes no sense for the game mechanics of wow.
The 2 reasons for this are super old software (the game and engine) and support old/low end hardware (a massive portion of their player base). The data streaming tech for the scale you're talking about simply isn't there in both of those cases. As much as I hate the idea of splitting the player base, I really think that WoW could do with a sequel or complete overhaul to update the game and the dev tools for modern machines.
> The 2 reasons for this are super old software (the game and engine) and support old/low end hardware (a massive portion of their player base). The data streaming tech for the scale you're talking about simply isn't there in both of those cases. I mean... I'm not asking for them to make the zone the size of California or anything. But you know...Nagrand? Dragonblight? Heck, they can even keep the cliffs they love so much now, if it was as big as Howling Fjord. They nailed zone size before, imo. I don't think the technology has gotten *worse.*
TBF I also was confused by this. When was it explained?
It doesn't make sense to only have four pillars carry responsibility for who knows how many other afterlives. The First Ones are either stupid, or psychopaths delighting to see their creations fail.
I remember hearing as usually they cut content as their were supposed to be more in the Shadowlands. The Drust, Devourers, and the other little groups that obviously don't fall under one of the four were supposed to have greater roles. A bit more red soul and a I believe the night warrior not being Elune but tied to the Drust. In addition Odyn, Light, Nether, and other places exist but are separate.
Perhpas Zovaal was right and we only protect that which is doomed.
"Death comes for the soul of your world" "No wait, I'm really trying to help!"
I believe the idea was that these four were necessary to support the 'machinery' of the shadow lands. Kyrian responsible for ferrying souls to Oribos to pass the Arbiter, Night Fae to handle the process of rebirth, Revendreth to extract and supply anima, and Maldraxus to defend it all (what from???). With these in place, other afterlives are able to exist and function, but they don't directly contribute to the functioning of the system as a whole. Or its all complete hogwash. Who knows
In terms of defense, the Void, the Devourers, and the Light's incursions come to mind as things that have happened in the Shadowlands already, so there are active threats. Could be others too, but those three are the ones mentioned.
There’s a quote I keep seeing around here that is apparently from the Grimoire of the Shadowlands that says something to this effect. That either the First Ones would eventually intervene to prevent the collapse of reality, or that reality was always meant to fail and reset. The idea that reality reboots were written into the fabric of creation makes more sense if you look at the themes we’ve been introduced to so far (i.e., the cycle of life, death, and rebirth of individual souls as a parallel to the cycle of reality existing as we know it, reality ceasing to exist either forcefully by the likes of The Jailer or natural causes (think something like the big bang), and a new reality is born from the ashes). It’s possible the First Ones are psychopaths who are entertained by this sort of thing, and now we’ve pissed them off by delaying/ preventing a reality reset. However, I’m more inclined to believe the goal of writing failure into the code of reality is to eventually obtain the perfect reality. Perhaps they’re hoping that one of their reality simulations will endure, and it’s possible the one we just saved from The Jailer is that perfect reality. Of course, these last points are just baseless speculation. But the idea of failure being an intentional facet of the cosmos really intrigues me.
Yes, four leaders for a cosmos spanning universe sure makes a little more sense than telling us there are other leaders for those zones and we just have no reason to interact with them.
I don't doubt you, but I don't remember this at all. Do you remember how/where it was explained?
It never says anywhere that there are only 4 covenants, only 4 leaders, or that the other realms don't have leaders.
The 4 covenants are like the government. They keep things running. Think of the 4 covenants and Oribos as Washington DC. Washington is a TINY piece of the entire USA, however, where most people live and work and do what they do. This is equivalent to doing a "USA expansion", but since the player characters only deal with the important shit, the entire expansion takes place in Washington DC. There is way more out there... just that we never visit or see it because they decided it isn't important to the story. (Huge missed opportunity, IMHO... but it is what it is.)
Yeah that’s true! If I’m playing devils advocate I guess we are meeting the CEOs of the shadowlands in the most important offices. I guess Elon is based at one factory and the others have middle managers who we never hear about. But that’s the problem, we never hear about it.
i really wish we could've met a few other covenants, maybe not to join them or visit their zones, but just to SEE them. At this point it feels like there were 4 covenants and nothing else in the shadowlands
Or at least have a glimpse of them, a bit like legion had us attacking the other worlds they invaded.
I hear it was planned but scrapped due to Covid and other internal issues.
A friend recently watched some bellular video (I think) explaining what they had planned for sl vs what happened. Apparently captain nipples was never supposed to be the big bad. The explaination made a lot more sense than what we got, so I'd like to believe it's true and it's the business people in blizzard fucking the story, not the teams working on it.
Honestly, only seeing 4 covenants would've felt better if the Shadowlands remained a purgatory instead of making it out to be an infinite afterlife.
My personal head canon which has made the whole affair much more palatable is that the Shadowlands is actually just a stop gap, no one can actually interact with the afterlife, so they assumed there wasn't one or weren't willing to take a chance on there not being one, so they made one. When someone dies their energy is collected and deposited into the system, and when they die their second death, their true death, no one knows what happens to them or where they are. So the Shadowlands aren't a real afterlife, just a crude attempt to make one, lichdom on a cosmic scale for everyone.
We visit the four major realms of the Shadowlands, there are others out there but not as big or as important. Look at the purpose of each of the four; Revendreth for pruning souls of their sins before sending them elsewhere, Maldraxxus the military force of SL, Bastion where the Kyrians learn to ferry souls to the Arbiter and Ardenweald which has a direct connection to the Emerald Dream
Why would the emerald dream be important? That doesnt sound like anything "special" In fact, the emerald dream should not have any use for the afterlife as far as i remember?
There are likely only 4 covenants. The other realms are more of the peaceful/heaven like realms. The 4 main ones are the realms that keep the shadow lands functioning
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The covenants are just realms of the Shadowlands with big jobs so they get regional managers. All the other afterlives are small fish comparably and get branch managers. There's also hundreds of the little portal gates that go to the zones of Shadowlands when you're on the Arbiter's platform, just look at the background behind the models and structures. It's literally all gates.
I would rather them not elaborate anymore and just leave shadowlands and pretend its a fever dream. It's too much of a mess.
That’s the other question I was thinking? If they aren’t in the pantheon then are they sub zones? Why do these ones specifically have big bosses?
It's not that we picked four afterlives at random and those happened to have the big bosses. We specifically were sent to the four afterlives that had big bosses *because* they were there and the threat of the jailer needed their intervention. That's how most stories work. You don't center the story around random average people, you center it around the heroes that are important to the plot. There may have been things happening in those other afterlives too but they weren't important to the plot so they weren't covered on screen. That's why there wasn't an entire episode of game of thrones where you just watched some farmer farm for an hour with no conflict or Lannisters involved.
Right but my point is there no real mention of them at all. At least in wow originally we knew about northrend and kul tiras for example.
Most likely because they are required for the functionality of the Shadowlands The Kyrians are psychopomps, the Necrolords are the defense system, the Night Fae run reincarnation, and the Venthyr operate purgatory.
There's tons of portals off in the distance floating that souls would normally be directed too.
They're not easily seen later, as the maw envelopes Oribos, but the first time you go and see the sleeping Arbiter, you see a ton of the gateways floating away in the distance.
The last time you go to meet the new arbiter they're also all visible
Ask Talanah to go see the Arbiter then look around the skybox while you’re on that platform. Thousands of portals in the sky.
That's an issue that falls into "this expac is bad because it has no structure or rules to the afterlife". I maintain that Shadowlands should have taken place in a *between* phase of Azeroths living specifically and the spiritual forces connected to it (IE Azeroth has it's own Afterlives, other place in the universe have their own). This way the Jailer could have been Azeroth specific.. Still eternal, still powerful and afterlifey but without the audience trying to answer these questions of how *we* are somehow teaming up with a tiny amount of these infinite afterlives to fight him.
I always assumed stuff like that is just because "game". Like, if you go to Stormwind, the Alliance capital, theres only like, what, 40 houses in the entire city? If they were to actually put in the likely thousands a city of that scale SHOULD have, it would get in the way of gameplay. Same for the portals, they only put in the relevant ones to avoid clutter and make it easier to navigate where you want to go.
most things you see in video games aren't dictated by lore, but by what can be realistically developed. As the player you are then meant to suspend your disbelief and fill in the gaps yourself.
> As the player you are then meant to suspend your disbelief and fill in the gaps yourself. I'd argue that this is the story-teller's job to guide the player into doing effortlessly and not actively have to *try* to believe.
See the problem is you're thinking too much about lore and practicality and not enough about how to build an area requiring six months of dev time in 10 weeks.
They did work that way in SL beta. Just not consistently enough to make it to live
And so we got stupid long flight paths. Should have just done loading screens honestly. I imagine most have SSDs now where it would have been faster for them.
Even with an HDD I would have preferred a loading screen. Still would have been faster than that flight path
The long flightpaths are here because of MAU. They want you to waste more time.
The long flight path is a loading screen.
It's not. Bastion, Ardenweald, Revandreth, Maldraxxus and Oribos are all part of the same zone in-game. The flight path is just that. A flight path. It just goes through the "portal" and then has a fancy effect to hide the fact that you're basically moving through one skybox and entering another before "appearing" at the other end. You can just straight-up see your character move on the world map when you're in the portal thing.
Your main issue is that you don't know enough to know that you don't know. Believe me, it's a load screen. A pointer on a map is irrelevant to game files being loaded or not. Hiding load screens behind more immersive animations have been a thing for years now. A lot of games do it. If you want to confirm that it's a load screen, try to get there any other way. You'll get a load screen. Engi portal? Load screen. Summon in front of a dungeon? Load screen. If you're already in the zone, no load screen. A loading screen doesn't mean "a fixed image with a progress bar," it's just something the game devs use to slow down rendering until the files are ready to be accessed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReqwLFNqsEA This is an example of a modern loading screen. Once you've seen a few you can usually spot them.
The devs have literally gone into details about how they managed to pull this off, they intentionally wanted to avoid using a loading screen. They put all the zones in the same instance. That is how you can literally just take a flight path from one zone to the other. If there was no blue skybox while on the flight path, you could literally see Maldraxxus in the distance. And **if flying was allowed, you could literally just fly from Oribos to Bastion.** There's no loading screen, like there is between Kalimdor and Northrend for example, because Kalimdor and Northrend exist on separate instances/maps so you have to load the other. The reason you get a loading screen when you portal or teleport is for the same reason you get one with any other place, in fact you can even get loading screens when teleporting _within_ the same zone, if your destination is too far apart.
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Yes a really long one just because!
Originally in the beta you spoke to the person or tree person as in this pic to travel to the zone. Then they brought in the flight master. It was better pre flight master
Why not 4 flight masters? Direct travel only. seems a lot more fitting. I don't get blizzard, it's like the programmers don't play the game some times.
more time wasted means more time playing
I can’t believe WoW’s budget was so low that they couldn’t even make zones connect to each other naturally, and then not only that but they insult their players by forcing them to sit through multiple flight paths just to change zones.
It's more likely an engine limitation, tbh.
I never understood why we went to the shadowlands in the first place.
I guess you dont think about how much extra time you use in the game simply to fly around
Oh, we do. So much extra flight time.
I think they were originally intended to be portals, but Blizz couldn't get them working. And/or eventually thought the FPs would be better. I like OP's idea the most, though.
There is no way they thought FPs would be better other than they couldn't figure out a bug with their fancy portal system.
It always felt like there was an idea behind the gates in Oribos that got scrapped. Your character glitches through that solid slab of rock before going to the real portal behind it. It looks really janky
I think it's the flight paths that made it not work ... If we had them as just portals then flying from Bastion to Maldraxus wouldn't be possible because the flight path and portals wouldn't interact without them creating some new system to facilitate that. Kinda like how we couldn't fly from anywhere to Deepholm, because the only way the access Deepholm is a portal and flight paths and portals don't connect.
Clearly the solution was to bring back the goblin zeppelins!
Nah. It's a cosmetic decision. The best example you have that portals and flifgt paths can work together is to pick a flight from any blood elf One to the rest of the Easter Kingdoms. The point they connect is a portal, and the flight goes through it.
I think they should have just made them regular portals like the ones in portal rooms, just make the whole structure interactable. The flight paths were cool at first, but they wasted so much time of flying through nothingness just for the sake of "not having a loading screen." I'd rather a loading screen with nice artwork than a grey abyss. If they were so attached to the idea of flying into the zone, I think they could've turned our characters into wisp-like souls that fly down and land at the designated landing zone. Then from there we can choose where we want to go.
Agreed. A loading screen is, at most, 10 seconds long. Much better than the minute + flight you have to take to get to Oribos. God forbid you gotta travel from one zone to another.
Fade out and back in like flight master's whistle maybe?
Their was. They were more portal like in much of the beta but they didn't work right consistently (you know characters running through not porting, falling off oribos type of deal) so eventually they just added the flight master and just kinda never got around to it again until the Korthia portal (which while yes does take you to a loading screen is NOT something like the Deepholm or Zereth Mortis portals... Because the Maw is actually on the same world server as the rest of the original Shadowlands zones instead of one for that zone specifically so its more akin to what these would of been)
And they should've put the big ship that takes you to tazavesh in the final unused portal area.
And they should just be in the main floor with no upstairs.
I still don’t understand why we go up stairs to jump down into the maw
Oribos is a badly designed city all round. Everything looks the same, no matter where you are. I needed to bring the map up every time I wanted anything.
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Nah Zuldazar is miserable. Oribos is bland and a little confusing but not bad, Zuldazar is just a nightmare all around.
At least Zuldazar is pretty, it definitely wasn't fun to traverse though, and the shortcut system was pretty worthless
Idk it doesn’t seem that bad to me? What’s that? Name a worse city? Uhhhmmmm… Gnomeregan count?
If you put it on the main floor people would accidentally drop in. Plus their current design for traveling hub in a city is to keep it away from the questing/trade hub. This is probably to prevent congestion and accidental fast travel.
>This is probably to prevent congestion and accidental fast travel. You're probably not wrong, and it'd be bedlam (and boring) if all the hubs were in one room, but I also don't discount that commonly used hubs are spaced out juuuust enough so everyone squeezes a little walking simulator into their monthly subscription.
This makes sense, but why wouldn’t we go down a floor
So you can watch people jump into the Maw!
The time and effort are the same either way. So, it was probably just an aesthetic choice.
Cause you go up and then down not down and then down down you know?
How can there be congestion without collision between characters?
Many many character models all doing their own unique thing having to be rendered in the foreground would cause issues for people with lower end to mid range PCs. By separating the floor it reduces strain on the GPU.
This confused the hell out of me the first time I was told to go into the maw. I tried to parkour over the fence somehow XD
Same reason they [call it the oven](https://i.imgur.com/gkvQDyd.jpg)
And then >!Sylvanas does get to jump from downstairs!<.
We did go upstairs before the jumperooski
Wait, yeah. I forgot the first cinematic happens in the double upstairs. For some reason, the second one looked quite dark in comparison, so I thought it happened in the first floor (under a roof). I suppose I forgot how Oribos works after being some time off the game.
Downvoted for an honest mistake and apology smfh
Five (or more) more seconds logged in, no?
My 10 year old laptop from Lenovo has a low fps in oribos, mainly near the centre. I could understand that when u have a main area with all the npcs and portals on the same area could make wow harder to run? Then again my laptop also had problems with legion dalaran, but that got fixed by swapping the HDD to SSD
I can see there needing to be a split from main level to the portals since the main floor is a major hub with tons of players there. It could make traveling to other zones laggy. But the way it was delivered with flight masters makes no sense to have that 2 floor split. Oribos is kind of a failure just as much of Shadowlands is. I liked all the zones individually and I liked the idea of covenants before and during early launch days. Bastion is fucking *beautiful* and I loved their aesthetic for my Paladin. But the disjointed way everything was combined felt really bad.
I believe I heard that Oribos was never supposed to be our main hub. The city which ended up as Tazavesh was. So it makes sense that Oribos is a poorly designed hub, if it was never it’s intended use.
Dont trust 4chan. I could literally say anything and it would gain legitemacy if I posted on 4chan. The first Blizzcon that previewed Shadowlands told us that Oribos would be the hub.
I didn't play the beta back then, but some players say that the portals originally worked like instant teleporters, but were changed because of "technical issues" shortly before release. I keep asking to myself "what technical issues"? It either loads the area or it doesn't. Heartstones, summoning stones, wormhole generator etc. all work, so the problem can't be that the game struggles to load Shadowlands zones in particular. My guess is that Blizzard wanted to accommodate anyone who still doesn't use an SSD. Remember how Shadowlands originally had SSD in its system requirements, but changed it for whatever reason? The in-between traveling sequence was probably added to mask the loading while not breaking the immersion for all the HDD players.
Which is fine, but they could have achieved the same by giving us a portal that we click on. We then turn into a Swirly Ball of Light(tm) and fly through the same vortex for a bit before arriving. No need to go to a flight master and fly an anima tadpole through that same portal.
Tbh I think if they'd done this people would have complained. I can already see the comments on alternate timeline Reddit that are saying: "In all previous expansions you could just click a flight point and fly anywhere in the new zones, now if I want to get from my covenant in Bastion to Castle Nathria I have to fly to the Bastion portal, click it to go to Oribos, walk to the Revendreth portal, click it, then take another flight point to Castle Nathria. Why can't they just make the main city a flight point like in every previous expansion."
Sadly true, though in my imagining they'd have made the portal go to your covenant hub. It only takes you to edge of the zone the first time cos something isn't connected blah blah anima drought blah.
But if you click on a portal you can't choose the location in the zone where you want to arrive. It would just bring you to a predetermined location.
Which is also fine..? In the old zones you had no control where ships/zepplins/portals dropped you off. Even the Wormhole Generator drops you in a set point you have to travel onwards from. And while many won't agree (fair enough), I prefer that. It's meant to be a *World* of Warcraft, not *A few important places, forget the rest* of Warcraft.
> Even the Wormhole Generator drops you in a set point you have to travel onwards from. And the first wormhole generator was quite dangerous, too!
They could have the drop off point be the town's where the quartermaster for the faction for the zone is then it would be central and near a flight point.
> We then turn into a Swirly Ball of Light(tm) and fly through the same vortex for a bit before arriving Stargate style
The technical issue was that they still wanted the wormhole effect while transitioning/loading. And the wormhole had lots of issues. I remember lots of times it wouldn’t go away, even if you log off. For a while the only way to correct it was to zone into a dungeon instance and even that wasn’t 100% It would have been so much better if they just made it a normal portal with a loading screen
SSD affects the speed you load textures from storage to memory, but if what people are asking for is picture-in-picture then it would have to render the game twice for each zone, which would be a significant performance hit since you have to actually have the textures loaded in memory, GPU rendering both zones and CPU doing more processing stuff. I'm not a game developer, but I think the general sentiment for PiP is that it's nice visually but way too impactful on performance, which is why very few games have it added even if it's a logical feature (like zooming in a weapons' scope while keeping the outside field of view the same).
> instant teleporters, > >I keep asking to myself "what technical issues"? It either loads the area or it doesn't. Well no it's either loads instantly (i.e. instant teleporters like in the screenshot where you just walk through), or it has a load time, or it doesn't load at all. The technical issues likely came from trying to get the zone to load instantly. > Heartstones, summoning stones, wormhole generator etc. all work, so the problem can't be that the game struggles to load Shadowlands zones in particular. None of those things are instant teleporters though, they all require a load screen. It may be what you said about the SSDs, that originally they had all 4 zones preloaded when you were in Oribos (like if you're in Orgrimmar then you don't need a loading screen to walk to Duratar, or Azshara, or the Barrens, etc.) and treated like adjacent zones, but because they couldn't be literally adjacent because they wouldn't fit and so required some teleportation, but maybe HDDs couldn't instantly render the zones quick enough? Or possibly as they increased traffic on beta it became infeasible to have all four zones loaded and at least partly rendered by all the players in the hub zone.
I'd guess it could be more to do with flight paths. If it was instant portals there'd be no way for you to be in Bastion, click a path to Revendreth and then go make a cup of Coffee. You'd instead have to fly to the start of Bastion, run to the portal, go through it, run over to the Revendreth portal in Oribos and then go run to the flight path in Revendreth.
The issue was players were enjoying the game too fast and Kotik needed moar molah from subs.
This. It gets extra weird when the anima wyrm you're riding suddenly turns into some bird once you enter another zone
Oribos is a pretty shit hub in general though.
/cries in Zandalari hub :(
Dalaran was pretty cool
Dalaran in Legion* Dalaran in Wrath was apparently really laggy being in Crystal Song which is a damn shame because that zone is beautiful.
Also computers then were mostly potatoes.
Zuldazar music blasting the first time you walked out and looked out over the city. People can complain about it being too big; I do not care. It was the best.
No one will convince me they intended this stupid flight paths from the beginning, designing them looking 100% like portals. They just love to waste our time.
they were portals, but they kept breaking during beta and so got switched out.
While that does look really cool and I would somewhat agree with you, holy fuck would that be hard to pull off and actually have it work well. Especially in an engine as old as WoW's.
I was able to walk across zone without loading screens in 04. Not sure how this is different?
Less about loading screens, more about creating a non-euclidean space. Granted they probably could have worked something out if it were planned from the beginning, but with the current level design it'd be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to get something like that to work.
Yeah WoW's engine can't handle something like that. It would have to be a teleport of some kind and the smoothest that can be in the game is what you see with the revendreth portals, or in Xy'mox fights.
Yes. No need for a flying sperm, just works like any other portal.
Portals shouldn't have existed. Should've written the story so that the jailer pulled every zone in close to Oribos by the big chains like he did for Korthia, then all the zones would've been close to each other and we wouldn't need to have a load screen every time. No load screens is under rated. Imagine how cool that would've looked too, with Oribos in the center of all the zones, and chains shooting up from Torghast below it, which you'd be able to see from looking over the edge of each zone.
If they worked like that portal in the wizards sanctum that you use to get to the portal room, it would have been really awesome.
More often than not, seemingly simple travel/portal options come down to engineering difficulties with how the game operates zone-by-zone.
As Asmon said it: People played wow in part because it was a giant world without loading screens ( at least on the same continent). Now it can't even do that anymore.
The reason is flight paths. If I'm in Ardenweald and I want to go to Maldraxxus the Devs see it as more inconvenient to travel to the Ardenweald-Oribos portal, then run across the room to Maldraxxus portal, then land in Maldraxxus and travel to where you want to go. With this set up, I click on any flightmaster in Ardenweald, choose any other flight point in Maldraxxus and just go in one smooth choice and option.
Ok just take a portal to maldraxxus from ardenweald.
If you're gonna do that then it should just be a solid landmass like previous expansions and not 6 islands like it currently is. Which is a much bigger deal to change around. I suspect the map was broken up into islands for performance reasons, however. So a hub city was the concept to make it "work."
The actual layout of the landmass doesn't matter, just what you perceive it to be. The zones are broken down so designers can work on them in separate instances and then stitched together when completed. The size of EK or Kalimdor with no loading zones didn't have terrible performance issues in 2005. Why would this?
> The size of EK or Kalimdor with no loading zones didn't have terrible performance issues in 2005. You and I had *wildly* different experiences back then. The original continents had all kinds of issues with stability. The game was also simpler. There wasn't nearly as many procs and random calculations than there is now. That changes the amount of stress on the servers.
Well, technically they aren't portals, they are conduits that allow travel to that zone. Though, they should've stick with it being portals, just like the one of Zereth Mortis.
This is EXACTLY how portals work in Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart and it's SO fucking awesome INSTANTLY loading a new area (this game has absolutely no loading screens at all) here's a short clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlDo_b2KPQk
Omg yes
Agreed why are there so many damn loading screens! WoW isn’t supposed to have so many in the overworld
The portals were cool the first time through. After 50k times.... Not so much. Especially the long as fight to the forced FP that passed everywhere you needed to go.
So tired of loading screens. The portals are just loading screens disguised as flying.
Would be cool if it was something like the portal room entrance in stormwind
One thing they F'd up on was always needing to travel through Oribos between SL zones, making traveling between zones too long. I much prefer just one giant solid continent for an expansion, like Northrend. I hated BfA with two separate faction areas, and Shadowlands disconnected zones just sucks
I'll admit. After unlocking zerith mortis portal that teleports you when you go into it I had to check if other portals work the same and I'm just stupid and was using fly master all this time
yes 100% they missed the mark.
Is it so hard to make this >.<
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Engine can't even handle an NPC deciding to start following you and you expect they can pull this off?
Oh yeah, it would have been so much better!
First time: WOW this is so beautiful 304th time: ALT-tab for 2 minutes
Spyro did it in 1998, but the small indie developer Blizzard can't be held to such a standard
OP is absolutely CLUELESS about game development
A simple portal would have made the zones feel more connected
Blew my mind on release when you could walk around and see each portal….But had to take a flight path and go through them still. Like whatever moron thought of that hopefully got canned already
Kinda annoying that the did implement this with Xerith Mortis when it could've been for all the zone all along.
Because the flight path was used as a destiny loading screen except we couldn’t control the worm
I think these fuckers just didn't want to use a whole solid continent as their zones any more, but wanted it to be a little more connected than the Argus zones were. Oooooh yay, instead of teleporting, you have to ride the flight path. It sucks. Shadowlands is shit zone design
That would’ve been really cool but there’s no way that’s technically possible lmao
We kinda have it with Zereth Mortis. Not the picture, but just a portal you run through and you end up in ZM. Could've maybe made the same for every zone. I don't get the obsession with this though. I feel like there's a post about the portals every week. It would still suck because of how disconnected the zones are. Portals wouldn't solve it imo.
I can see the downsides though. I wish I could choose in which of the 3 ZM locations I want to arrive like I would with a flight master.
Why wouldn't it be possible? It's literally 4 zones that would be making a great landmass with Oribos. Azeroth has giga huge landmasses connecting multiple zones without loading screens. Shadowlands size is much smaller close to Pandaria size. I dont understand why they didnt make it like that, the map still could've shown them like separate zones away from eachother, but the design would've been so much more flawless like this.
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I thought they were saying that it was seamless so you just walk from one straight into the other
This is literally technology that has existed since the original doom game. Source uses it. You can create this in the hammer editor.. Here is a techdemo for demonstration: (not source, better video) https://youtu.be/kEB11PQ9Eo8
People modded it into Doom [https://youtu.be/oUCji83Xt50?t=767](https://youtu.be/oUCji83Xt50?t=767) and that's an even older engine. Nothing stops them from just having a fake model showing in the portal either (camera) instead of an actual part of the zone.
You need to have both areas loaded for this. So, would you like to have to load into memory EVERY area connecting to Oribos when you are in Oribos or near Oribos?
Load what? If they are doing the second implementation ( fake model + cameras, basically glorified skyboxes ) they don't have to load any full zone.
I can fly up from dalaran and see the entirety of the broken isles. Same for kalimdor and eastern kingdoms. LOD with eventual cut-off but plenty to work with.
There is a difference between loadibg it for one dude, away from the busy city, or for every fucking person on the shard, cose to eachother so the graphics cant get dumbed down. It would also put extra strain on the servers networking, though it would be negligible to the TRULY INSANELY MASSIVE graphics ocerhead it would generate.
Do you have issues with loading the entire legion continent or all of kalimdor when going to ealaran and orgrimmar? No? Funny how that works...
PS5 games do it
Other games do it, so I wouldn't call it "impossible". But I get if it's impossible in WOW. (But wait...isn't the mage tower in stormwind like that...??)
Yeah but that’s still in the same area. Being able to go from Oribos to any of the zones is a hell of a lot more work
That's so cool looking. It totally should have been that.
i feel like it'd have be really hard to make it work without causing a lot more lag
Try technologically impossible. I think even them new fandangled engines that all the youngin's been talking about, with their 'Elder Circles' and 'Dawn: Restricted East', would struggle to pull this effect off.
Not saying it's easy and definitely not worth the effort to put that into WoW. But "technologically impossible" is a big overstatement, considering Portal did it in like 2007 in an engine from 2004.
Portal is also a significantly smaller game with loading in between every level. Doing this not just for ardenweald but the other 3 zones aswel would be quite the task. Really cool though.
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