I remember leveling as a kid and looking at the zones that were so far away on other continents and I would wonder what they looked like and what was there. Truly spectacular.
I was 30, yes 30, when wow came out in 2004 and I felt that same kid-like wonderment you describe here. Retail just doesn’t have that for me. I even would fly back to these old zones i.e. Westfall, Duskwood, Darkshore, they are all entirely empty in retail even on highly populated servers and that just so sad. I won’t be going back to retail again I’m staying in classic sod.
Exactly! It felt much more like being a Hobbit going into the vast unknown world than being Aragorn. It relates also much more to real life, for example Tolkien hiked in Switzerland at places like Lauterbrunnen, Rothorn, Grindelwald and was inspired by those and you can do the same IRL or in WoW. I think this LotR analogy is a big reason why WoW Vanilla was so successful... around the same time the LotR trilogy was released and Azeroth just felt like that. I especially loved WoW Vanilla/Classic because of that and the high fantansy genre, the other expansions (except WotLK to some extent) didn't have this anymore.
I love the hand-drawn maps. Modern MMO maps are so cluttered with all the different bits and bobs everywhere. I get so overwhelmed and, ironically, lost in the forest for the trees. I love the simple WOW classic maps.
@@eliashautala7450 The underlay yeah, but they still are so cluttered. Here's a world quest, here's a rare, here's the grand hunt, here's the dreamsurge, here's a treasure, and on and on and on.
Its because vanilla wow was created in times where games were actually a challenge and forced people to think, read quests. Now it's just a mindless clicking in order to get some dopamine rush.
@@ady007plnot really the case with modern wow tbh. Most endgame content on the form of dungeons and raids is way more complex (with more mechanics and shit to keep track of) and difficult than it was on the past. To the point where it's detrimental to the game's growth. There still is mindless button clicking with some activities, but that was the case since vanilla wow
@@kaironst2969i kind agree with you, but i wouldn't say its complex its just that if 1 person fucks up the whole raid is fucked which is hard not to do cause there's so much animations and shit you dont know whats what or the color schemes just blend in perfect so you could be standing in some swirly of death and not even know, when it comes down its just poor design and then top of it you got all the try hard sweats that have addons and all that shit cause they've never done anything with their life to gets dads approval. Like I can understand if it's a world 1st achievement your going for, but after its been out for how long its just like dude calm the fuck down it's just a game and if your gonna be competitive about it join a guild or make your own thats why of many reasons why guilds exist
I remember playing this in my 20s. The world was so full of people and wonder, it just filled you with wonder. This was considered a 'casual' MMO back then (Everquest was the Hardcore MMO at the time). Reviews use to say you could log in for an hour and accomplish something. Eventually, the world became less and less populated as they had the Dungeon finder, but part of the fun was getting to the dungeon, and maybe running into the opposing faction waiting for the rest of their group, and you'd have these spontaneous fights organically. Those were good times!
I'm probably in the minority, but I felt very sad when Blizzard implemented the first battlegrounds, and even sadder when the first expansion was on a different continent. Each of these updates seemed to remove more and more players from the world. I still remember looking at the undeveloped 'zones' on the original map wondering what they would add.
I've been playing on private server myself... the world being empty was never an issue to me. It was part of the charm. You'd meet people in towns, but you'd often be on your own outside.
@@Dasein23"Dungeon finder destroyed" Before the dungeon finder, running instances was a chore when you had to spa the trade chat in a capital city to get a group together only the group getting disbanded after the first wipe.
oh god the music... my brain was very young, between 5 and about 12 when I played wow, something sad rises up within me when I hear that music - it's like I used to live on another planet
I was like 7-8 and had a full blown addiction even though i never progressed much further then the starting zones before i would start a new character. When my brother cancelled his subscription i used to sit and look at the photos in his thick WoW gaming booklet and imagine i was still playing it. Years later when i got access to youtube i used to sit and watch videos of the login screen for the burning crusade, the one with the big glowing gate and the music would warm my heart like a drug addict describing how their drug of choice feels.. i know if i were to play it now it wouldnt feel the same so i see no point, my adult comfort mmo is elder scrolls online lol.
I started playing classic again yesterday without quest helper. Clues from the quest makes it immersive, suddenly im happy to see a windmill or small hut in the horizon because the quests describe these landmarks you take for granted with questie addon
@kasper8509 all servers are linked. So you have to question yourself if you want to play pvp or pve :) (those are not linked together) I play horde pvp which has 40% and alliance 60%. It's a gamble playing outnumbered faction
Like you, I’m playing without quest helper and know exactly what you mean in having to decipher the quest log with more scrutiny lol. I’m not using any add ons not out of desire to do so, but because I have an iMac and for the life of me cannot figure out how to make add ons work for me lol. I’m an old dog that can’t seem to learn some new tricks I guess. But the result is having to play the game very organically and that’s not all bad. If I’m really in a rut I consult wowhead which is fantastic and gives me all the info I need when necessary.
@@LifeHawkeyeyes agreed. I played with 0 addons like you, but i like some addons though :) like automatically sell grey items or selling single items at auction house faster. What I noticed was that I move in cities more like a mouse in a maze, checking every room to see if a quest is available. With questie I just ignore 90% of the map
I tried that when classic servers originally launched and by the time I was 60lvl everyone else had full T2 , I wish there was a specific slow paced PvE server that had a bigger community , of course you can play solo but it sucks.
I guess technically WOWs map style was taken from the campaign loading screens of WC3. I at least felt very familiar to the style when I started playing coming from WC3
The campaign maps from WC3 were meant to look like medieval maps, where the map was a rough estimation of distance with some major landmarks as a reference. WoW maps were like that, but with more detail. Like, the Human campaign had only the major towns going from Brill to Andorhal to Hearthglen to Stratholme with some gnoll and ogre camps and a rough lay of the land on them. WoW maps detailed caves, farmfields, etc. On the other hand, it was said by Metzen that WoW is the theme park version of Azeroth. Distances in lore are meant to be much bigger.
Vanilla was more about exploration, and enjoying the journey from 1-60. Later on, it became more about efficiency, which, as someone who has leveled countless characters since launch, I do understand. I just wish there was a happy middle ground, so there's still time to enjoy everything instead of blasting through it. It's all about endgame; reach max level, raise your gear score, min/max, raid, and focus on hps/dps meters.
Gothic 1 and 2 had similar maps. They are in this hand drawn style. What made it even more immersive is that you had to buy, steal or get maps some other way. There were even partial maps.
@@nikitatsybryk9146 Well in Gothic 1 your character really didn't need a map of the world, since he was stuck inside of the colony. No way out until the end of the game. Similarly in Gothic 2 you were stuck on the island.
@@nikitatsybryk9146 I cant remember that one. Where was she? Only women i remember were "maids" in high places that served people like Y'Berion and Gomez.
@@nikitatsybryk9146 The only women in Gothic were the "maids" that worked for Gomez and other high ranks. You got the map from the guy who draws them in the old camp. He tries to rip you off with taking money for it even though Diego already payed him for it, so you have to press him a bit for it if you don't want to waste your currency.
I think We all took map design for granted when the game originally launched in 2004. The way the maps worked was terrific and certainly gave you a sense of exploration and discovery.
Speaking of the size of the world and maps....flight paths. WotLK and prior, these were few and far between. You got a real sense of just how large the world really is. Now, portals and flight paths everywhere- it feels small.
They were like actual hand drawn maps with major locations marked but not a complete reprint every possible location/quest, etc. lead to a lot of natural exploration…don’t have that anymore 😢
I remember when I first started to play WoW, I started off as a night elf, and I would spend my days looking over the great sea wondering what was out there beyond them map. I've always imagined it to be a giant arathi empire, hidden behind a wall of storms.
As someone who never dipped into WoW or MMOs in general (I have far too an addictive personality to let myself do that), this is a fascinating look at an aspect of the game I had no idea about. It's amazing to think that the maps of WoW weren't 1:1 representations of the actual world, but more artistic than that. It's something so commonplace in games today that I wouldn't even think of it as an option, but it would be insanely immersive, kind of like the flat grey box you get in upper left hand corner of the original Legend of Zelda. It tells you where you are, but not what where you are is exactly like. You have to learn it.
The problem with all open world games dare I say is they wont leave you alone. Wow left you the f alone to explore, modern games has pointers and huds and overlays etc
Great video! WoW's hand-drawn maps are one of the best to this day, even the rougher older versions of Vanilla. Just imagine how much work the artists put into painting out each and every zone, and then breaking it down for explorable bits to discover. What I can't get over with is how you did Guild Wars 2 dirty here :D Yes, its map is a birds eye view render akin to WoW's minimap when you discover everything, but if not discovered, or even simply zoomed out, it's this beautiful stylized handpaint with wide brushes and watercolor and whatnot (I suck in artsy terms I admit) which made GW2's art style so unique. And all the markers that are there are built in more subtly, which does make a pretty picture after all.
:) Sorry about being a little over critical! I guess the key point was the different between that really hand-drawn inaccurate kind of "adventure map" feeling and the high accuracy of other game maps. I don't think they are that bad at all, they are pretty, just a different approach!
Back at mop when i was a broke teen, i played some starter edition. I reached so many places with just the 40% riding. It was amazing. I spent ages time just exploring and trying to reach unreachable places.
I do believe maps have been a staple of fantasy - beyond just videogame fantasy. Tolkien, obviously, added depth to his world through its maps. And where games are concerned, we can always talk about tabletop RPGs and how they too use maps as tools for immersion and convenience. I never really thought abput how WOW might've been the first electronic rpg to do maps the way so many of them do it nowadays, it's a pretty interesting thing. Pioneering the use of an important staple for the overall genre in their specific medium
I really like maps and I think that WoW's maps are awesome! I love how there are maps for every zone in WoW and how these zones are connected and fill up multiple worlds. I hate how in most other video games, they only have maps for small areas where things happen and that only a tiny fraction of their worlds are accessible.
Old maps way better, especially having no instance map. Getting lost in dungeons is not a bad thing it's part of a good immersive fantasy experience. It's about the journey not the destination.
I sit here almost wanting to cry watching WoW videos remembering the child-like wonder I felt when I first played this game. My buddies and I were obsessed with Warcraft 2 ToD and BtDP. We were kids when they came out and we would make custom maps and have each other play them huddled around my computer. Many a night with my buddies over was spent on that franchise. We even wrote fan fiction stories about these characters and lands. Then WoW came along. I had heard about it and desperately wanted to play it. I was 19 in 2004 and I could NOT believe it. I had always heard of Everquest and Ultima Online but never once tried an MMO. It was completely new to me and it was my FAVORITE franchise. I'll never forget choosing Alliance, the camera panning through Elwynn Forest, and seeing unique looking characters running around and doing various tasks. I was asking my buddy "Are those people? Are those other players!?". Then the iconic Northshire Abbey is the starting point! No way! It just went on from there. I'll never forget how amazing this game was for me. Alas, it got much more complicated and became a different game to a point. I think I may have just grown out of it, save for a few relapses over the years. The last time I played was probably 2014 or 2015 Warlords of Draenor.
Agree, it's just nostalgia pandering. New zones still have the same values and issues. Sure you have a mark for your next destination but there will be obstacles in the way just like 20 years ago.
I’ll never forget when my cousins got me hooked on WoW towards the beginning of Wrath, and when they zoomed out to the world map showing Outlands next to Azeroth it blew my little kid mind that there was an entirely different world to explore. Great video!
The flying in all the zones killed it, it's that simple. When u dont have to think about the way to ur objective by just flying straight to it, u dont get to know the map properly. That's why they dont let u fly right away in the new expansions, so u get to know the map better.
This is a stupid oversimplification that leaves out the obsession with packing the world space full of shit and condensing quest spaces down. Not to mention the obsession with verticality that took hold in Warlords - notably an expansion that had NO flying save for those willing to go through an absurd and tedious achievement process.
I used to play in a private server back in the day, and I still remeber I was a blood elf, knowing nothing about the game, not even how to get a mount! and lvling in the ghostlands up to lvl 31!!!!!! it was crazy, then Me and my brother realize with the help of a friend we can take a portal to undercity and then fly to the OTHER continent, We dont even know how many hours we spended i ntrying to get out of that zone because we had 0 mision, and enemies didnt give us any xp, We were sooo lost
This is the WOW that made me wow back in 2005! I have even downloaded on Spotify one of my favorite songs from the game, "The song of Elune" from Ashenvale... I remember going as a low level Night Elf warrior through those lovely forests one day, and the song just popped! And for a while I just sat there and listened to the music and admired the ambiance... That was brilliant! To those working hard to create such moments, a big thank!
There's an aspect to exploration like these that's often overlooked and that's how player will also improve their navigational skills as they play. This is an aspect of player-game I see very few people appreciate, how not only your character gets stronger as you go through the level/gear treadmill but you as a player also improve your skills over time giving you a sort of quadratic curve to your performance. Mythic raiders perform better than normal raiders because they have better gear but also they also play a lot better, similarly a higher level player will be able to orient themselves better than a low level player who will easily get lost and wander off. This was huge in the landscape of classic WoW with the 1 hour CD on Hearthstones limiting you options for "OK I'm really far from where I want to be", lack of fast and flying mounts made terrain a lot more important and you were also at risk of getting dismounted. In a way being a good navigator would also mean getting from A to B faster and safer in a short trip, where lower level and less knowledgeable players would need to run gauntlets to get to their destination.
Great video! Not sure if someone already mentioned this, but Ultima Online was my first mmorpg experience around 1997 possibly earlier. I played Wow off and on from 2004-2010 then came back in 2023 to play retail for 10 months. This week I decided to play WOW SoD and honestly I don’t see myself going back to retail ever again. For me, I love the way the classic wow feels and even the maps are better in my opinion. Yes retail is beautiful and has some advantages. But for those that played wow long ago and came back because of nostalgia, well it’s easily understood that wow classic and sod have the nostalgia advantage hands down. Retail really is a completely different game and it took me 10 months to realize I didn’t like it…I just missed classic wow. Great video thanks.
A game that did great with imprecise maps, although another genre, was "Thief: The Dark Project". As one of the first "First Person Stealth Games" you played a Thief entering heavily secured mansions, abandoned ruins and mysterious places. So it was just coherent that your maps were pretty imprecise, sometimes as vague as "left wing of the building, main hall, right wing of the building". And it was awesome, because it created immersion and tension. Trying to navigate in an uncharted environment while dodging guards and fiends was hard and sometimes frustrating, but fit perfectly in this game world. Thief II had way more detailed maps. It was also great because the game was balanced around it (in my memories at least), but sometimes I missed these vague maps from part one and the love-hate relationsship with them. :)
Classic wow was amazing in that regard. The quests were rarer, took longer to complete making them more rewarding, needed you to find the right mob even. Modern MMOs is "Get 3 thungamajigs by killing, pick up 5 more thingamajogs off the ground conventiently placed next to a mob group, then go to the spire thing and activate the lever, then return and do it again, as fast as possible, with markers everywhere"
I recently tried to play wotlk again, because back in the days i really enjoyed it. But holy shit questing back in the days fkng sucked, i cant imagine how bad it was in classic. Its not rewarding its just annoying.
"Amazing"... yeah, "Amazing" Having to spend an hour looking for that one thing that was poorly described in the quest log (if at all), and then killing x mob for another hour because of it's insanely low drop rate. Then after you're done having to spend another 10 minutes walking back to the quest turn in only for it to sending you to another zone which required a 5 day long trip on a flight path... "Amazing". Nostalgia is a powerful Loa. Back in original wow (I started in Dec 04', a month after release) we just didn't know any better, for many of us this game was our first introduction in to MMORPG's or even just RPG's, everything was oooh, aaah, but I would never ever want to go back to that version of the game (which is why classic never interested me). The game has improved in so many countless ways, it's such a better game now than it was then. The style never changing means the maps were as good looking then as they are now.
@@TahiriVeila13ABY I am not sure I fully agree. I played from early 2005 until shortly after Cata dropped. Quests in vanilla felt meaningful and real, and that is in part because they were sometimes annoying and the non-linear design of the maps meant that there was more running around. In the Burning Crusade and especially in WOTLK, the quest design "improved" massively, and became increasingly linear, but the larger map sizes meant that they were explored and quested in sections. NPC quest givers always conveniently close to the targets, and the directions of where to go meant that the content simply wasn't as immersive.
WoW has such a beautifully crafted world from classic to today, even if an expansion itself isnt amazing I am always excited to play and explore the zones
The only complaint I have with the old maps is that it should have more hover over labels or have house/cave markers pop up in some areas. Mainly for the immersion of "noting" a place you discovered.
Dungeons don't need maps. You heard me. Getting lost is part of the experience, the gameplay, the community. Finding someone who knows their way or not, is a choice just like real life, before technology replaced social interaction. Exploring the unknown and exploring the community is EXACTLY what it's all about. It's group content after all. Mapping everything out or worse, dumbing everything down into a corridor like FFXIV, is the death of dungeons as fun content.
Another thing that i noticed about oldschool wow maps is that most of the zones are more flat than the new ones. They were more farsighed and less clustered with meaningless hills everywhere. It felt free and wide and way more inventing to explore. Plus the absolutly stunning music for the perfect atmosphere. Loved it.
I absolutely agree. Around Mists/Warlords (but especially warlords, and MASSIVELY in Legion and BFA) the maps started to become obsessively vertical, despite that being the time where flying was at its most curtailed and made world traversal a fucking chore. It also meant that exploration was completely limited to what you ran into for quests or saw on the map because of how close the horizon always was. You couldn’t look at a flat Barrens-like vista and select something in the distance.
There may have been a technical aspect to that decision. Vanilla was plagued with long loading times and disconnects due to data loading too slowly. Long vistas are more data-intensive.
The thing is that by Cataclysm the quest descriptions were wonderful and descriptive, so if you turn off the map quest helpers you will see how nice the questing is since Cata, although it's numerically easy until the last 10-20 levels. This way you remember what you did, you look and remember where you went and the places themselves.
Sometimes less is more, the simpleness of the old map made the world feel more mysterious and unknown. The new maps looks like a GPS with too much detail, taking away from the mysterious
I remember when i first started playing the game, and I had one of those poster maps. It was such a magical and wonderful experience exploring the world for the first time And constantly checking that map while playing. Its hard to recapture that with later expansions to the same degree. Convenience is both a huge plus and a huge negative. Its really hard to find the right balance and that balance changes over time too. I think Wow did an incredible job with their maps. I still remember the feeling of constantly wondering what was beyond certain walls, and used to love watching those exploration videos people would do by wall jumping or other stuff. No other game that I can think of made me care about a map like this game did.
Never wanted to be in the first place, it just makes the world feel less special. Legendary figures become quest givers. Once fabled weapons are now leveling weapons... etc. When everyone have the Ashbringer, no one has it. I know a dungeon like Naxx was probably seen as a mistake by Blizzard, given how few where actually able to enjoy the content... but for the people who couldn't (like me), it was something to dream about and added mystique to the game.
Map style IMO was inspired by the original Ultima series for the Apple ][ that came with printed/cloth maps in the box (which I still have). And while Ultima was inspired by by D&D, its maps paid homage to Tolkien’s map of Middle Earth.
A bit late to watching this but I played Ultima Online a long long time ago and the maps are very similar. I'm glad someone else had already mentioned it!
Convenience is in my opinion what ruined WoW community: everything became a rush: rush to max level, rush to epicware, rush to rep. The game switched from playing dungeons and content for fun, to a second job to minmax everything to not be "left behind". In Vanilla rares were... actually rare items and epics were something that felt good to have, not the minimum requirement to not be considered "crap". Also, since everything would take so long to do, players would enjoy the ride, and wouldn't be annoyed by "bad rig".
I hate hate HATE what the modern world map looks like. There's like 6 giant islands scattered in the must ugly cluttered way, to the point that some of these new islands which are supposed to be small are almost half the size of Kalimdor.
You’ve mentioned something essential, we were kids at that time, with no expectations, just being kids enjoying video games. Now when we grown up we started to have expectations that will gives a bit of joy and forget about how life could be hard sometimes. People are stressed and social media does not help while constantly telling you that you need to self develop not to waste time by just entertaining yourself with a decent video game . I would say if you remember how it was being a kid and start acting more easy going on daily basis you could actually relax. Tl:dr
I am so grateful you made this video. I didn't begin to play regularly until Cata and really wanted to play thru the original World in order to see and experience the original zones and quests. Unfortunately, when I tried to play Classic, I just couldn't deal with the lack of map. So I went back to regular WoW. Watching this made it clear there was a map, I just needed to find it. And I found it in five seconds sitting right under my nose on the action bar. /shakes head at self Will enjoy hours of more fun in WoW because of your video so thank you very much! And you are right, the maps are awesome and underappreciated.
Classic maps were all a mystery waiting for the player to uncover, retail maps on the other hand weave and scream to you "HEY YOU, YES YOU, COME HERE AND GET YOUR DOPAMINE SPIKE, NOOOOOOW!" It's what it feels like to me (I pref the old way)
Almost 20 Years ago every teenage boy had the map of azeroth hanging in their rooms. When Bruning Crusade came out everyone and their mother played WOW. The enormous map was fascinating to me. So many far off lands and you always wondering when and if you'll get there. Those were the days, man.
I think WoW maps may have been influenced by Lord of Rings maps. The way the hills are set, this artistic feeling, it looks like Tolkien's to me. I find the classic WoW maps so awesome, so awesome. It was one of the things that hooked me into this game. I remember my friends using coordination add-ons to it. I didn't. I tried (with my poor English) to understand and read every quest and guess from there where to go. Sometimes, it took me a very significant amount of time to find the correct place. After a while, in certain areas, before getting into quests, I actually made recc of the whole region so I could have a better idea of how to deal with different tasks. Thanks to the maps, the game had this raw clay feel, like placing your bare hands on the ground, on the earth, and building stuff up. Getting yourself virtually dirty. It wasn't simply an action RPG. It had many exploration and other things together other than quests to do, like the world PVP, which was another element within this looseness of the maps. The maps actually had fog of war. Another thing important to mention is WoW's fidelity to Warcraft 3. You could visit the places from WC 3. They were all there. They were also somewhat in line with maps represented in the story, in which you could have a glimpse in the loading screens. Along with that, the 3d artwork of the buildings and environment felt very connected, almost as of a third-person extension of the game. I think Blizzard was very lucky and wise up to the first expansion. Then they added so many features that the gameplay went from a Tolkien based MMORPG to an action MMO, more set for performance other than storytelling, in my opinion. Great video! I liked it a lot. A subject people often ignored when talking about video games! Kind regards!
Now, just an add-on, I would like to point out the things I think Blizzard failed with classic WoW. I think one of the most important things they failed was in giving the game and the map a more recycling feature. I mean, you went to each area, got yourself the level necessary, and then left, with no reason to go back. They made this enormous, gigantic map but didn't give it enough things for the players to do and use it more, especially after reaching the top level. So, the game felt a little bit tracked despite all the broadness of it, with not that much replayability, at least in terms of exploring and being around each unique region. So, when players runned out of things to do and got bored, Blizz had to keep expanding the map, creating DLCs for people to buy and leave entire continents and worlds empty behind so people could level in other different places. Had they made the world more smart, allowing for more recycling features and replayability, the game would have been much better. They could have explored the PVP element of it, this two factions dispute and add some sort of territory conquer element to the game, other than controlling some tower here and there. I understand that the game came long ago, without many resources to creating cool stuff, but still, though, I think it could have been done. In that aspect I think WoW distances itself a little bit from Warcraft 3 in the sense of creating a base, a history, and using an area more broadly instead of making people go somewhere else and pursue an entire different story.
Thanks for the great comment and for watching! I think you're right it's inspired by LOTR, and curiously enough you don't find that kind of hand-drawn feel in many other games!
@@learnwithmapster WoW's map was one of the best made. Really well thought and worked quite fine. I have seen two examples so far of video game maps similar. One is the own LoTR online game. As far as I'm aware (long time since I don't play it) the game map had WoW's looks. Another example and completely unrelated to RPG games is the first Shogun Total War. It also looked hand draw. Great table top strategic map that old one.
And not just WC3, but WC2 and even WC1! I was confused why there are so many ballistas in Lordaeron and Stormwind for example, then I realised humans DID use ballistas in the First and Second War. The most brilliant is how classic Warcraft RTS units are made into npcs in WoW, like the Huntresses who patrol Telsrassil, or the Stormwind Guards who are basically Footmen, the Mountaineers who are Riflemen from WC3, the Dragonhawk Riders in Quel'Danas, the Grunts and Raiders all over the two continents, and the Warcraft 3 siege veapons that became setpieces in WoW.
Never played at official server. 2005-2007. The most interesting part first me was world exploration and craft some weird stuff,like scuba helmet or defibrillator. Due to numerous bugs on pirate server, i could use scuba helmet to swim in lava and steal treasures from dungeons. Also i liked to visit Booty Bay , climbing to the end of ship nose sitting there and watch the sunset. And then life happened, and WoW was forgotten completely.
10:23 TES3 : Morrowind featured an artsy printed map that came with the game and which hung on the wall above my CRT monitor when i played it as a 12 year old. Very similar to the wow maps but morrowind did have an additional ingame map with less detail. The art map actually allowed players to find hidden caves and settlements that were not on the ingame map!
Excellent video. I could never exactly understand why I didn't like the modern maps, but now I can. Imagine having the old Atlas and an updated version. The old one would put the new one to shame. Great channel! I discovered it from this video. Keep up the good work :)
One of the few things I would change about the vanilla map would be fog of war is removed account-wide upon exploration if you toggle that option in user settings
Man great video! You can really tell Blizzards team put in a lot of love with the maps. Specifically love how you said about as your exploring the maps get drawn out and discovered as your adventuring. Very unique feel you don't get with other modern MMOs.
I still remember when questie came out. I love that app lol. With that in mind ,retail wow's map doesn't bother me much. I just wish questie was still a thing in retail. Blizz map interface sucks.
I've always loved the maps. There are certain classic, natural aesthetics that will always be pleasing to humans. I hate how modern design, art, architecture, etc. has forgotten the standard of beauty that came from nature and our perception of it. Things that look clearly crafted by humans are warm and welcoming (even if the map is of some barren or inhospitable place), and things that are not feel cold and lifeless. On a psychological level, our modern lives are dull and the future is uncertain; aesthetics that point to our early history and simpler times would likely be appealing. It's the difference between a frozen TV dinner and a home cooked meal. On top of all of it, the simplicity and slight abstraction is appealing. You don't have to be the best artist or game developer to accomplish this; it only requires passion, creativity, and attention to detail. I believe too many people overthink and overdesign... it's best to keep it simple when you can.
The great thing about WoW vanilla's focus on immersiveness and intentional obscurity is definitely how it forced you to talk to other players. Where is that quest item? How do I get to that place? Which enemies drop that thing? How do you find your way throught this dungeon? It created a vibrant and alive community, instead of a single player experience.
It was the lack of shit on it. I want a MAP. not an interactive overhead display. It's a fucking fantasy game. The second anything appears on it it's just taking the game out of it.
This is awesome. Thanks for making this. 😎 Not sure why I subscribed, but given the quality and tone of the video, I expect good things from the channel.
I too came across the tradeoff between convenience and immersion, I think it is the secret to the great puzzle of how to create that feeling of vanilla that people long for so much
I got hooked into WoW because of the original story & the maps made me happy to fill in! They reminded me of the maps my friends & I would draw when we played D&D!
What was so great about WoW's maps? It used to have a WORLD. every expansion is a handful of zones and makes you feel how isolated and small the expansion is. We just want a bit of world in our world of warcraft
maaan what are y'all on about putting mods on to find basic shit. If I could find my way with no addons at like 11 years old, anyone could, and that was half the fun.
I loved in Vanilla and TBC that there were no maps in dungeons and raids. It gave you a feeling of being in a dangerous and uncharted territory that you had to search and explore on your own.
Loved Vanilla. It was all the "improvements" that eventually got me to quit. Disliked everything being spoon fed to me and how the sped up leveling while taking out actually playing the game. Rush to end game and get on the hamster wheel. No thanks. Came back for Classic's re-release and would love to see that classic with new content, but doubt it will ever happen.
Its not the map layout, its whats in it. We exolored because we hoped to find treasure and adventure. Then yohtube cqme qnd teached us "there is no loot or adventure out there, onmy in dungeons" Once thwt happened, wow became a boring liat of items to cross of players checklists. Its not an MMORPG anymore, its a groceries-list simulator.
Retail is so far away from classic in everything, we can call it simply another game. The Trailer for the Dragonflight could be any other game, just change the title. I prefer WoW ...
All the people who were complaining about how hard it was and the inconvenience of it all. They didn't want to be immersed they just wanted to win and feel as accomplished as the people who unraveled it themselves.
The agree filling in the map makes sense to me. It did make the map very interactive and memorable. I think part of it too though, was that I was sort of instantly Nostalgic. It made me think of the Warcraft 3 campaign maps, even though they don't agree exactly. It was fun finding that one location I did a campaign mission at in Warcraft 3.
btw idea- add to the game diary like from Rdr2. if you see some unique rare mob, place, hidden something add it to your journal. so you have something to go back
I love the old WoW maps. The new ones are way too cluttered with information. This also lends into the design philosophy of cramming the zones with crap.
I do sort of miss the days when games didnt hold your hand, to me, maps are a feature that should be put behind a wall of gameplay in order to be discovered, hollow knights this very well, you could buy half completed maps, and finish them by your own exploration. And they were finished when YOU were finished.
I missed huge areas that are not glutters when so many stuff on them. It gives you the feeling of how vast the world was. The last time I had this feeling in WoW areas was in WoD with the original Draenor that later became Outland.
Oh man i remember buying the Strategy Guides back in the day. Reading the quests and recipes it was like I was just some random adventurer armed with only a traveler's guide 😂
Wow, it was good when we were sub 20s Wow is bad bc we're in 30s and 40s trying to balance rl and mmo gaming I myself don't blame blizz as much as the time how we've been changed in the past fun and joy were our priority , now finish earlier go faster be meta is the priority
I remember leveling as a kid and looking at the zones that were so far away on other continents and I would wonder what they looked like and what was there. Truly spectacular.
@MoosePolo same! I remember clicking through the Outland maps and wondering what sort of wild landscapes were going to be there :D
@@Jediwarlock I remember being 12 and having that exact same experience
I was 30, yes 30, when wow came out in 2004 and I felt that same kid-like wonderment you describe here. Retail just doesn’t have that for me. I even would fly back to these old zones i.e. Westfall, Duskwood, Darkshore, they are all entirely empty in retail even on highly populated servers and that just so sad. I won’t be going back to retail again I’m staying in classic sod.
@@LifeHawkeyeyep. It's not just nostalgia. Retail is fun for a bit but Classic era is fun for longer and way more immersive
Or the excitement you felt when seeing newer expansions being announced, now I hardly care anymore but outland and northrend reveals were legendary
I dont wanna be the savior of azeroth anymore, I just wanna go back to being an adventurer wandering the world and being a part of it.
Exactly! It felt much more like being a Hobbit going into the vast unknown world than being Aragorn.
It relates also much more to real life, for example Tolkien hiked in Switzerland at places like Lauterbrunnen, Rothorn, Grindelwald and was inspired by those and you can do the same IRL or in WoW.
I think this LotR analogy is a big reason why WoW Vanilla was so successful... around the same time the LotR trilogy was released and Azeroth just felt like that.
I especially loved WoW Vanilla/Classic because of that and the high fantansy genre, the other expansions (except WotLK to some extent) didn't have this anymore.
Classic Hardcore's giving me this feeling. If you haven't yet, I would recommend trying it. :)
just do what i did and start playing SoloCraft.
This
Being a regular dude in a huge world that goes on without you is so much better than being THE CHAMPION AND CHOSEN ONE
I love the hand-drawn maps. Modern MMO maps are so cluttered with all the different bits and bobs everywhere. I get so overwhelmed and, ironically, lost in the forest for the trees. I love the simple WOW classic maps.
Dragonflight kinda went back go the classic style
@@eliashautala7450 The underlay yeah, but they still are so cluttered. Here's a world quest, here's a rare, here's the grand hunt, here's the dreamsurge, here's a treasure, and on and on and on.
Its because vanilla wow was created in times where games were actually a challenge and forced people to think, read quests. Now it's just a mindless clicking in order to get some dopamine rush.
@@ady007plnot really the case with modern wow tbh. Most endgame content on the form of dungeons and raids is way more complex (with more mechanics and shit to keep track of) and difficult than it was on the past. To the point where it's detrimental to the game's growth.
There still is mindless button clicking with some activities, but that was the case since vanilla wow
@@kaironst2969i kind agree with you, but i wouldn't say its complex its just that if 1 person fucks up the whole raid is fucked which is hard not to do cause there's so much animations and shit you dont know whats what or the color schemes just blend in perfect so you could be standing in some swirly of death and not even know, when it comes down its just poor design and then top of it you got all the try hard sweats that have addons and all that shit cause they've never done anything with their life to gets dads approval. Like I can understand if it's a world 1st achievement your going for, but after its been out for how long its just like dude calm the fuck down it's just a game and if your gonna be competitive about it join a guild or make your own thats why of many reasons why guilds exist
I remember playing this in my 20s. The world was so full of people and wonder, it just filled you with wonder. This was considered a 'casual' MMO back then (Everquest was the Hardcore MMO at the time). Reviews use to say you could log in for an hour and accomplish something. Eventually, the world became less and less populated as they had the Dungeon finder, but part of the fun was getting to the dungeon, and maybe running into the opposing faction waiting for the rest of their group, and you'd have these spontaneous fights organically. Those were good times!
I'm probably in the minority, but I felt very sad when Blizzard implemented the first battlegrounds, and even sadder when the first expansion was on a different continent. Each of these updates seemed to remove more and more players from the world. I still remember looking at the undeveloped 'zones' on the original map wondering what they would add.
I remember doing that too!
I've been playing on private server myself... the world being empty was never an issue to me. It was part of the charm. You'd meet people in towns, but you'd often be on your own outside.
Dungeon finder destroyed WoW (as a game). It turned it into WoW (the loot grind simulator)
@@Dasein23"Dungeon finder destroyed" Before the dungeon finder, running instances was a chore when you had to spa the trade chat in a capital city to get a group together only the group getting disbanded after the first wipe.
oh god the music... my brain was very young, between 5 and about 12 when I played wow, something sad rises up within me when I hear that music - it's like I used to live on another planet
My brain is also wired for music and WoW has some of the best. It talks right to your soul.
Absolutely, it'll be with me for the rest of my life
I feel the same 😢
I was like 7-8 and had a full blown addiction even though i never progressed much further then the starting zones before i would start a new character. When my brother cancelled his subscription i used to sit and look at the photos in his thick WoW gaming booklet and imagine i was still playing it. Years later when i got access to youtube i used to sit and watch videos of the login screen for the burning crusade, the one with the big glowing gate and the music would warm my heart like a drug addict describing how their drug of choice feels.. i know if i were to play it now it wouldnt feel the same so i see no point, my adult comfort mmo is elder scrolls online lol.
@@tylermunday2146 It's strange how we long for the past...
I started playing classic again yesterday without quest helper. Clues from the quest makes it immersive, suddenly im happy to see a windmill or small hut in the horizon because the quests describe these landmarks you take for granted with questie addon
I will jump in today too. Are you playing EU? If that is the case, what realm?
@kasper8509 all servers are linked. So you have to question yourself if you want to play pvp or pve :) (those are not linked together)
I play horde pvp which has 40% and alliance 60%. It's a gamble playing outnumbered faction
Like you, I’m playing without quest helper and know exactly what you mean in having to decipher the quest log with more scrutiny lol. I’m not using any add ons not out of desire to do so, but because I have an iMac and for the life of me cannot figure out how to make add ons work for me lol. I’m an old dog that can’t seem to learn some new tricks I guess. But the result is having to play the game very organically and that’s not all bad. If I’m really in a rut I consult wowhead which is fantastic and gives me all the info I need when necessary.
@@LifeHawkeyeyes agreed. I played with 0 addons like you, but i like some addons though :) like automatically sell grey items or selling single items at auction house faster.
What I noticed was that I move in cities more like a mouse in a maze, checking every room to see if a quest is available. With questie I just ignore 90% of the map
I tried that when classic servers originally launched and by the time I was 60lvl everyone else had full T2 , I wish there was a specific slow paced PvE server that had a bigger community , of course you can play solo but it sucks.
I guess technically WOWs map style was taken from the campaign loading screens of WC3. I at least felt very familiar to the style when I started playing coming from WC3
The campaign maps from WC3 were meant to look like medieval maps, where the map was a rough estimation of distance with some major landmarks as a reference.
WoW maps were like that, but with more detail.
Like, the Human campaign had only the major towns going from Brill to Andorhal to Hearthglen to Stratholme with some gnoll and ogre camps and a rough lay of the land on them. WoW maps detailed caves, farmfields, etc.
On the other hand, it was said by Metzen that WoW is the theme park version of Azeroth. Distances in lore are meant to be much bigger.
Vanilla was more about exploration, and enjoying the journey from 1-60. Later on, it became more about efficiency, which, as someone who has leveled countless characters since launch, I do understand. I just wish there was a happy middle ground, so there's still time to enjoy everything instead of blasting through it. It's all about endgame; reach max level, raise your gear score, min/max, raid, and focus on hps/dps meters.
Gothic 1 and 2 had similar maps. They are in this hand drawn style.
What made it even more immersive is that you had to buy, steal or get maps some other way. There were even partial maps.
And an item named "map"... but.. it wasn't really a map... not of the world at least xD
@@nikitatsybryk9146 Well in Gothic 1 your character really didn't need a map of the world, since he was stuck inside of the colony. No way out until the end of the game. Similarly in Gothic 2 you were stuck on the island.
@@Nik930714 i was referring to a woman painting that you can find 1st Gothic :p
@@nikitatsybryk9146 I cant remember that one. Where was she? Only women i remember were "maids" in high places that served people like Y'Berion and Gomez.
@@nikitatsybryk9146 The only women in Gothic were the "maids" that worked for Gomez and other high ranks. You got the map from the guy who draws them in the old camp. He tries to rip you off with taking money for it even though Diego already payed him for it, so you have to press him a bit for it if you don't want to waste your currency.
I think We all took map design for granted when the game originally launched in 2004. The way the maps worked was terrific and certainly gave you a sense of exploration and discovery.
and when you think about it almost all of the zones were fully used, unlike many games where some zones are pretty much empty.
1:09 That's Yakuza like a dragon. 1:13 That's Far Cry 3.
I fr had to double take at the caption 💀💀💀
THANK YOU
Speaking of the size of the world and maps....flight paths. WotLK and prior, these were few and far between. You got a real sense of just how large the world really is. Now, portals and flight paths everywhere- it feels small.
They were like actual hand drawn maps with major locations marked but not a complete reprint every possible location/quest, etc. lead to a lot of natural exploration…don’t have that anymore 😢
I remember when I first started to play WoW, I started off as a night elf, and I would spend my days looking over the great sea wondering what was out there beyond them map. I've always imagined it to be a giant arathi empire, hidden behind a wall of storms.
Love this. So much wonder in that world!
Small correction: at 1:09 it's showing Yakuza: Like a Dragon rather than Watchdogs.
1:13 it's Farcry 3 and not Crysis
*smaller correction: no.
As someone who never dipped into WoW or MMOs in general (I have far too an addictive personality to let myself do that), this is a fascinating look at an aspect of the game I had no idea about. It's amazing to think that the maps of WoW weren't 1:1 representations of the actual world, but more artistic than that. It's something so commonplace in games today that I wouldn't even think of it as an option, but it would be insanely immersive, kind of like the flat grey box you get in upper left hand corner of the original Legend of Zelda. It tells you where you are, but not what where you are is exactly like. You have to learn it.
Probably inspired by Tolkien's map of Middle Earth.
The problem with all open world games dare I say is they wont leave you alone. Wow left you the f alone to explore, modern games has pointers and huds and overlays etc
The freedom to just… be, and not to do. Something lost on most of modern media that is so obsessed with every ounce of our attention.
and u are 15 years old and played only new games or what is this joke suppose to mean lol.
Growing up playing warcraft 1. I'm still blown away walking around the buildings.
Same. I grew up playing WoW and wandering around the vanilla world just makes you feel so small. There's such a feeling of grandeur and immersion.
Great video! WoW's hand-drawn maps are one of the best to this day, even the rougher older versions of Vanilla. Just imagine how much work the artists put into painting out each and every zone, and then breaking it down for explorable bits to discover.
What I can't get over with is how you did Guild Wars 2 dirty here :D Yes, its map is a birds eye view render akin to WoW's minimap when you discover everything, but if not discovered, or even simply zoomed out, it's this beautiful stylized handpaint with wide brushes and watercolor and whatnot (I suck in artsy terms I admit) which made GW2's art style so unique. And all the markers that are there are built in more subtly, which does make a pretty picture after all.
:) Sorry about being a little over critical! I guess the key point was the different between that really hand-drawn inaccurate kind of "adventure map" feeling and the high accuracy of other game maps. I don't think they are that bad at all, they are pretty, just a different approach!
Back at mop when i was a broke teen, i played some starter edition. I reached so many places with just the 40% riding. It was amazing. I spent ages time just exploring and trying to reach unreachable places.
Your intro made me feel things I didn't know I had forgotten
Nice video, I think the weakness of low information is only a problem when you play through the map instead of the world.
Very well-said!
I do believe maps have been a staple of fantasy - beyond just videogame fantasy. Tolkien, obviously, added depth to his world through its maps. And where games are concerned, we can always talk about tabletop RPGs and how they too use maps as tools for immersion and convenience.
I never really thought abput how WOW might've been the first electronic rpg to do maps the way so many of them do it nowadays, it's a pretty interesting thing. Pioneering the use of an important staple for the overall genre in their specific medium
I really like maps and I think that WoW's maps are awesome! I love how there are maps for every zone in WoW and how these zones are connected and fill up multiple worlds. I hate how in most other video games, they only have maps for small areas where things happen and that only a tiny fraction of their worlds are accessible.
Old maps way better, especially having no instance map. Getting lost in dungeons is not a bad thing it's part of a good immersive fantasy experience. It's about the journey not the destination.
I sit here almost wanting to cry watching WoW videos remembering the child-like wonder I felt when I first played this game. My buddies and I were obsessed with Warcraft 2 ToD and BtDP. We were kids when they came out and we would make custom maps and have each other play them huddled around my computer. Many a night with my buddies over was spent on that franchise. We even wrote fan fiction stories about these characters and lands.
Then WoW came along. I had heard about it and desperately wanted to play it. I was 19 in 2004 and I could NOT believe it. I had always heard of Everquest and Ultima Online but never once tried an MMO. It was completely new to me and it was my FAVORITE franchise. I'll never forget choosing Alliance, the camera panning through Elwynn Forest, and seeing unique looking characters running around and doing various tasks. I was asking my buddy "Are those people? Are those other players!?". Then the iconic Northshire Abbey is the starting point! No way! It just went on from there.
I'll never forget how amazing this game was for me. Alas, it got much more complicated and became a different game to a point. I think I may have just grown out of it, save for a few relapses over the years. The last time I played was probably 2014 or 2015 Warlords of Draenor.
Nostalgia. It's all about desperately trying to revive those early memories from the very first days. Everything was new. Everything was magical.
Agree, it's just nostalgia pandering. New zones still have the same values and issues. Sure you have a mark for your next destination but there will be obstacles in the way just like 20 years ago.
F$&k not the Barrens music making me tear up again 😢
You gotta love it :)
I’ll never forget when my cousins got me hooked on WoW towards the beginning of Wrath, and when they zoomed out to the world map showing Outlands next to Azeroth it blew my little kid mind that there was an entirely different world to explore. Great video!
The flying in all the zones killed it, it's that simple. When u dont have to think about the way to ur objective by just flying straight to it, u dont get to know the map properly. That's why they dont let u fly right away in the new expansions, so u get to know the map better.
This is a stupid oversimplification that leaves out the obsession with packing the world space full of shit and condensing quest spaces down. Not to mention the obsession with verticality that took hold in Warlords - notably an expansion that had NO flying save for those willing to go through an absurd and tedious achievement process.
Storm peaks in wrath were still cool and the TWW zones are good with flying imo
You can fly right away in the new expansion, thankfully.
I used to play in a private server back in the day, and I still remeber I was a blood elf, knowing nothing about the game, not even how to get a mount! and lvling in the ghostlands up to lvl 31!!!!!! it was crazy, then Me and my brother realize with the help of a friend we can take a portal to undercity and then fly to the OTHER continent, We dont even know how many hours we spended i ntrying to get out of that zone because we had 0 mision, and enemies didnt give us any xp, We were sooo lost
This is the WOW that made me wow back in 2005!
I have even downloaded on Spotify one of my favorite songs from the game, "The song of Elune" from Ashenvale... I remember going as a low level Night Elf warrior through those lovely forests one day, and the song just popped! And for a while I just sat there and listened to the music and admired the ambiance... That was brilliant!
To those working hard to create such moments, a big thank!
There's an aspect to exploration like these that's often overlooked and that's how player will also improve their navigational skills as they play.
This is an aspect of player-game I see very few people appreciate, how not only your character gets stronger as you go through the level/gear treadmill but you as a player also improve your skills over time giving you a sort of quadratic curve to your performance. Mythic raiders perform better than normal raiders because they have better gear but also they also play a lot better, similarly a higher level player will be able to orient themselves better than a low level player who will easily get lost and wander off.
This was huge in the landscape of classic WoW with the 1 hour CD on Hearthstones limiting you options for "OK I'm really far from where I want to be", lack of fast and flying mounts made terrain a lot more important and you were also at risk of getting dismounted. In a way being a good navigator would also mean getting from A to B faster and safer in a short trip, where lower level and less knowledgeable players would need to run gauntlets to get to their destination.
exactly,
before: it is all about exploring.
now: here -> mission -> next
Great video! Not sure if someone already mentioned this, but Ultima Online was my first mmorpg experience around 1997 possibly earlier. I played Wow off and on from 2004-2010 then came back in 2023 to play retail for 10 months. This week I decided to play WOW SoD and honestly I don’t see myself going back to retail ever again. For me, I love the way the classic wow feels and even the maps are better in my opinion. Yes retail is beautiful and has some advantages. But for those that played wow long ago and came back because of nostalgia, well it’s easily understood that wow classic and sod have the nostalgia advantage hands down. Retail really is a completely different game and it took me 10 months to realize I didn’t like it…I just missed classic wow. Great video thanks.
back then, exploreing the maps are one of my favorite things to do in wow.
A game that did great with imprecise maps, although another genre, was "Thief: The Dark Project". As one of the first "First Person Stealth Games" you played a Thief entering heavily secured mansions, abandoned ruins and mysterious places. So it was just coherent that your maps were pretty imprecise, sometimes as vague as "left wing of the building, main hall, right wing of the building". And it was awesome, because it created immersion and tension. Trying to navigate in an uncharted environment while dodging guards and fiends was hard and sometimes frustrating, but fit perfectly in this game world.
Thief II had way more detailed maps. It was also great because the game was balanced around it (in my memories at least), but sometimes I missed these vague maps from part one and the love-hate relationsship with them. :)
Classic wow was amazing in that regard. The quests were rarer, took longer to complete making them more rewarding, needed you to find the right mob even.
Modern MMOs is "Get 3 thungamajigs by killing, pick up 5 more thingamajogs off the ground conventiently placed next to a mob group, then go to the spire thing and activate the lever, then return and do it again, as fast as possible, with markers everywhere"
I recently tried to play wotlk again, because back in the days i really enjoyed it. But holy shit questing back in the days fkng sucked, i cant imagine how bad it was in classic. Its not rewarding its just annoying.
They weren't more rewarding. Just because they took longer didn't make them more fun. Which is why everyone dungeon grinded/boosted in classic
"Amazing"... yeah, "Amazing" Having to spend an hour looking for that one thing that was poorly described in the quest log (if at all), and then killing x mob for another hour because of it's insanely low drop rate. Then after you're done having to spend another 10 minutes walking back to the quest turn in only for it to sending you to another zone which required a 5 day long trip on a flight path... "Amazing". Nostalgia is a powerful Loa.
Back in original wow (I started in Dec 04', a month after release) we just didn't know any better, for many of us this game was our first introduction in to MMORPG's or even just RPG's, everything was oooh, aaah, but I would never ever want to go back to that version of the game (which is why classic never interested me). The game has improved in so many countless ways, it's such a better game now than it was then. The style never changing means the maps were as good looking then as they are now.
@@TahiriVeila13ABY I am not sure I fully agree. I played from early 2005 until shortly after Cata dropped. Quests in vanilla felt meaningful and real, and that is in part because they were sometimes annoying and the non-linear design of the maps meant that there was more running around. In the Burning Crusade and especially in WOTLK, the quest design "improved" massively, and became increasingly linear, but the larger map sizes meant that they were explored and quested in sections. NPC quest givers always conveniently close to the targets, and the directions of where to go meant that the content simply wasn't as immersive.
WoW has such a beautifully crafted world from classic to today, even if an expansion itself isnt amazing I am always excited to play and explore the zones
The only complaint I have with the old maps is that it should have more hover over labels or have house/cave markers pop up in some areas. Mainly for the immersion of "noting" a place you discovered.
Dungeons don't need maps. You heard me. Getting lost is part of the experience, the gameplay, the community. Finding someone who knows their way or not, is a choice just like real life, before technology replaced social interaction. Exploring the unknown and exploring the community is EXACTLY what it's all about. It's group content after all. Mapping everything out or worse, dumbing everything down into a corridor like FFXIV, is the death of dungeons as fun content.
I don't see many people complaining about maps being added to the dungeons, by your logic why have any maps at all?
1:11 that is not Watch Dogs thats Yakuza Like A Dragon
How can you dishonor such a good game with a label as gross as watch dogs
Damn those OG WoW map was spectacular
We all installed quest helper addons, if only we knew what we were losing :(
Another thing that i noticed about oldschool wow maps is that most of the zones are more flat than the new ones. They were more farsighed and less clustered with meaningless hills everywhere. It felt free and wide and way more inventing to explore. Plus the absolutly stunning music for the perfect atmosphere. Loved it.
I absolutely agree. Around Mists/Warlords (but especially warlords, and MASSIVELY in Legion and BFA) the maps started to become obsessively vertical, despite that being the time where flying was at its most curtailed and made world traversal a fucking chore. It also meant that exploration was completely limited to what you ran into for quests or saw on the map because of how close the horizon always was. You couldn’t look at a flat Barrens-like vista and select something in the distance.
There may have been a technical aspect to that decision. Vanilla was plagued with long loading times and disconnects due to data loading too slowly. Long vistas are more data-intensive.
The thing is that by Cataclysm the quest descriptions were wonderful and descriptive, so if you turn off the map quest helpers you will see how nice the questing is since Cata, although it's numerically easy until the last 10-20 levels. This way you remember what you did, you look and remember where you went and the places themselves.
Sometimes less is more, the simpleness of the old map made the world feel more mysterious and unknown. The new maps looks like a GPS with too much detail, taking away from the mysterious
I remember when i first started playing the game, and I had one of those poster maps. It was such a magical and wonderful experience exploring the world for the first time And constantly checking that map while playing. Its hard to recapture that with later expansions to the same degree. Convenience is both a huge plus and a huge negative. Its really hard to find the right balance and that balance changes over time too. I think Wow did an incredible job with their maps. I still remember the feeling of constantly wondering what was beyond certain walls, and used to love watching those exploration videos people would do by wall jumping or other stuff. No other game that I can think of made me care about a map like this game did.
Sergeant Major Eslam Spotted at 7:12 WOOO. AGUANTE TEMPLARIOS *se vuela la cabeza*
Never wanted to be in the first place, it just makes the world feel less special. Legendary figures become quest givers. Once fabled weapons are now leveling weapons... etc. When everyone have the Ashbringer, no one has it. I know a dungeon like Naxx was probably seen as a mistake by Blizzard, given how few where actually able to enjoy the content... but for the people who couldn't (like me), it was something to dream about and added mystique to the game.
There were a bunch of less successful MMOs alongside EverQuest. I can’t recall all of them but one I remember was Ultima Online.
Map style IMO was inspired by the original Ultima series for the Apple ][ that came with printed/cloth maps in the box (which I still have).
And while Ultima was inspired by by D&D, its maps paid homage to Tolkien’s map of Middle Earth.
I've still got the maps (and manuals) from Ultima 3 and 5, they are among my favorite classic gaming possessions 🙂
A bit late to watching this but I played Ultima Online a long long time ago and the maps are very similar. I'm glad someone else had already mentioned it!
Convenience is in my opinion what ruined WoW community: everything became a rush: rush to max level, rush to epicware, rush to rep.
The game switched from playing dungeons and content for fun, to a second job to minmax everything to not be "left behind".
In Vanilla rares were... actually rare items and epics were something that felt good to have, not the minimum requirement to not be considered "crap".
Also, since everything would take so long to do, players would enjoy the ride, and wouldn't be annoyed by "bad rig".
I hate hate HATE what the modern world map looks like. There's like 6 giant islands scattered in the must ugly cluttered way, to the point that some of these new islands which are supposed to be small are almost half the size of Kalimdor.
You’ve mentioned something essential, we were kids at that time, with no expectations, just being kids enjoying video games. Now when we grown up we started to have expectations that will gives a bit of joy and forget about how life could be hard sometimes. People are stressed and social media does not help while constantly telling you that you need to self develop not to waste time by just entertaining yourself with a decent video game . I would say if you remember how it was being a kid and start acting more easy going on daily basis you could actually relax. Tl:dr
Wow is a masterpiece, to this day you can play classic and feel impressed
Fantastic video. Just discovered your channel. Subscribed!
But... Where is mankriks wife?
they were simple. they showed you a cave entrance. that was it. you got excited .you learned. you played. you gamed.
I am so grateful you made this video.
I didn't begin to play regularly until Cata and really wanted to play thru the original World in order to see and experience the original zones and quests. Unfortunately, when I tried to play Classic, I just couldn't deal with the lack of map.
So I went back to regular WoW.
Watching this made it clear there was a map, I just needed to find it.
And I found it in five seconds sitting right under my nose on the action bar. /shakes head at self
Will enjoy hours of more fun in WoW because of your video so thank you very much!
And you are right, the maps are awesome and underappreciated.
Classic maps were all a mystery waiting for the player to uncover, retail maps on the other hand weave and scream to you "HEY YOU, YES YOU, COME HERE AND GET YOUR DOPAMINE SPIKE, NOOOOOOW!"
It's what it feels like to me (I pref the old way)
Almost 20 Years ago every teenage boy had the map of azeroth hanging in their rooms. When Bruning Crusade came out everyone and their mother played WOW. The enormous map was fascinating to me. So many far off lands and you always wondering when and if you'll get there.
Those were the days, man.
I think WoW maps may have been influenced by Lord of Rings maps. The way the hills are set, this artistic feeling, it looks like Tolkien's to me.
I find the classic WoW maps so awesome, so awesome. It was one of the things that hooked me into this game. I remember my friends using coordination add-ons to it. I didn't. I tried (with my poor English) to understand and read every quest and guess from there where to go. Sometimes, it took me a very significant amount of time to find the correct place. After a while, in certain areas, before getting into quests, I actually made recc of the whole region so I could have a better idea of how to deal with different tasks. Thanks to the maps, the game had this raw clay feel, like placing your bare hands on the ground, on the earth, and building stuff up. Getting yourself virtually dirty. It wasn't simply an action RPG. It had many exploration and other things together other than quests to do, like the world PVP, which was another element within this looseness of the maps. The maps actually had fog of war.
Another thing important to mention is WoW's fidelity to Warcraft 3. You could visit the places from WC 3. They were all there. They were also somewhat in line with maps represented in the story, in which you could have a glimpse in the loading screens. Along with that, the 3d artwork of the buildings and environment felt very connected, almost as of a third-person extension of the game. I think Blizzard was very lucky and wise up to the first expansion. Then they added so many features that the gameplay went from a Tolkien based MMORPG to an action MMO, more set for performance other than storytelling, in my opinion.
Great video! I liked it a lot. A subject people often ignored when talking about video games!
Kind regards!
Now, just an add-on, I would like to point out the things I think Blizzard failed with classic WoW.
I think one of the most important things they failed was in giving the game and the map a more recycling feature. I mean, you went to each area, got yourself the level necessary, and then left, with no reason to go back. They made this enormous, gigantic map but didn't give it enough things for the players to do and use it more, especially after reaching the top level. So, the game felt a little bit tracked despite all the broadness of it, with not that much replayability, at least in terms of exploring and being around each unique region. So, when players runned out of things to do and got bored, Blizz had to keep expanding the map, creating DLCs for people to buy and leave entire continents and worlds empty behind so people could level in other different places.
Had they made the world more smart, allowing for more recycling features and replayability, the game would have been much better. They could have explored the PVP element of it, this two factions dispute and add some sort of territory conquer element to the game, other than controlling some tower here and there. I understand that the game came long ago, without many resources to creating cool stuff, but still, though, I think it could have been done.
In that aspect I think WoW distances itself a little bit from Warcraft 3 in the sense of creating a base, a history, and using an area more broadly instead of making people go somewhere else and pursue an entire different story.
Thanks for the great comment and for watching! I think you're right it's inspired by LOTR, and curiously enough you don't find that kind of hand-drawn feel in many other games!
@@learnwithmapster WoW's map was one of the best made. Really well thought and worked quite fine. I have seen two examples so far of video game maps similar. One is the own LoTR online game. As far as I'm aware (long time since I don't play it) the game map had WoW's looks. Another example and completely unrelated to RPG games is the first Shogun Total War. It also looked hand draw. Great table top strategic map that old one.
And not just WC3, but WC2 and even WC1! I was confused why there are so many ballistas in Lordaeron and Stormwind for example, then I realised humans DID use ballistas in the First and Second War. The most brilliant is how classic Warcraft RTS units are made into npcs in WoW, like the Huntresses who patrol Telsrassil, or the Stormwind Guards who are basically Footmen, the Mountaineers who are Riflemen from WC3, the Dragonhawk Riders in Quel'Danas, the Grunts and Raiders all over the two continents, and the Warcraft 3 siege veapons that became setpieces in WoW.
@@Nothraxius yep, they emulated very well the atmosphere. WoW felt quite Warcraft 3 like.
Never played at official server. 2005-2007. The most interesting part first me was world exploration and craft some weird stuff,like scuba helmet or defibrillator. Due to numerous bugs on pirate server, i could use scuba helmet to swim in lava and steal treasures from dungeons. Also i liked to visit Booty Bay , climbing to the end of ship nose sitting there and watch the sunset. And then life happened, and WoW was forgotten completely.
10:23 TES3 : Morrowind featured an artsy printed map that came with the game and which hung on the wall above my CRT monitor when i played it as a 12 year old. Very similar to the wow maps but morrowind did have an additional ingame map with less detail. The art map actually allowed players to find hidden caves and settlements that were not on the ingame map!
Excellent video. I could never exactly understand why I didn't like the modern maps, but now I can. Imagine having the old Atlas and an updated version. The old one would put the new one to shame. Great channel! I discovered it from this video. Keep up the good work :)
The mystery of that huge world was amazing. 20 years later I still havent seen it all. Retail can suck it.
One of the few things I would change about the vanilla map would be fog of war is removed account-wide upon exploration if you toggle that option in user settings
Man great video! You can really tell Blizzards team put in a lot of love with the maps. Specifically love how you said about as your exploring the maps get drawn out and discovered as your adventuring. Very unique feel you don't get with other modern MMOs.
I had a WoW map on my wall for the longest time. It was so awesome
I still remember when questie came out. I love that app lol. With that in mind ,retail wow's map doesn't bother me much. I just wish questie was still a thing in retail. Blizz map interface sucks.
I'm surprised he didn't mention that it is like the difference between a hiker's map and google earth
I've always loved the maps. There are certain classic, natural aesthetics that will always be pleasing to humans. I hate how modern design, art, architecture, etc. has forgotten the standard of beauty that came from nature and our perception of it. Things that look clearly crafted by humans are warm and welcoming (even if the map is of some barren or inhospitable place), and things that are not feel cold and lifeless. On a psychological level, our modern lives are dull and the future is uncertain; aesthetics that point to our early history and simpler times would likely be appealing. It's the difference between a frozen TV dinner and a home cooked meal.
On top of all of it, the simplicity and slight abstraction is appealing. You don't have to be the best artist or game developer to accomplish this; it only requires passion, creativity, and attention to detail. I believe too many people overthink and overdesign... it's best to keep it simple when you can.
The great thing about WoW vanilla's focus on immersiveness and intentional obscurity is definitely how it forced you to talk to other players. Where is that quest item? How do I get to that place? Which enemies drop that thing? How do you find your way throught this dungeon? It created a vibrant and alive community, instead of a single player experience.
It was the lack of shit on it.
I want a MAP. not an interactive overhead display. It's a fucking fantasy game. The second anything appears on it it's just taking the game out of it.
This is awesome. Thanks for making this. 😎
Not sure why I subscribed, but given the quality and tone of the video, I expect good things from the channel.
I too came across the tradeoff between convenience and immersion, I think it is the secret to the great puzzle of how to create that feeling of vanilla that people long for so much
I hate to nit pick, but that wasn't Watch Dogs, that was Yakuza: Like A Dragon
I got hooked into WoW because of the original story & the maps made me happy to fill in! They reminded me of the maps my friends & I would draw when we played D&D!
What was so great about WoW's maps?
It used to have a WORLD. every expansion is a handful of zones and makes you feel how isolated and small the expansion is. We just want a bit of world in our world of warcraft
Nothing speaks of immersion better than finding Mankrik's wife
1:11 is not Watch Dogs, this is Yakuza like a dragon 😂
Wow! Such a surprise to see the Elendor login screen out of nowhere. Good times!
0:50 That music hits so hard
maaan what are y'all on about putting mods on to find basic shit. If I could find my way with no addons at like 11 years old, anyone could, and that was half the fun.
I loved in Vanilla and TBC that there were no maps in dungeons and raids. It gave you a feeling of being in a dangerous and uncharted territory that you had to search and explore on your own.
Loved Vanilla. It was all the "improvements" that eventually got me to quit. Disliked everything being spoon fed to me and how the sped up leveling while taking out actually playing the game. Rush to end game and get on the hamster wheel. No thanks. Came back for Classic's re-release and would love to see that classic with new content, but doubt it will ever happen.
Amazing video. Very detailed!
Its not the map layout, its whats in it.
We exolored because we hoped to find treasure and adventure.
Then yohtube cqme qnd teached us "there is no loot or adventure out there, onmy in dungeons"
Once thwt happened, wow became a boring liat of items to cross of players checklists. Its not an MMORPG anymore, its a groceries-list simulator.
Retail is so far away from classic in everything, we can call it simply another game. The Trailer for the Dragonflight could be any other game, just change the title.
I prefer WoW ...
All the people who were complaining about how hard it was and the inconvenience of it all. They didn't want to be immersed they just wanted to win and feel as accomplished as the people who unraveled it themselves.
The agree filling in the map makes sense to me. It did make the map very interactive and memorable. I think part of it too though, was that I was sort of instantly Nostalgic. It made me think of the Warcraft 3 campaign maps, even though they don't agree exactly. It was fun finding that one location I did a campaign mission at in Warcraft 3.
btw idea- add to the game diary like from Rdr2. if you see some unique rare mob, place, hidden something add it to your journal. so you have something to go back
awesome video very well put together
I love the old WoW maps. The new ones are way too cluttered with information. This also lends into the design philosophy of cramming the zones with crap.
I do sort of miss the days when games didnt hold your hand, to me, maps are a feature that should be put behind a wall of gameplay in order to be discovered, hollow knights this very well, you could buy half completed maps, and finish them by your own exploration. And they were finished when YOU were finished.
I missed huge areas that are not glutters when so many stuff on them. It gives you the feeling of how vast the world was. The last time I had this feeling in WoW areas was in WoD with the original Draenor that later became Outland.
Oh man i remember buying the Strategy Guides back in the day. Reading the quests and recipes it was like I was just some random adventurer armed with only a traveler's guide 😂
Great video there! Keep up this amazing work! 🙂
Wow, it was good when we were sub 20s
Wow is bad bc we're in 30s and 40s trying to balance rl and mmo gaming
I myself don't blame blizz as much as the time how we've been changed
in the past fun and joy were our priority , now finish earlier go faster be meta is the priority
I like that Commodore Pet in the intro. Good job. I'ma sub.