Video: Whether it’s the lack of things to do, boring quests or depressing aesthetics, WoW has some zones everyone tries to skip or avoid.
Here’s a top ten from WoW veteran Crendor, and it’s a list of abandoned places that could be easily extended to 15. There are so many zones in the game. Luckily, though, most of them are still amazing.
10. Vashj’ir
9. Moonglade
8. Burning Steppes
7. Thousand Needles
6. Deadwind Pass
5. Dustwallow Marsh
4. Borean Tundra
3. Ghostlands
2. Silithus
1. Bloodmyst Isle
We can’t agree more, but wait a second… No Desolace? No Hellfire Peninsula? It’s still a nightmare to progress through those two.
Comments
35 responses to “Ten World Of Warcraft Zones No One Visits”
Shoutout to Deadwind Pass. I remember that when it was a placeholder “they’ll do something with it one day” zone where I farmed briefly.
Man, I miss WoW…
Same but don’t want to go near wow again for my life’s sake.
Word.
Not even once.
Dont bother… as an ex WoW raider i went back for the last xpack – didnt last me month. It just doesnt feel or play like WoW use too (i quit raiding and WoW at Ice Crown Citadel).
Its sad because i so avidly loved and played the game and now i want to love it, i just cant find the fun anymore.
I only miss the exploration.
I found myself missing WoW…decided to try out Tera.
Two days in and I’ve realised I was just missing MMOs, doesn’t need to be specifically WoW that I play.
I may have to do something similar. I liked ESO enough, but Neverwinter looks so much like WoW…
Rift will hit that WoW spot and it’s pretty too.
Theorycrafters and min-maxers have probably since crafted some cookie-cutter builds that fit the ‘current meta’ or whatever bullshit term is used to describe looking up a build online and using that instead of experimenting, but in the early days, Rift was amazingly well-balanced and generous in terms of the number of viable builds you could play with, for all classes and souls.
I fell in love with that experimentation process, there was simply so much choice on offer.
Maybe looks like on the surface, but spend five minutes playing it and you’ll be ready to tear your hair out or punch a dev over the differences.
It is a gaping F2P maw which never stops begging you for money, ever. No matter how much you pay, you cannot make it stop nagging you. The game constantly posts front-and-centre in your screen whenever someone has got a lucky drop from a lockbox, exhorting you to open some too. There are a dozen types of currency for cash-shop purchases, with not just daily login bonuses, but optimal free-currency is attained hourly. The shop icon is present on every other menu window and the game is deliberately designed to inconvenience you with bag space, companion upgrades… every single aspect of the game has a pay-2-win alternative, robbing you of the feeling of satisfaction from attaining anything by reminding you that you can get something nicer for a dollar or two.
And it never stops.
At least SWTOR has a subscription where all of that F2P nagging can be turned off because you finally subscribed and now get the ‘complete’ experience. Neverwinter? Nope. It doesn’t matter how much money you sink into it, there is no option to stop the nagging.
Lockbox notifications forever and ever.
Yeah Neverwinter just constantly pumps you like a mobile game.
It also had a shockingly bad network connection last I played (much like ESO) which makes you try and avoid AOE or attacks that actually finished before you actually saw it coming.
Buy this lockbox! xxD0MinturdZxx just received “insert purple item” from a lockbox! You should buy lockboxes!
Ugh. Thanks for the info! The constant nagging to spend real life money is what turns me off mobile gaming lately. I understand that’s how F2P makes money, but holy shit, some games need to have a little respect for themselves. If it’s a good game, people will spend money on it, like GTA Online or WoW.
Seriously, thank you for that. Saves me a big download and a lot of frustration… My main issue is not having a working PC, other than my wife’s gaming laptop that I don’t really like much for gaming. So PS4 and Xbone are my only options!
I’d go with RIFT if you haven’t tried already. It’s got a pretty unobtrusive F2P method.
And it really is a very pretty version of WoW.
I played ESO in beta. Hated it and never went back.
I was tossing up between trying out Tera or going back to Age of Conan. Played AoC for a few weeks at release, hit max level on one char and level 40 or so on another than quit because lack of end game content.
I also played ESO in beta and didn’t enjoy it. I’ve just returned a few months ago and It is a wildly different beast now to what is was. A few years of updates and learning can really be felt, I am actually really enjoying it at the moment and think I might even grab A few of the DLC’s ( I didn’t want to buy more than the base version until I found out if I liked it or not).
My issue is I don’t want to spend money on the base version to find out if I like it. Plenty of other games to spend my cash on instead.
I hated the beta, the controls were awful, the engine was awful, and it was so hard to tell the bugs from the simple design flaws. A pretty bog-standard MMO with an Elder Scrolls lick of paint.
It was all tainted by the horrible disappointment from being in an Elder Scrolls world which isn’t your playground as much as it was the playground of a hundred other bunny-hopping XXDarkPalliXX and Legalass characters, steamrolling the area you’re trying to quest in, de-populating it until thirty seconds later everything re-spawns. (Just like in Skyrim, right?!)
Containers everywhere which couldn’t be opened, but looked almost identical to the special type of container that could be, archery which sucked balls because it was auto-targeting, the addition of strict classes, and a harsher level cap, the pitiful token lip-service towards ‘stealth’ (feh), meant that my preferred Elder Scrolls playstyle (snipe everything from the shadows and silently clear out every dungeon without raising an alarm) was literally impossible. The game practically forces you to go magic or melee.
I gave it another go when they went B2P, and found it to be vastly improved, but still an in-all-possible-ways-inferior version of Skyrim. I have no idea why anyone would ever play it solo.
I don’t think it’s trying to be any version of Skyrim. Skyrim is not an MMO and lots of things that skyrim does, simply can’t be done in an MMO.
I haven’t found the controls to be confusing or difficult once so far, haven’t come across any bugs, every MMO I have played suffers from groups of “bunny-hopping XXDarkPalliXX” clearing things as you arrive. “Containers everywhere which couldn’t be opened, but looked almost identical to the special type of container that could be” – I don’t even know what you’re talking about there??
Sounds like every time you’ve played it you thought it was going to be Skyrim 2.0, spoiler alert….it’s not skyrim, nor is it attempting to be Skyrim. It’s an MMO set in the ES world.
“I have no idea why anyone would ever play it solo.” – Yes I’ve heard this before, you don’t like something therefore nobody else should.
Yes. Your justification here is exactly what I considered wrong with it. Just another MMO like every other MMO, but set in the ES world.
Dear god why, then? The lore of TES is frankly unremarkable. Its greatest strengths come from its freedom. Freedom from classes, freedom to explore, freedom of play style. Just… unparalleled freedom of choice. Before you even start looking at mods. That freedom is the hallmark of the TES franchise and it is utterly abandoned for the sake of being an MMO because for some ridiculous reason they thought they had to, that it couldn’t be a good TES game AND an MMO.
That is the problem. They didn’t make an Elder Scrolls game and make it multiplayer online… they took a bog-standard, utterly generic, safely unremarkable MMO template and added some TES lore to it. It’s like TES fanfic layered over a WoW clone.
Also, I wouldn’t say that ‘no-one should be able to enjoy what I don’t enjoy’. I have no idea why anyone would watch paint dry, but there are apparently people who are into that. Just as there are people who are apparently so into TES lore that they are desperate for a prequel whose lore has been twisted and contorted into supporting gameplay ‘requirements’ such as contrived factions, to slather as the paint over an uninspired MMO clone which when compared to its predecessors in the franchise is just… worse. In every way.
There are obviously some folks so desperate for something branded TES in name only that they don’t mind the fact that the game they’re playing has less immersive or intuitive controls/mechanics (seriously, block only the telegraphed attacks instead of every attack? Fire your bow via tab-targeting and to hell with actual aim or – god forbid – headshots?), sluggish lag-affected response, uglier graphics, and illusions of persistence thrown out the window with enemies and containers that respawn endlessly within minutes if not seconds. Some people are obviously so desperate for anything TES-branded that radically departs from the strengths of the series that they don’t mind the ludonarrative dissonance of standing in line with twenty other gormless clones who are all being told that they are the unique chosen one, or standing in line to kill the big bad… when he respawns.
Obviously there are people so desperate for some contrived TES lore that they don’t mind sacrificing the class/skill/faction/gear freedom found in every other TES game (which arguably defines the franchise), or abandoning gameplay styles (such as stealthy assassin) entirely in favour of forcing players into a tank/heals/dps trinity paradigm.
So yeah. I don’t know WHY anyone would want a TES game that is mechanically worse in practically every way to every other TES game that has come before, but obviously some folks do.
I’m surprised the game was made and I’m surprised there are people who enjoy it, because I can’t understand the appeal. It’s a shame, because we actually could’ve got a good game if they’d bothered to make an MMO without simply copying what every other MMO does and actually implemented the gameplay pillars on which the TES franchise made its name.
@transientmind I don’t actually care much about TES law, nor did I get it because it was part of TES franchise, or the fact that it had it in the title. I got it because it looked interesting on the box and I enjoy it because I just do. How does this fit in with your ranting theory?
I feel like I need to get a teddy so you can show me where ESO touched you inappropriately…
I bloody love Ghostlands, so many memories there.
I once explained why leveling is an outdated mechanic for MMOs – one of the key points being so much resources and development time is dedicated to something that is quickly moved past and begrudgingly reused (i.e. leveling an alt).
If these (and all other zones) were “open dungeons” with areas of varying difficulty catering to players of different skill/equipment you would find a lot of these dead zones wouldn’t be so…dead. As a bonus you don’t have to go through the tedious time consuming alt leveling process which means you can with your friends sooner.
That being said an MMO without leveling would suck just having to get gear….yeah i want my mmo’s to play like a normal rpg to an extent.
If MMO’s stopped leveling i would quit and play older MMO’s as would most people i feel.
Eh, I prefer leveling because your character grows as you learn more about the game and how to use them.
If it was gear only then presumably the skills you have access to would depend on what gear you have equipped which boxes you in to using certain gear if you want certain skills. Open that up with leveling and you have access to all the skills and just use gear to supplement them.
I prefer levelling. What I enjoyed about wow was that there were so many zones and quests to choose from in the process. You build your character up, experiment along the way with new and existing abilities, and performing your best in dungeons along the way is very different to the end-game where most people have the same or better gear. It’s the meat of the game – I found the process tedious in Aion, where there didn’t seem to be many quests to tackle and I was consistently behind said quests in level.
Absence of Duskwood means I can’t take this seriously.
I dunno, haven’t they changed the questing in Duskwood to werewolves or something? I never went full ham in the zone – often snagging a few quests on my way through to Stranglethorn – but I loved the atmosphere. The lighting and environment just ticked with me 😛
The wolves were always there – amongst all the other mini quest-chains you had to stumble across, since there were no lead-ins.
Didn’t try it after Cata, but I imagine the revamp was the same as every other ‘new’ Alliance levelling zone. Idiotic joke zone-story based around a TV reference.
If this dude put out an album, I would listen to it. The ‘music’ at the end is gold.
have to disagree with silithus and the comment about desolace. Both are amazing zones for condensed quests and grinding out mid 30s and late 50’s before moving on to BC content. You usually wind up in either un’goro – silithus or felwood – winterspring or hinterlands – eastern plaguelands for your lvl 40-60 if you are leveling without dungeons.
Pre cata I would agree with desolace but now it has some colour about it. Silithus also pre AQ stuff back in the day when there really was bugger all there but a wealth of quests with a good exp income.
Netherstorm is still my favourite. The aesthetics and the music are fantastic imo.
But I’ll never forget when I first stepped through the dark portal when Burning Crusade came out. Hellfire Peninsula blew my mind.
Have to agree with Borean Tundra though. That place was just so ‘meh’.
For those that miss classic WoW, check out the Nostralrius private server. It took me 5 hours to get to level 10 and it was glorious.
Remeber when the Needles had a race track and you could get the carrot trinket to make your mount go faster
HAHA Carrot on a stick, the must have item for travelling. (Combined with the Outfitter mod to automatically equip it when you mounted!) Oh the memories.
For those who are saying “never again” I can’t stress how good the levelling storyline is, if you have the spare cash I would recommend playing the main quest lines up to max level then quitting 😛 The last 3 expacs I’ve only ever played 1-3months each, and the quick burst was worth it.
Whoa, no hating on HFP. Flying into Hellfire Peninsula for the first time was amazing.