World of Warcraft. A lot of people
have spent a lot of time in Azeroth. In this video we’re going to talk
about one of the most important, most enduring parts of WoW, but a part
that doesn’t get all that much attention: the world and zone maps. WoW has some of the most
unique maps out there when it comes to MMO games, and their simple style has hardly changed
since they were first introduced in 2004. If you launched WoW back in the early days, you
were treated to this introductory cinematic, where the very first thing you see is this old-timey
feeling map of Azeroth. You don’t know it yet, but this is the world that you’re about to
spend an awful lot of time in. So let’s look at the design and creation of the maps of World of
Warcraft, and ask, are they Awesome, or Awful? Maps in video games essentially
need to balance two things: player immersion and player convenience. A lot
of times, these things are in conflict. If you give the user too much convenience,
they just zip from quest to quest, ignoring the world around them as they run
from one part of the map to another. If you don’t give the user enough convenience, they can get
completely lost and frustrated just trying to do simple things like find out where someone
is in a city or meet up with their friends. The WoW zone maps, overall, are definitely on
the side of immersion over precision. They aren’t so far beyond what you could imagine your
character actually carrying with them and drawing as they go. The maps are less guidelines than
they are thematic representations of the zones: each map has a different color scheme, with
unique little drawings and features. By looking at one of these maps, you can instantly
tell what kind of zone you’re in — is it lush, or dry and desert-like? Is it volcanic, or
farmland, or somewhere a bit creepy, or somewhere full of sickness? These maps
line up incredibly well with their zones. Here are some examples. We have Feralas,
a land of huge trees and thick forests, full of giants and wildlife, with a
lush, green map. We have the Barrens, a big dry plain filled with animals you’d find on
a safari, and dangerous pig-men, with a yellow, dry-feeling map. There’s the Plaguelands,
once lush lands now stricken by sickness and undead monstrosities, with maps tinged odd,
unnatural colors. And the list goes on — Durotar, Strangethorn Vale, Duskwood, Tanaris
— all of these zones, and their maps, have a distinct feel and a distinct
artistic style. And all across these maps, there are also unique little features, buildings, and
geographies that push you to explore. Yet these features — the topographical layout, the size of buildings and cities — are still pretty
vague if you’re trying to figure out exactly where you can go. Vanilla WoW did have an
element of intentional obscurity to it, like a lot of games at the time, and you ended up having to learn these zones
and read quest text in order to keep going. Ashenvale is a good example of how this could
be frustrating at times. It’s full of bits of hills and apparent plateaus on the map. But you really
can't just use these topographical lines as a guide for trying to get somewhere. In some
places, you can go straight up past them — and sometimes where they are gaps, but you can’t get
through at all. Some places have fences that prevent you from moving; and other places there are caves and
moonwells that aren’t marked. These maps are low information and rough guides, telling you
just enough to get you moving on your own. That said, one of the most common experiences in
WoW is the random jumping and trying to climb up hills, because you get stuck in some weird little
spot and the map doesn’t ever show anything in that place, or you’re trying to get to some
quest giver way up on a hill somewhere. It can be frustrating and sometimes quest text just
isn’t descriptive enough. Way back in the day, a lot of times we had to turn to resources like Allakazaam for
this kind of thing, or ask for help in chat. Because of this kind of stuff,
eventually people built QuestHelper addons, to throw giant arrows in the middle of
your screen to tell you where to go, or icons on the map — and eventually
Blizzard gave in and added this into the base game around 2008. So today, in retail WoW,
the original vague and artistic map style remains, but it’s augmented with tons of navigational
tools. But I'm getting ahead of myself a little bit. Back to the original maps, let’s talk about
cities. Cities are way more detailed than the general world, and you can reliably find your
way to specific places. The only big weakness is multiple floors — WoW never really shows
clearly what surfaces are higher than others, for example, in Orgrimmar, or Thunder Bluff,
so you can end up running around on top of the Bluff when you are supposed to
be in a cave inside it.
It's a little bit annoying. In terms of the immersion, though, each city
map keeps the artistic, hand-painted feel: each has their own pretty map, and the
neighborhood names reek of good fantasy. The Mage Quarter; The Valley of Wisdom; The
Apothecarium; The Great Forge. The labels are clear and it’s quite fun to look at these maps and then go
explore. Each map, despite its small weaknesses, feels unique and handmade because it is.
It’s not just a screenshot of the world. Aside from the style, WoW also includes a
revealing mechanic, where the maps are blank at first and reveal in chunks as you explore.
It’s another thing that makes the map feel like they are your own character’s, carried along on your
adventure. This all means that you are encouraged to head to each corner of a zone to make sure the map
fills out. This is a tick on the side of fun, but it’s also a bit silly sometimes, because you can
be running around in a blank area until you just happen to find one of the spots that lets it get
filled in on the map. In retail WoW today, there are achievements for exploring zones, adding a bit
more reason to get all the blank spots filled in. Finally, we have WoW’s minimap. It’s not something your
character would ever be able to see, since it shows the birds-eye view, and so it does break the
immersion, but it’s really useful all the same. It uses a totally different set of images than the
full-size map, and these images have actually been cobbled together by some users
to make highly detailed Google Maps-style maps on sites like World of Mapcraft, but something like
this has never released officially by Blizzard. So on sites like these, you can see something like
what WoW’s map would have been if it was made like most modern MMOs — the full world in more detail.
It’s more realistic, but way less artistic. In game, this map is just seen through
the little circular lens of the minimap, which also sometimes has little icons on
it to show things that you’re tracking or looking for — not much more than that. The
minimap serves a useful purpose, and while it still maintains a particular style, it’s
far less immersion device than practical tool. One thing that WoW didn’t have was maps of
instances. So, when you were in a dungeon, you were completely on your own with your group
to find your way through. This was, at times, actually pretty brutal, and groups
definitely fell apart because of this. This actually illustrates just how important having a
general map is — you don’t want total confusion, and you do need to balance convenience
with the actual experience of players. In instances like Maradon, or Blackrock Depths,
you could get completely and hopelessly lost. This is especially true when players are
in groups, because some people are going to be getting pissed off pretty fast if
someone doesn’t know where they’re going. So that's how the maps work.
But to understand them properly, it's good to put the development of the game, and its world,
into context too. This is the first known map of Azeroth. Painted on the wall of the Blizzard
development conference room by Chris Metzen, the writer for Warcraft, in 1999, it represents
the first visual version of a world that would come to be lived in by so many millions
of people, and would be known better than most of those people know their own cities. So, this all started as a painting, and a story. WoW is, of course, part of the Warcraft
franchise, so this was a world that was deeply thought out by the time WoW began
development in 1999. But making an MMO, with wide open areas for players to explore,
requires a level of worldbuilding far beyond a normal single-player linear game. Also, WoW,
developed simultaneously with Warcraft 3, was Blizzard’s first truly 3D game, meaning that whole
new art styles and interfaces had to be explored and developed. WoW was, in many ways, Blizzard’s version of
Everquest, one of the first hugely popular MMO games. For a long time before Everquest, gamers
had already been participating in shared worlds, where they created stories, gathered items, and
adventured together. These were called MUDs or MUSHs (Multi-User Shared Hallucinations).
I remember playing, as a kid, a totally text-based Lord of the Rings MUSH, where everyone
interacted with each other through text, creating a giant shared story. The maps for these places
were things you had to make by hand, and nothing was graphical or visual. Everquest, despite being
a visual game, still stuck with this system in its original release. No maps at all — you had
to memorize the zones or make maps by hand. I guess Blizzard decided this was just a little
too hardcore. So, by creating these maps which sat in between convenience and immersion,
Blizzard did something fairly original. Now, it’s not like this was the first game to use
maps — not by a long shot — but I haven’t been able to dig up clear examples of other
fantasy-type games that clearly inspired the WoW design style (if you know of some, please
let me know in the comments!). It seems like this was something special, grown out of the story,
the art style, and the development direction of the WoW team. The maps therefore reflect
the team’s balance of immersion and art, and the desire to push players to explore
and be in the world they were creating. So, all in all, are vanilla WoW’s
maps awesome or awful? I think that, despite some annoying moments trying to explore
the world and being frustrated by the maps, they fall squarely into the awesome side of
things. I think, if there’s one glaring weakness, it’s the lack of dungeon maps in the
original game — but that doesn’t turn it awful. The maps give a bit more help
than having to totally memorize zones, but still don’t give everything away.
Overall, having a strong push to explore
and find your own way in the world is, in my opinion, way better than a fully mapped out,
follow-the-arrow style map — which, unfortunately, is exactly what WoW has become in today’s retail
game. It’s convenient, but to the point of being able to almost completely ignore the in-game
world. It’s great for doing something mindless, and that has its benefits, but I think the
original maps and navigation of vanilla WoW was a big part of what made this game immersive and
sucked us into Azeroth, so long ago. That said, I’m not advocating for a return to the original
WoW maps — those days are long gone in retail WoW today. I’m just saying that these original maps,
and the way they worked, were definitely awesome. Today, almost all maps in video games — and MMOs
— tend towards the side of convenience over immersion — modern WoW included. But in a time
long ago, World of Warcraft’s awesome maps gave players a chance to take a break from their
own lives and enter Azeroth, a world where they could really explore, adventure, and always
find something unexpected around the next corner.
