Z and Cinder’s Blog Challenge Topic 12: Design your own Zone

Cinder and I have opened up our shared blog topic challenge for everyone to join in on. The more the merrier! Each Saturday we post a new topic that’s open for a fortnight for everyone to write about. Cinder and I will link all posts for this topic on our shared blog website here.

My all time favourite zone is the Ruins of Gilneas.  I love the spooky deserted English/Scottish countryside feel of it.  I head up there fairly regularly just to spend time exploring in the deserted Gilneas, poking my head into all the gorgeous little houses and wandering through the rooms of Greymane Manor.

I’ve made quite a few Worgens to get to see Gilneas in its hey-day. One of my biggest regrets about the zone is that more of the houses in Gilneas city itself aren’t able to be entered into. It would be awesome to be to click on a door and have it open so you can go see inside. Given how much I Iove Gilneas, it shouldn’t be surprising that I really enjoy going to visit Bradensbrook in Legion, as it uses a lot of the same architecture and feel of the zone.

So if I could design any zone; I would want to actually take the existing Ruins of Gilneas and modify it a little into an awesome enchanted adventure zone. I’d like to see secret passages inserted into Greymane Manor that you can activate by clicking random panels on the wall and get to wander through secret rooms hidden away. Or stepping on  specific floor boards that then open up staircases that lead down into winding tunnels that could come out into main city or even down onto the beach. I want a library inserted that has all of the readable books that are currently available in the game in the one place, and I would put in  extra books where the text is actually clues or maps to follow to go find random treasure chests.

I’d like quest givers to be there but their quests would be randomized each time you talk to them and offer a series of riddles or clues that you would have to solve to reach the next part of the chain or next quest giver.

One of my favourite books when I was little was the Folk of the Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton. So I think the insertion of a big spooky forest that you could wander through with daily shifting paths that lead to secret little dells with random portals  that lead to other places would be awesome. No names or distinguishing features on the portals so stepping through them is an adventure in itself as you wouldn’t know where you might end up. You wouldn’t be going to this zone with your hearth on CD. Oh and no big spiders in this forest, we’ll stick to populating it with the cuter critters of Azeroth.

I would adore to be able to have a zone that you can just visit solely for the purposes of exploring and each time it’d be slightly different so exploring and meandering through it would feel a little new each visit.