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The Realm of the High Elves

"Summer was undying within its breadth. Where the ilk of elven kind; what remained of the wasted progeny of Highborne and no less upon token of their blunder, do these scions reign defiantly beneath the baleful gaze of death. And in the loom they are sleepless; watchmen trembling with the promise of reprisal."

#high elves #high elf #quel'dorei #crystalsong forest #world of warcraft #epsilonWoW #epsilon #headcanon

Bread’s Game Journal 06/06/20: Wrath In The Frozen North: A Northrend Retrospective, Part 9: Crystalsong Forest & Dalaran

From a sheer visual design perspective: Crystalsong Forest is incredible.....from just about every other perspective, it barely has a reason to exist. Dalaran, however, floating above Crystalsong, is such a wonderfully iconic World of Warcraft location that they literally re-used it four expansion packs later and people were just thrilled it was back! These two zones are like oil and water, they don’t mix. Dalaran is a literal icon of this game, widely beloved by damn near every player, and Crystalsong.....is in the game! I’ll start off with Crystalsong and it’s positives, because no matter how much I joke, it certainly has them. From a sheer visual design perspective this zone is a genuine treat. The way the crystal formations have dominated the forest lends to an ethereal feeling that really has no equivalent anywhere else in the game! I remember being thrilled to get to this zone for the first time, riding among the crystal trees on my way up into Dalaran and thinking that questing in this zone was going to be incredible.....and that’s where I think we we’re all wrong.

Just....just look at this absolute visual bliss! How did they do so little with such an incredibly visually designed zone!

There really just....isn’t anything to do in Crystalsong, like...nothing. There’s a handful of quests but they don’t really lead anywhere. As far as I’m aware there’s really never a good explanation for what the deal with the magic crystal forest even is! Interestingly, there’s two settlements, one Horde and one Alliance, and they really seem like they’re poised for some kind of cool story line, they just don’t ever amount to anything. I have to assume at some point content was cut out of this zone, and I’m sure information about that is out there, I just don’t know!

Looks even better from ground level, no other place in this game looks like this! I’d love to see a re-visit to this concept in the future!

Dalaran, on the other hand, is well known by every player of this game, and for excellent reason. Being the second neutral capital (Not counting Vanilla WoW’s wonderful “Booty Bay” of course), Dalaran was a huge deal back in the days when hanging around in the city was still a normal part of playing World of Warcraft. Prior to this expansion, what had been happening with Dalaran was a big question that lots of people had in the lore community, especially me!. All we really knew about it was that it was decimated during the Third War, and had since been under that big magical bubble in The Alterac Mountains. So color us all surprised that it would be literally ripped from the ground and flown to Northrend to serve as a general staging area in the war on the scourge! It was the first big change made to the old world too, at the time I don’t think any of us could have predicted that it would lead to the full scale world remake of Cataclysm, but it was a first step!

The fact that max level players still stand around AFK in Dalaran in Northrend says a lot about how iconic this city is to a lot of players.

In comparison to Burning Crusade’s Shattrath, Dalaran had significantly more whimsy and fun to it. Rather than being a desolate, dirty ruin filled with refugees, it was a grand magical city that hovered high above the earth. Hell, it even had a toy store! You could buy fun mounts, explore the bizarre shops, visit the towering sanctums, and my personal favorite: fish coins out of the fountain for fun little lore jokes! There was even a full blown five player instance in the city itself, just like Stormwind’s Stockades only, you know, with content in it! This “flying magical city” version of Dalaran became so iconic that not only was it re-used later in Legion to incredible effect (honestly, just bring it back again!), but it was semi retcon’d into always having been this way in the Warcraft movie. They don’t even seem to bother pretending that it used to be a normal, ground based city at any point anymore, and why should they? This version is way cooler!

Bread’s Coveted “Best Town” Award: Dalaran:

I mean....what else was it gonna be?

Random Screenshot Of The Day:

Crystalsong also has a half that isn’t a crazy crystal forest, but uh, it doesn’t really merit mention because it doesn’t really even have the visual design perspective going for it. It does have a nice fall kind of vibe though!

Stray Notes:

- Tune in tomorrow when I wrap up this sub series with a look at World of Warcraft’s only PVP exclusive zone! An experiment that didn’t seem to quite work out, but was one hell of an attempt! - I’m not kidding, if they just kept bringing back Dalaran every expansion to serve as a capital city with minor changes every time, I think damn near every player would love it!