The Old World: Alterac Mountains.
Welcome to what I hope will get my game writing creative juices flowing, two subjects that are hard to go wrong for me: environment design, and World of Warcraft. To put it simply, in this (Hopefully) series of posts, I want to take a look back at some of the more notable zones in WoW Classic. Zones that changed heavily with Cataclysm, and thus no longer have the same feel, or design, as they once did, but are now preserved inside WoW classic, hopefully forever! To kick things off, I thought I'd start with a zone that has long fascinated me as a player. All the way back to when I first started playing World of Warcraft: Alterac Mountains. If you've only played World of Warcraft in the post Cataclysm Era, you may well be thinking "That isn't a zone", but here's the neat part, it never really was! Oh sure, Alterac Mountains had it's own map, and it's own set of neat things to find, but beyond five or six quests, that didn't even start in the zone itself, there really wasn't much to find there. That said, that's what made it so fascinating to me the whole time!
Of course Alterac has it's place in Warcraft Lore, home of the kingdom that betrayed The Alliance and was destroyed for it. Home to the original location of Dalaran (Still there, as of The Burning Crusade), and an important area of the kingdom of Lordaeron all the same. So somehow with all of that to work with, how is it that there's so little to actually do in the zone? It has a snowy mountain core, and some hilly grasslands, but not a whole lot to find in either place. There really aren't that many quests that have much to do with Alterac. You'll be sent to kill a few wizards, silence a few turncoat Forsaken, asked to steal some syndicate plans, but nothing with any kind of story through line, just scattered tasks. That lack of cohesion is, to me, what made this such a fascinating place to explore. It's like there was this whole grand zone, with so much to find, just left to rot on live servers with no real plan, or idea of what it's supposed to be.
The Lordamere Internment Camp is a fun example of everything WoW needing to be scaled down as an open world. I'll be honest, thousands of orcs probably didn't fit in those two buildings. Going there yourself reveals so many interesting sights even beyond the big points I've already touched. The claw like mountains overlooking Hillsbrad offer the best view a 2007 level of distance fog could handle. The southern shore of Lordamere Lake's long easy curve as it makes contact with the land, is a small little piece of natural beauty still left in a land that had been so thoroughly ravaged by the army's of the scourge. The farmstead in the northeastern corner of the zone that seems, against all odds, to actually be a functioning settlement so close to the Undercity. There's much to see, and more to find, even if nobody actually points you in it's direction. During Cataclysm, when the map was being changed, altered, and in some cases condensed: Alterac Mountains ceased to be. Obviously, it was still there, it never actually left the game, and many of the same sights I brought up in this post are still there for you to find. In reality, all that happened was the zone became combined with Hillsbrad Foothills. And frankly, it wasn't the worst idea. The two zones flow into each so naturally it's actually a bit a odd they weren't always just one place. After all, for a zone with the word "Hill" in it twice, it was always sort of odd that going uphill in any real way in Hillsbrad would invariably bring you to a different zone.
Alterac Mountains is an odd place. A full zone by name, the location of one a battleground entrance even, but still a little forgotten piece of one of the, at the time, biggest games around. I've imagined many more things that could have been done with Alterac, but of course, it's far from the most important place in the game. Until we get that Lordaeron revamp expansion of course, I'll just be over counting the days down to that theoretical beauty. Well that, and continuing to love Azeroth and everything in it.
