Posts with tag old-world-revamp

The Shattering has torn Azeroth asunder, and the world has broken under Deathwing's mighty power. However, your intrepid WoW Insider team has saved the old world for you in gallery form! Kalimdor, the Eastern Kingdoms, the capital cities and more are all going to be preserved forever, thanks to our galleries. Take time to see your favorite places and reminisce, because when the servers are back up, there's no going back.

Jump through for a list of galleries of the old world, pre-Shattering, and sigh wistfully.

With the old world changing so drastically come The Shattering, there's been some question of how the Loremaster achievement might change in the wake of Cataclysm. Community Manager Zarhym has clarified this for us in a recent blog post. As he puts it, if you already have either Loremaster of Eastern Kingdoms or Loremaster of Kalimdor, those achievements will stay intact. However, if you're only partially through with those achievements, you may suffer a setback, as any quest that's being removed from the game will no longer count toward those achievements in progress. Therefore, it's a good idea to finish up the achievement if you can.

That said, it will be a little bit easier to get those Loremaster achievements come The Shattering. Instead of having one huge quest counter for each continent, patch 4.0.3a will introduce zone-specific quest achievements to the old world, similar to the ones that already exist for Outland and Northrend zones. Once you finish the zone-specific achievements for every zone on a given continent (minus the new Cataclysm zones, of course), you'll have the achievement. Even old-school Loremasters can get in on the action, as the zone quest achievements will still be available for them to complete.

While Zarhym didn't specifically outline it in his post, Loremaster of Cataclysm will be required for future Loremasters as well, although it's not clear whether that will start to be a requirement in patch 4.0.3a or at the launch of Cataclysm itself.

World of Warcraft: Cataclysm is coming. Sometime. We're at that point now where BlizzCon has been over for a few months and Blizzard is being pretty stingy with new information in the meantime. It's a definite dry spell, but the same thing happened with Wrath -- and then the Friends and Family Alpha began, and all bets were off.

And while the F&F Alpha for Cataclysm hasn't started yet (believe me, we'd know), that doesn't mean you can't stay informed. There've been bits and pieces of new info released, in PC Gamer magazine, on Twitter, and elsewhere on the internet. And we like to keep track of that! What's come out is mostly new information on what's going to happen to Azeroth. And we just recently decoded this planning map of Cataclysm zones, which is where some information comes from.

So what this article is meant to be is a compendium of all known changes to old-world zones that'll occur in Cataclysm, sorted by continent and zone. We'll update whenever new information is released.

Hit the jump to get caught up!

Disclaimer: Some information may be outdated or incorrect by this stage in Cataclysm's development!

Reader comments – ahh, yes, the juicy goodness following a meaty post. [1.Local] ducks past the swinging doors to see what readers have been chatting about in the back room over the past week.

Flamers and trolls aside, WoW Insider readers are generally a contentious lot. Their viewpoints are as divergent as the player demographics the site attracts – all types of players, from the casual to the hardcore. With this many angles to consider, WoW Insider becomes a melting pot of ideas and opinions, from the sublime to the ridiculous. (And let's face it – some of the so-called ridiculous ideas are the most entertaining to read.)

Yet this week, readers seemed to be more often of one mind than not – whether that agreement was ultimately to agree over the topic at hand or to agree to disagree. [1.Local] highlights several reader conversations that made the radar this week.

So there's been a feeling in the air lately that some of the blues have been in a bit of a teasing mood. Sure, that's not neccessarily new, but what is interesting is what exactly they may be teasing us about. For example, here's a recent post in which one Sulmus of Aerie Peak asks for the Greymane Wall to be opened. Zarhym soon jumps in to say that they would be "out of their mind" to open the wall... then follows up with random ellipses. To top it all off, Bornakk and Crygil jump in with silly punctuation of their own.

Now when Alex and I were discussing this the other day, Alex insisted that they were basically admitting that the Greymane wall would be opened, likely in conjunction with the next expansion. He says it's already in the planning stages, and the blues are just waving the knowledge tantalizingly out of sight because they're not allowed to officially announce it yet. Now, at first I wasn't really on board with it, but then I noticed another post Zarhym commented in.

A couple of days ago at the midnight release of Wrath of the Lich King in Anaheim, CA, our very own Dan O'Halloran had an opportunity speak with Tom Chilton (also known as Kalgan), Lead Game Designer of World of Warcraft. They spoke on a wide variety of topics, from raid philosophy to the growth of the game in North America and many things in between. Read on to see what Kalgan had to say!

WoW Insider: What did Blizzard think was the most surprising class development of The Burning Crusade? Did you think Paladin tanks would be as popular as they were, did you anticipate the Druid supremacy in the arena?