Yeah, Blizzard had posted something about how Zaralek Caverns are technically on a different map entire, but have found a way to seamlessly transition you back and forth without any loading screens. I'd seen a few error messages pop up before when traveling into the caverns (only seemed to happen on a Dracthyr while using Soar), that'd talk about something something transfer to map or something like that (cannot remember the exact message, but it made it clear that this was on it's own map, per se) Edit: Yeah, the official @Warcraft twitter account posted about this on June 1st -- Would link to it, but RU-vid would probably eat my comment then..
Soar on dracthyr will also remove most of your forward momentum once you transition between maps. The tech behind this is so cool though, and allows them to make the world completely open if they wanted to
indeed. I have to be on a different map. As the wow engine does not support having ground of same x and y coordinates in multiple z heights -> meaning just you cant have 2 grounds above each other. If you look at the map in the map viewer, you can see the teleport works in a way where both zaralek caverns and dragon isles have the same long cave. Once you enter the cave on dragon isles, the zaralek cavern map starts to load, and once you get to a specific spot in the cave, you get teleported to the copy of this cave in the zaralek caverns map, with the same speed and direction. Since the caves are exactly same, you wont even notice. And thats the seemless teleport.
You can easily confirm this, when your game tends to render slower, there is a big rock covering entrance/exit which makes you go back to despawn it and make it render again without the rock
That makes a lot of sense! One thing I can tell you for a fact is that I do not follow Blizzard or WoW on Twitter, so thank you for the information! It's crazy how seamless the transition is (unless I just hearth to Valdrakken). and I was just shocked at how massive the area truly is.
MOM GET THE CAMERA, I'M FAMOUS! I'm really glad you enjoyed this exploration. Soon as i found it, i knew i had to show you lol. The zone is INSANELY huge, you really cannot appreciate how big it is until you get there. You can also get into the 'exit' tunnel to the east (from above) and you go past the 'trigger' that loads the surface world.... and it's just blocked off by a giant rock. Keep up the good work, i love your videos
Lol, idk about famous by being on my channel (maybe one day), but at least over 8k people have seen it! It definitely is mesmerizing how large it is. And yeah, I didn't try the exit tunnel, mainly because I had already spent nearly 4 hours exploring. And thank you so so much!!
Yeah it's nuts, I'm gonna go back and see what else i can find because as you said, 4 hours and there are still things we haven't seen! I'll DM you if i find anything worth while. x
It's possible to fly outside with a carefully aimed dragonriding surge too :D Thooough keeping your momentum after that is hard, since it'll be difficult to land
I was thinking about that gap with the flying dragons, and it made me think about some possible tools for getting around out of bounds, ontop of the demon hunter abilities and goblin glider. Craft Creche Crowler, an item specifically bought off of Kajithalan, might be able to help, as it launches you upward and causes you to glide. The extra height could perhaps make a difference in some scenarios, along with the elixir of Gusts, as they dont share a cooldown.
Would love to see you get out of bounds on the sniffenseeking caves. They’re entirely isolated caves (you queue into them essentially) and they’re numbered. People show up on maps as in adventure cave 25 or something along the lines. Would be very fun 👁️👁️
I’ve been really enjoying watching your explorations the past couple of weeks, thanks for the content! I tried finding a proper video of someone exploring outside the Stormstout Brewery instance but all the videos I could find were very short and didn’t seem to cover the entire explorable area (which seemed very big, btw!). I was wondering if you would have any interest in escaping the brewery? I saw someone mention it might take a rogue to do it (not sure about that though, it was also pre-Legion of course)
When I was flying into the caverns once I got this error message that said "you dont have permission to this" or something like that. What was weird is I remember seeing a person flying in a corner on a jellyfish mount (which you know in the dragon isles you cant fly like in other zones) it was weird
Thats the "cave portal" loading the new zone. If you fly from valdrakken fast enough through the waterfall cavern entrance, you can see a large boulder blocking the entance off until you're loaded in. Either that or I have a slow enough pc to witness it
Interesting! Sometimes I hit a rock with a "you don't have permission to access this area" message if I hearth to Valdrakken and immediately head to the area.
@@GameUnCrafter it was so weird to see someone on a mount though! Like they had the jellyfish mount equipped but I was moving so fast I couldnt see if there was a name or who it was
Have you thought about using a toy like Bowl of glowing pufferfish, you can click on the bowl, get a few fish then use the fish on yourself to get a buff which causes you to emit light? Not sure if that would help with the darkness
Oh, weird thing I've been curious about: how the game handles sniffenseeking. Players are still sort-of on the map while doing it, but the areas are self contained (and presumably phased to be unique to each person)
@@GameUnCrafter Yep! It's a semi-weekly little puzzle-dungeon you can enter with one of the local mole-folk. Nothing too hard, but they're all pretty fun, and have some delightfully weird characters.
actually i found that out a while because i have pretty bad internet and when i fly down the tunnel to enter the cave there is a giant boulder blocking the way and then a loading screen appeared and i found out the tunnels were portals of some kind
At one point in DF alpha, There was a large volcanic island south of Azure Span with a blocked cave - Presumably this was the original Zaralek entrance but it was removed by DF beta. Anyway, that weird water area felt like the chunk from that concept of the zone, which was abandoned.
Very interesting. At some point I'd love to dip into beta. I was actually accepted into DF beta, but sadly it was only a month before release (didn't see the email) and didn't have enough free time to make it to the Dragon Isles in time.
I wonder if you can OoB in the Primalist Future. I flew full speed into the gold bubble surrounding the area and got disconnected and couldnt log back in for a while, lol
So being a old time explorer and 3D animator. Wow is built on levels. I have fallen thru AV map died in west fall when I crashed into the ground after falling for about 30 seconds. I don’t believe a teleport happened. When building a model and to save processor rendering cycles textures are only applied to only one side of the polygon plus rendering distance adds a whole new element with the sky box. I have seen the sky box has large horizontal views but when looking vertical it’s shortened by lots. Love the video tho looks awesome. I haven’t explored much of wow in the past 8 years due to job and life 🤣.
Westfall is the default graveyard - if you die in an area that has no assigned graveyard, that is where you go, regardless or race, class. HOWEVER, a lot of wow's early development did take place using that Selfsame map, it being the first map ever created. It's featured in many of the old developer islands and instances, so, unfortunately its not infeasible that westfall could be stored there, But wowdevs prefer to move things along the horizontal plane when developing and not downwards, as there's mosttimes a deathplane in those areas. So, to cut my long story short, i'd Guess you went to default graveyard. I don't have the willpower or desire to find the current version of AV to check.
Completely understand about not playing WoW much, haha. That makes a lot of sense with the skybox, and very interesting about falling through AV. I wish there was an easier way to explore underneath maps, but they're usually incredibly glitchy.
YEs it has to be elsewhere so that people on the overworld dont affect the underworld considering mob pathing and terrain works based on the topographical map and these cant be stacked on one another and make sense...
I didn't think they'd be able to stack them just because there are usually a ton of janky invisible walls and death zones and everything else underneath the map, but it's super interesting to see that there's so much more to this zone.
