One thing the players ACTUALLY wanted for "Classic /Vanilla +" was the completion of the original map, adding new zones for the dozens of missing areas, and finishing the incomplete questlines.

One thing I always found interesting with the real version of the map is how so many of the regions are roughly square or rectangular in shape - likely somewhat intentional so that they fit the map screen while in a zone. It's much more pronounced in the Eastern Kingdoms since the developers worked on those zones first. By the time they got around to Kalimdor, they started experimenting with more unique shapes that, for the most part, still fit well on a square or rectangular map screen.

This is why I love the private servers that are playing around with these spaces as their version of classic+.

I love how this just has an early WoW kind of feel when there were videos, screenshots and stories about the small, less known things about the game that little to no people had seen or knew about. It gives off that charm of the world, about its wonders and the nooks and cranies that you need to actively search for to find them - the treasures that may not be tangible, but where the finding them and their tales are the reward by itself. Really well done.

One noteworthy thing to mention about Azshara: The old mountain at the center of the main landmass had the Alliance and Horde entrances for the scrapped Crater of Azshara BG. Supposedly they were going to do a MOBA style BG in it, in which waves of NPCs clash while the players tip the balance by fighting and completing objectives, kind of an expansion of what they already done in Alterac Valley. Sadly they weren't able to finish it due to AI Pathfinding being wonky at the best of times and later, with TBC, players began to gravitate towards shorter BGs, which meant that a very long BG, as Crater was meant to be, wouldn't be played. And so the BG was scrapped and later with Cataclysm the zone was reshaped and the mountain leveled by Goblins.

Man, this kinda put me back 18years ago, very nostalgic watching these places from up above and remembering myself questing there as a teenager... WoW lives like a very fond memory in my brain, almost as a past life or something like that. I'm happy you did this on classic, I stopped playing just after WotLK

holy moly what a time travel experience you took us through. I loved your ending or when you rapped it up to show us the details the dev team done.

In the older versions of the retail map, far off the coast of Booty Bay, assuming you could reach it, there existed a kind of alpha version of Outland, heavily influenced by the Warcraft III interpretation of the zone, complete with trees floating atop large crystals. The layout wasn't too dissimilar from what we got when BC came out, but all of the buildings were clearly deteriorated versions with placeholder textures. Classic WoW is this time capsule of unending possibilities, there was so much content that just blew out the scope of what they could reasonably achieve. So much was just there, sitting unused, like when some people stumbled into hidden GM commands that weren't meant for players that got them access to a proposed test version of the Emerald Dream raid that would only be fully realized much later.

I’ve been playing Wow since 2005 and I didn’t notice until your video that Duskwallow Marsh is the shape of a dragon head breathing fire.

10:39 I love how they implemented GM isle there. I still have screenshots of a friend going there. We were in a group and I followed his dots on the minimap and he went there way in the northwest of kalimdor at the exact spot where it is on the map you show.

Super interesting. I understand that the area above Stormwind was originally planned to be an area where deathwing would surface from and they were going to make a raid there. But they eventually decided not to as it would have been difficult for Horde to get there with it being between Stormwind and Ironforge so they just removed it and made him come out of the Maelstrom instead.

Pls more content like this!! I’ve never even played WoW but I was enthralled from start to finish of this video. Subbed.

Wow, thank you for this video. Great explanations and breakdown. Kudos and hope you continue to make content you are bound to get big

Wonderful and very valuable video. For me it show's how genuine the community still is in it's admiration and fascination of the original vanilla map. I think Metzen said "The main character in vanilla is the world" and this one really got me. It's exactly how I feel while playing vanilla and why I love to revisit the imaginary place over and over for years. I told my brother some years ago "You know, all that famous green area in front of stormwind, the whole vibe and all that. This place doesn't really exist. It's just a virtual experience." and the fact that people feel connected to a virtual place still 20years after means a lot imo. I think the vanilla devs might be very nostalgic too, seeing this original raw version of the map, because they probably have a lot of memories with it, connected to hard work and busy nights and all that intent to create a world that would fulfill every warcraft fan's wildest dreams. They had so much fun when they played classic again for the first time ("Original World of Warcraft Creators Play WoW Classic!"). WoW truly has a magic value in our time. You can't make things like this up.

Love the content! Your dagger farm video helped me finally get it !

One of the things I always liked about looking at the WoW map this way is how colourful it is, or rather how obvious the splits are between the zones. You're in Swamp of Sorrows and its this cloudy yellow / green colour, head south and its immediately bright orange, head west and its completely grey in Deadwind Pass. Theres no blending, or basically none at all. One second its orange, now its grey. One second its grey, now its green. They got better with this in later expansions, but in these early ones I always found the transitions fascinating for some reason. I loved standing in the canyon thing that connects Redridge Mountains to Burning Steppes, or the gap in the hills that connects Duskwood to Stranglethorn Veil. I liked looking at the floor texture and the texture on the hills next to me and watching them rapidly and abruptly shift as I moved just 20 or 30 yards into the next zone. Skyboxes, same deal. Being in the Zangarmarsh skybox while looking into Nagrand for instance. Later in the game, I think around Legion, they introduced a potion called the Inky Black Potion, which when drank, changes all of the skyboxes in the game for you to be pitch black dead of night with a few stars here and there. It completely changes the vibes in zones.

Nice how you returned to your first question in the end and answered it.

awesome video, ive always wanted to see the world from this perspective :)

Oh man, this brings back SO MANY memories! Back during classic, made it a point to get into all those areas in the game, on the servers, no hacks and I managed to get into all of them, including UNDER Stormwind and into that large area, which was actually easy as there was a bug in Stormwind where if you jumped up on a wall, north of the bank near the exit that went to the left, there's a spot where two sections clearly join along the wall and you could "fall" through it if you jumped at it right, and end up under SW. You could get behind the portal, into different parts of SW and of course that huge zone. It was awesome. I miss those days.

I really love this view. It really feels like you're doing a bird's eye view of everything as if there are players running around there.

Great video idea! Was definitely a good watch!

Very cool, thanks for sharing

Good video, I'm always interested in those inaccessible places, I remember trying to climb mountains for many hours haha.

Its a strange deja-vu seeing videos like these pop up 15 years after seeing videos like these. 😁

*_"Interesting stuff!"_* -720 Zone

Wow! Just wow! Such an incredible video I’ve just witnessed!

Awesome video thanks!

The level 50-60 zones are the zones I have the least, if any experience with even after starting playing in early TBC. Very much looking forward to next phase

Ah, the memories. It was amazing getting to all those secret places.

Wrath client priests with levitate can explore these places pretty easy since you'll stick to the side of sheer drops

very beautiful the map from above

1:53 I would have loved it if there had been a mountain pass from Stormwind to Dun-Morogh. With strong winds and snowdrifts, even without questlines and only with some mid-level yetis. That would be epic in my opinion to pass this mountain instead of take the train.

That was really interesting, plus this map tool will be helpful for my conan exiles buildings :)

As of last week, you can still access Hyjal in SoD. A friend and I got into and took a bunch of screenshots together, explored the whole zone. We never got ported out.

I remember we had the old wow map (with terrain) printed out. It sat at my father computer, and whenever you wanted to see what the level recommendation were, I ran to the map (because it had printed levels on it) good old kind of Analog days 😂 This video reminded me of it because it's the exact same map you use!

To me it was ALWAYS strange that Ironforge and the whole area of Dun Morogh is placed in the equator of the planet. Think about it, it's like seeing snow in the Sahara desert in Africa. And before you tell me that i am wrong, make a straight line from Dun Morogh to Kalmdor and see which areas are there and what kind of climate they have. I don't know, it's kind of strange to me that a snowy are is in the equator of a planet.

Seems like there is a general lack of Warcraft lore knowledge in this video, but it is interesting for those who are newer to the game or started with Classic. The “worgen starting zone” is the Kingdom of Gilneas and was done dirty in later WoW expansions, although its king, Genn Greymane gets a decent role in events going forward. I may add more missing tidbits of lore after I finish this video. …okay I finished the video. No major complaints except that Lordaeron, which is a very important zone lore-wise, was skipped since it I guess the BC parts were instanced and not available in the viewer used. It should have been at least mentioned that this huge chunk was not covered so no Silvermoon City or the zones around it or the Isle of Quel’Danas with the Sunwell.

What a curious way to see the map, that was cool!

Thank you for the great video and for sharing the source! That‘s exactly what I‘ve needed!

Eggsellent video. Cheers from a fellow explorer. Used to glitch 20 years ago myself.

I don't even play these kind of games, but this was super interesting!

Bad lands was always my favorite place to go, it just looked beautiful and no one quests there much, had it all to myself

Just one minor correction, Wailing Caverns is the oasis south of the Crossroads, not the one in the north that you pointed out, you can even see the entrance of the instance, it's the light grey portion of the map there.

You used to be able travel (be patient, it takes some doing) from Kargath to SW and then glitch into a basement in that town. Got "under" Orgrimmar by going up the mountains to the west of the southern instance entrance. Saw Hyjal by dying and rezzing on the other side of the instance portal. The Hydraxian guys are on the little island to the north of the one you indicated. 😄

Really makes you appreciate the work that world designers/devs needed to do to allow flight, patching up all those dead zones and making things really fit together. :)

My guild and I used to get underneath Stormwind in vanilla by starting in Dun Morogh and hopping up the hill at the point where the road eastward split. From there you can straddle between Loch Modan and Dun Morogh, walk past the mountain camp (that you fly over on the gryphon route, I can't imagine what the people riding the gryphons thought), and then walk along the northern border of Searing Gorge westward. At that spot was probably one of the highest cliffs I ever saw in vanilla. Usually only mages (using feather fall) and paladins (who would bubble) would survive the fall if they timed it right. If I recall it was so high that mages would need to cast feather fall multiple times and would end up like a kilometer downrange. After the paladins rezzed everyone (who jumped from the top and went splat), we walked for quite a while and we eventually got to the spot you were talking about at the start of the video under Stormwind. We would make our way over to the entrance-way of the city and have conversations with people inside the city through the wall there. The speech bubbles popped out of the wall to the people on the outside. lol My guild was never any good at raid dungeons but man did we have fun exploring all the corners of Azeroth no one else would tread. Those were some fun times.

First area they have finally teased with the test realms. It's Searing Basin. You can actually find the cut off cave in Searing Gorge that would have led to it.

I managed to get under Stormwind onceby climbing up a mountain range on western edge of Dun Morogh and walking around and down, past the dwarf starting area. I had more fun doing that than playing the actual game, to be honest. I also got to the dancing troll village once, but forgot how.

i explored a lot of theese zones ingame. For example, you can walk towards the above Stormwind area from the dwarf area. (the mountain who seperate the starting zone from loch modan are a good start). Hyal can be accessed from Winterspring, Below silithus from Tanaris, Southern Island and the corner of the World also from the southern most point of Tanaris while swimming. (at some point fatique buggs out) And the area northwest of the eastern plaquelands... you guessd it from the plaquelands. Also the bis snowfield left from the dwarfen starting area is accessible by a long march over the mountains. And you can even shortcut to menethil with that. And both, the caverns of Time and Kharazan crypt are well known already. However this was on vanilla Minecraft, and on vanilla Private servers. in actual Classic, they might have fixed some of theese possibilities. edit: Oh yeah, and there are som minor interesting places too. Sleeping Dragon cave on a Coast, or an abandoned hut northcoast from westfall. Places i didnt manage to reach ingame... emerald Dream and GM Island.

the map that was explored was designed without flying mounts in mind, would be interesting to see how it looks in Cataclysm and onward after flying was enabled in the classic zones

I always forget about GM Island. Every single time I see a video like this and it comes up, I get absolutely blindsided by memories of the first time I heard of it, but it's like it doesn't exist in my brain outside of that

great video

I used to explore a lot of the inaccessible areas around Stormwind in game as there was a very easy spot to clip out of the map. You had to jump on a box, then a wall torch, then kinda wedge yourself between the top of the archway and the roof and mount your mount and it would push you out of bounds. I don't think you can do the glitch in current WoW classic though. I also used to do a ton of "climbing" with the forward + jump tap. I spent more time trying to climb places than lvling my character. My greatest climbing achievement was climbing up Northshire Abbey all the way up into that tower bit at the top. Also climbing the rafters of the AH and doing a little dance at the top. Just climbing up to the tippy top of the fountain in front of the bank in Stormwind was pretty cool. We didn't have very good internet at the time and I didn't have millions of hours to spend on the main game so instead I just screwed around and tried to glitch myself into strange places, having to message a GM every now and again to TP me back because of getting stuck and unable to Hearthstone.

That small section of grey flat terrain between north west Badlands and south east Loch Modan is reachable on foot in vanilla. IIRC you can go to Kargath, and walk north west up into the hills and jump your way up out of bounds over a bunch of rocks. No wall walking or glitches are needed.

Back in the very beginnings of vanilla classic in 2019, my 36 shadowpriest was on a flight path one day that crossed between Mulgore and Desolace, when I got dc'ed. Once I logged back in, I was no longer on the gryphon and fell down onto an area similar to the dwarven airport: an area that was rendered and meant to be flown over on the flight path, but not meant to actually be traversed on foot. (You can see these areas at 15:51: this cut-through where I fell is directly west of Stonebull Lake and north of the gray rectangular unfinished area.) After I fell, I ran east out of that pathway, and then south along those brown-topped mountains that form Mulgore's western border. To the east, I could look down toward the Tauren staring area of Camp Narache. To the west was an absolutely massive 90º cliff down into that gray unfinished zone. The "ground" in that gray area is down at the bottom of the world, quite a ways down from the Mulgore mountaintops... (levitate ftw!) When I ran south through the gray void, I made it into the brown area underneath Dire Maul. I could look up and actually see and target the elite ogres patrolling around the big courtyard far above me. Heading back north from Dire Maul, there was a small valley entrance cut into the giant vertical walls, with an actual rendered path leading north into that massive bowl-shaped crater on the map. Just like the map shows, the ground texture changes in a perfectly straight line in the north of the crater, it looks pretty trippy in person. Those were the only areas I was able to access after jumping down into the gray area, unfortunately. It was a unique and memorable little experience for sure. Getting to see what all of this actually looks like on the real physical map is really cool!

I love these exploration videos. I love WoW so much.

If a world revamp ever happens in retail, I really hope the whole map is made more cohesive, with a lot of these "hidden" places fleshed out and made into playable spaces rather than the boring mountains they are now. The previously unavailable empty nothing between Stormwind and Dun Morough is particularly funny to me. In a real world, that place would absolutely have have settlements or at least a road. In retail it's currently a bay, which would be the perfect place for a joint naval/air force base.

I remember using priests levitate to reach off limit zones like plateau next to Ironforge, Hyjal, Gilneas.

You can also setup a private server and fly around, visit hidden areas and even edit and add your own content

I think the most interesting is how "video gamey" the map ends up being. Obviously it was built for a purpose. Every zone being perfectly gated by conveniently huge mountains despite the environment being flat grassland, the square shape so it would fit nicely on a square map, but also the vastly different climates of neighboring zones. Dun Morogh is completely frozen over despite being directly on the equator, and right next to Burning Steppes and Searing Gorge. I guess maybe the excuse is it's elevation in the mountains. Though it's really utilitarian it's fun to look at it and see why it was built this way, what were the designers trying to accomplish. The Dwarf airfield is a good example. They know you will be flying through these areas and it's purpose is to make long flights more interesting.

This video is like teleporting 15 years back: Classic Wow graphics, bad microphone, no annoying background music, long duration and paused and relaxed explanations. Back when internet wasnt overrun by rats without focus and emotional problems. 10/10

Thanks for the nostalgia! ;-) Wailing Caverns is one hill to the south, I think... you can actually see the entrance on the map. ;-)

You should look at the maps and then compare it with maps which we used in Warcraft 1, 2 and 3 and you see how the continent slowly changed or that they had area's developed but never finished because something was there in WC1, 2 or 3.

All the desert and rainforest at the south end of the map makes me think that’s the equator more than it is the bottom of the map.

You forgot Eversong Woods along with the Sunwell Isle and Ghostlands, and of course Azuremyst Isle.

It's actually really easy to create your own local private server and give yourself gm powers to explore

"The starter area of Brill" Deathknell in SHAMBLES.

Extracting the map textures and pasting them together in photoshop was a personal hobby of mine archiving each map update by build number.

I looked at this, as I was on my first playthrough. I was fascinated, that humans basically spawn right next to an end game zone. 😂 I love the whole forensical / archaeological stuff, where you can see, what game development back then meant.

Haven´t played in many, many years, so why is every inch of this map still etched into my memory? *sigh* ;-(....

14:15 tiny mistake: Wailing Caverns is by the oasis to the southwest of Crossroads, not northwest. You can see a grey square on the map which is the entrance

great stuff...would be fun the see what difference TBC did to this one :)

Interested in Northrend!

If you haven’t, try mentioning some of the stuff that we don’t typically see. There’s something off of Westfall and another off of durotar.

Would be nice to know whats the actual % of playable map (including finished mountains) vs non playable map, Its actually a quite decent area, all put together.

I can see why it's difficult to dice that to put there. Its a vulnerable space between 2 major cities. I'd have made it an area accessible by booty Bay, and enclosed enough that you can only exit through a ship, or flight path.

cool video

It's weird how long it takes to get to Blackrock Sprire from Stormwind, but they are practically right next to each other.

In the alpha client the outdoor dungeons didn't have instance portals or even dark portal placeholders like Scholo and such, so places like ZF might have been planned to be similar to Jintha'alor before deciding on being made dungeons.

This brings memories😄

Would be nice if they actually started remaking most of the game based on classic finish all the zones with content graphics etc

cool vid

I remember using wow carto and look at the map for hours

06:50 ALL the way to the right of Arathi The small patch of land a long the coastal line is a secret zone :)

Great memories.

I wish someone would do this for Fallout 3 I always wondered what the Capitol Wasteland looks like

WHAT is the sand colored square box just below Zul Gurrub , at 10:11???

i’ve been to a huge amount of these areas on live servers, was inspired by the old noggaholics videos

You can use far sight to explore areas like Hyjal. I will say, many of the unfinished areas are unsettling. One time I was in Ghostlands and I far sighted over the portal to EPL and got to the edge of that particular map and the world just ended with a huge drop off and that made me feel very unsettled.

I don't know if this is right or if I am making it up but I thought I heard that they might be adding new areas in SOD with endgame content and putting it in places that were undeveloped like some of the plain flat areas. Maybe I dreamt this

Subscribed!

Hey Jeff it's Telli. Basically a lot of the stuff you covered was what should have been in SoD - without all the extra nonsense we have in it now. Side note - you glanced right over Troll Village! One of the best hidden farm spots.

Is there a tool like thus but have higher resolution maps? Do I can zoom further.

anyone else see the two monsters facing off when the look at the two continents? It's got to be intentional.

I was able to get this map in my classic era addons but sadly it didnt work in Bc or Wotlk

this needs a map mod

do you have a link to this game files map?

I love that in Hyjal zone you can find Archimonde’s skeleton stucked to the Nordrassil tree

The “monumental” work - put it under water 😂

I can't find the website, can anyone share a link?