The Daily Grind: What's the most poorly designed zone?

We've all been there: trekking through the levels, traversing the world, and eventually arriving at... that place. The zone that seems to have been designed to irritate you, personally. Either it's laid out too confusingly, or the quest objectives are too hard to reach, or you get turned around every two feet. It's a poorly designed area, plain and simple.

I was pondering this during a recent expedition to the Foundations of Stone in Lord of the Rings Online's Moria. It's not a horrible zone; the creatures are terrifying, the atmosphere is spot-on, and it contains a few of the signature landmarks of the game world. And yet I have to contend that it is a poorly designed place. It's difficult to navigate, the walls are tough on the eyes, and the key quest hub is incredibly hard to find on your first (or second) try. With a few tweaks and a moderate redesign, it could be much more accommodating to the odd traveler.

What other zones fall into this category for you? What zones aren't necessarily bad so much as they're just poorly laid-out and structured?

Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!

Reader Comments (48)

EQ2s lavastorm and several in Rift that cause you to run over large areas just to get one item.

I agree with Moria. Atmosphere wise it is perfect, and each time I go in I'm all YEAH MORIA but a couple of hours later I'm like oh god Gandalf I want to see trees. To me, I love the crazy navigation and sometimes dead ends, you can get used to those and learn them quite quickly. What I'm not too hot on is the mob density. Make the main tunnels going around more or less mob free and the actual quest zones as hard as they are now. After all, the fellowship didn't even see any orcs until the big confrontation.

WoW's Ashenvale, pre- Cata. Talk about a long-ass run just to do anything. In fact, the whole Teldrassil thing was too spread out and hard on the eyes as well. The purple, the purple!

@pcgneurotic This. I actually wasn't a big fan of any of the NE zones, just for the sheer green/purple combination.

@Loopy

Agreed...I actually hated the NE zones with a burning passion until I rolled my first NE a few weeks ago (5 years after I started playing haha).

For some reason, I love it now.

Go figure

-Birk

@Birk Heh i kinda liked it too when i rolled my first druid. But even still i decided to go back to wetlands and level there. I don't know, maybe i'm just too used to humans :)

The four Shadow Shard zones in City of Heroes. By "Shards" they mean "vast distances between the scattered floating chunks of rock that make up the vast majority of some of the largest zones in the game". Fortunately, there's a jetpack vendor at the start of the zones for those who can't fly.

There's also no compelling reason to go there in the first place since the Task Forces there aren't at all popular and there are no story arcs in the Shard. This is also fortunate, according to most players.

@The Ogre
I totally agree. Adding the Shadow Shard was a really huge waste of resources. It's a royal nuisance to travel around in without flight, and (at least back when I was playing) it had the worst task forces ever, taking many hours to complete.

@Haldurson
The Shard (and the TFs therein) suffers greatly from the designers' assumptions of the time. This was back when they figured that people, in PUGs even, would do long TFs over two or more sessions - as if that wasn't a colossal hassle to coordinate - so they could make them that long. Also, as a friend tells it, the TFs were supposed to feature several more custom maps... but when that content got cut, the missions that were supposed to use it weren't, and so you get (e.g.) four in a row that are exactly the same.

Add to this the difficulty getting around that others have mentioned, and the prevalence of enemies that throw around defense-ignoring Psi and auto-hit attacks, and you have a great big patch of wasted potential that might as well have tattered five-year-old "UNDER CONSTRUCTION" tape all around it.

@The Ogre
/agree

The 4 Shadow Shard zones are the most poorly designed zones (under-designed, tbh) in any MMO I've ever played.

If they had compelling content maybe they wouldn't seem so bad, but apart from their horrible task forces (which hardly anyone ever wants to do by choice) they're basically mob-grinding zones that nobody really needs at that level, nor would want to grind in when there are much easier-to-traverse zones at those level ranges.

It's a shame because they look so cool when you first go there, but they're such a hassle to traverse unless you're a flyer/teleporter and there's so little reason to go there, that I honestly can't think of any zone in any other MMO that could even challenge the Shards for the title of the most poorly designed zone.

I remember my first time in Warhammer Online's Black Crag and trying to get to Badmoon Hole Keep particularly frustrating and overcomplicated, especially if you missed the cave entrance.
Circling around the area trying to get to the warband inside while constantly avoiding or dying to Destro gank squads made the zone one of my least favourite places to go to in the game.

@eltahin WAR also had the Lemming Hill. A hill in one of the High Elf areas that was just steep enough for people using mounts to take a little fall damage when riding down. Usually resulting in their deaths because people never paid attention, since you wouldn't expect riding down a hill to give you damage.

Desolace in WoW would be my choice. It was just a colorless mess that was INCREDIBLY hard for alliance players to get to in the original incarnation of WoW. Alot of players leveled all the way to 60 and never set foot in the zone (alliance and horde).

Which was a shame since Desolace had Maraudon. One (two if you count the purple and orange entrances) of the best looking dungeons that I have ever seen in an MMO game (pre Wrath).

@Quarlo

Desolace wasn't *that* hard to get to as an Alliance player - just have to go up through Feralas. Of course, if you mean getting to Desolace before you've outleveled it, that's a different matter. :)

@Quarlo

I levelled in Desolace on my first ever Alliance character and it wasn't hard to get to at all. Has no one heard of just going through the Stonetalon Mountains?

@(Unverified)

You can go through Stonetalon, but it's *NOT* a fun experience, especially on a PvP server. Or at least not in the Elder Days. Dunno if the routes've changed enough so that the Alliance can get there safely post-Cataclysm...

@The Ogre
Leveled a few characters there on a couple different PvP servers; was never attacked during the crossing (except when I tried to go through Sun Rock, without taking the proper shortcut before the guards).

I'd go with Desolance in WoW pre-cata. It's hard to get to, and everything you need to do seems like it's on the other side of the zone no matter which faction you're doing it on. Another one is Duskwood, for much the same reason someone mentioned Ashenvale (you had to runs to get anything done).

Current WoW I'd go with Hellfire Peninsula and Terrokar. Hellfire just gets tiring to do after a while, and I've never enjoyed the quests in Terrokar.

@Greyhame

Definitely agree with Hellfire Penn post Cataclysm.

Pre Cata... I'm suprised no one mentioned Barrens. The amount of quests you had to do out of crossroads was absurd. Quests sent you to the edges of the zone (I even remember pre WotLK before they dropped the lvl requirements on your first ground mounts to 20), and many of them contained annoying quests requirements.
* Collect 40 "bracers" (or hooves, medals, etc)
* kill a bunch of centaurs until we decide to spawn the named mob you need to kill.

I'd say Zangarmarsh pre 60 flying. I don't know why people like the zone so much, it was terror to level through - swamps everywhere, no water walking and no flying, meaning I had to swim constantly, and for one or two quests the naga were grouped up so tightly on their small and medium sized islands that I was forced to kill them 2 or 3 at a time, something every rogue avoids at all costs due to the single-target nature of the class.

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The Daily Grind: What's the most poorly designed zone?

Reader Comments (48)

Posted: May 1st 2011 8:27AM kschir said

Posted: May 1st 2011 8:35AM Comrade Domovoi said

Posted: May 1st 2011 9:10AM pcgneurotic said

Posted: May 1st 2011 9:42AM Loopy said

Posted: May 1st 2011 10:03AM Birk said

Posted: May 1st 2011 2:03PM Loopy said

Posted: May 1st 2011 9:35AM The Ogre said

Posted: May 2nd 2011 8:58AM Haldurson said

Posted: May 2nd 2011 3:04PM StClair said

Posted: May 4th 2011 9:18AM Valdamar said

Posted: May 1st 2011 9:45AM eltahin said

Posted: May 1st 2011 10:06AM MagnetHead said

Posted: May 1st 2011 10:05AM Quarlo said

Posted: May 1st 2011 10:47AM The Ogre said

Posted: May 1st 2011 12:51PM (Unverified) said

Posted: May 1st 2011 1:29PM The Ogre said

Posted: May 1st 2011 5:03PM DarkWalker said

Posted: May 1st 2011 10:27AM Greyhame said

Posted: May 1st 2011 2:49PM (Unverified) said

Posted: May 1st 2011 6:59PM kasapina said

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