I’d like to thank Final Fantasy XI for having some of the most obnoxious areas in any MMO to navigate ever. Maps that are difficult to read? Holes that you can fall through into lower regions? Paths that only open in one direction? All of the above, and many of them were made almost impossible to navigate without larger groups willing to work with you. How deeply annoying to just grab one item from therein.
Not that Vana’diel is alone in having obnoxious areas; World of Warcraft has always had regions “designed for flying” insofar as they’re annoying as heck to navigate without flying mounts, and the less said about City of Heroes and the infamous cake cave, the better. So what MMO area do you find the most annoying to navigate? Perhaps not even the hardest to deal with on a whole, but the most annoying to just move through on your way to other objectives?
Every morning, the Massively Overpowered writers team up with mascot Mo to ask MMORPG players pointed questions about the massively multiplayer online roleplaying genre. Grab a mug of your preferred beverage and take a stab at answering the question posed in today’s Daily Grind!
So many good answers in these comments! I’m surprised by how many of them I’ve experienced.
I just got out of Dustwallow Marsh in WoW, myself, so I’m going to nominate that hellhole. Uniform shade of brown. No landmarks. The second bridge to Theramore mitigates the horseshoe shape of the vanilla zone (if you’re Alliance), but does nothing to improve lines of sight obstructed not only by trees, but by hanging moss, thick underbrush, and undulating terrain. Did I mention the hollows in the terrain are all filled with water just deep enough to require swimming?
I don’t know how we did that zone in vanilla, without quest markers on our maps.
My answer: any capital city in WoW.
Seriously, those city planners should have been sacked.
The old forest and Moria in Lotro before they changed them both . I am finding some of the Heart of Thorns areas in GW2 a bit annoying to navigate but I am having fun .
The second half of Egypt in Secret World Legends. After I finished my story missions there I never went back to that godforsaken place.
Loved the main story arc there with the talking statues, but a few of the quests in that zone I’m in no hurry to ever do again.
In terms of overall navigation, not a specific zone or region, GW2. I didn’t mind GW1 at all, but the map and quick travel system in GW2 definitely contributed to me never being able to get back into the game post-launch.
Currently the troll capital in BfA. Gorgeous but incredibly annoying to navigate
The first two maps in Heart of Thorns are two of my most disliked designed maps in all the MMO’s I’ve played. Both maps involve a maze of verticality with large portions of the map being locked off until the 2 hour event has finished running.
HoT made me quit GW2 lol. Nothing worse than a vertical zone that required grinding to navigate…
The POF mounts make the HOT maps MUCH easier to navigate. The bunny is really good for getting up the vertical climbs, and the jackal is perfect for running past the archers and mini-raptors that will one shot you because their damage is WAY over-tuned.
The Caves you needed to get through to initially unlock Samurai in FFXI.
Kingsmouth in The Secret World. So many quests that had you run back and forth through town. Hordes of zombies waiting for you, all super low level, so it was never worth fighting them, but always fast enough to slow you down and pull you into combat, so you had to spend ten minutes punching zombies every single time you needed to go through there.
Hated it.
Kingsmouth is an open area with clear map, so its very easy to navigate. And you dont have to stop to kill zombies, they are very easy to avoid
In EQ and EQ2 too many zones to count. Old forest in LoTRO. Old Targonor in Vanguard. vanilla BRD in WoW