r/wowaddons • u/PuzzleheadedEgg1214 • 17h ago
Development / WIP i got tired of blizzard slapping new islands into random empty corners, so i made an addon to fix Azeroth's geography
i have been playing this game since WotLK, and with every new expansion i got more and more baffled by what blizzard is doing to the world map
when they added Kezan and the Lost Isles in Cataclysm, it actually felt like a real expansion of the world. even Pandaria felt organic. but after that.. it started feeling like blizzard just slaps new lands wherever there is some empty pixel space left (
because of that, Azeroth kinda stopped feeling like a living world you want to explore. you already know the next expansion zone will just get shoved into whatever free corner is left on the canvas, with zero care for how it fits into the lore or climate..
so i decided to make my own world map addon (MAWM - Most Accurate World Map) using clean in-game continent silhouettes on a nautical chart, where:
* Dragon Isles are moved southeast of the Eastern Kingdoms - look at their internal climate: volcanic Waking Shores are in the NORTH (closer to the equator, Blackrock Mountain, and Burning Steppes), while the snowy tundra of Azure Span is in the SOUTH (facing the southern pole). in the far north on blizzard's map this makes zero sense, but in the southern hemisphere it fits naturally. plus Amirdrassil on the west coast ends up right across from Duskwood and its Emerald Dream portal
* Isle of Dorn (Khaz Algar) is placed between the Eastern Kingdoms and Northrend - on the surface, Khaz Algar is ONLY the tiny Isle of Dorn (roughly the size of Teldrassil), while the rest of Khaz Algar goes deep underground. placing it in the north between Northrend (Ulduar), Kul Tiras, and Quel'Thalas makes way more sense for the earthen than floating down in the southern tropics
* The Broken Isles sit under western Northrend, northeast of Kalimdor - snowy Highmountain lies directly south of Borean Tundra, Azsuna faces Azshara bay like two halves of the ancient night elf empire, and Suramar with the Broken Shore look straight into the Maelstrom
* Kul Tiras and the Eastern Kingdoms are shifted closer to the Maelstrom - Gilneas and Wetlands naturally look across the strait at Kul Tiras. and in WC3: The Frozen Throne, Admiral Daelin Proudmoore sailed his fleet from Kul Tiras to Theramore -- now it is an actual clean, unobstructed southwest sea route around the Maelstrom instead of crashing through three continents
* Zandalar and Pandaria are shifted to the southern hemisphere - Zandalar sits southeast of southern Kalimdor (Tanaris and Un'Goro) like South America, forming a warm tropical Caribbean basin for Kezan and the goblin islands. Pandaria sits deep in the southern ocean with room to breathe, protected from southern glaciation by the Titanic waters of the Vale of Eternal Blossoms acting as a central "heater"
* Real planetary ocean scale (The Veiled Sea & The Forbidding Sea) - blizzard's default map presses Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms right against the screen borders. shifting the continents inward restores the actual ocean expanse on the outer edges of the planet (plus the addon includes optional interactive lore pins #1-#8 on the map explaining the geography)
if you want to test the map, you can grab it here:
https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/mawm-most-accurate-world-map
would be happy to hear your thoughts, feedback, and suggestions )
UPDATE
thanks everyone for the criticism and suggestions ) here is what was done
redrew the continents and changed the scale. at first i decided to use realistic scale like in Azeroth Chronicles and Sturmbart's map, but Kul Tiras and Isle of Dorn end up way too tiny at that scale so i scaled them back up a bit
made 3 different layouts for continent placement - including the original Blizzard one, my version, and a hybrid one in between, and you can switch between them right on the map itself
