The Ultimate Quest

The Rankings

1. Silverpine Forest

2. Searing Gorge

3. Western Plaguelands

4. Eastern Plaguelands

5. Tirisfal Glades

6. Durotar

7. Dun Morogh

8. The Wetlands

9. The Badlands

10. The Hinterlands

11. Loch Modan

12. Burning Steppes NEW!

13. Arathi Highlands

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Mission Statement

Alright, let’s do this.

I have embarked on an endeavor, my dears, to comb through the absolutely massive World of Warcraft in search of the best it has to offer. 

Yes, you read that right.

We’re going to find the best World of Warcraft zone.

Criteria

How? Good question. Of course, this will need to be a completely objective task. So we will need to measure each zone by the same factors. To accomplish this, I will focus on a few basic ideas: what is the story the zone is trying to tell (if it tries to tell one at all)? And within that overarching story, what little stories are there to find? Is there a unifying theme?

Importantly, how does the zone itself play? Are we just collecting animal body parts for sundry quest givers, or is there anything clever going on? Are we subverting tropes, or reinforcing them? 

Now, to journey through a game like World of Warcraft is to journey through a place. So we will need to pay attention to how the zones look and feel too. And most importantly, we will record the towns we visit, for towns are one-third of the town-overworld-dungeon RPG archetype.

Stipulations

Lastly, some stipulations: I am grading the zones from within the context of my playthrough as a given character. So while the Horde version of Arathi Highlands might play out differently to the Alliance version, I will not play both before entering an entry into this endeavor. Instead, I will simply grade it as it is, however I first encounter it, and should I encounter it later from a perspective of sufficient uniqueness, we will simply revisit the original ranking. I may tackle these in more or less a random order as well. The first two entries will cover the career of a single warlock, but future ones may deviate. There are a lot of zones to cover, so we will just continue the work until we are done. And for now, there is no option to legally experience pre-Cataclysm classic zones, and should I ever find and take that opportunity, I will grade them as entirely different zones in their own right. Charts will be updated accordingly, but for now, assume I am playing through post-Cataclysm zones.

One more note, for those wary: there will be plentiful spoilers in this series, certainly within the zone, but often outside of it as well.

Onward!

But anyway. On we go. This should be easy, right?