The Undermine for World of Warcraft has been out for a little more than a week now. For the first week they only had the world content available, and on the second week they released all the seasonal content including the new raid. I've had enough time to do most of the new content now and I can safely say that this is officially one of my favorite zones in the game ever.
In my initial post I already mentioned that this update is all about Goblins. The Undermine is basically the capital city of the Goblins and it's the first time we see such a central location to Goblins in World of Warcraft. I've never looked at Goblins as anything else that a funny sub-race that's obsessed with money and riches. That hasn't really changed but I can see that the while Goblin vibe is just so funny and a great addition to the game.
The zone has a great design. It's the first time an entire zone has a urban design. There's usually vast stretches of wilderness and scenery with some smaller central urban locations. This is something new entirely. When you make a dense zone like this you need to make it feel detailed and alive and they've done a good job of that. There's so many small details to this zone and it's littered with references and Easter eggs.
In my journeys so far I've found so many funny references. The main building in the zone is called the Gallagio and references the Bellagio in Las Vegas. You'll find Hob Ross painting as a nod to Bob Ross. There's Gelvis (Elvis) impersonators on the beach. A raptor is even sitting on the roof of the Gallagio as a reference to Yoshi in Super Mario 64. There's a lot more that I haven't mentioned and most likely more that I haven't found yet. They must have had a lot of fun while designing this zone. It's meme central.
One other thing that's worth mentioning is that this is a no flying zone. Those are usually rather unpopular in World of Warcraft seeing as most mounts are flying mounts and it's just a lot more convenient to zoom around on flying mounts. Instead they've given us a car that we can drift around in which feels as fast, if not even faster, than flying mounts. I've seen no complaints about this which is rare for a ground mount zone.
I remember once they released the first new zone for the Dragonflight expansion I tired of it almost immediately. I'm not ready to give up on this zone yet. There's a lot of mounts, pets and other things to collect here and I'm all in for it in the coming weeks.
All images in this post are screenshots taken by me.
