Old world

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"Old World" redirects here. For the lore usage, see Eastern Kingdoms.
Azeroth as it appeared during Wrath of the Lich King.

"Old world" is a term used in World of Warcraft to denote the parts of the in-game Azeroth that predate the current expansion. At BlizzCon 2023, Chris Metzen used the term "old world" for the Midnight and The Last Titan expansions as "returning to the old world" to Quel'Thalas and Northrend.[1][2] The term for "old world" now likely includes past expansion continents that are not from the current expansion.

The "old world" term officially covers the following:

The term was also used in the patch notes for patch 10.2.5 which brought "Dragonriding" to the rest of the game zones, which includes all continents from past expansions up to Shadowlands.[3]

2010 original meaning

Azeroth as it appeared at WoW launch

The "old world" term was originally used in the World of Warcraft community to denote the parts of the in-game Azeroth that had existed since vanilla WoW, before the addition of any expansions. As commonly understood, the old world did not include the Azuremyst Isles and Quel'Thalas (which were added to Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms, respectively, in The Burning Crusade), nor Northrend, or islands like Kul Tiras and Zandalar even though they are all located on the current map of Azeroth.

This term was also used internally by the developers in 2010, as seen by the filename oldworld.mpq in patch 4.0.1 and patch 4.0.3, which contains the classic versions of Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms — as opposed to world.mpq, containing the versions introduced with the world update in patch 4.0.3a.

Now that Cataclysm and its world revamp have now been in the game longer than the previous "old world", it stands to say that the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor as they stand today can still be considered the "old world" despite them already receiving one revamp.

References

 
  1. ^ a b World of Warcraft 2023-11-03. BlizzCon | Opening Ceremony | World of Warcraft (21:40 - 22:40). YouTube. Retrieved on 2023-11-04.
  2. ^ a b World of Warcraft 2023-11-03. BlizzCon | Opening Ceremony | World of Warcraft (22:40 - 24:10). YouTube. Retrieved on 2023-11-04.
  3. ^ Harvey Randall 2023-11-17. World of Warcraft's adding dragonriding to old world content ahead of schedule. PCGamer.