World of Warcraft Wednesday: Silvermoon City
The home of the High/Blood Elves since they accidentally blew up their old one in Kalimdor, and then Arthas came along and blew that up, but they didn’t want to move to Northrend and they were out of continents, so they just rebuilt this damn city.
Well, the rebuilt half of it, anyway, and they half that’s left is really good looking. Silvermoon has some of the best art direction in the entire game, it’s really lovely in a cartoony, elfy, fantasy way. If it was better made, it would be my favorite city.
Therein lies part of the problem, of course. The layout is an odd figure eight, where everything is oddly separate from each other, and nothing really works well together. Not that it matters, because even starting elves just fast track to Undercity to start, and everybody’s hearths are set to Dalaran anyway (or Shattrath when Burning Crusade first dropped).
Convenience: D-
You can get to Silvermoon by bat or teleporter from The Undercity. Which is nice, because you can actually get back to the mainland from here (unlike, say, The Exodar). Even the Alliance doesn’t have much trouble getting to Silvermoon, thanks to the neutral flightpath outside Zul’Aman in Ghostlands. Unfortunately for the Alliance, nobody’s ever home.
The city’s contained behind one big gate that then opens up into the main drag which leads to two smaller sections, which then wend their way in sort of a ovular fashion ending up in the palace which is under the thoughtful watch of…some guy.
The problem is, for every cool Murder Row and Bazaar that looks great the whole layout of the city sucks. Everything’s seperated off in weird areas and the streets kind of wind off into nowhere. It’s like they had way too much space and no idea how to fill it, so they just stuck things in random places. Which is weird.
Ambiance: B+
I said it before, but I love Silvermoon. The towing spires draped in gold and red cloth, the tiled streets pouring out of the buildings, it’s everything you want in a fantasy city full of stupid elves.
It’s really too bad that it came out when it did. If Silvermoon had been in at launch, I could see it being a popular hangout for people in vanilla WoW, especially on RP servers, because it’s so fun to explore. But as it is, it’s not a very functional city, it’s not close to anything, and by the time it dropped, Shattrath was the place to be.
Special Features: C-
Silvermoon, sadly, didn’t get its full due during or after Burning Crusade. There’s some fun stuff to find if you go exploring, such as the leper gnome slaves locked away by tailors, or the Warlock dungeon, as well as a few scripted events, like a Horde tour of the city, but other than that there’s nothing really special. Even the big events that went down in Silvermoon, Kael’Thas trying to storm the city, the capture and captivity (and eventual release) of a Na’ru, either took place outside of the game, or were limited scripted events that basically nobody got to see because nobody was there to watch them.
Key Stats
Average Population: Very low
Class Trainers: Warrior, Hunter, Priest, Paladin, Rogue, Mage, Warlock
Best Feature: By far the best looking city in WoW
Worst Feature Designers forgot to make it functional
Recommended Hearth for Levels: 1-5
Silvermoon is basically made just for roleplayers. It’s a huge city with almost nothing going for it as a place to play WoW. As a place to chill out and wander around, though? Awesome. I still think it would’ve gotten a lot of play from Horde players if it had come out before Burning Crusade, hell people still love Orgrimar, but by the time Burning Crusade hit, nobody cared about another faction city, and even the role players had their favorite hangouts already picked out, so Silvermoon sits sadly abandoned on every server, until somebody decides to run For the Alliance or some odd holiday quest there.
January 29th, 2010 at 3:19 am
Some great information up here, thanks man. You know Cataclysm is driving me crazy, at one point it was going to be released in Feburary 2010, currently it’s supposedly November 2010!