My hunter on Turtle WoW reached the first of their mid-level custom zones recently. According to their wiki, the zone of Northwind is designed for characters of level 28-34.
Though taking this screenshot at sunset did manage to make it look a lot better than it really is.
Northwind on Turtle WoW has a lot more interesting things going on. My description above is a bit of an oversimplification, as there's also a jousting tournament area and a quarry with Dark Iron dwarves for example. But the general vibe is definitely very similar to Elwynn: a lush forest dotted with human settlements and populated by bears, wolves and boars.
Weirdly, this was another thing that once again made me appreciate Blizzard's artists more because even after ten expansions of adding new terrain, they are still very good at making each zone visually distinctive with new assets and different creative directions. (That's why WoW GeoGuessr is so much fun!) Even if some zones obviously have similarities at this point, I don't think the Blizz devs have ever created a zone that's as obviously just a derivative of another zone the way Northwind is of Elwynn Forest.
That said, obviously part of Turtle WoW's charm is that everything they add is "more of the same" in a way, and I thought the zone was very beautiful and enjoyable to quest in. (It does have unique music too.) I did particularly enjoy the thought put into the lore and how a zone in that location would connect to everything around it.
My favourite bit was probably this mini garden/nook (there's probably a better English word for this that I'm not aware of) that featured a statue of Tiffin Wrynn and has you meeting her elderly mother, who still grieves for her daughter and asks you to carry a gift for Anduin to Stormwind Keep as she's not allowed to see her grandson. That hit kind of hard for me because Queen Tiffin is such a minor character in Warcraft lore, seemingly only created in order to die and give Varian something to brood over, it had never even occurred to me that she should probably have some other surviving family members, or to wonder how they might relate to Anduin.
A lot of non-quest NPCs also offer additional chat options to flesh out their characters and paint a richer picture of the zone, and I thought the whole thing felt significantly more coherent than the Thalassian Highlands.
As for some negatives: Why are all the boars aggressive? Boars are usually neutral mobs in WoW unless they are corrupted or diseased, but for some reason all the boars in this forest hate people and other animals, and you'll soon learn to loathe the sound of their angry squeals as you get attacked by one for the 50th time while just trying to pass through. I've seen people meme about this in general chat too, so I know it's not just me.
The bodies of water in the zone are clearly unfinished in some way, because when you dive into one... you don't get a breath bar! It's apparently a magical forest where everyone can just breathe underwater. Also, while they actually remembered to add fishing pools here (unlike in Thalassian Highlands), you still can't fish - or at least I couldn't, as I'd just get an error whenever I tried.
The worst part of it all though was undoubtedly the Dark Iron quarry in the north-eastern corner. I don't know what they screwed up there with the terrain building, but I struggled with mobs evading, falling through the floor, attacking through walls and the like repeatedly, to the point that it made the whole place a royal pain in the arse to quest in.
Another problem I had was that one quest I had in that area was just to search the quarry and return with anything useful I find, with no further details. At first I thought that I'd be looking for a piece of parchment on a table or something, but after searching the whole area and coming away empty I resigned myself to looking it up outside the game. I found that I was actually looking for a drop from an "Overseer Bragordi", which it turns out I had never come across because she was basically constantly dead. I more or less found her by accident eventually because I loitered near a few other players for a minute and it turns out they were sitting around specifically to spawn-camp her.
This lack of clear directions (this wasn't the only quest this applied to) was generally a weirdly double-edged blade from my point of view. The issue was also exacerbated by it turning out that Northwind was actually Turtle WoW's most recently added zone - there are some help resources for Turtle WoW questing available after how long they've been online, but naturally there wasn't much for their newest release yet.
Sometimes it was just frustrating, like in the above mentioned example. Other times I was actually quite satisfying - there was a quest to find a Defias hideout for instance and I was so chuffed when I found the guy's tent on the shore of a lake in a hidden valley because of course it makes sense that a secret hideout is well hidden and I actually felt quite proud of myself for finding it.
Yet other times it could lead to unexpected adventure and interactions. There was one quest that instructed me to pick some herbs similar to Wintersbite, herbs that were supposed to grow "along the snowy ridges to the north". I understood that to mean that the plant would grow in the snow (like Wintersbite) and wondered how to get up there, as the only snow was on top of the mountain and the cliffs were very steep. I wandered up and down the zone looking for a hidden path or something, and even tried to climb southward from Dun Morogh, all to no avail. I also asked for advice in several chats without ever getting a reply.
Finally, when I teamed up with a paladin for the local group quests and the other player showed as having already completed that particular quest, I asked them directly what they had done, and it basically turned out that I had been massively overthinking the whole thing - the flowers were right there in the grass and looked more like Peacebloom; I had just been so fixated on needing to get to the snowy area that I'd completely missed them. So that was kind of annoying, but ultimately arriving at the solution with the help of another friendly player was kind of nice. Either way not an experience you're likely to ever have in official WoW content nowadays, considering how thoroughly everything gets datamined and mapped out before it even launches.
One last thing I noted, since my character is a miner: the distribution of ore nodes was strangely retail-like, with the whole zone yielding nothing but iron. From what I can tell, the other custom zones around this level are the same. In Vanilla, different ores are always mixed together, which makes it much more challenging to farm just one specific type. As it is, Northwind is an easy zone in which to level your mining skill, but you can tell that its existence has somewhat devalued iron, as it was going for so little on the auction house that I just had to vendor hundreds of bars. Meanwhile copper is quite expensive for its low level, so it seems to me like the economy obviously would have benefitted from a more true-to-Classic approach here by having the zone yield a mix of copper, tin and iron together.
