In video games it's the off the beaten path, random places that stick in my memory, not the boss fights or the big set pieces. I wanted to share a few of those locations with you here today. These are a handful of the hidden nooks and seemingly desolate areas I've come across that ended up making a game feel immersive and lived-in.
Elwynn Forest's Hidden Gnoll Community
As the starting zone for human characters, Elwynn Forest is where most Alliance players began their journeys back in 2004 and 2005 (me included). It has its share of random, mundane locations, from the odd wolf's den, to the meandering river bordering the haunted Duskwood, and the roving hordes of bears and Defias inhabiting its eastern edges.
What I want to focus on here is something I truly only discovered playing the 20th Anniversary Edition of Classic WoW. Namely, the gnoll society built up around the northern end of Stone Cairn Lake. It may seem improbable for someone who has played countless human characters since 2005, but I had never really explored that area. Sure, I'd died countless times to the murlocs at the south end of the lake, as many of you have. I had been to the island in the middle of the lake, because of the class quests located there. But I had never bothered to go further beyond. Turns out, it's an interesting subregion.
Similar to Forest's Edge, gnolls are everywhere. But there's even more here than in that infamous western patch. There are rare spawns that appear, random chests, and burnt down buildings, implying that the gnolls killed the human settlers here and moved in rather recently. As far as I can tell, there is no quest related to the area and no real reason to go there. Places like this really flesh out a world and make it feel more immersive. On the gameplay side, it's a fantastic spot to farm low level loot, get experience points, and find ore and herb nodes.
Netherstorm's Mote-Laden Cliff Edges
Sometimes, a location's significance is forged in the grind. For me this was true of the cliffsides of Netherstorm in WoW's Burning Crusade expansion. To the casual observer, these look like barren areas devoid of anything valuable. Look closer, however, and you'll find walking goldmines in the form of monsters that drop motes of mana.
This was an important crafting reagent that could be combined to create primal mana. I farmed the heck out of these back in the day. It wasn't the most efficient way of getting gold, but it was relatively easy, and I knew it would work. I used the proceeds from the motes to buy several powerful crafted items for my mage, like a spellpower dagger and some nice pants.
Sometimes you'd even come across other people farming for motes of mana and strike up a conversation with them. A desolate purple cliffside thus became both a source of in-game wealth, and an opportunity for socialization. I have good memories of the area, even though outwardly it looks like nothing important goes on there at all.
SSV Normandy's Command Center
In Mass Effect, the Normandy is Shepard's home and base of operations. You're there so often that it eventually bleeds into the background, sometimes becoming an annoyance as you wait for the loading screen elevators to finish. Initially, though, the Normandy is where you are introduced to the world of Mass Effect and the mechanics of the game itself.
Specifically, there's a scene at the very start where you converse with the ship's Chief Navigator Pressly. The conversation is memorable because, in 2007, it felt like the most immersive moment I'd had in gaming up to that point. The character animations, the dialogue options, the camera angles, it all felt so fresh and polished. And it all took place in a relatively non-descript area of the ship's bridge that you will likely never really pay attention to for the rest of the game.
Sometimes I stand there just to take it all in, as if I can re-experience the first time I talked to Pressly. And even though Pressly is a minor character in the grand scheme of the galaxy, he stands out to me as significant for the reasons stated here.
Spires of Arak's Dramatic Entrance
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Few remember World of Warcraft's Warlords of Draenor expansion fondly. Well, few besides me. I have plenty of good memories constructing my garrison and working through that expansion's zones. One area that WoD succeeded at was its leveling storylines. To date, I'd contend that it delivered some of the best stories we've seen in WoW.
This was particularly true in the zone Spires of Arak. When you arrive there, you are immediately thrown into a major crisis situation that you know little about. A stream of refugees flees the zone as you rush in, establishing an ominous tone. As you move further, the town of Veil Akraz is completely obliterated. The music shifts, NPCs scatter and react, and you're left dealing with the aftermath.
It's one of the more impactful set pieces I can recall in WoW, and I've played all the expansions. It was also a good example of show, don't tell. Nobody explains to you the situation in Spires of Arak, but it becomes clear what the problems are soon after you enter.
Oblivion's Feed Bag
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is filled with demonic portals and Ayleid ruins, but strangely enough, those aren't the places I remember most clearly. Instead, it's the simple bars, stores, and taverns you find littered across its cities. One in particular is "The Feed Bag" located in the Imperial City. It serves no real purpose. To my recollection, no quests take place there and nothing pertaining to the main story happens in that location.
But what's interesting about it is its sense of immersion. It showcased the game's Radiant AI, highlighting how NPCs had lives and routines that existed beyond the player's needs. I remember being fascinated in 2006, watching NPCs come and go, eat together, have random conversations, and react to me in interesting ways. At the time and ever since, The Feed Bag set a standard for what I like to see in games in terms of immersive experiences.
Halo 2's Relic Map
As a kid I spent a lot of time playing Halo 2. Unlike today, much of that time wasn't in frenetic matchmaking sessions (though those did happen), but in more low-key custom servers with friends from school. In those situations, you'd basically chill in the same map for hours, discovering glitches and doing random things sometimes completely unrelated to the normal goals of the game.
In the map Relic, for instance, there was a glitch you could pull off using the warthog and the floating Covenant sniper tower you can see to the right in the image above. My memory is a bit hazy, but what we would do is have a couple people in the sniper tower, and a couple people in the warthog. Using a method I don't recall entirely clearly, you'd use the warthog to push something that caused the tower to glitch and float out over the ocean.
You could get pretty far out, which was cool if you were one of the people inside the sniper tower. From there you could hold fun little duels in the tower, or try and see who could survive the longest when the tower inevitably falls to the ocean and begins sinking like the Titanic, slowly tipping over and filling with water before eventually submerging completely.
There are many more stories like that from Halo 2, and I fondly remember glitching to get out of several of the maps and explore what lay beyond their natural boundaries.
Conclusion
From World of Warcraft's Elwynn Forest to Halo 2's Relic, I've found that my enjoyment of games as digital spaces often comes from how my experiences in them allow me to better immerse myself into their worlds. These days I've come to realize that I'm often not looking for the flashiest gameplay, or the rarest loot, but for the experiences in games that make these worlds feel like real, lived-in spaces that I want to return to.
Do you have a video game location that you remember fondly, or that you still think about to this day? Comment below and share your experiences!
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