Quote Originally Posted by Tirian-Hammerfist View Post
I was thinking about those images shared by Thormund and have attached what I think is likely for this zone, based on the description of where these images were located and how large the zone would potentially be.

In the image below, the orange Xs are roughly where the images were from, based on Thormund's descriptions (please correct me if I'm wrong). That makes the red area what I think is likely to be added if this is a 'filling in the gaps' kind of zone.

However, given there's no natural barrier along the south of this zone, I wonder whether this is actually part of a bigger piece of development which will extend further south (the blue area), to cover all of the western border of the current Shire (potentially even including the Grey Havens?)

Either iteration of the zone, however, is certainly much bigger than the Wildwood or the Angle, although it certainly is filling in a long remarked-about gap!

I'm very curious what they're doing with Yondershire. There's a very large area being developed; I think this map gets the extent of the zone right (though I think it will only include the area marked out in red, not the area marked out in blue). If you look at Garan's in-game terrain map, you can see there's been development as far northwest as the Wardspire, as far southwest as the Falathlorn Homesteads, as far southeast as Little Delving, and as far Northeast as the borders of Evendim. And in addition to the in-game changes that others have mentioned, if you look through the gate between Ered Luin and the Shire from the Ered Luin side, you can see elven ruins to the southeast, at the base of a large hill/mountain and climbing up the hillside/mountainside. The area involved is comparable to the Shire or Ered Luin in size, so I think it's better to think of Yondershire as a full-fledged zone rather than a small filler zone like the Wildwood or the Angle. It will probably be bordered on the south by a stretch of hills or mountains, perhaps the Tower Hills. And there's probably going to be a lot going on in this area; there are large ruins in the northeast and northwest, elven buildings in the southwest, and, as Tirian-Hammerfist has pointed out, several hobbit villages that should be located within Yondershire's borders. The White Towers may or may not be accessible from Yonderland as well.

What I wonder about is what level the quests and enemies in Yondershire will be. It's a region situated between two starter zones, and it's the only physical connection from Ered Luin to the rest of the game world; it's likely there will be people trying to venture into this area at around level 10. It looks like they're planning to have a path leading into Yondershire from Little Delving, where hobbits are dropped immediately after the Archet introduction, so there could be players as low as level 5 making a wrong turn and entering Yondershire by accident. So it would be dangerous to make this an end-game area. And besides, this would be an excellent opportunity to the devs to show new players how good the graphics and world design have gotten in the years since the game was released. So my first inclination would be to assume that this will be, say, a level 10-20 or 10-25 area.

As I said, though, this would be a large area. Several times larger than the Wildwood and the Angle. Would they really put so much time and effort into developing a new zone that wasn't at level cap? That seems dangerous in its own way; level-capped players get bored easily, and creating Yondershire uses up development time that could be used to feed hungry level-cap characters. For that reason, it's also tempting to think that Yondershire could be a level 140 region.

There are scenarios where Yondershire could contain low-level content and high-level content as well. It could primarily a level 10-20 zone, but with a small area devoted to level 140 players. There could be missions and a set of epic-style quests for level 140 players, and perhaps even an instance or two. Perhaps they could do something similar to Tales of Yore, where the version of Yondershire that's directly connected to the landscape is level 10-20 but there's a closed-off version of the area that's level 140, similar to what they've done with the Tales of Yore areas, War of the Three Peaks, and the many different iterations of Minas Tirith; this could be a nice opportunity to show how the situation in Eriador has changed since we left it, which could in turn direct us elsewhere in Eriador to undo the damage that's been done during the war. Or maybe they're even going to roll out some fancy new version of layering or phasing or level scaling that allows Yondershire to exist at both levels at once.

However they approach the level of Yondershire, I'm eager to see this area. I'm one of those people who's been begging to see this area filled out since the beginning of the game, so I'm happy to see it's finally coming to pass.