A Deeper Look At... The Future of the Past: Walk of Echoes.

Another new event here for my blog, I am going to start doing a series of posts about places you might not know about because they are unreleased, because they are hard to get to, or because you have never needed to go there. This week we will start with a look into the Future of the Past: The Walk of Echoes.

So, a while ago I wrote about some information on the zone that would eventually turn into the area used for Einherjar. I found this zone interesting because it was absolutely huge, 9 consecutive chambers all the size of a small zone but just small enough so that you can see the other side of the zone, leading to a huge chamber at the end that was even bigger than the rest of the chambers.

Now, I thought they could have done a little more with this zone, but after some tweaks Einherjar turned out to be pretty challenging, and not as daunting as it first appeared. The adding of ampules even if you didn't have the zone completed really was the clincher for general use of this zone. Now, I think that people that whine about making content easier are just assholes that can't think about anyone else besides themselves. I don't know why it would bother someone that someone else was able to do something if it doesn't hurt your enjoyment. It's not like they really made Einherjar easier. I also take a bit of umbrage with those that wanted to Einherjar to scale, because I don't remember them ever saying they were going to do that, but I do remember a vague reference to them considering it. The point is that some things should be kept for larger groups and small groups shouldn't really be able to do all the content in the game. Let me preference the next statement by saying that I very much love doing small group events, in fact that is how I do Salvage and ZNM's right now, but that being said, I think that some people take the ability to small group things as justification for being completely antisocial and justification for being a douchebag.

That was a long-winded rant that I didn't mean to start because it is completely off of the topic of what I want to get at today which is new end-game events in the past. This is what I really wanted to talk about: That is the area that is designated the Walk of Echo's, or at least that is an rendering of the area by a kind JP fellow. Much like the Einherjar area this area is apparently friggin' huge if the size of the Hydra is to be believed. I have basically two ideas for this area. Either it is going to be one comprehensive area like Sky or Sea, which I kind of doubt because there is no map for this area, or it is going to be broken down into sections like Einherjar or Limbus, which I think is a little more boring but at least it means that SE is listening to requests for individualized or instanced content. This area also just plain looks cool. :)

The general area looks much like what appeared in the trailer for the Wings expansion, but lets take a further look at some of the areas of the zone. First of there is the battlefield area and this is the entrance to it. Pretty impressive and pretty big, because the Taru should be to the correct proportion. Though that is pretty impressive, inside looks even better. This is a great area to have almost any battle. Something like Salvage? Maybe. Something like a Limbus final areas? Maybe. Something all new, maybe even like a raid in other games? Maybe. Here is an overhead picture of the area. This I want to touch on because we don't really have areas like raid in other games, in that our instanced areas don't really tell a story like other the instances of other games. I guess they might in that I just have done them so many times that I don't really think about it, but to me they more seem like puzzles that I have already solved rather than something that has storyline importance whenever I do it. I don't know, it just seems different in my mind but I have never done instances in other games so I might just be romanticizing them. Anyway, the next picture shows depth the pit in the center of the zone, which is pretty deep. There is also quite a regal entrance way, and you can see Lilith for comparison because I don't think necessarily that she is bound to this area. The entrance way overlooks the pit but it is kind of unclear how exactly you would enter the pit area, probably some kind of intra-area teleporter. Here is one last shot of Lilith looking down on the pit area. I want to finish this up with two youtube clips that go over both the arena area and the entire Walk of Echoes area. I hope this whets your appetite.

Next week: Other unreleased past areas.