Blackrock Mountain takes the cake for me- the reveal of the central rock suspended with huge chains, the giant lava pool, the size and scale of everything, and the environmental storytelling with orcs behind barricades and dwarf corpses telling you that the upstairs and downstairs neighbors don't get along.

I think the lack of dungeon map really plays into it. Like you're really uncovering a mystery

3:45 Eh, shadowfang keep has an entire city of humans that turn into werewolves at night. That's pretty immersive imo

The change in loading screen art changing in WotLK makes sense, since this coincides with the introduction of the dungeon finder. Before, having the art be of the entrance would be redundant since you were just there. Instead, it focuses on concept art and the mysteries/dangers that lie ahead.

But with dungeon finder, you get ported straight inside the instance and the loading screen becomes something like “this is what the entrance looks like, btw” since a-lot of players will never see it. Also having a less ambiguous loading screen allows players to easily note what dungeon they’re loading into when queuing random.

Vanillas dungeon design wasn't just about the dungeons, it was about how those locations impacted the world. How and why were they there, not just another random portal to a dungeon you could run. There was something really special about the consideration put into them for sure.

John Staats mentioned in his Dev Diaries that most of these "buffer zones" were originally part of the instance, and due to the amount of time it took to complete they backed off the dungeon run time by shriking what part was actually instanced. Thats one of the reasons why they look and feel just like part of the dungeon themselves.

8:56 goes extremely hard tbh

I agree about the buffer zones. It feels like getting to the inner sanctum of whatever place you are venturing into. The perils of going to a dungeon feels bigger.

It is interesting to think of how the raid portals for MC and BWL that exist inside dungeons minic the structure. Buffer zone-ception.

Unfortunately, I have often experienced that other players have seen the buffer zones as a nuisance. I suppose that is one of the reasons they discontinued the concept.

The sketches leading screens take me back to the chapter illustrations of the Dragonlance books.

The Dungeons and Dragons module feel to the zones were very prevalent in early WoW design.  Shadowfang Keep and the surrounding zone always felt like Ravenloft to me - with the Barovia adventuring setting the tone and establishing what the players will encounter as they travel the road and approach Castle Ravenloft itself.

I started playing in Cataclysm but the zone before the deadmines still left a big impression on me to the point that I still remember the first time I found a dungeon, peeked inside, then turned around as soon as I saw the damage the enemies were doing. But the fact that the mine continued on, and I couldn't see what was at the end unless I find a party and venture deeper together did push me to play group content where I originally wasn't planning to.

Ive a soft spot for the buffer zone before blackfathom deeps. The mobs there dropped pretty rare loot and were useful for hyping the group up for the dungeon ahead.

10:44 Man, that shot is from somewhere so out of the way that I don't even recognize it at first glance.

the old style loading screens, top quality.  We need this again.
About the pre-dungeon areas. For me personally, they don't have to be there.

You're totally right. I never recognized how much the areas of elite mobs outside of an instance create a foreboding atmosphere.
And you are also spot on that the older loading screen arts are more compelling. More intrigue by showing less. It looks like these drawings on paper were in an adventurer's sketchbook

I love the dungeons with pre instance areas. It feels like you're entering a lair or a secret place where high level enemies await. It's pure old school RPG. It bums me out when my group just wants to rush through it to get to the instance entrance.

I was pretty said, when i first entcounterd, that they made nealry all the Elites to non-Elites in the outerworld... took away so much mystery and danger from the world for me

Talking about dungeons made me recall one thing that I really wanted from a Classic+ but I doubt they'll do with WoW Forever is add an Adventuring Journal which functions broadly like the one in Retail, but you can only see what loot & abilities each boss has after you experience them.
My fantasy was that, after you kill a boss you'd get a section of the dungeon map, a sketch of the boss (done as if you the adventurer sketched it out not a straight model) & you also get a loot table with all the items that you've witnessed drop from that boss (& the game element would be that you can see the percentage chance for each of those items & blanks for the items that CAN drop but haven't). This I feel would be a way to do collections in the method of Classic WoW, giving you incentives to run dungeons multiple times, but this would be shared across your account.

If you wanted to further expand the system you could also use it to track things like quest locations & resource nodes after you have completed a quest or harvested a resource node, this would give you an in-game way to map out gathering routes & a reason to have the quest markers, just requiring you to actually engage with a quest the first time around before activating easy mode. You could also add stuff like account wide zone maps, quest accept & turn in locations, Trash mobs & their drops in dungeons with more sketches, world boss entries similar to the dungeon boss ones, rare entries too, etc. etc.
It would be a good way to integrate the "Enhanced" mode into a Classic framework & it could be further expanded to do other things that even I haven't considered, making it sort of like your own in-game database so that you don't have to go to Wowhead to find things.

4:15 and that's how you find friends that you add in your list.
Classic connect strangers while Retail is for formed irl friends, collogues and contact groups.

I think almost everyone has a memory of going into a instance and wondering why the enemies are so strong because they didn't know better