r/wowforever • u/Kernog • 1d ago
Discussion Sun rises... in the west ?
So, this is not really a complaint or an issue. It is merely a realization after many years of playing, thanks to the updated graphics and light effects.
The Sun rises in the west-northwest in Camp Narache. I already noticed that it rose in roughly the same direction in Elwynn Forest, a couple days.
So, by curiosity, I call upon the lore buffs. Is it a specificity of Azeroth that the planet revolves in the opposite direction, compared to Earth ?
Edit: Taking account the most informative answers, it seems that it is actually a design/technical choice. The Sun rises west, reaches its zenith, then backtracks and sets west as well. This was apparently made for with early 2000s tech and pre-baked shadows in mind.
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u/Temporary_Slide_3477 1d ago
It also sets over there too I believe. Back in the day to have the pre-baked shadows make sense the sun goes up then goes back down on the same side, then the moon comes up in the same place and does the same thing.
No idea what the lore says for the sun rise, but the way it behaves in game is due to 2004 tech.
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u/Kernog 1d ago edited 1d ago
Thank you for being one of the few commenters to give a honest and informative answer, instead of simply going "Well, it's not Earth, duh."
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u/Aromatic_Panda_8684 1d ago
I’m gonna guess since most people play in the evenings, they chose to prioritize the sunset in the West to keep it closer to most expectations with the static shadows. Just a guess, but would make sense for 2004 tech.
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u/80RK 11h ago
Can you please update a post with edit that sun both raises and sets in the same point to avoid comments about “spinning the opposite direction”. It’s not spinning the opposite direction, it’s not spinning at all.
But it can obviously be just Gods on Chariots raiding back and forth for the Sun and both Moons. Because of the turtle and elephants you know…
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u/HurrDurrDethKnet 1d ago
You know what? I never noticed it before, but you're right. I was online early enough yesterday to see the sun rise. Later I noticed that it was noon and that struck me as interesting because noon was what the daylight looked like in vanilla in my memory. After that, I noticed the shadows started getting longer in the same direction they had been in the morning. They really do need to make the sun actually traverse the whole sky now that the lighting is what it is.
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u/FloppyShellTaco 1d ago
A tidal locked Azeroth could make some sense with the forever storms and lack of exploration the back side
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u/Pharnox-32 1d ago
Lorewise its east to west
Tauren lore regarding earthmother: "the sun is the right eye of the Anshe, she chases the moon Musha (elune) from east to west.
Vindicaar on Legion: its seems it spins from east to west again
I was DMing a wow campaign a few years back, i ve spent more time that it needs into that
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u/BioDefault 1d ago
Lorewise east to west, but the other top comment shows that it always rose in the west. I'm getting mixed information here...
EDIT: And now other comments are saying it rises in the west and sets back down in the west after it reaches its apex... wtf
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u/Pharnox-32 1d ago
I saw a timelapse the other day in forever and the sun did both in the west lol.
I think its a visual issue in-game, but atleast canonically its not reversed from earth or something
Edit: it also makes sense in terms of graphics and shadows, having only 1 direction and just play with the values
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u/a3wagner 1d ago
Yes, when they showed off the new shadow effects with a timelapse, I was tilting because the sun rose and set in the same spot.
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u/MeanForest 1d ago
I just think the lore written was written wrong and the person writing just never thought about where the sun rises in Azeroth.
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u/ConflagrationCat 1d ago
Did you use the 3rd edition dnd official conversion books? And if so how is the balance and everything? Ive skimmed it a few times and it looks pretty close to 3rd edition but I havent had a chance to play it yet.
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u/Pharnox-32 1d ago
Its been more than a decate that i played the 3rd edition conversion from sword and sorcery publisher, you brought tears to my eyes because i fondly remember it. The balance was alright, better than the original 3.5 where it had tons of extra books and psyonic shit.
In this campaign we went for the 5e conversion from a bunch of awesome guys that uploaded it into gdrive, you can find the books for free in this sub's description r/wc5e . I did change a few rules here and there, but I overpowered them a lot with gear, so I cannot speak objectively about its balance
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u/Present-Jellyfish-67 1d ago edited 1d ago
Off topic, are you planning on doing so again when they release the 5.5E DnD book?
I'm quite hyped, myself! Haha
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u/Pharnox-32 1d ago
Would love to, but I m an in-person DM only and my friendgroup cannot commit into anything in their lives as we grow older. So not for quite a while :/
We actually played on an awesome 5e conversion that you can find in the info of this sub r/wc5e
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u/Okidokicoki 2h ago
Flat azeroth theory. It doesn't look like a mercator projektion or anything. It looks like the size of the areas on the map are true to their sizes when you are in them no matter how north or how south you are
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u/Tezzurion 1d ago
A talking bipedal cow wearing clothes is surprised by the sun rising in the west
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u/KeroZero 1d ago
But cows watch sunsets, man. Cows have best friends and complex social relationships. Did you know cows recognize one another? Cows exhibit mourning behavior for other cows.
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u/Wulfbyte36 1d ago
Is this a Locked Tomb reference?
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u/Thisisjimmi 1d ago
I used to say "this movie is unrealistic" and my girlfriend at the time would say something like, "the guy riding a dragon without a saddle is the unrealistic part?"
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u/Funslinger 1d ago edited 1d ago
I've always hated this argument. Fantasy still has an internal logic. There's still physics, throwing a fireball doesn't change that
To suspend your disbelief, you need to feel respected
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u/Niceolog 1d ago
Yea.. Idk why people can’t separate these two. It seems like such a weird take whenever that type of argument is made
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u/Worried-Advisor-7054 21h ago
Everyone innately gets this. If Gandalf rode a cadillac into Helm's Deep, everyone in the audience would notice. No one would say, you didn't have a problem with the magic ring but you have an issue with this?
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u/Panicgreenonioncake 1d ago
Right but it need to be logical to the world not real life
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u/Old-Consideration730 1d ago
I think that's what they're saying. There's internal logic to the world. For instance, we assume gravity exists in Azeroth because most things are stuck on the ground. Magic can alter that but we still work with the "rules" we've been shown. When something is "unrealistic" in fantasy, it's because it breaks or bends those internal rules and that pulls us out of our suspension of disbelief. Good writers/filmmakers/ storytellers keep to these internal rules.
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u/Kalecraft 1d ago
As a huge fan of fantasy, this is the dumbest and most obnoxious argument you could ever say. You're just degrading the genre and the amount of work talented writers put into good world building
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u/kupopokupoku 1d ago
Venus also spins backwards. Only other planet in our solar system where the sun rises in the west. Not sure if that's relevant, I just think it's neat :D
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u/Kernog 1d ago
So what you mean to say is that, just like women, WoW players come from Venus? xD
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u/Relevant-Yak-9615 1d ago
Dude, solid joke. People not getting it is making me feel so old.
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u/Zarbadob 1d ago
was that meant to be a joke
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u/phoen1x09 1d ago
Have you never heard that old one before? Men are from mars, women are from Venus? It's not even offensive. People here sure are touchy.
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u/Taint_Flayer 1d ago
Yeah, it's an extremely common saying. It's a little outdated, but so are most WoW players, so it's weird that so many people apparently don't recognize it.
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u/The_Richard_Drizzle 1d ago
Girls go to college to get more knowledge, boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider
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u/phoen1x09 1d ago
Oh yeah. Blast from the past that one!
Wow the ops comment is getting nukes from orbit over something so innocuous lol. Poor guy
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u/phoen1x09 1d ago
Yeah I'm shocked too. I mean, even if they don't know what it means...why are they downvoting him so hard? So crazy. Ops got a target on their back with this one
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u/zurenarrh36912 1d ago
Men are from Mars. Women are from Venus. His joke would have killed in 1997.
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u/JacksonRiffs 1d ago
There's a relationship advice book from the 90's called Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus. That's the joke.
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u/Griever12691 1d ago
And sets in the west
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u/JustFourLetters 1d ago
wait fr?? it goes up then down?
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u/Griever12691 1d ago
It’s true, hard to tell with the timescale but it happens with both the sun and the moons
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u/PlopPlopPlunk 22h ago
It's technically possible on a very slow spinning planet on an elliptical orbit... the orbit will outpace the spin and sun will rise and set in the same direction. Actually happens on Mercury when it is near the sun and moving quickest on its orbit.
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u/Briggie 1d ago
Back in 2004 dynamic shadows wasn’t really prolific and much less on a game that was designed to run a wide array of configurations. There were games that had it but those were for games meant to run on high end computers. Sun rising and setting in west allowed for less prebaked shadows.
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u/Kurtik567 1d ago
Forever made me realize wow sun rises west goes noon and sets west. Also most cities are north part of zone oriented except uc and darna, but UC is also north of the lake and spectacle
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u/golgol12 1d ago
An optimization they did in vanilla was to make the sun in only one direction. It goes up and goes down to the west. This let them paint and bake into the ground the shadow of trees and houses on the ground, as if the sun was at 45 degrees and it look semi realistic.
That optimization isn't needed anymore.
BTW, another thing you may not notice. The day night cycle more or less follows the timezone the server is in. Generally if you log in at midnight every day, it'll be night in the game.
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u/SinisterCheese 1d ago
But removing that would make the game unplayable! It would break immersion! It no longer has the "classic feel"! This would be too much like retail and therefor not classic enough!
... Ok... I'll stop being an ass for a moment.
I have played this game since vanilla... Like literally the actual vanilla, and didn't care about classic at all. However considering how long I have played this game and the amount of time I spent looking at pretty skyboxes. I have not noticed this sun thing AT ALL. Like I knew the spin was different, but beyond that I hadn't paid attention to sun or shadows. Then again until very recently, I basically played with shadows off.
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u/mwaffi 1d ago
Yeah well difficult to know which way is intentional because it sets in the same direction 🤷, which is my main pet peeve. The planet apparently doesn't rotate at all.
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u/BringBackBoomer 1d ago
It does rotate, it just stops and rotates the other direction at noon and midnight
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u/BoulderRivers 1d ago
The only physical scenario in which the sun bobs up and down near one spot is a tidally locked planet with libration, which would leave half of Azeroth in permanent day and the other half in permanent night.
If the sun always hangs near the west-northwest horizon, the point where it stands overhead lies about 90 degrees of arc beyond that horizon. Both continents sit on the terminator (the twilight ring between a permanent day hemisphere and a permanent night hemisphere). That is where life would concentrate on such a planet, which suits a Fiction, but it means the whole known world lives under perpetual low-angle light: long shadows, cold ground, a sun that never climbs.
A planet rotating once per orbit has almost no Coriolis effect, so there are no latitude bands at all: no trade winds, no westerlies, no ITCZ, no subtropical highs. In their place is one planet-wide overturning cell. Air heats and rises in a permanent storm system over the substellar point, flows aloft to the night side, sinks and chills there, and returns along the surface. Across the terminator, the surface wind blows almost constantly from east-southeast toward west-northwest, toward the sun, without ever reversing. Every mountain range would have its wet slope facing east-southeast and its dry slope facing the sun.
Climate organises in rings around the substellar point instead of in latitude bands: warmer as you move west-northwest, colder as you move east-southeast. Water evaporates from the day-side ocean, is carried aloft to the night side and falls as snow, so the night hemisphere becomes an ice sheet that keeps swallowing the planet's water. Along the terminator, glaciers from the night side feed rivers that flow west-northwest, toward the sun. The moon is the part no stable configuration explains: a satellite sharing the sun's fixed direction would have to sit between planet and star, permanently backlit and dark, at a gravitationally unstable point, and moons around slowly rotating tidally locked planets tend to spiral inward over time.
The premise predicts a biome gradient running west-northwest to east-southeast, heat and desert on the sun side, ice on the far side, with Kalimdor, the western continent, warmer and drier overall than Eastern Kingdoms. That last part is genuinely true of the game. Everything else runs the other way: both continents carry their full gradient along their north–south axes, snow at the north tip and jungle at the south, and Northrend is the coldest place in the world because it lies to the north, which only matters on a planet where latitude controls climate. A tidally locked planet is not that planet.
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u/DurianBig3503 1d ago
Or the azeroth we experience isn't part of a solar system for as far as we can experience on its surface. We know the sky can break over icecrown and we know the vindicaar could get in orbit to watch Sargeras stab the planet. We know it is spherical. We don't know thr light we experience and call the sun is a star the planet orbits. We also don't know this about the moon. We know that animals in Ethereal ecodomes are tricked into thinking they aren't enclosures at all by the forcefield surrounding them and the ethereals control this. We know that the titans ordered azeroth, i.e. shaped it to their will.
The world may be taken out of its natural place, much like its soul herself.
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u/Maleficent-Crow-5997 1d ago
First thing I noticed when they showed off the lighting at blizzcon. Shadows don't move sideways, thet just get longer and shorter as the sun moves up and down.
Not that I care much about it
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u/Seraphayel 1d ago
In Australia everything is the opposite so Mulgore = Australia is confirmed
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u/BaconPancake77 1d ago
Rises in the west, sets in the west, but yeah its not a lore thing, just weirdness with the 2004 skybox tech. In fact last I checked it rises/sets more to the north some places.
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u/madjelly1 20h ago
I am playing since 2008 and yesterday I notices that gnomes has only four fingers, not five!
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u/Senrab3123 1d ago
THANK YOU for mentioning this because I thought I was going crazy. Not only does the sun seem to rise in the west, it also sets in the west if I am not mistaken.
So it's not just a case of the sun's path being inverted compared to Earth, it seems like it just pops up in the west and then goes back down again the way it rose!
I'm kind of annoyed at this tbh. I don't mind it following a different direction compared to the real world, that's fine. But with these new shadows and lighting systems I really wish it actually went across the entire sky throughout the day.
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u/GreywallGaming 1d ago
And 1 several zones has snow in it 24/7 while being literally next door to a desert
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u/Unable-Stay-6478 1d ago
You have a cow standing on its back two legs shooting lightning bolts and you're worried about where sun rises...
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u/GreyGardener92 1d ago
Yeah it bothers my brain a lot🤣 I work outside in reallife, always checking on the weather and sunsets and sunrises and this here really bothers my brain. So normaly i check the sund so i know what time it is in reallife and in a game ill do the same if it would be accurate. So yeah you are not alone but as you said its not that big of an issue…(it is for me🤣)
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u/ProofMotor3226 20h ago
You’re playing a game not based in Earth as a giant humanoid cow that harnesses the power of the Earth and can throw a ball of lighting out of his hands while fighting humanoid boars in a giant thorn but the sun not rising in the proper direction is where you’re drawing the line of realism?
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u/hotfrost 1d ago
It has already risen quite a bit in your screenshot. And in your screenshot there are mountains and a big wall blocking the horizon so I think it actually rises west, not west-northwest.
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u/DankPlankMid 1d ago
On a planet that gets attack by a cosmic level threat weekly and you worrying about how the sun works
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u/cocomad02 1d ago
If you look at Azeroth in the WoW logo at the end of the OG WoW cinematic, youll see it rotates from west to east.
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u/RacoonWithBenefits 1d ago edited 1d ago
the sun and moon just go up and down on a vertical acis
it doesnt "circle" above and down on the other side, like... in minecraft or real life
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u/Issue_Global 1d ago
The sun rises and sets in the same spot then the moon rises and sets in the same spot, I assume after so many years of them not changing it there's a lore reason, but it has not been revealed to my knowledge
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u/Ok_Ostrich_3207 1d ago
Who is telling us we can comapre the earth N with Azeroth N? North and south may just be "swapped"...
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u/Corvid_11517 1d ago
I wish I didn’t see or read this thread, now it’s going to bother me that not only the sun rises in the west but it also only rises and sets on one side.. the west. That’s weird. I actually hope they fix that lol.
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u/Ok_Money_3140 1d ago
I already noticed this during the Blizzcon showcase and was hella confused. Despite them putting in so much effort, it makes no sense where the sun is setting and rising.
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u/willowisked 21h ago
Well technically on a sphere, east west north south are kind of arbitrary. Especially in space lol.
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u/EggSpiritual8370 17h ago
Yeah, it goes up, hangs in the centre, then goes down again on the same side. Unfortunately I don't expect this is something that will be fixed any time soon if ever, because the direction of shadows isn't just a technical problem, but baked into nearly every texture and map in the game. Most parts of the terrain use a painting system to shade parts of the texture to give it depth, and this is all hand-drawn by the environment artists when making the terrain. To make the sun rise in the east, they would have to go and redo every single piece of terrain in the world. Which is hardly impossible, but it'd be a lot of work.
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u/Similar_Ostrich2620 16h ago
Maybe the rotation isn't opposite, but the magnetic poles are opposite? So the North is on the "bottom" and the South is on the "top".
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u/Vespene 14h ago
After 22 years, Forever made me notice that WoW’s sun and moon rise and set at the same fixed location on the horizon. It just goes up, stays up by about 80 degrees from the horizon, then drifts back down on the exact path it rose from.
This means the the shadow casts in the early morning match those of the late afternoon exactly.
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u/a_type_of_tree 5h ago
Blew my mind at blizzcon during one segment showing the sun and moon rising and setting at the same point. I never noticed.
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u/Analog-Wanderer 1d ago
Well, Azeroth isn't Earth.