World of Warcraft Forever’s rule sets are staying separate for now, but Blizzard has an emergency lever to change that
World of Warcraft Forever is just days away now. Its reimagined Azeroth adopts a ‘realmless’ approach to weave all its players into one giant world, but there are still some dividers in place. PvE, PvP, and roleplaying rule sets are being kept separate, and layering means you won’t see absolutely everyone at once – but could that change? Senior Game Designer Josh Greenfield is joined by Lead Software Engineer Ana Resendez, Principal Software Engineer Frank Williams, Josh Corbett of the Countdown to Classic podcast, and WoW streamer ‘Shobek’ for one final discussion before launch.
Williams recalls the development of WoW Classic, and the struggle of working alongside the modern retail game: “We’re on a train that’s moving – World of Warcraft exists, you’re constantly playing it and we’re modifying it while that’s all happening.” He says this meant integrating changes that were “not flashy, not sexy, stuff like security updates or compliance updates that we have to do.” With Forever, he says it was essential to “build something that would last the test of time,” because there was always an internal promise of longevity even before the reborn MMORPG got its final name.
“Huge shoutout to the housing team,” Williams adds, “WoW Forever is running so well because of a lot of work that went into that.” Greenfield is quick to clarify: “That doesn’t mean housing is coming for WoW Forever,” he laughs, “but we were able to pick up a lot of the tech improvements they made under the hood.” That’s enabled some really impressive large-scale events in the beta already, and as one of the people working to orchestrate them Shobek asks whether there’s any possibility to have bigger party support.
“Everything in WoW Forever seems bigger,” he remarks, “and I was wondering about 80 to 120 [player] parties.” Greenfield reflects on previous comments from Lead Gameplay Designer Tim Jones: “We’ve been thinking quite a bit about how we could maybe let you make an army which is maybe 80 to 120 people, or make an alliance of a couple of different groups together, something like that.” No announcements there for yet, but it’s at least got a spot on the ideas table.
“Early on everyone’s going to be leveling,” Greenfield continues, “but once the game matures a little bit, then people want to start doing more emergent behavior, and we obviously want to support that as much as possible.” He says Blizzard has been watching the ways people are using specific add-ons to organize groups, to help determine what else it should prioritize. Resendez adds that work is ongoing “to make sure that you encounter the enemies that you want to encounter,” referring to issues where layering was sometimes disrupting conflicts by separating some players out and causing them to disappear from each other’s worlds.
“Maybe I shouldn’t be saying this, but there might be a whiteboard on campus with the words ‘mega raid’ scrawled on it,” Williams teases, drawing a laugh out of Greenfield. “We’ve also been thinking of ways to autodetect PvP battles that are happening and have the servers expand slightly to keep the battle contiguous and flowing.” For launch, however, he says you should expect the general state to be similar to how it was at the end of the beta.
Resendez addresses the layering concerns more directly. “We started seeing a lot of reports of people being like, ‘Hey, I’m inside of Orgrimmar and as I look at the Barrens, people start disappearing.” She says Blizzard is reconsidering some of its world boundaries as well as how the tech works more broadly. “We sort of have each individual zone, or a small grouping of zones, be kind of one layer together,” Greenfield explains, “and one of the things we can tune and tweak is which zones are actually connected to each other.” This will allow such connections to be adapted as the game evolves and the concentration of players shifts.
“At launch, the way it looks may be much different than the way it looks a month down the road,” Greenfield remarks. “That’s when we’ll expect to start seeing things like large battles happening at cities and stuff like that.” Williams believes that serious instances of vanishing or reappearing groups should already be fixed, noting that a lot of it had already been resolved by the final days of the beta. Greenfield also notes that the team is wary of explaining too much, less it “give ammunition to allow people to exploit or find weird edge cases and stuff like that.”
Williams says the team always knew WoW Forever had to be ‘realmless’ within each ruleset, pointing to all the times you might discover a friend plays World of Warcraft, but is on another realm. “Now that doesn’t have to be the end of that conversation,” Greenfield says. Resendez has been one of the big advocates for the tearing down of those walls, so Corbett asks her whether there’s any possibility that we could see PvE and PvP players integrate in some way.
“When we looked into that, it’s a balance,” Resendez responds, “because we want to make sure of the economy and the world that exists within a rule set – we want to make sure that each different rule set still has their own flavor, and that’s where you have to make the tough choice.” She reveals that there were quite a few differing opinions within the team at Blizzard regarding how this should be handled.
“At one point we were talking about letting PvE and PvP people group for instanced content,” Greenfield notes, “and it’s something that some people on the team were in favor of, and some people on the team were vehemently against.” Ultimately, the deciding factor “that nudged us over was the idea that it’s a lot easier to farm stuff on a PvE server.” He adds that there were similar conversations about the likes of auction houses and whether trade could be allowed, but ultimately it was decided to keep them separate.
“That is a part of original WoW that we don’t just want to throw out completely,” Greenfield concludes. Never say never, though. “I think the tech is set up in a way that if we ever did really feel like we needed to make a change, we could do so.” He comments that Blizzard recently changed its mind on including an RP-PvP server, something that was initially going to be absent from Forever.
“One of the big concerns we had there was splitting up that community, and what happens if either rule set becomes unsustainable in population.” The sheer popularity of the game so far helped convince Blizzard it could work, but also “if someday down the line, if something happens, and one or both of those populations can’t quite sustain themselves, we have options if we do need to link up their action houses or allow them to group for instanced content.” It’s a last resort, he says, “but it is a lever that we can pull if we need to.”
One change being made for launch is that you now won’t be automatically forced into a world refresh when you join a group. Williams says you’ll now get the pop-up allowing you to choose when you’re ready. “Universally, we want it to be consistent where we’re not going to disrupt your gameplay, and when Hardcore comes out shortly that’s going to be a huge thing. You don’t want to be in a cave and, oops, you got moved to a spot where there is an elite standing right next to you.”
MMO interactions aren’t always friendly, so what about ignoring players? Can you just make someone you don’t like go away… forever? “I don’t know if we’re going to ever have plans for that,” Williams answers. “If you allow ignoring, what a lot of games have seen is everyone just ignores everybody.” He recalls the ‘thumbs-down’ option that existed in Overwatch at launch: “That quickly got removed because you notice the pattern of ‘When you lose, you thumbs-down everyone.’ You’re just going to eventually eliminate the rest of the population.”
“You can still put people on your ignore list,” Greenfield remarks, “that just won’t necessarily remove them from your ecosystem. Over time it’s something we want to keep looking at and make smart improvements to that don’t allow people to overly game the system by tactically ignoring or friending people.” “Players are very smart,” Resendez chimes in, “and they find a lot of things, so that’s definitely something we need to be agile about.”
World of Warcraft Forever launches on Wednesday November 4. That means no podcast this coming week, because Blizzard will doubtless have more than enough on its plate between support issues and just enjoying the game alongside the community. Expect its return the week after that, however, and perhaps then we can start looking towards the future.