As the World of Warcraft Forever launch looms, Blizzard talks about keeping players together, pushing them apart, and merging rule sets.
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.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.pcgamesn.com/world-of-warcraft/forever-rule-sets-layering-world
