The launch of the great experiment that is World of Warcraft Forever is now just a few hours away. Our hopes and fears will be laid bare come 15:00 US Pacific Time today.
WoW Forever – Global Release Times
A few people I could mention got over excited and were ready to log in and play yesterday. I put that down to a desire to do anything besides watch election results… or the fact that Tuesday is the usual launch day for these sorts of things. It was enough for me to wonder briefly if I had the date wrong.
I have also seen online a number of people declaring that they’ll be taking time off for the launch. Probably not today, but their optimism is enough to maybe knock off work on Thursday and Friday to jump on into the experience.
I am not that invested.
Or, rather, I am not in that much of a hurry. “Forever” is a long time, right? Why be in a rush?
Also, I work from home. I will be able to turn my office chair 90 degrees from my work setup to my home PC and see how big the queue is when the time comes. I will be there for opening night, but more as a tourist checking out the sights than as a player determined to get out of the starter area and on my way.
As usual, I expect a comedy of problems, both expected and unexpected, and that Reddit will light up with myriad complaints about how Blizzard has failed again or some such.
There is a non-zero chance that there will be nothing wrong. Blizz has a fairly unique chance to show that, with all their past experience, they can make this work. But if it doesn’t… well, it will all settle down by the weekend. That is why you don’t launch on Friday.
There was a last minute patch update that included a lot of class changes that seemed to surprise most everybody. (The patch notes are linked at the end of the post.) The update included developer notes describing the team’s position and why they made the change:
- Developer’s notes: Over the course of Beta, we came to the realization that trying to hold ourselves roughly to Classic power budgets for each class meant that every new element we added needed to come at the expense of something else. Those reductions left some iconic abilities feeling lackluster, and closed the door to other potentially exciting design options. So over the last two weeks, we’ve raised damage on classes across the game, and have increased the health of higher level creatures to compensate. This additional “headroom” has allowed us to tune things to a place that we hope feels better overall. Beyond that, some of this round of changes reflects areas where we were likely hasty in turning to Burning Crusade- or Wrath-era solutions rather than carving out new ones that better fit into the Forever combat model. Our aim in class design is not perfect numerical equality, but rather for every class to feel valuable to the groups they join, with powerful, unforgettable moments brought on by mastering them. In Forever this is accomplished by doubling down on the strengths and differences that make each class unique, rather than overly unifying them.
- Developers’ notes: We’ve used the data and feedback gathered during Beta testing to get everything tuned to a reasonable place. However, the only true test of that tuning is the game itself. With the exception of bugs and serious outliers, we don’t plan on making big tuning changes between now and the opening of the raids next month. Once we have sufficient data from players leveling past 30 and engaging in a wide range of content, we expect that we will do a large tuning pass based on our data. And this is all merely a starting point for the classes in Forever, which will continue to evolve over the course of the months and years ahead just as they did following the original launch in 2004.
So there we go. Opening day will be a different experience from beta I guess. There are details for all the class changes as well, but I haven’t sifted through much of it. None of it will likely change my class choices in any case. I’ll play the same pally, hunter, druid trio to start with like I always do.
Down near the bottom of the notes there was also this item about adapting to the initial rush on launch day when it came to mob spawn rates:
- Developers’ notes: Our goal with these adjustments is to properly support large player volumes at launch, so that players aren’t hitting hard bottlenecks and can continue to enjoy the game. Some contention for spawns is expected and part of the experience – it is not our goal to remove that. These adjusted rates are generally on the faster side in lower-level zones – with starting zones being the fastest – and gradually fall to slower rates as you level up, consistent with when players naturally spread out across the many zones available in WoW Forever. Once the initial launch surge of low-level characters has settled down, we will adjust the lower-level zones down to more typical rates.
That seems reasonable… though it does raise questions about how layering is supposed to be working. Ideally, layering should be doing some of the heavy lifting on the mob spawns versus zone population front, though were that done perfectly I imagine there would still be bottlenecks. We shall see.
The team has also been promoting the “WoW Portal Room,” which is the new official Discord server for World of Warcraft. I joined, hoping that there would be an official news channel. There does not appear to be one yet. But you can get the server tag and some emojis and join in on some contests. Blizz seems to think it will be a new social hub… and maybe it will be. I tend to find Discord pretty unusable beyond a certain server size, and with the WoW Portal Room running to 100K users, that does not portend well for me spending much time there.
They also posted an update about how the game pad control scheme has been updated since beta. I played with that during the beta and it seemed… pretty good actually. And the changes they have made look like they address much of what I was having problems with. Given that I have been playing a number of titles with my controller lately, I will certainly give it a go. It is still technically in beta, so we shall see if it ends up being more than a gimmick or if it means WoW Forever on XBox.
Anyway, I will be ready to go come launch time today. My afternoon calendar is clear after 14:00.
Related:
- Blizz – World of Warcraft: Forever Site
- Blizz – The Last Pre-Launch Patch Notes
- Blizz – World of Warcraft: Forever Goes Live Globally November 4!
- Blizz – Explore WoW: Forever with a Gamepad
- Blizz – WoW: Forever—What’s New and What Feels Familiar
- Blizz – Your Next Adventure in WoW: Forever Starts in the WoW Portal Room (Discord)
- Inventory Full – This Is Planet Azeroth
- CMP – Will World of Warcraft: Forever Meet Player Expectations?