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Hello. We are live. We really are live. This is the World of Warcraft Q&A. I am Randy Jordan.
You know me as Kyvax from the Warcraft community team.
And I'm joined by WoW Developers.
We're going to answer your questions that you asked us following BlizzCon.
I'm joined by Paul Cubit, Maria Hamilton, and Jake Miller, who I saw carrying around
a sword at BlizzCon.
Jake, where's the sword?
Oh, it's off getting room forged.
It's getting room forged.
Okay.
All right.
Coming out of all of our amazing announcements at BlizzCon, we had so many questions from
players all around the world, thousands of questions.
We've gotten the most prominent ones together, and I'm going to ask you all an example of
each.
So every one of these questions was asked by hundreds of people.
I'm going to ask you an example that caught my eye.
And so I want to start with Maria.
We saw a question in Germany from a player named Navarre, who asked, will we ever see
return to faction-specific narratives and stories?
I mean the short answer is yes.
Okay good, short answer, give us a long answer.
So with the story we've been telling so far, with the World Soul saga, we've needed to
come together and unify and our concerns have been largely, we need to deal with this overwhelming
problem.
Yes.
sort of grudging unity. For example, Silverman City, you know, we're having a horrible problem.
Please come help us with this horrible problem, but also you can't go to that part of the
city because we're going to kill you if you do.
And that doesn't always feel good.
No, no. You're definitely getting a different experience. You're playing an alliance character.
You've got NPCs coming up and telling you they don't like you. And even after you successfully
help them, then they say, well, grudgingly thanks, but also I still don't like you.
So we want to make sure we maintain that conflict.
We want to make sure we maintain that idea that we're not in agreement.
We aren't all after the same thing, but we'd like to survive.
So we'll work together very grudgingly there.
And back in the war within, we did have an area where we had an opportunity to tell a
a slightly different story, which was in the Arathi Highlands
when we went and encountered the Red Dawn.
And so there, we intentionally broke you out
so you could sort of see what was going on
from the Horde perspective and what
was going on from the Alliance perspective.
And there, we were able to find out, oh, the problem actually
are these crazy fanatics.
Let's deal with them.
But again, it's a grudging unity.
And that's going to change over time.
it's not going to be always happy, friendly, you know, we need to unify, we expect to have
more conflict in the future and more opportunity for those unique points of view.
Speaking of change over time, I'm curious, how has narrative design in WoW evolved and
changed over the first half of the World Soul saga?
Yeah, it's hard to remember that we're about halfway through.
So when we started, the very first thing we did was sit down
and figure out the broad strokes.
What are the big beats?
How does the story begin?
What happens?
The big pieces.
And then how is it going to conclude?
And we set that up.
And then we started looking at all the smaller pieces
and how we can start moving things, people, places.
We can have certain events happen.
We can let you know about and foreshadow certain things.
And we started setting all those pieces up.
And that's what we've been doing with some of our content
that drops at various intervals.
We've also done a lot of lore walking that's
trying to introduce you to or remind you
or if your new player teach you about people and places
and things that will add to the story.
So we've been setting all of that up.
But most importantly, we've been able to listen to you.
We've been able to listen to what players are responding to
and learn, oh, this wasn't as clear as we wanted it to be.
Oh, they've got a lot of questions about this.
We should make sure we reinforce this.
So with those smaller beats, we're able to do that.
And that's very different from what we've
been able to do in the past.
I mean, a trilogy in and of itself
gives us a different opportunity.
So fundamentally, as we move through this now,
we're getting all of our pieces in the right places.
We're raising all these threats.
We're making clear how serious things are becoming.
And from here forward, we're just going to go, go, go.
Now we're going to just keep moving.
And there's going to be many things happening very quickly.
So we started off kind of pacing with slower,
and now it's going to get a lot quicker.
Exactly.
Good.
Very next question, I want to turn to you, Paul, because so many players asked us about
race class combos.
At BlizzCon, we announced some really exciting things.
I'm personally going to be an undead paladin in the very near future.
The question that caught my eye was from a player named TinkerShell, who said, are we
going to see more race class combos with the current races and classes?
So short answer again, yes, for sure, yeah, I mean, so in 12-2 we saw a really cool opportunity
to add more races to the Paladin roster, I mean, we've been thinking about this for
some time, if you remember back to when we were announcing Midnight, we talked about
the Boyd Elf Demon Hunter, introducing maybe some unfairness, well this is only an alliance
race, how come Horde races didn't get a chance to be a Demon Hunter, we said wait, with time,
and as the Midnight story evolves we're going to have some more opportunities coming for
for Horde races as well.
And Undead Paladin, Forsaken Paladin was specifically
what we had in mind there,
because we had some cool story for it.
But we also, as the story grew into telling,
found some really cool opportunities for story
for Night Elf and Dark Spear.
So these opportunities sort of manifest themselves
as we build the game,
as the team thinks about what we think is cool.
There will be more stuff in the future as well.
And this will all be just a function
of where the story takes us,
as well as sort of the output of the team,
what we're able to accomplish.
So yeah, there will be more.
They came.
Good.
Excellent.
Alongside all of those questions about race class,
we're just questions about how we all look, how we're able to
design our own characters to look.
And so I picked this one question from a player named
Omidon.
It's not even a question.
He said, please tell me there is hope for broader character
customization options.
And I'm telling you, hundreds of varieties of this question.
Yes, so hi, Omidon.
Hi, hundreds of other people.
Yes, there's hope.
Yeah, so this has been something which has been super
important to us, is just being able to express yourself.
And you've seen this in so many ways in the game.
Housing is probably the most apparent and recent one where
we want to make sure that players have choices from a
whole bunch of different cultures, a whole bunch of
different vibes to be able to express themselves
specifically in their home the way they decorated.
But it's not just that, it's also the amounts you choose.
It's the pets that go alongside you.
It's the transmog with changes of coming to transmog in 12.25,
which I'm super excited for.
You'll be able to transmog across different armor classes.
And that is all done with the mindset of let's just
give people more flexibility to be able to express themselves.
Character customization, the way you do your hair,
the way that you present your skin color, facial features,
any of that stuff.
Tattoos is absolutely in that space as well.
So this is something that we're passionate about, providing more options.
There will be one future for sure.
This is always something that we're looking towards for, you know,
and these will manifest themselves in ways you might expect.
So cool new hairstyles, cool new hair colors and whatnot.
And also maybe ways you didn't expect, maybe new options,
new drop downs up here on races that didn't exist before.
You mentioned trans mod restrictions being lifted in 1225.
I just want to ask you, yes or no, what are we doing with class sets with those?
So for clarity, the specific rule sets are cloth, leather,
mail, and plate.
Don't matter anymore when you are transmogging.
You can transmog across those sets.
As far as class specific sets, those will still
be class specific.
And also weapons is something that we've seen questions
about.
You won't be able to transmog to a weapon.
You don't know how to wield.
So no transmogging, swords into guns, and things like that.
Unless you're capable of wielding a gun.
Yes.
So you need to know how to use a gun in order
to transmog into a gun.
It's a short answer there.
And the reason behind this is 100% just trying to find the
coolest way that we can provide flexibility to players.
We've seen a lot of feedback from players that like, yes,
this is awesome.
This is exactly what we want.
But then there's also people on either side that say, hey,
this went a little too far.
That makes me feel uncomfortable to be able to
transmug from plate to cloth and cloth to plate.
And also people who say, we didn't go far enough.
I would love to be able to transmug from paladin to
priest, from rogue to hunter, or what have you.
And so we're going to keep listening to feedback, but we're really excited to sort of take this big giant step forward in flexibility because once you start mixing those armor classes, the possibilities for transmog go exponential.
Got it.
Jake Miller at BlizzCon, we announced Wrath of the Lich King remix, and I saw this question from a player named Parmelion from Slovakia.
Parmelion said, why have you decided to go with Wrath of the Lich King for the next remix?
Well, after we finished Legion Remix, we knew that we wanted to do another fondly remembered
expansion, and with it being the season of Northrend, going into Northrend for the last
Titan, what better way to experience it than to go back to Grizzly Hills, enjoy that lovely
music, and as the Remix team, look at a more mechanically simple expansion and see how
we could remix it even more than we could, say, Legion Remix.
So you'll see systems present in Rath Remix that include things like outbreaks occurring
in the outdoor world, as well as in dungeons.
The magic of the infinite is going to make our dungeons infinitely scaling in difficulty,
as well as seeing what rune forging can look like for every class.
The Hearthstone concept art of every class raised in the Scourge.
I plan to just see that we're very, very happy to water here.
And there's also a surprising amount of unreleased item appearances and rewards that we want
to be able to bring to players, as well as watching concept artists go wild with these
themes.
It's so incredible.
I can't wait for you to see the modern take on mounts like Invincible.
I just want to jump back because I didn't hear that at BlizzCon.
You said Rune Forging for every class.
Rune Forging.
We will die.
We will come back and be ready to Rune Forge as every class.
That's amazing.
I'm really looking forward to that.
There'll be more info in next year.
Next year we've got more info on Wrath remix.
Another thing to consider too, I think, is that we have a lot of players that have never experienced Northrend before.
And since we're going there in the last Titan, it would be really good if they had an opportunity to kind of understand what the place was like,
should anything happen to it.
Understood. Moving on, a lot of questions about housing.
So I just picked one from a player named Mario.
Mario said, what will the future of Warcraft housing look like?
Will there be continual additions, upgrades?
Will there be new styles created down the line?
Yeah. So for sure, I mean, this is a lot same as my previous answer.
answer, it's going to continue to grow in ways you might expect and ways that you won't
expect as well.
So, ways you might expect, yeah, we're going to go to new places and we're going to steal
all their furniture and bring them to our houses.
So, you're going to have all these new cultures of decor that you can be able to absorb.
There will be new endeavors where, you know, these cultures from around the world are going
to come visit our neighborhoods and we're going to have cool opportunities to interact
with them either through the, you know, the quests and tasks that come out of those endeavors
as well as just getting some of their furniture as well.
But also, as you might not expect, I mean, we talked a lot about a lot of these in coming in Eclipse.
Things like showcases, things like mannequins coming up, the functionality like copy-paste, multi-select, by now.
All these things are going to, you know, sort of increase the functionality that you have with them housing.
And we're not stopping there. I mean, we're going to continue adding new things to housing.
I mean, one of the things I've heard a lot of people ask for is different exteriors that
better reflect the exteriors of the different cultures in the world.
We've heard you.
This is something that we are absolutely going to be thinking about as we continue to move
forward.
That's specific to announce at this time, but I want to make sure people know that those
questions and requests are not going unheard, and teams hard at work.
Speaking of questions and requests, well, I've got you, Paul.
So many questions about class design, and we just can't possibly touch on every class.
So I picked a question that's about all of it.
A player named Spicy asked, what have you learned from the reduction of class complexity
in midnight and how has your class design philosophy shifted as a result?
Yeah, so as sort of a reset reminder, at the beginning of midnight we were specifically
looking to reduce complexity in classes, specifically focusing on complexity.
So reducing cases where our class felt complex, but with an attempt to make sure that we kept
depth within those classes as well, kept a sort of a high skill ceiling.
And a good example of a place where we said we gave our example ahead of midnight, and
I think that we hit the mark, hit the mark by and large across a lot of specs, but this
one is Outlaw.
Outlaw is one where we have this mechanic, roll the bones, which is highly complex.
You have a lot of different buffs where you need to memorize the relative value of each
of them.
And in the heat of combat, it was difficult for players to be able to identify when should
I roll the bones?
I re-roll my bonuses to get a chance at maybe getting a better one.
This is something that a lot of people use add-ons for, to just, well, do the math for
me in my head.
This was redesigned in a way where it still has some pretty clear break points of how
your mechanic works.
And you do still have those choices of, well, should I re-roll, but it's much easier for
players to be able to sort of tell in their head when the best time is to do that.
So we think we're able to keep that high-skill ceiling, keep that complexity, and the flavor,
keep the flavor of rolling the bones, rolling the dice without losing it.
Another good example is evoker.
Evoker has the flame shaper hero talent tree, which previously, similar setup, it was all
about setting up in golf, but it was difficult to tell exactly what the best way was to do
that.
The previous version of that tree, that got rebuilt in midnight, which is now more about
flexibility.
You have some charges on some of your sort of iconic and power abilities.
It's more about maintaining uptime on your heal over time, damage over time effects.
And so these are all things which are going to give you flexibility, going to give you,
Again, high-skill ceiling and still maintaining
that fantasy of what it's about.
Resto shaman is another class, on the other hand,
where we saw some examples where players said, excuse me,
players said that when we reduced complexity,
we also maybe reduced some of that skill that was required.
And so we've done a lot of iteration on Resto shaman
over the course of midnight.
I think we're still not quite there yet.
Still a little bit more work to do there,
but this is an example where we're still learning
and adjusting our philosophy.
And speaking of learning and adjusting,
this is my best transition so far,
I'm telling you we had questions from all around the world.
I found myself translating Korean questions
and there was one in particular from a player named Sourcrout
that I really want to ask because it's just,
the question was some raids used to have fun vendors inside
for repairs and upgrades.
why don't they include that anymore and could we see that in the future
first i have to say is our crowd in korea essentially kimchi
i
i didn't
didn't inquire for that
okay just
i'm just someone let me know i just i need you to know i'm very proud of having
translated this correct this is very well done uh... thank you
uh...
so first of all uh... you know we've kind of had a darker tone things have been
pretty serious, so kind of goofy, goofy sorts of vendors would have felt, you know, not
not quite fitting with the story we're trying to tell. That said, I don't see any reason
why we couldn't put more of those in. It sounds sounds great. Glad to hear that this
is something that was enjoyable and we can definitely look at doing that.
We have more raids coming. We do. It turns out.
Plenty of them. Yeah, I'll say sauerkraut. We didn't know that you liked those vendors
and so now that we know, yes, much higher chance that you'll see more in the future.
Flipping all the way back around the world to Romania. I saw a player named Denny boy say
Can we talk about the sword some more?
He Denny boy asked if Sargeras is the only one that can come remove the sword
Jake Jake's looking what sword? Oh my gosh
We're retiring that joke right here right now
We're done
That joke is horrible.
Oh.
Oh.
Wow.
But the sword, the sword was questioned by many players.
Yeah.
So I don't want to, I obviously don't want to spoil here.
As we talked about at BlizzCon, you
can see the tip of the sword, actually,
when you are in the mental vault.
Sargeras barely missed, assuming he was going for the world
soul. That's just as he was. He barely missed. And, you know, I don't want to spoil who or
what is necessary to remove the sword. I can promise that we are going to be dealing with
that sword, but I want to make sure you're all prepared for when that happens.
We prepared, got it. I think I know what you're laying down. A number of questions were about
our new announcements, things that are coming that surprised players.
And I just gathered all the questions up about Tailbound and put them all together.
And so what I saw was how replayable is Tailbound intended to be and what carries over between
runs.
Those are the main ones.
But I just want to ask you, tell us more about Tailbound.
Oh, absolutely.
As with any roguelite game or game mode, those are the questions that are top of my mind.
mind. And so, Tailbound's replayability is about the authored experience going through
authored levels with a known beast sherry that the player can start to learn and embrace
as they carve their own path through them. Of course, they may not succeed on their first
run, but should they succeed on their first, on their second or third run, they will be
able to, they'll be able to unlock more difficulties to take on those levels, on those tails, and
face more challenging mechanics and tuning layered on.
All of those through the lens of the different three classes who solve
problems in slightly different ways.
But in terms of what's carried throughout
a run and throughout
many runs,
inside a run the player will run through the level and explore to find
flasks and drafts and potions. Those are on use effects that are consumable
and as they defeat monsters
you'll collect experience that levels you up
and at each level up point you'll get a choice.
It's not too dissimilar from Torgast
where you are gaining capabilities
and ready to take on a final boss.
Should you fail or succeed,
you'll find yourself back at Quillgrave level one,
but with many spoils to trade in
with the various NPCs in Quillgrave,
those villagers will give you improved starting stats,
they'll give you ways to change up your class talents,
change the flask options that can be found in the world, both the variety and potency,
and the level up choices that you get will change based on how you upgrade things back
with the villagers.
Really common question about Tailbound, and I picked a version of this question from a
player named Cassiel.
The question is, is Tailbound a limited time event, or will we be able to play Beyond Midnight?
A very important question with a more experimental style game mode especially.
When we have the servers up, it's important that we dedicate resources to support and
enable maintenance for those servers.
There's also a lot of WoW to play right now and in the immediate future.
We wanted to balance these, but we're always open to player feedback on when to extend
or bring back events.
A tail bound will be up from 12.17 through 12.25.
A good amount of time to try and fail and try and succeed, to bring back all your cosmetic
rewards to midnight in time for Rath Remix.
Thank you very much.
I am going to ask the last question of this panel.
No.
No.
We are going to have one more question, and that is from a player named Bagzax.
The question is, if any new playable races get added to WoW Forever, will we be able
to see those races, including maybe Skyborne, eventually be added to Midnight, The Last
Hiden, et cetera.
Not for the World Soul Saga.
Not for the World Soul Saga.
You would not see any new race.
I can definitely say that won't be happening for the World Soul Saga.
I don't think we can squeeze in another new race at this point.
I think we're, as I said, we're about halfway through, we're set, we're ready to go.
It's just going to be go, go, go, go, go, that would be difficult.
We still have a lot to pay off, so not for the World Soul Saga.
But you never say never going forward, beyond that, we'll have to wait and see.
Something else in WoW Forever that I really like is you're now creating a character with
a first name and a surname.
How about that?
Is that coming to?
Not in the World Soul Saga.
Not in the World Soul Saga.
Alright.
Okay.
Understood.
Yeah.
very, very excited. And we got a lot of questions about this kind of thing. So thank you very
much. And that's it. That's all our questions about, well, Midnight, we have a lot more
questions to get to. We're going to have the, wow, forever devs out here in just a few minutes.
And I'm going to carry on with them for now. Thank you very much. Paul, Maria, Jake, anything
else? Got anything else?
No, I mean, thank you all for playing Midnight so far.
We got a lot of fun twists and turns.
Hatch 1215 with Unbinding of Kithix Raid is on PTR right now.
A bunch of players are working their way
through the labyrinth of Kindojohn.
And there's all sorts of stuff beyond that in the roadmap.
So thanks for playing with us.
Thanks for your great questions.
And yeah, I'll see you in Azeroth.
Thank you for a good BlizzCon.
Again, we'll see you right back here in a few minutes
with the Wow Forever developers.
Thanks, bye.
We're back, and we're live. We really are live. I'm Randy Jordan. You know me as
Kyvax from the World of Warcraft community team, and I am now joined by the
Wow Forever devs. This is Josh Greenfield, Nora Mills, and our returning
champion Tim Jones welcome back from BlizzCon what a BlizzCon we had and coming
out of BlizzCon we asked for player questions and we got them we got so many
I want to go right to the first one as fast as I can because we got so many
questions a lot of them were about this first topic Josh I found a player named
Maga Taurash who said what went into the development of the Skyborne Elves what
What makes them different from the cinderella or the queldorae?
Yeah, this is a pretty meaty answer, so I think I'm going to kind of start with the
back half of this question.
In terms of what makes them different from the cindorae or the queldorae, they're essentially
kind of cousins to those races.
The queldorae is both a Thalassian and a Darnassian word for essentially noble people or children
of nobility, and they all kind of hail from ancient calendar.
And they've sort of descended, it kind of gone different paths, you know, the, the,
the Queldwry who would eventually become like the Blood Elves of the Shindorai, fled across
the ocean, ended up in, um, uh, um, uh, Quelfaloss on the Eastern Kingdoms.
And the, uh, Skyborne or the Shindorai, they ended up going a different path.
And there, it's a long winding road, I suggest you watch the, uh, the, uh, found photographic
panel for an overview, but they ended up in Skywall, which is in the elemental realm,
elemental plane. And in terms of kind of what makes them different, you know,
one of these two sort of offshoots of the high elves have sort of
suffused themselves with arcane magic and they become dependent upon arcane
magic, which obviously the Shindorai in Skywall, they don't have that sort of
thought, they don't have the Sunwell, they don't have anything like that, and
so they've kind of suffused themselves with more natural or elemental
magic. And in terms of kind of what went into the development of the Skyborne
is I kind of want to sort of frame this question with an answer talking about like, you know,
I think a lot of people have asked like why not the quell the quell Dora or the quell philosome?
I'll call them philassian high elves. And I think that kind of simple answer is kind of like why not
both? I think whenever Tim was up on stage, he showed a picture of all the areas that we want to hit
at some point during our development kind of the journey of wow forever, you know, like I said
multiple times, it's on the box, it's wow forever, right?
And that's not things that we're like, man,
it would be really cool, we should maybe think about that.
That's like things we intend to do at some point.
And so we will be back to quell for loss.
But in terms of the actual development process,
we started off sort of thinking, obviously,
a natural place where we want to do elves for wow forever.
And we ended up kind of, as we were going through the
development and thinking about Quothaloss, we pretty quickly realized that
Quothaloss and our ambitions for it were kind of too big for just kind of a
simple starter or low-level zone and it was also sort of not the right time for
it. We talked about the time bubble that WoW Forever takes place in and it's
if you think of it as terms of the original like first year of WoW, what
that really means is we sort of dilated that first year. It's like a time
dilation effect so that we can sort of hit a lot of content in between kind of the major beats.
If you think of the major beats in original WoW, it's like, you know, molten core and
docking layer and zoogaroo, etc, etc. And also sort of, but we are following that chronology.
And so at the time that we're launching WoW forever, it's actually not quite the right time
for us for quothalos either. And so it's one of those things that I think we, whenever we were
sort of working through that sort of problem, I guess, is it's like, yeah, you know, we
still really want high elves.
And you know, one of the things we thought about was like, what if we started like the
The Lassian High Elves and Northshire Abbey and had them play through like that.
And I think that pretty quickly, yeah, it pretty quickly kind of was like, well, some
people might be excited about that, but it didn't really feel like we're putting our
best foot forward.
And once we started really digging into it and really talking to, you know, different
people on the team, Chris Metzen, had a little bit of input on this, and he, you know, he
kind of encourages, he's like, hey, you know, spread your wings a little bit.
Let's see what we can come up with.
And we were really excited about some things that we wanted to do with, let's say, certain
epic, I would even say legendary original WildQuest lines.
Did somebody say Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker?
Anyway, anyway, we had some ideas and we realized that, you know, kind of framing this and this race's origin story and this sort of realm of sky wall gives us a really good set of hooks that we can sort of pay off later.
And I talked about that time dilation, that sort of timeline. When we get there to that content, I think it will be something that has a really satisfying payoff that we're super-duper excited about.
about. And the last thing I want to say too is one of my favorite things about
the Skyborne is it gives us a really great opportunity to explore class race
combinations that high elves have never really had and that's like high elf
druids or Shindorai druids and also shamans if you're playing on the horde
side. We've never had a high elf sort of looking character that could be druids
or shamans and that's super duper exciting from a gameplay perspective and
You know, we do have a gameplay first approach on the WoW Forever game.
I know a lot of Druid-only players who are very excited about this.
And since you mentioned it, I just wanted to make sure everyone knows
all of the BlizzCon panels that the WoW Forever doves put on this past weekend
are on our YouTube slash Warcraft channel.
And I have also been posting those into our new WoW Forever forums.
Every panel, you can go watch them right now.
Next question, huge question.
Saw so many of these and a player named Andormu asked,
will character models also have a classic skeleton option?
Andormu said they noticed that even with classic models chosen,
the skeletons are still from the modern game
and seem like they just have the old running animation.
Sure, well, very astute observation.
You know, one of our core pillars is we want to be both
approachable and familiar.
And so how we interpret that as it applies to character
models is that in approachability, we want people
who aren't necessarily diehard classic fans to be able to
come to our game.
And if they want to be optioned to have a higher
fidelity character and those higher fidelity customization
options on that character. We have an option for them to try out. But also on the familiar
front we have the ability to play as an SD character model from Vanilla. But in order
to make the toggle work, there's some technical hurdles that we have to get over. And we had
to have parity between those models' animations, and so we've painstakingly gone through all
the animations on both character models and made sure that we have animations like Clay
was showing at BlizzCon where the run animations are much less bouncy for dwarves and across
all race-gender combinations, making sure that running, walking, swimming, attack animations,
and there's lots of attack animations, spell casting animations, interact animations, that
those main enemies are all grounded in a very classic feel, even though the skeletons for
both HD and SD character models are shared.
But I would stress that the beta
and getting this out to our player base,
we want to hear what people are and aren't comfortable with.
So we want that feedback, tell us how you feel.
I just saw so many questions on this
and I just wanna ask you,
can you just quickly run down what our options are
and what those options result in
as we're creating our character in WoW Forever
and then, you know, how the world looks.
Sure.
So when you first log into the game,
there will be a classic and enhanced version that you can
mode options that you can select.
And when you're selecting a classic mode option,
you will automatically turn off quest tracking.
You'll automatically turn off transmogrification.
When you get to character select,
there will be a toggle option at the bottom of all your character customization options
that lets you toggle whether you want an SD or HD character.
Now that option exists outside character selection too.
You can just open up your game menu, go to graphic settings and toggle this in the world
wherever you want.
Okay, okay.
That's exactly what I wanted to know.
And speaking of character creation, so many questions about Realm-less.
So we announced at BlizzCon that WoW Forever is going to be Realm-less, I'll put air quotes
up because that's a new term for us, right?
I found a question from a player named Erwax from France and Erwax said, how does Realm-less
actually work?
And then I have a second question from them, but first Nora, how does Realm-less work?
Yeah, so really it's all about trying to decouple the player's social experience from the kind of old method of just selecting a fixed realm.
I think the example that Anna gave on the deep dive panel from BlizzCon weekend was really apt, but basically where when she approached wow and she's just like, well, I want to play with my friends, you know, let's roll on the same realm.
and discovering that like there are restrictions based on like what you know
realm you pick even within the same rule set normal PvP and so on and so what
realm list really means is it like the word I guess itself is somewhat self
explanatory but in WoW forever you will be selecting a specific rule set rather
than a realm it will be you know so normal PvP role play or hardcore similar
to selecting a mega realm would be the vibe. So you would be playing with other players
within your given rule set. That also means, oh, I guess I guess a good caveat is battlegrounds,
in which case you may end up with players from other rule sets when you queue for battlegrounds.
But for the most part, you would be playing with players that are within your given rule
set. One of the other things I did see online was a little bit of confusion about whether
you could kind of like hot swap between the rule sets with that one character. It's a
a lot like current WoW were basically without a character transfer,
you're not just going to be able to flip-flop between,
I wouldn't be able to flip-flop between role play and PBE, for instance.
So no easy hopping between the real sets,
but we really wanted to balance seeing familiar faces with
the flexibility of trying to manage player populations in-game.
Because as you can imagine,
the experience can get a little out of control if you try to
cram way too many players in one given location, but it's so important to us that you still
see familiar faces and we want to replicate that sort of neighborly vibe on a classic
realm, respectively.
So then a follow-up question has to be, how does this handle server-wide events, the opening
of the gates of Encarage, what does that look like in Realmless?
I don't want to share too much about Encarage specifically, but I will say that we are putting
effort into making sure that any events that should feel like a global effort
should still feel like a global effort. So players can look forward to
contributing to some pretty big awesome fun event type stuff, but yeah I'm being
intentionally dodgy. And I'll just underline that we do not have on
Garage coming at launch. You mentioned Hardcore. We don't have Hardcore
coming at launch. That's coming later, but it will be when it comes it will be
be a choice like RP or PvP.
Yeah, exactly.
Okay, so Nora, I'm just going to keep going on this because the question that just blew
me away, so many people from one part of the world wanted to get an explanation for how
it's going to go there.
So I picked a question from a player named Truth Teller, and Truth Teller said, will
will, wow forever, use Sydney-hosted game servers for Oceanic players?
And I'm curious if the answer is yes, how does that work for them?
Yeah, so we are, I guess I'll note, we are going realm-less, but not region-less.
So we'll still have regions like EU, CN, and so on.
But yeah, Oceanic players are going to be, for the most part, hosted on Australian data
centers.
also means, you know, Oceanic players,
you also do still have the option to play
with your US player friends.
You're also actually going to share a,
the same ruleset wide auction house
with your US friends as well.
The, I guess the one caveat is,
if you do find yourself in situations
where you are mostly playing with players
from a very different geographic location,
European can vary as you may end up connecting
to their local data centers.
Basically, we're trying to pick whatever makes the most sense
for that group of players in a given area.
So I'm here in California.
I join a group of friends, and they're all in Australia.
I'm going to be getting-
You're probably connecting to their data centers, yeah.
Okay, that's fine, that's fine.
I'm willing to make that sacrifice for my friends.
The next question I found in our German forums,
a player named Sarima asked,
Do you have to choose a second name in WoW Forever?
So in WoW Forever we have first name,
we have surnames now.
Do you have to put something in that field
or do you have the option to still go with one name?
So yes, you do have to put something in that field.
One of the things that's at the forefront
of a lot of what we're doing in WoW Forever
and it's kind of grounded in our very like
a pro social values for the game is just,
We want, like player identity is really important to us, right?
We want folks to be able to kind of like be known
by their unique name, and the thing I said earlier
about Realmless being a lot like, you know,
if I choose role play, it's effectively like
I'm joining a role play mega realm, right?
And that means a much, much larger player community
to play with, which also means a little bit less
specificity with the names.
Now I will say names are region wide in WoW Forever.
So that means if I create Nora Anihart on the role play
rule set, that name is taken for the PVP rule set as well.
So it is region wide.
But yeah, we find that second name
is kind of a role play forward way
to reinforce that player identity.
And it still enable people to have unique names in WoW
Forever.
Personally, it's something I'm excited for
because it is something that's very unique to World of Warcraft,
I think so.
I think so.
But I'm personally excited to see what the players do with this.
We just have no idea yet how they're going to use first name and last name to make a
family of characters, to join someone else's family of characters, so forth.
Social media is going to be so good for a while while we see how everyone sorts out
their first and last name.
question that I saw so many of for you Josh and that it came from a player
named W. Punk or maybe W. Punk I'm not sure but W. Punk said is GDKP going to be
allowed for Wow Forever why or why not what are we doing there yeah this is a
bit of a involved answer and so it's gonna I'm gonna kind of bucket my answer
up with a few other different questions I've seen around this.
So I think the most important thing to us about, the short answer is that no, we are
not going to allow GDP.
Thank you.
Good job.
We're done.
We're done.
Okay.
I think the most important aspect of that to us is our first pillar, which is to nurture
and protect social experiences.
I think a lot of times concerns around GDP sort of get bundled up in the conversation
around RMT and things like that, and I will come back to that, we will adjust that to
it.
Okay, RMT, real money transfers, real money transactions, real money transactions, yes.
But the actual main reason that we are sort of not going to allow it in a while forever
is, you know, it has a sort of tendency we've noticed in the regions where it has been popular
for longer to reach a level of ubiquity, that it can kind of overtake the traditional
guild structure and that's one of the really kind of difficult things about
being a game designer and managing sort of a game at this scale is sometimes you
have to make difficult choices and you know we never really want to tell people
how to play but at the same point that is one of our pillars and we want to
nurture and protect those social experiences and that also means the
traditional guild structure. The other thing too that we've kind of found is
that a lot of times once it reaches that level of ubiquity it's a
really big barrier to entry for new players or players that just don't
don't have as many resources. If you're kind of the traditional carry or someone that has
a lot of resources and has been playing for a long time, it's great for you. You get a
raid and you're going to make some money on the side, but the barrier to entry for newer
players is oftentimes they have to buy gold to buy into it. And that's something that
we're taking very seriously in a while forever. And that leads me to the second part of the
question, which is the real money transactions and the economy. GDP is an excellent way for
bad actors to launder large sums of gold and we do try whenever we you know
action accounts of buyers or sellers or bots we try to pull that money back and
it makes it more difficult for us and that's why one of the things that I'm
really excited about too about while forever is that we are going to be very
very actively monitoring the economy you know one of the things that we hear a
lot with GDP is like well I need this to afford consumables we didn't have
of GDP and season of discovery and the levels,
especially once we get to level 60
and like sort of the rating economy sort of settled
the way you would kind of expect.
On a original WoW server, the economy was excellent.
Expecting for a version of vanilla WoW was very, very good.
And part of that was because we were constantly managing
the inflow and outflow of resources.
Like if we got to a new phase
and nature protection potions were very needed,
we had a lot of not uh... you know levers we can pull in knobs we can turn
to affect the availability of things like elements or if you dreamfoil
and uh... you know we also have the tarnished undermined real system which
we are having and while forever
said that i i didn't know that tarnished undermined real in welfare
that's correct it's it's kind of like a bat emblem of justice system essentially
and one of the things we have there was uh...
you know we had these kind of boxes that had met random resources and i mean
That was another kind of lever we could pull to adjust the economy, and when a certain
resource got scarce, we could up the drop rate of it in those boxes.
That gives you a lot of replayability for dungeons and things like that, and it's great.
The last thing we're going to do in terms of GDP, and it's just not GDP, but real
money trading in general, is we're going to very aggressively punish gold buyers.
Being frank, we've been probably too lenient on gold buyers, and it's been a little bit
easy to get around some of our some of our actions before and we are taking this very
seriously and you know as someone who's got a 22 year old world of Warcraft account I can tell you
it's not worth losing it permanently it's not worth losing any of your accounts permanently so I
would very strongly recommend that you don't do it it's not worth it I won't I promise thanks man
Our old friend, Omega, asked a question that got my attention. Omega said,
will Wow Forever use the midnight add-on API restrictions or the classic API or something else?
Yeah, so when kind of sitting down to consider this, like I actually like that you listed it out
that way because like we had to choose between like a do we want to go the modern approach,
classic approach or some third thing, right? And we have a lot of empathy for add-on developers
and their ability to also kind of keep up with our patches, our changes to those APIs,
and so on. So I guess to answer the actual question, we did opt for the modern API approach.
That said, I will say, you know, Boston counters and just a lot of things I think in WoW forever
are just kind of a lot more simplified compared to modern. And so I don't really necessarily think
that the combat restrictions necessarily are going to really impact someone's experience negatively.
Our hope is that kind of unifying that API with modern is going to be a lot easier to kind of
keep up with, you know, add-on updates and develop add-ons for our game. I know it's a very common
use case, for example, for players to customize their UIs with the add-ons. I personally love
I love doing that myself.
We also very much don't want players
to feel like they need add-ons in order to play the game.
Because I don't know, myself and others on the team,
like we're add-on purists.
So I tried to get by with very minimal add-ons.
And I'm delighted to say that we do also offer,
In Wild Forever, the damage meter, the cooldown manager.
And actually, additionally, I'm proud to say too,
Swing Timer perhaps coming soon.
So again, we want people to feel like they can just
jump in and play without feeling like they absolutely
have to go download add-ons in order to hang,
in order to play WoW Forever.
So why do we want that is my question.
As an add-on impurist,
Yeah.
What are we benefiting in WoW Forever overall, the summary?
the summary. It's I mean it's a lot simpler to be able to like if you're a new player coming to
the game and like you don't know about the slew of add-ons that are available you don't even
necessarily know where to look to go get the add-ons basically someone has to like adopt you take
you under their wing and be like oh you don't use this can trivialize this you should use this to
customize this piece of your you know like there are a lot of things that can kind of create friction
in ways that aren't super social or fun, right?
Because it can lead to some amount of gatekeeping
if we go too hard on allowing add-ons
to be a critical part of your player experience.
And so we're trying to alleviate that while still allowing
players to have the freedom of utilizing add-ons
if they want to, if they so choose.
All right.
Carrying on from there, Tim, I saw a question
from a player named Allystar.
and AllyStar asked, will forever include flex rating?
Smaller guilds, they can struggle.
Even with 20 players, a smaller guild
can have a hard time getting there.
Let alone 40 person raids, that's a lot.
So the question is, flex rating possible?
And then the follow-up question is,
will cross-faction rating be a possibility
to solve that issue?
To start off with the beginning of that question,
no, we're not going to start off with flex rating,
but one of the promises that we want to make,
or that we are making in World of Warcraft forever is,
we want to support guilds of different sizes.
At the beginning of Season of Discovery,
Some people really love the consistent ecosystem of being able to just smash two five man groups together and have enough people for a 10 man raid.
And that's the promise every single tier that we will ever do will have both a 10 player raid and a 20 player raid.
And we want it to be really easy for people to graduate from dungeon gameplay into being a 10 man guild.
And if you have more people than that 10-man guild can approach 20-player content.
And in those separate ecosystems, we want the content to be rich, deep, fulfilling.
The 10-man raids will have a lot of bosses.
I think we have eight or so bosses in our first raid, in the Barrow Deeps.
Really? Just eight?
I think somewhere around there.
And even more in the in the hydra rate and you can get to your pieces across those experiences
And there will be some people who want to do both and that's awesome
But we want our our guilds and our social groups that really gravitate towards 10-man content to have a consistent
piece of endgame content that they can they can do and do it consistently and not have the rug pulled out from under them
And then the second part of that question about cross-faction gameplay, you know
So, this is vanilla, we're based in vanilla WoW, the Horde and Alliance hate each other,
we want to embrace the war in Warcraft and so there's not going to be any cross-faction
play.
Horde and Alliance are going to hate each other, they need to fight, we want to encourage
world PvP, battlegrounds, so yeah, that's our stance on that.
Alright, I just want to hit a couple other things that were in there.
40-person rating is on the table, is coming at launch, and then potentially later.
That is correct. So for launch, we have Onyxia's Layer.
We aren't going to have a 40-player raid every single tier, but where we're starting out with Onyxia's Layer is kind of the first foray into having
an extra piece of rating content in addition to the 10 and 20 ecosystems that we want to consistently support.
And Onyxia really serves as just call all your friends in your guild together, call an extra guild to group up,
go to Duswallow Marsh and rate Onyxia, get a ton of awesome loot, get some extra tier pieces and have an awesome time.
Nixie's head is on the table.
Of course, yes.
And let us, I would like to understand a little more
about how dungeons fit into that ecosystem.
Like, you know, I'm playing World of Warcraft
for the night sometimes,
and there's a lot of different difficulties for dungeons.
Well, we are taking a hard stance
on across both dungeons and raids.
The instance is a single difficulty.
There's no heroic difficulty.
I know some people have been seeing multiple color variations
of armor.
Those are just for offset pieces.
There's only one version of our 10 men raid.
There's only one version of our 20 men raid.
Same with dungeons.
You get what you get.
Understood.
Another subject that I want to make sure and just touch on
before we go is transmog, because this is a bit novel.
And so I just want to ask the panel,
does anyone have something to explain about Transmog?
We mentioned it quite a bit at BlizzCon,
but players like, I saw a player named Rosalia,
came onto our forums and said,
could you provide some more details?
Just like, can we just unpack Transmog
so we can understand how it differs from modern wow?
Absolutely, yeah.
One of the things, I think it's really important
when we were designing Transmog,
we really wanted to make sure that we were able to,
even if you haven't enabled,
maintain a lot of the silhouette that you would have had.
That's why things like,
if you have a cloth chest piece and you're a paladin,
you're gonna need to have another cloth chest piece
that you're gonna transmog over that.
And that is kind of important.
So it's obviously, it's not gonna be completely
kind of Wild West.
And then the other thing too that I think we're,
it's just, it's kind of unique and we're really kind of,
we think it's really cool.
is just the ability to have multiple different pieces of armor per slot
saved per set that you have.
So again, if you're a healer paladin
and you get a plate chest piece out in the world,
if you've designated a plate chest to transmog over that slot,
it will swap to that plate chest appearance
when you equip the actual plate upgrade you get.
And I think that's really cool because it gives you
a lot of flexibility even within each set.
and it allows the players who just don't care for it to hop out and they don't have to care for it.
Yeah, exactly. You can pretty much pretend it doesn't exist.
So, last question, because we have PVPers and a lot of PVP enthusiasts just asking for some more information.
So, Tim, how will PVP in forever be different than other versions of World of Warcraft?
Specifically, there was this player named Last Rodeo in England who asked how will PvP in
forever be different?
And so, you know, we're going to go to a rodeo.
Sure.
And what happens with PvP in forever?
Well, like I said before, we want to embrace the Horde and the Alliance conflict.
PvP is something we want to heavily invest in and support.
We love the fact that people love dueling so much.
We love the fact that people love running battlegrounds.
There won't be any rated PVP, though we've re-envisioned the PVP ranking system.
There will be a new PVP track to gain honor in and level up through with your own unique
PVP rewards that will reset every season or tier.
They'll be aligned with our tier and raid releases.
And we've really taken care to look at how people participate in battlegrounds and make
sure that we've adjusted the honor so that people don't feel like they just have to sit
in Alteric Valley over and over and over.
So we want our brand new battleground, Darkspear Islands, which has a brand new reputation,
another progression track as well to explore and get rewards from.
We want that, Warsaw, Arafy Basin, more battlegrounds to come in the future.
We want people to be excited and rewarded for participating in all of those.
Love more battlegrounds to come in the future, that is a great thing.
So I want to leave that there.
But before we go, Josh Greenfield, tell us what you got.
Yeah, so starting next week I'm really excited to announce that we will be having a weekly
podcast.
It's going to be hosted by myself and Josh Corbett of Countdown to Classic Fame.
Josh and Josh.
Josh and Josh.
show I guess, but we'll be having that weekly all throughout the beta for the next six weeks.
So we're going to dive into a bunch of different topics, talking about sort of the topic of
the week, you know, whatever content is unlocked.
We're going to have guests from the team, we're going to have other developers on to
talk about things that they've developed in systems and features and content, a whole
bunch of things like that.
And we're also going to have members of, you know, like content creators and members of
the community who are going to join us at various points as well.
I would like to join you at some point.
I just love this so much, podcasting, just speak to my heart.
So that's it and we're going to get out of here because there's a beta to open.
There's a wow forever beta waiting for one of you to press a button and send that thing
live.
So we're going to go do that right now.
Thank you very much.
Thank you so much.
Thank you everyone out there who asked so many questions.
It was our pleasure to meet you at BlizzCon, to see you online, and to try to answer some
of your questions.
We will see you in the Wow Forever Beta in a few minutes.
Thanks.