WoW Forever: stronger weather coming to certain beta zones

On 23 September Blizzard announced that stronger weather is coming soon to the WoW Forever beta, which runs until 21 October. Community manager Kaivax posted a 38-second video on the official forums in Europe and North America with a single line: ‘Coming soon to the Beta’. In posts on its official social media accounts, Blizzard said the increased weather effects will come to ‘certain’ beta zones.

The video is set in Elwynn Forest, the human starting zone. It shows heavy rain, with fog thick enough to shorten the view between the trees. Players replying on the forums say the sound of the rain changes when the character goes indoors. Replies differ on how much weather the beta has now: one tester has not seen any weather effects in the zones they know, another says snow falls in places like Dun Morogh but only now and then, and a third saw rain in Brill. Press reports present the change as an answer to players who found the beta's weather too weak; Blizzard's posts give no reason.

Apart from Elwynn Forest in the video, Blizzard has not said which zones will get the stronger weather, and it has not given a date. It has not said whether other kinds of weather, such as snowstorms or sandstorms, are part of the change, or whether the weather will affect anything beyond how the game looks and sounds. On 24 September Blizzard took the beta down to put in a new build and said full development notes would follow; its weather posts do not say which build the change comes in.

Many replies ask for more: thunderstorms, snowstorms and sandstorms in Tanaris. Some want a way to turn the weather off or down; one of them says the fog already makes it hard to see when it rains. Others want stability first, pointing to crashes, low frame rates and memory problems they report on the beta. When Blizzard changed routing for EU testers on 21 September, it said that finding and fixing performance problems is a key reason to run a public test like this one. As of 24 September, no one from Blizzard has replied in either weather thread.