WoW Forever: updates will roll out one region at a time

Senior game director Ion Hazzikostas and executive producer Holly Longdale answered questions from the press on 13 September, the last day of BlizzCon. One question was about modern WoW, where players still ask for patches to reach all regions at about the same time: will the server technology built for Forever come to every version of the game? Hazzikostas replied that Forever will also get its updates in a staggered rollout, one region after another. He said this is not because the technology is missing: it is a matter of time zones.

He explained that patching means taking the servers down for several hours, and that Blizzard wants to time this with things like the weekly reset and do it at off-peak hours. A simultaneous rollout for the whole world is possible in theory, he said, but he did not think most players in Europe would love having the servers offline from around 17:00 to 23:00 on a given day. That is why Blizzard has always patched one region at a time, and why it will keep doing so in Forever. For players in Europe, this means the EU region of Forever will be updated at its own time, separately from other regions. He did not say on which day or at what hour that will happen.

Hazzikostas also said Blizzard will look for chances to bring parts of Forever over to modern WoW, such as the improved server technology and the better lighting. Surnames might follow too, depending on how players feel about them in Forever, where a character's name has two parts. He added that much of this is not as simple as flipping a switch. The new lighting is not only an engine improvement: environment artists relit all of Forever's zones by hand, and the same work would be needed for modern content. He gave no timeline.

Asked what impressed them most about Forever, Longdale named the lighting and the water, and Hazzikostas agreed. His example was Duskwood at night, where torches and lanterns that characters carry now light up their surroundings in real time. The assets and the setting are still those of Classic, he said, but the atmosphere is massively enhanced.

On modern WoW, Hazzikostas called squishes a necessary evil. A stat squish cuts the big numbers in the game down to smaller ones, such as item levels and the stats on gear. There is nothing to announce yet, but he said Blizzard will definitely do another one. He said Blizzard decides when one is due by looking at gear: when the numbers on items grow so long that every piece of gear starts to look like a spreadsheet. Further ahead, when characters reach level 100 again in The Last Titan, he said Blizzard will probably want to look at another level squish, a cut to character levels, as it did in Shadowlands.