WoW Forever: Skyborne can talk across factions in Darnassian

A report published on 28 September says that on the WoW Forever beta, elves can talk to each other across the faction line. Both versions of the Skyborne, a new race, know Darnassian, the night elf language: the Windshapers, who join the Horde, and the High Order, who join the Alliance. A Skyborne who picks Darnassian as the language to speak in is understood by Skyborne of the other faction and by night elves, the report says, and a screenshot of a chat window shared by a player shows 2 players talking in Darnassian. Normally, when Horde and Alliance characters speak near each other, the other side sees their words replaced by made-up ones. We found no statement from Blizzard about this: for now it comes from this one report, and Blizzard has not confirmed it.

Players on Blizzard's American forums had noticed it earlier. In a thread opened on 20 September, a player with a Horde Skyborne wrote that they had talked to a night elf in Moonglade after choosing Darnassian with the chat bubble button to the left of the chat box, and that each message is then marked as Darnassian. Not every attempt worked: another Horde player in the same thread said that night elves in Moonglade could not understand them, even with Darnassian selected. A third player wrote that in the original game's beta the Undead could speak Common, the Alliance language, until this was taken away because players abused it. That is one player's memory, not a statement from Blizzard.

The report says it is not clear whether this is intended, or a bug that comes from all Skyborne starting out in the same place. It notes that Blizzard has in the past been firmly against blurring the line between the Horde and the Alliance, while many players welcome the chance to talk, for roleplay and for the story. On 25 September a player on the forums asked for it to be switched off on the PvP ruleset, where a player can create characters of a single faction only, saying the 2 sides there should not be able to talk at all.

Blizzard has not explained why the Skyborne speak Darnassian. In the story it published on 22 September, the race descends from Highborne exiles who made a pact with wind spirits thousands of years ago and built a civilisation in Skywall, one of the elemental planes, and the High Order are descendants of the Highborne scholars of Eldre'Thalas. Some players on the forums say Darnassian fits, because in their view the Highborne already spoke it before their exile and the High Order are still proud of their Highborne roots. Others find it odd that a people cut off for so long never developed a language of its own. The beta runs until 21 October, and WoW Forever launches at 23:00 UK time on 4 November, which is midnight on 5 November in Central Europe. Blizzard has not said whether Skyborne will still be able to talk across factions at launch.