Xal'atath has entered the Nexus!
To celebrate, HotS Twitch Drops are live now. Check out the Patch blog for full details on Drops, Xal'atath, and more!
https://t.co/rjIb1l3YEa
Reminder that Grimgor, the toughest Orc to ever live, literally headbutted Chaos Incarnate, Archaon, & made him spill his spaghetti in front of everyone, literally everyone.
Imagine if Sauron was on the warpath & some green hooligan just curbstomped him, had a laff & went to pub
I'm seeing a lot of discourse about who WoW Forever is being made for and while I cannot speak for anyone else on the team I can speak for myself. I am making WoW forever for the classic gamer and for the millions of people who have had their accounts lapse over the years because they were not satisfied with changes that were made to the game. Whether those changes were to the art style, the story, social aspects, game design, or changes to their favorite class.
I did not spend the last year of my life relearning and mastering how to do things like we did it 20+ years ago for retail players. I could have taken it easy and just kept doing things like I had done for the past 8 years on retail...because I was much more familiar with it and it actually takes a lot less time to do (height maps on textures do a ton of heavy lifting). Because the reality is that the majority of retail players wouldn't care and would probably actually prefer it. But I felt I had a duty to uphold an artistic vision and integrity that millions of people expect from us. But not just for our players, but for my co-workers past and present who worked on it over 20 years ago. If I could not create something that resembled their work then I failed not only them...but myself.
Please do not take this as me throwing any shade at retail players or the retail team because I am one myself...but I wanted to make Forever as authentic of a Vanilla experience as possible. This involves making decisions wildly different than retail. It means holding the line against changes that create a domino affect down the road. It means keeping friction and inconveniences in the game. It means finding friends and forming groups with strangers and being social!! Because WoWs social aspects have always been the pillar of the game and over the years it has slowly been chiseled away at with changes that allow you play alone.
Since the day I started working on the Riverglades I have lived by three sayings.
"Convenience is the death of the journey."
"If you're making a game for everyone then you're making it for no one."
"Every change we make incurs a debt to the authenticity of the game and sooner or later that debt will be paid."
These are my core beliefs and I had a specific group of people I was targeting with my work. These beliefs cannot be shaken and I will try to hold the line against anything that goes against them and will continue to pester the team about things that feel out of place.
That being said, my hope is that Forever will pull in as many people as possible, whether you are a retail gamer, a classic gamer, someone who hasn't played in years, or even a new player. I hope you can all remember what made this game so special in the first place and that starts with understanding why we are so passionate about keeping it authentic.
The WoW: Forever beta is proving much more popular than Blizzard expected. Launch demand far exceeded typical WoW beta numbers.
Senior designer Josh Greenfield called it “the craziest numbers I’ve seen in 17 years working at Blizzard” and said, “We’ve got something really special here.”
Ellis said the team initially couldn’t see an obvious CPU problem, making the bottleneck harder to find.
They later identified several issues, including database performance and game worlds that weren’t shutting down correctly and were slowly eating up CPU and memory.
After 20+ years of WoW, Blizzard still managed to find a new way to break the servers.
Darkness descends on the Nexus! 🌑
A new hero: Xal'atah steps onto the battlefield September 28th.
She brings the horrors of the void and will stop at nothing to achieve victory.