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WoW Forever | OG TBC Gladiator | The Goblin Lab
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An enhancement shaman glides in with the new Sky Elf racial, the lightning lands and @TheGoblinLabTV is done for the night.
"We just got one tapped by a fucking flying shaman." Shamans with Rage of the Storm are completely out of control right now ๐ญ
Had a really busy day today so I'm late posting this, but just wanted to say, thanks for playing the beta to all those who did. These kinds of things present us with so many opportunities to tune our systems, fix bugs, observe behavior that we can't replicate internally, and generally help ready the game for our launch.
Development on MMOs is never over. We are never "done". However, things like this beta help get us closer to a healthy starting point on November 4th. So, thank you everyone for playing with us.
See you on November 4th!
Last day of the Forever beta: realms close at 7 pm CEST, 10 am on the US West Coast (PDT). We clipped it every single day, and this beta gave us more great moments than we could ever post.
The roadmap runs to the winter. Name reservation on 27 October, Forever on 4 November, raids on 9 December with Barrow Deeps, Hyjal Summit and Onyxia's Lair, then Hardcore.
Until launch we are running flashbacks from the beta. Name the moment you want to see again and we will queue it. ๏ฟฝ๏ฟฝ๏ฟฝ
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The Forever Open is done and a Warlock is $50,000 richer. Warlockguy beat Neepzen in a grand final where both players were Warlocks, and the community tally of the qualifiers had Paladins and Warlocks on top of the win rates.
Every duel was played on a fresh level 30 character, which is where the beta stops. At 30 nobody's got a full toolkit and nobody's got endgame gear, so the bracket measured a game that's still missing spells and stats. What ships on 4 November doesn't play like that.
Now the part that outlives the prize money. Is any of it representative of level 60? The class that looked unplayable at 30 hasn't had its real buttons yet, and the one that looked unbeatable has never been tested with full talents and full gear. Blizzard shouldn't take this bracket as a balance blueprint. That's tuning a game nobody plays yet. Which class takes over at 60? ๐ค
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An enhancement shaman glides in with the new Sky Elf racial, the lightning lands and @TheGoblinLabTV is done for the night.
"We just got one tapped by a fucking flying shaman." Shamans with Rage of the Storm are completely out of control right now ๐ญ
Today we're standing up XBOX LABS (https://t.co/dJSufI1vni). Here is the note that I sent to the team:
Team,
The first video games emerged some 75 years ago. In the time since, there have been booms and busts, but every year there are more great games to play, more devices to play them, and best of all, more people than ever playing. That growth helped make XBOX what it is today, and we've helped shape the industry in return, from bringing hard drives to consoles and online gaming through Xbox Live to Game Pass and cloud gaming, alongside franchises that have brought millions of people together.
In recent weeks, we've seen games rapidly decompiled and rebuilt to run on hardware they were never originally designed to support. Windows PC builds have been translated to run on Apple Silicon or ported to run inside a browser through WebAssembly and WebGPU, the latter now approaching 90% global browser support. Perhaps more surprisingly, we've seen many of the biggest games in the world have been remixed into the source code of another.
These experiments challenge long-held assumptions about our industry: the tether between software and hardware, the boundary between creation and play, and how people discover and experience games. While it is hard to predict the future of gaming, it is easy to see the possibilities in making great games easier to access, giving old games new life and allowing more players to become creators and co-creators. These are unmistakably good outcomes for players, even when (and sometimes because) they challenge our existing business models.
To explore these possibilities, Iโve asked Scott to stand-up XBOX LABS, a small group of game makers, engineers and scientists whose job is to turn emerging ideas into things our players and developers can experience. We'll build in the open, learn from what people do, and measure success by whether more people are playing and creating.
I think XBOX has an important role to play here. Coding became the first major workload for agents because they can write, run, and test software. Games share many of those same properties, and people spend more than 72 billion hours a year playing XBOX games, roughly five times the estimated time spent writing code worldwide. We've spent 25 years learning how to make great games, and I want our game makers to help shape what these new technologies make possible. As we learn, weโll share the tools we build with developers across the industry, just as we always have.
Our priorities aren't changing. We remain committed to the 4Cs, to making great games, to our hardware and to being responsible stewards of IP and the communities built around it. LABS gives us a way to explore new technology that is game design led without abandoning the work already underway.
Asha